I was thinking more like:

“Yesturday”

I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite.

Perhaps not a luddite, but a Luddite.

The actual followers of Ned Ludd weren’t opposed to technology. They were, in many cases, experts in the machinery — sometimes having built the machines they would later destroy.

They opposed the new social order that seemed to inevitably arrive with the machinery. The capitalists would make more money than before, the workers less, and also endure more dangerous working conditions.

Btw, your note about absorbing and repackaging counter-culture reminded me of Rebel Sell by Andrew Potter. There’s a good episode of You Are Not So Smart about it: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/10/08/yanss-podcast-episode-five

The author seems to have fallen for two tricks at once: The MPAA/RIAA playbook of seeing all engagement with content through the lens of licensing, and the AI hype machine telling everyone that someday they will love AI slop.

He mentions people complaining that stock photo sites, book portals, and music streaming services are all degrading in quality because of AI slop, but his conclusion is that people will start seeking out AI content because it’s not copyrighted.

Regardless… The position of those in power has not changed. They never believed in copyright as a guiding concept, only as a means to an end. That end being: We, the powerful, will control culture, and we will use it to benefit ourselves.

Before generative AI, the approach was to keep the cultural landscape well-groomed – something you’d wanna pay to experience. Mindfully grown and pruned, with clear walking paths, toll booths at each entrance, and harsh penalties for littering or stepping on the grass. You were allowed to have your own toll-free parks outside of the secure perimeter, that continue the walking paths in ways that are mutually beneficial, as long as visitors don’t track mud in as a result.

But now? The landscape is no longer about creating a well-manicured amusement park worth the price of admission. There’s oil under the surface. And it’s time to frack the hell out of it. It’s too bad about the toxic slurry that will accumulate up top, making the walled and unwalled parks alike into an intolerable biohazard. There are resources to extract. Externalities are an end-user problem.

Yeah, turning culture into an expensive amusement park was a horrible mistake. But I wouldn’t get too eager to gloat over seeing the tide of sludge pour over their walls. We’ll still be on the outside, drowning in it.

Sure, but if you’re specifically trying to go South, Spain is about the same latitude as most Canadian cities.

Time for Mexico?

US once again beaten by rest of world.

They’re an ad company that just happens to offer search as a way to show ads.

Their ideal scenario is one where you search forever and never find what you were looking for.

Yeah, how far back you wanna go?

I’m thinkin George Lincoln Rockwell or John Birch Society are probably pretty good landmarks for the budding of what became MAGA.

Only time in my life I wished a politician leaned further to the right.

The real question is all the stuff beyond just having the distro installed. The packages, the services, the configs, the application data.

If you leave all that stuff the way it was installed via the old package manager, it may have some bad assumptions baked in and may be incompatible with packages you install with the new package manager.

And if you clear all of it out and reinstall it, have you really gained anything vs. just doing a clean install?

There’s a reason you have a home dir. Just copy that forward along with whatever other config files you might’ve customized.

Btw, if the ability to make drastic changes while still maintaining continuity is an important feature for you, maybe check out NixOS.

So you’re saying they didn’t even have enough resources before the slaughter began. Cool cool cool. Very nice and good.

Reminds me of how virologists were warning that we were underprepared for a pandemic even before Trump cut that funding in his first term.

Seems like the debate is always whether we can afford 10% or 30% of what a normal first-world country would have, and we act relieved when the 10% guys leave office and the 30% guys make a compromise to bring us up to 20%.

Yep: https://open.substack.com/pub/cyberintel/p/once-private-government-networks

But… I don’t think that’s true, and yet it didn’t make me laugh.

Worth noting that Japan is the #1 foreign holder of US treasuries. More than anything, they want stability. Good sign for the US that they’re holding off on damage control mode.

Do you know the muffin man in my ass

Driver comes running over to move the car just in time… “Ram Dodged”

IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.

1. Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
2. Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
3. Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.

Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.

But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.

There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?

upower -d can provide some useful info on-demand. I think there’s a daemon component to it too, which may have variable log levels.

Fourth week of getting NixOS running on an aarch64 laptop here… If I could get the adsp running by the time I get to userspace, you better believe I’d play a tada.

(In all seriousness, it’s not that bad. But it does make you very aware of just how delicate the whole stack of software is.)