... is doomed.
... mental illness. Commercial "social" media is a thing that really shouldn't exist. Especially since they're just glorified versions of already existing protocols. Limiting access to these for youngsters is a good thing. The teenies won't listen of course, but that's beside the point. It's about being able to sue those corps into next wednesday if they choose to target minors. And that's a good thing.
... without (ultra)powerful ad- and trackblock setups, media buffers and stream-rippers. I currently use Brave and that works pretty well, but the amount of big guns I have to whip out in order not to be bombarded like some sorry-ass regular browser user has gotten ridiculous in the last five years. I wonder how further this can go on before a notable portion of us just get's fed up and redoes the Web entirely.
When I'm on a regular browser on some other machine and I see ad-trash or cookie popups clobbering the screen and my eyeballs, I usually just close the tab and do something else. I'm sick and tired of this garbage and it's simply not worth my time or cognitive load. Same with youtube ads.
Maybe it's time us nerds retreat to a new type of protocol and service, like some fully encrypted and signed WebFS thing where this garbage simply doesn't exist. It feels somewhat overdue to be honest.
A complete redo of lifestyle design and moving 'sitting at screen, doing computer stuff' to some side-task level cultural technique rather than my actual day job is due for me too. AI does 90%+ of coding now and way better than me and I'm just shooing it around and double-checking the diffs and commits in case something goes haywire. Which it doesn't happen that often compared to the output.
I'm clearing out my stuff and preparing to do more human things. Coding is still fun, but so is hiking, biking, travelling, social dancing, boardgaming, etc. We're at the brink of a post-scarcity economy. Might as well get on with it.
If the bot is 30x better than me on a bad day, botsitting is my new fucking main task. Obviously. In the last 6 months me and my AI metasubscription have grown to become a 10 head pro devteam with me at the helm. I've basically mutated into a chief senior lead and a full crew at zero extra cost and _ less_ effort for me. It would be irresponsible for me not to botsit and hold up everything by hand-coding myself. My current productivity would drop 10x instantly.
Bottom line: The bots are here and they've taken over. Get out of the way you slow-ass bipedal meatbag.
Modern smart devices offer awesome quasi-magical advantages over my very first computer which was a mobile pocket handheld computers I brought when I was 16, sporting Basic and 1.2kb RAM.
However, the distraction and mental load that comes with these devices and services these days is larger than any single human can reasonably consume in their life. The idea of ditching the smart devices and going back to paper notebooks and dumbphones the size of which I can _actually_ handle has been quite enticing to me too for the last decade or so. And I might actually do it some day.
Then again there's Google Maps, Communications, Notes, an ultra high end Digital camera, automatic sync and Backup, times and alert, notes, checkliste, calendar, groupware and a full blown VM with programming environment (I do Web) right there in my pocket. Star Trek is bronze Age compared.
Maybe it's just best to use these devices but work on the discipline in using them. A thing I'm equipped for better than anyone as an 80ies computer kid. The best way is probably some combination of both.
Brexit happened on lies upon bloody lies by populist douchebags like Nigel Farage. The British people were once again screwed over epic style by the political class. Which made things even worse after Brexit, ironically.
We all knew Brexit would hurt, but holy cow, as much as we like to make fun of the Brits for doing Brexit, this is painful to watch. We feel you guys.
... a post-cyberpunk post-scarcity economy. If he only achieves half of what he's pushing for that wealth won't mean that much. It's precisely that he's acting that way that puts him in a position to be this wealthy. The final goal of capitalism is to make itself obsolete. We might actually be getting there just now. Musk being a trillionaire is just an intermediate step on that scale.
... Moscow was clogged with Pokemon Go players, just like any other big city on the planet back in the summer of 2016. It was insane. Gorky Park, Victory Park, Arbat clogged with young people running around with their phones, collecting their Pokemons. I was surprised seeing the same crazy stuff going on just like in my homestates capital of Duesseldorf.
That such data is enough to program homing drones with ultra high precision is of no surprise. The sheer amount of data is enough to get all the accuracy you need.
Tokamaks also have no solution to the fast-neutron problem, which "embrittles" the core components of the reactor itself into powder over a few years of operation.
Only magnetized target fusion, like what General Fusion is pursuing, solves that problem.
I'm not sure that fusion will ever reach economic viability. But they're literally the only ones that even have a chance.
cootys rat semen
... Lobby crew!
FOSS finally getting general public mindshare. Finally!
... big thing. I don't think anybody has anything against any vehicle, tractor or other, or anything at all stuffed to the brim with useful electronics. (emphasis on useful) The problem is when that technology is proprietary, disfunctional on purpose and designed to be extortive. That farmers are sick and tired of that I can see clearly.
One big part of the problem also is that farmers are locked into their business harder than other people, more prone to corporate extractive and extortive business pratictices and they are likely not the type to have the free time to deal with these practices in other ways.
Setting up a non-profit and/or publicly shared business to offer hardware designs that counter these problems are a likely candidate for some use- and helpful businesses. I expect this to be the next big area where the FOSS concept catches on.
How many weeks are there in a light year?