It's mid-70s stuff. It was part of moving the manufacturing that couldn't be automated over to China and Japan.

The factory workers were fucked either way because automation was coming for their jobs. But nobody likes to talk about or think about technological unemployment because the moment you do people start braying like donkeys repeating the word Luddite over and over and over again occasionally stopping to belch out a comment about buggy whips.

I used to wonder why Europe let the Russians put Trump in office but now I know those dumb motherfuckers think they can take over from America as the predominant global currency.

Short-term China's going to steamroll them and long-term has the American empire collapses we're going to invade Europe and Russia and even eventually china.

Because that's what dying empires have to do. You expand your borders to loot other countries so that you can fill the coffers back home because you're all you're incompetent mismanagement.

Of course this time we've got nukes so that's going to be fun. Said it before I will say it again I just wish I had died before all this crap.

It helps but it's not enough to get us this crazy dominant position that allows us to get those ultra cheap imports that allow Americans to maintain their high standard of living.

And also Louisiana and well every other Red State I think it's safe to say you aren't going to be getting anything through Congress.

It's possible Gavin newsome has the cojones to get the Democrat governors together to counteract the gerrymandering with their own gerrymandering, but after so many years of my party rolling over I'll believe it when I see it.

Still if he wants to be president he doesn't have a lot of options. At the rate we are going there aren't going to be elections in 2026 let alone 2028.

The funny thing is assuming the Democrats don't pull off and upset a whole shitload of people who have been voting Republican since Reagan or about to find out what that means. Starting with their 401ks going to the Elon j Musk memorial trillionaire fund.

Like they did with those postal workers.

What I like about criminal justice systems is that they are all absolutely fucked up and terrible but they each have their own unique flavor of fucked up and terrible.

That's what happens when you focus on punishment instead of harm reduction. But a lot of people find punishment fun and not in the kinky fun way in the sadistic way.

It's going to be difficult for you to ignore Americans, the Internet is lousy with them.

I'm discussing association football. I like to think we're talking about the same thing, but there seems to be some disagreement.

It would be like saying "it's 36 degrees out" and not specifying Celsius or Fahrenheit, then getting tied up into knots if someone asked for clarification. Nice to know if I need to wear more layers or fewer.

Everything is political now

Mike Masnick wrote an article on Techdirt recently about why he’s leaning in to “political” coverage on the site. To put it succinctly:

When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.

I get that there are people who might want to escape politics in the safe haven of technology. I don’t understand people who still insist that it’s possible to participate in and use FOSS apolitically. Too many things are intertwined to be able to separate the development and distribution of FOSS from politics.

Anyway, go read the full post by Masnick. And the rest of Techdirt, too. I’m continually impressed by his take on the tech world. I don’t always agree, but I always find his coverage worth reading.

Tab Overflow: Markdown for timelines, AI for 78s, the superpower of being glue, and maddog on Red Hat Still working on the next installment of the Clone Wars, but in the meantime some interesting things I’ve stumbled on the past few days. AI Audio Challenge: Audio Restoration of 78rpm Records — The Internet Archive is looking for “a program that can take all or many of the 400,000 unrestored records” in its 78rpm archive and clean them up. They have 1,600 examples of 78s that were cleaned up manually by humans, and are hoping that they can be used to train a program to do the work in an automated fashion. See also: AI@IA — Extracting Words Sung on 100 year-old 78rpm records.I have a lot of concerns how AI* is and will be used overall, but automating restoration and preservation of materials seems like a really good use of these tools. (*Some folks are very pedantic about terms like AI. I am not one of them, so I’m just being lazy and saying “AI.” Sorry.) Valuing undervalued superpowers: Being Glue — Great post on julia ferraioli’s blog about “Being Glue” by Tanya Reilly. Part of julia’s “Influential Articles” series, this one looks at the importance of “glue work” and how it gets overlooked or considered non-essential. Instead, the argument here is that glue work skills are superpowers even though doing a lot of glue work means you’re less likely to succeed career-wise.If you’ve done any job interviewing lately you may recognize questions that ask you to highly your individual, personal accomplishments and not what you’ve done to help teams succeed. You can have 1,000 instances of how you’ve helped a project or organizations succeed but nobody cares. They want the big thing you launched, etc. IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view — If you’re keeping up with the Clone Wars, this post by Jon “maddog” Hall is required reading. Yes, he addresses the “freeloader” question. Decided to make you read the full post to get there, though. It’s worth the time. I’ll just say this, no disagreement registered. Markwhen for Markdown timelines: Happened to catch this on Hacker News, a Markdown-driven calendar and planning app. I’ve been looking for something to display timelines around the Clone Wars posts but hadn’t found anything great. This might fit the bill. Note that the site is geared towards the web service and editor, but you can install the CLI utility and generate your own timelines as HTML.



why yes, I do have an LLM training on my posts, why do you ask?

