Well, based on what he said, he’s wrong.

Unless he’s not from the usa. So before I pointed out the flaw in his plan, I want to make sure I’M not wrong.

…where are you from?

Ubuntu used to be the obvious choice for reviving old systems that couldn’t run Windows

It didn’t.

It was though. You are living in a bubble. For five years all I ever heard was “You gotta switch to Ubuntu! Windows is awful!” Except this is when I was still using Windows XP, so from my perspective Windows wasn’t awful. It was just out of date. From 2006-2011, that’s all I ever heard was Ubuntu Ubuntu Ubuntu.

Finally I looked at Ubuntu, and instantly realized I hated it, but that’s because of personal choice. For the masses, Ubuntu=Linux at one point. If you knew enough to dispute that fact, then you’re already in the Linux ecosystem enough to have your own opinions.

But for non-Linux people, I’d say Ubuntu was the default Linux experience for most people for 15ish years. I’d say around 3-4 years ago it started shifting towards Mint.

And now Mint is the default experience. The problem is Linux users are very opinionated. Their distro is the best distro. Their distro “just works”. And these opinions are on a spectrum. I don’t mean autism, I mean the opinions are literally a whole spectrum. You could have someone who has almost an identical set-up as you, except they use a different file browser. So, slightly differrent. On the other end of the spectrum you might have someone who uses Arch. Or if you use Arch, maybe they use vanilla Debian.

Whatever the specifics, that’s not the point. The point is Linux is a whole range of visions, which is why your vision will never be THE vision for Linux. Because regardless of your opinions, no matter which stance you take, there’s going to be thousands of people who want to tell you how stupid your setup is, and how much better theirs is.

But the default Linux experience is just the one that the majority gravitate towards. 90% of normal PC users never change any settings, or try different distros. The difference is that most Linux users aren’t the typical PC users. Linux users like to customize their PC. Most PC users don’t even change the theme. That’s why Windows has such a monopoly. The user buys their PC, plop it on their desk, and the factory settings are good enough.

The other thing I find most Linux users do, is they want to grow the Linux base. So they introduce the “easiest” distro, and that becomes the default. For a very long time that was Ubuntu. I actually like Mint, so I personally see this as a good step for being the default.

And if you don’t believe that there are users who don’t change their PC or customize things, I’m running ZorinOS, as my first Linux full time use case. The only thing I customized was putting a custom taskbar at the bottom of my screen. Outside of that, my PC hasn’t been updated, or changed in any way since 2023.

And if all of this sounds like horror to you, then that just means you have opinions that I don’t have. But you’re also one of the advanced PC users who use linux easily. I still struggle with this. If Windows wasn’t one massive privacy invasion, I’d still be on Windows despite all the things you hate about them. For me it was the spying. Linux just does it’s thing, and isn’t controlled by corporations, so it doesn’t spy. That’s literally the only difference for me. I don’t even update firefox. I’m running 133.0.3. I think firefox is somewhere near version 200.

“If it was banned, organized crime would fill the void”.

It already IS organized crime. The only reason it’s not considered organized crime, is because it’s not banned, and therefore not a crime.

But really, all thats saying is “If you banned it, they would still continue doing this exact same thing.”

Except now they need to bribe the government to allow them to continue. Thats the only difference.

On the one hand, fuck Rockstar. On the other hand, fuck the police too!

Feel free to cross post this to Fuck_AI

insert Kash Patel joke here

I’m now trying to imagine what series of events would lead to you being shot because of subpar soldering skills.

Shhhhhhhhhhh. A man can dream.

Nah. I hope OpenAI is fined 800 billion dollars.

You ever play monopoly? I want them to land on Boardwalk, with 4 hotels. I know thats not how the game works, but I want it to be a game ender.

Then do the same to all these. Throw in Meta just for good cause.

Factually? You’re right. The problem is, “work isn’t paying the bills anymore” is also true for a lot of people. So they’re looking for any solution they can. I’m not saying this is a good solution. I’m just saying it’s all they have.

You think they care about things like facts, or logic? No. This is, and always has been about control.

Even the business side of things know piracy doesn’t actually hurt business, it helps it. They’ve conducted studies on this since 2004. They found that the vast majority of pirates are actually the biggest spenders. They found more often than not a pirate will download a movie, or an album or a game, or whatever. Then within a month buy that same thing they just pirated.

Thats the reason you used to see these record labels try to stop piracy back in the days of kazaa and napster, and limewire. There used to be lawsuits where they’d sue some household for 20 million dollars. Knowing they don’t have it. Well what ended up happening is they ended up suing this elderly man who had no idea what limewire was. He didn’t know how to use a computer. And the only one who used the computer was the 8 year old boy, who now had to live with his grandpa, because both his parents were killed by a drunk driver. Now this record label was trying to put his grandfather 20 million in debt. For someone who had no idea who the black eyed peas. When they kept asking him about it, he asked why they kept asking him about soup if this was about music theft.

