Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That’s when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.

Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there’s some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it’s actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.

C-x C-f /sudo::/path/to/file

Yeah, in emacs you use tramp to open the file with /sudo::

If I were malicious enough to design the system, I would make it a heartbeat. Skip too many heartbeats and your car bricks. It could be written in to the terms of the loan since companies are using in-car computers for repossession.

“Why is my car bricked?”

“Because you tried to disable our payment verification system.”

“I live in a rural area.”

“You’re like 1% of customers. Your loan contact says you have to drive within cell range once a month. Fuck you, we’re repossessing the car and keeping the money anyway.”

your car is bricked

People who understand technology know that most of the tremendous benefits of AI will never be possible to realize within the griftocarcy of capitalism. Those who don’t understand technology can’t understand the benefits because the grifters have confused them, and now they think AI is useless garbage because the promise doesn’t meet the reality.

In the first case it’s exactly like cryptography, where we were promised privacy and instead we got DRM and NFTs. In the second, it’s exactly like NFTs because people were promised something really valuable and they just got robbed instead.

Management will regularly pass over the actual useful AI idea because it’s really hard to explain while funding the complete garbage “put AI on it” idea that doesn’t actually help anyone. They do this because management is almost universally not technically competent. So the technically competent workers who absolutely know the potential benefits are still not able to leverage them because management either doesn’t understand or is actively engaging in a grift.

Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.

Also fellow emacs user, I see.

Why is “the most incompetent fascist alive can’t use Windows” a Linux meme?

Yeah, there are lots of people who’ve said this and are not also fascists. There’s no reason to platform this scumbag.

But this is really more a product of capitalism than anything else. Under capitalism you just have to keep moving even if you’re just making garbage and debt. There’s no reason to stop and think, because that is seen as a cost (even though it costs more to move without thinking).

Even the best companies that do factor in planning (at least in concept if not actually in practice most of the time) end up with the other problem of “resume driven development” where things that are totally fine and actually working get replaced with things that don’t work because someone needs a new project to get their promotion.

Capitalism produces garbage and puts the people who are least qualified in decision making roles. This still happens in natural systems, but much less. In (healthy) anticapitalist organizing, the people who know the most are generally asked to lead and when they don’t know what to do they stop and figure it out before moving forward.

Aimless wondering can still be a problem, but it’s not forced by the system to continue it’s just people who are learning.

Lemmygrad is tankies, which is exactly the point. You can’t tell the difference between anarchists and the people who murdered them. The political compass exists to create that confusion, equating “libertarianism” (by which, they mean right wing “libertarianism”) with the original definition of libertarian socialism.

Even the choice of “libertarianism” as a name was intentionally chosen to confuse things, to steal a word and destroy it’s meaning. IIRC, Murray Newton Rothbar literally said that he was intentionally stealing the word “libertarian” for the right. The whole thing is about propaganda and confusion, and the political compass is part of that.

The political compass is literally a propaganda tool created by right wing “libertarians.” It’s complete bullshit.

Russia always was capitalist, that’s kind of the point of Animal Farm. If you look at the company towns of the Kentucky Coal Miners historically, it’s the same structure as the Soviet Union: the company (or the state) owns everything and enslaves the workers. One used debt, the other pretended to represent the proletariat, but the ruling class extracted labor from the workers and only supplied them the minimum necessary to survive. Lenin was a reactionary pretending to be a revolutionary.

I did that for a number of years. I never had a credit card because I never wanted to spend money if I didn’t know I had it. When it came time to buy a house, they told me they couldn’t give me a loan because I didn’t have credit history. I had to get a credit card in order to get a loan. You can’t take on debt unless you’ve had debt.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, if you don’t take on debt unnecessarily that’s seen as a good thing. No credit history is optimal.

I went to school in a dirt poor place. Like half of my graduating class joined the military. Recruiters were in the halls like every week. Yeah, it’s absolutely intentional.

So funny thing, Seattle Police Department did a pilot for AI that did sentiment analysis on police audio and looked for things like racial slurs. They pretty quickly disbanded the project and destroyed the evidence.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/decision-to-halt-program-analyzing-seattle-police-bodycam-video-under-scrutiny/

(IIRC some folks requested info from the pilot and they claimed to have deleted it.)

It’s really worth looking at Rojava here. Democratic Confederalism can exist within borders. So norther Syria has it’s own military and acts independently, but is still technically part of Syria. That model could be a way to maintain autonomy and build a better future even within a collapsing US.

And cascadia as an idea is really not intended to be another colonizer project anyway. Official secession would just be further occupying indigenous lands. Democratic Confederalism could offer an alternative while also embracing Land Back. That’s just my €0.02 anyway.

Yeah, buy a bullet proof vest if you’re staying. I decided to stay and fight after Trump got elected and I got shot. A lot of people got shot, some for just being brown or queer. They will bring the violence to you and if you try to stop them from hurting other people, they will try to kill you. That’s their scam. It’s always been abuse others and claim the victim, all the way back to Hitler.

I wish you the best of luck. The Pacific Northwest would be a wonderful place if it wasn’t part of the US. It was incredibly hard to leave, but there’s absolutely no way I could stay. I hope you win the fight. I’d love to come back some day if it’s ever worth coming back to.