And while copyright holders have cash AI is worth trillions based on the possibility that it could replace most if not all white collar workers.

At best this will hit the supreme Court where they will declare that it's fair use. The decades of precedence around storing the contents of copyrighted material won't matter.

There is no way something is valuable is AI is going to get derailed by a little thing like the rights of the copyright holders. This is happening and we all need to get comfortable with it.

We could do something about the antisocial aspects but well, I don't think we have it in us. It requires way too much deviation from the things we were taught during the critical 4 to 14 age demographic...

It's an exclusive club of members who achieved a positive troll mod on slashdot.

The easiest way to get into the club is to point out that old people are in charge and the world is a hellscape therefore old people, who let's remember go on endlessly about personal responsibility, our responsible for the state of the world.

It's Schrodinger's boomer. They're in a quantum superposition where they are both completely blameless while at the same time completely in charge.

Honestly I don't think the NBA thing matters so much as legalizing stock buy backs in the first place.

I think the only reason it took so long for Intel to go all in on them is because they were making so much money hand over fist in the '80s through the early 2000s because of the . com bubble and because they didn't have any viable competition whatsoever.

Don't forget all the antitrust violations Intel did. The only reason they aren't the only company for x86 CPUs is because Microsoft propped up AMD because Microsoft knows what happens when there is only one company and one game in town.

See y'all in the reeducation camp, they're taking me sooner rather than later.

You can and should ban people in real life. Refusing to interact with people who are not interestes in a mutually beneficial relationship is normal. If someone car jacks me, I cross him off the invite list to my BBQ.

Unfortunetly the scalability of AI is not infinite. There is a point of diminising returns. Some of what AI researchers are up to is either doing more with less, or with making bigger clusters that are better connected.

I am a cruel master, I have never even let it download a software update.

It still is you just don't understand the first thing about the American economy.

America is an empire. Our military is the iron fist. That's pretty obvious and even you've got to understand that.

But what about the Velvet glove? It sure is shit isn't foreign policy we're not very good at that.

It's our monetary policy. We use our national debt to lock people into our currency. The enormous military means that it's a safe bet because nobody's going to drag us into a war. And the big threat to a currency is wartime spending look at Russia. Short-term economic bubble that collapses and explodes the second to fighting stops...

So we use the debt to artificially inflate the value of the American dollar and then we bring in trillions of dollars of imports for a fraction of their actual value.

If you haven't figured it out I will spell it out in simple terms, this is imperial tribute.

The idea that we are extracting tribute is so counter to everything you were taught in the critical 4 to 14 age demographic that it's basically impossible for most people to wrap their heads around.

I did not figure this out on my own much much much smarter people that nobody listens to besides me figured it out and explained it to me in simple terms.

And now Donald Trump is basically fucking that system over in order to have a national sales tax.

Within 10 years you will no longer be able to afford a nice fancy suv. Hell you might be taking the bus to work.

And you've got a 50/50 shot of losing your house. If you're retired you are fucked because they are coming for your retirement. They will raid your 401k and if you take the money out they'll find a way to get it anyway. You could put it in a bank but that's going to end up getting eaten alive by inflation when they artificially lower interest rates without solving any of the underlying economic problems...

We are at the point where the Republican party no longer believes we are going to have elections and they are ruling by Fiat through Donald Trump. This will continue for at least another seven and a half years assuming he doesn't drop dead. Well into Donald Trump's third term.

It's possible the Democrats will somehow through sheer miracles put the brakes on this but I have serious doubts. They are just up against too much and they kind of need some poking and prodding from the left wing but the left wing is too busy being pissy little bitches too do anything helpful. They would rather spend their time bitching about Nancy pelosi then stopping fascists from killing them...

Anyway if you are at all anyone who might be targeted you need to get a passport right now. I mean as in if you even have so much as a slightly large nose or maybe one of those afros associated with white boys now would be a good time to make sure you can get out of the country. And if you're queer yeah, you are are they going into hiding or into a camp.

As for the rest of us half will be homeless with all of our assets extracted from us in order to create trillionaires and the other half will be struggling to afford cat food. We will not own cats.