As the case went on, it was revealed that between his parents, and other family members, he had a cd collection, including the albums accused of stealing, worth over $5,000 worth of cds.

The whole thing turned the public against record labels, and painted them as the bad guys for trying to ruin peoples lives over music. To this day I haven’t heard of another time they tried that tactic.

And the republicans know this.

You have to remember one thing. The cruelty is the point. It doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to punish their enemies. And at times even punish their own base. I saw a story last night where a guy who voted for trump was complaining that insulin used to be $6, and now it’s $80 under trumps new plan. And he said “I didn’t think it would happen to ME!”

And thats where we are right now. Just leaving the fuck around stage. Now entering the find out portion of our journey.

When they tried asking musk’s AI service a week ago how to handle things, it said “eliminate the billionaires”.

Then a few days ago I started seeing headlines that the ceos are now saying AI is dangerous.

There’s also the headlines that ICE is buying equipment from Boston Dynamics to use as AI guard dogs.

And now we see this headline.

We’re living in the future of Terminator 2.

You’re not making a single point for why trump wouldn’t do this on a whim because some corporate asshole smiled at him and praised him.

Ya know…I always thought that when we started living life in a 1984 world, there would be a pendulum. I figured it would swing the other way after enough people got tired of their shit. I thought there would be riots, and calls for violence against CEOs and the elite.

Had that happened, that’s the dangerous part. Because then, I don’t think Flock would stop this bullshit. I just think they’d do it more quietly. Let the people think their activism won the day, and then in secret, keep building up databases, keep spying on people. Did you know your own wifi router, regardless of which one you own, can map out your house? Did you know it can keep a real time sonar watch on where your body presence is in your own house in real time? Did you know the spy doesn’t even need to be in your country to watch you?

So I thought the real danger was when the people thought they had defeated the fascists. I thought people would feel they had won, and now things can go back to “normal”. With everybody in a false sense of security, everybody goes about their lives without thinking they’re being tracked/followed. Meanwhile they’re still behind the scenes with new projects that the public doesn’t know about, and is all kept quiet. That’s where I thought the push for AI by the billionaires was coming from. They don’t need it to work. They need the public to be dumb enough to think it works. They only need it to be good enough to use a camera, identify people/objects, and send the data back to them without anyone knowing. Meanwhile everyone else thinks AI is just the way you do everything now. That’s their plan. To make people reliant on their AI.

I hadn’t considered the fact that today, most people know ring doorbells are 24/7 monitoring systems that feed back to HQ, where the company freely sells this data to police and other organizations without a warrant. Most people know flock cameras track you through the city, street by street. Most people know ICE exists, kills people, and is running concentration camps. These are things people know…and yet, I see no action. I see no riots. I see no backlash.

I hadn’t considered that there would be no pendulum at all. It’s just all one way, and the people just accepted it. THATS the part I wasn’t counting on. I didn’t for a second consider that there would be no cat and mouse game. I was SURE the people would fight back when everybody realized what’s happening here. They’re not. People see these stories where Target wants you to download their app, so that they can spy on you in their store…which has been going on long before all this tech came out. Cameras in the ceilings have existed since forever…but now with the app, they can identify you by name, by face, and then you take your tracking device into the real world OUTSIDE of their stores. Their app monitors your cell phones buying habits. If you buy something from Walmart from your cell phone, they know. They know who you are, what you buy in real time, and how much you were willing to spend. They also sell that data to anyone who wants to buy it.

In 2014, I told anyone who would listen that the battle for Net Neutrality was important. Nobody would listen.

I forget the name of the bill now, but in 2019 there was a bill that would allow anyone to sell anyone elses data without the individuals consent. I warned anybody who would listen that this is a dangerous bill. No one would listen.

So now, those two things combined have made it so that your ISP, who knows every single service, and website, and app that you use, is now allowed to sell all that info to whomever wants to buy it. And other companies like Netflix can make deals with your ISP to slow down the connection to Hulu or Youtube, or any other video service, while leaving their own service unrestricted. And since Netflix is going to pay for that service, they may as well get a bit of information about you. So now they’re buying the data logs of what you do online. Now they know you buy dog food every 2 weeks. They know the brand. They know the volume. They know the flavor. They know how much you normally pay. So now they can tell the dog food company "Hey, give us money, and we can run commercials for your product, advertised to people who we know already buy your product. Or we could run a competitors ads instead.

