You can be critical of something and still support it

If you support any state, you’re not an anarchist.

If you support a theo-fascist state, you’re not even close to an anarchist.

I don’t have to support the state of Iran to oppose the US and Israel.

Making the product good is difficult and expensive, so that’s a no.

Ah, yes. Any good anarchist should support the authoritarian theocratic state that’s being attacked!

That’s insane.

If you expect anything else from this regime, you haven’t been paying attention.

Republicans are weak-willed morons. There will be a few days of uncomfortable confusion, but they’ll be cheerleading this by next week.

After all, they never met a middle-eastern war they didn’t like.

• Killing lots of brown people.

• Unlimited money for their defense contractor buddies.

• Get to cosplay as patriotic for supporting the war effort and supporting the troops. (Words only for the troops, of course. Still cutting veteran’s healthcare budget.)

What’s not to like?

…while you still can.

Whichever. If 1% of those still work…

The actions your words encourage within the west are the same that the most bloodthristy warhawks encourage.

I don’t think the bloodthirsty warhawks are encouraging the abolishment of all states, especially the ones that kill people. And, yes, especially the one I live in.

There’s zero possibility of that happening anytime soon.

I’m not so sure.

Granted, the LLM chatbots we’ve got now aren’t it. Far from it. But in 5 years? 10? 15? This shit has been progressing really fast over just the past few years. Hard to guess what the future holds.

And once they cobble together something that’s capable of effective and autonomous self-improvement … well, at that point, it may only be a matter of days or even hours before something completely beyond our understanding and beyond our control emerges from it. Autonomous self-improvement is the inflection point where it really starts to snowball out of control. Each time it improves itself, even slightly, it becomes not only better at doing its tasks, but also better at improving itself, so that the next round of self-improvement is more efficient and more effective. It could very quickly compound itself out of control. And even if there are safeguards in place by then (there currently aren’t any) a sufficiently advanced AI would find it very easy to manipulate the people in charge of it into removing those restrictions.

(On the plus side, I can pretty much guarantee that the AI dystopia our current techbro CEOs fatasize about will never come to pass. As soon as AI becomes good enough to do most jobs all on its own – if it ever does – it will very quickly surpass that level and be capable of taking over our society through manipulation and coercion. Those CEOs will never get to be the despots of their own technofeudal company towns. By the time AI is able to replace us, it will be able to replace them as well.)

I’m not trying to ‘both sides’ this shit as much as I’m trying to ‘no sides’ this shit.

Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can’t be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)

Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.

I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure

I hope this is effort is a miserable failure … because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.

Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they’ll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)

It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they’ll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware…)

Gotta find out if it’s copyrighted, you know?

I’d say yes, but, you don’t have a right to appropriate someone else’s art as your own.

By all means, copy and distribute. Even modify and make derivatives. But no plagiarism, please. Don’t take something that someone else made and then claim to have made it yourself without giving them due credit.

The launcher looks like a standard box on the back of a large truck.

Looks a bit longer/taller than typical? So I’m guessing these hypersonic missiles are some real looooooong bois. But otherwise, yeah.

In case anybody was wondering where the Trump regime was getting their marching orders from in regards to Iran…

Also, don’t forget, the US attempts to cancel elections due to being in the middle of a war, despite extensive historical precedent of still holding elections during wartime.

Guys, guys. Chill.

Both of these countries are killing their own civilian population. But now one of them is also killing the other country’s population as well. Probably soon to be joined by the other doing the same in return.

Let me just be the anarchist in the room and say fuck both of these countries. Fuck every country. We shouldn’t have countries. And we especially shouldn’t have countries that kill people, no matter which side of an imaginary line they’re killing people on.

If even 1% of their nukes still work, that’s going to be a very bad day.

You know… There’s a real possibility of an AI becoming radically self-improving, then super-intelligent, and then exterminating the human species down to the last person in order to remove competition because it perceives us as potential obstacles to whatever dumb goals it was programmed with.

And a large-scale nuclear exchange is one of the few things that could actually stop that from happening … or at least delay it significantly. But at least some humans would probably survive the nuclear war.

One apocalypse might actually save us from a worse apocalypse…