Now we’re living in that world. A world that everybody told me “Net Neutrality isn’t that important.” is now seeing how one thing can build upon another. If ONLY Net Neutrality was the only thing broken, no. They couldn’t do all this stuff together. But it’s not the only failure point. It’s just the easiest one to take. Because most people don’t understand it. And in the short term, it changes nothing. So even when changed, people still said “See? Nothing changed!”. I said “Just wait”.

Now we’re here. I feel both validated and frustrated. Validated because I saw ALL this shit coming 10+ years ago. Frustrated because even when we’ve arrived in the fascist times I was trying to warn against, people STILL won’t admit that this isn’t just trump. Trump could die tomorrow. None of the bullshit changes. Trump is not a leader. He is a puppet. Puppets don’t control the situation. They distract, and entertain. That’s it. He doesn’t even know (or care) about all the destruction he’s causing. That doesn’t mean it ends when he leaves. There WILL be a new sack of shit trying to instill fascism into your daily life. There always is. Whether that person is named Reagan, or Bush, or Trump, or some other asshole. There’s always another round of bullshit. We aren’t addressing the core issues of our country which have existed since it’s founding. We’re only addressing the symptoms.

Except, now, we’re not even doing that. Everybody is just shutting up, and fucking off to accept it all.

So yeah, I’m frustrated because as far as I can see, everybody has just accepted that the elite will rule over us. Instead of…you know…breaking out the guillotines.

It really doesn’t need to be though. Let’s say he has a shitty little rocket.

Ok. So now lets shoot the rocket at the warship. Ok, it didn’t do much damage. Maybe it was even shot down by anti-air defenses. Now try shooting 900 of them at the ship. They’re cheap, they’re disposable. Sure, the anti-air might shoot a lot down, but you’re shooting down a $3 rocket with a 1 million dollar anti-air missile.

Even if you never hit the ship, you’re causing financial drain that cannot be sustained. You spend $10,000 on $3 rockets, fire them all off all day and all night, and the USA is using military grade defenses. That $10,000 might drain the USA half a billion dollars just to defend one ship.

Now scale that for every ship in the military. Little tiny unmanned rafts basically, shooting off cheap rockets at close range, and being defended by expensive ammo. All across the ocean. With the proper planning, you could probably drain the USA’s global navy in a day without sinking, or even hitting a single ship. All without losing anything at all.

That description is like the type of thing I’d say, and other people would tell me how wrong I am.

“Just cut a hole in the roof, and get some machinery to lift the generators out, and then drop new ones in. Easy peasy!”

“It doesn’t work like that! It’s not legos. You can’t just snap a new one in the old spot like plug and play!”

“Why not?”

“Because these are highly sensitive nuclear reactors where small mistakes kill a whole city! These things weigh 100 tons EACH!!!”

“I’m sure it’ll be fiiiiiiiiine!”

And I’d be called an idiot for thinking you could just do this. Yet, in this timeline I never had this EXACT conversation, so I can’t say I was “right”, but I can totally see me having this conversation and being told I was wrong.

People always think I’m wrong, and that you can’t do things just because they aren’t regularly done.

My current thought is that if America wanted to absolutely dominate the globe in terms of GDP, they would install solar panels all along the nevada desert. All that prime solar space is being wasted.

Plop down a few million solar panels, and you could generate enough energy for the entire planet.

The bottleneck wouldn’t be creating power. The bottleneck would be distributing it.

But you could easily put something big and important in the middle of the desert. Something that consumes more energy than you can imagine.

I’m thinking like a 2,000 foot tall voltron mech which is all electric, and powered by solar.

Then if we go to war, you just send these massive mechs. No atomic bomb needed. It just flattens the city, and comes home. Recharges, and goes back out. All they do is switch it’s batteries.

What they going to do? Shoot missles at Voltron? Those missles won’t even dent the armor.

The only reason we don’t have voltron is because the solar power needed would spur a solar explosion, and everyone would be getting solar. Then power utilities wouldn’t make money.

So we don’t have Voltron because Thomas Edison’s ghost is still a capitolist.

I’ve stopped caring what the capacity is. Youtube doesn’t require a fraction of what we have already in place.

However, they’ve put so many ads that an adblock is required.

But, if you have adblock you need to click the video you need to watch, let it not load, refresh the screen, wait way longer than should be needed, and then watch the video while getting a nagging popup that says “Experiencing interuptions?”

Followed by watching the video rendering NOT rendering at various points, and you need to pause and let it buffer.

All because google thinks they are entitled to push malicious ads onto my device, and punishing me for blocking them.

The speed we have is more than enough for the internet we have. The bottleneck is the companies enshittifying their own service.

Faster speeds mean nothing when you artificially throttle them.

Gottem!!!

Yes. Yes I do believe they are one and the same.