What a read

This paragraph stood out to me, but the whole article is pretty distopian. It’s good to be aware of what intelligence is being gathered, and when wanted, used against us.

In one instance that Schwindt and Bromberger shared with WIRED, local police used software from Latent Wireless to locate a suspect in an office building knowing only the MAC address of the employee’s device. In another case, a robber connected to a Wi-Fi network at a local coffee shop before committing a crime. Police identified the MAC address of his device through the coffee shop’s router logs and eventually tracked him down by detecting the signal from that device as they drove around.

That’s not what I am saying.

In my opinion the forum is a altruistic area. Is the value I provide tailoring the posts by up voting and down voting not valuable? Is the value I provide by summarizing and or giving interpretations of the articles posted here not valuable? Or engaging in thoughtful honest discussion not valuable?

I believe they are.

Do I feel entitled to some profit because of my input on this forum? No I do not.

I give this work because I provide my value to this site voluntarily, honestly, many hours of my day, altruisticly, to build a better community and discussion. I don’t demand money because I receive a community in return.

What I am saying is that this kind of stuff will segment our community, by creating a profitable segment of the community and an unprofitable segment of community, implicitly creating a “correct” and “incorrect” way. Beyond that it will introduce people to our community who care less about furthering this forum, and more about making profit.

Remember YouTube before the partner program and video responses and how much more engaged and equal that community was? And what it is now with most every prominent channel being sponsored on top of ad breaks and product placement?

Obviously, if a person wants to dedicate their full time to some art and wants money for it, they should, and I’m excited for what they produce, but this is not where to do it.

But you don’t have vibrant thoughtful debates about world events in target, you don’t purchase microwaves at the library. You go to stores to buy stuff, you go to forums to discuss stuff.

Content creators can create their own site, their own patreon, or whatever - they can freely submit their work to our forum for feedback and an audience, and they can even link someone the link to their store if they ask - but introducing the profit angle directly to our forum and integrating it in will be the beginning of the end for this community as it is. The first crack of enshitification.

Fuck the commodification of culture.

Fuck full time content creators.

I don’t want people working full time on social networks. I don’t want to read your ad, your secret knowledge, your product placement, or sponsorship, or your oh so subtle pitch for VC funding. I’m certainly not going to give money.

I want people who do their own thing in the real world, and as a hobby and show-and-tell, submit their work freely to the Internet to hone and expand their craft and field, and gain organic enrichment altruisticly.

If you want to sell stuff and make money, make your own website and store. Not on our forum.

Don’t pollute our forum. I want to be inspired, be in awe, be entertained, be informed, and to give back in my own way that continues this cycle and fuels the forum.

We’ve fled so many greedy sites - fleeing this capitalistic parasite in hopes of finding honest discussion untainted by greed. I’m tired of fleeing.

Some advice that has taken me over a decade to learn myself:

There are no rules, the titles are made up, the responsibilities and requirements do no matter.

Get what you can from your job, and once you get something do your Best even if that best sucks, and stay until you have gotten what you want out of the job, or realize you can’t or don’t want to do it anymore, and then start again doing something else.

Don’t ever limit yourself thinking you need to “level up” or something needs to get unlocked.

Learn by doing, try your best, you will make things that suck sometimes, but as you do more and more you should be making things better.

Or, it’s because whoever is doing this hates freedom of information and historical evidence. There’s a long list of powerful people and governments who have the resources and will to carry out these attacks.

Cyber warfare is real, and the Internet archive is a museum and library of culture and truth. It provides evidence and context to our past.

As in conventional war, it is valuable to the amoral to destroy culture and truth in order to control it. Many would like to kill that to supplant it with their version of events that can’t be refuted with evidence.

In a way, yes.

Historically, the US fought a war to not be the UK. There was an earnest attempt to enshrine freedoms to privacy and thought from the beginning of this governments creation. With the ability to enforce free thoughts through explicitly allowing speech and weapons, along with the ability to reject search and intrusion from the state (outside of due process)

I think it’s important for people to be able to be private and to have secrets. People act differently when there’s trust that they are not observed and will not be observed.

I think it’s cruel to confine the human experience to only being in the “observed” state of mind.

Being able to secretly meet people, and go places without others knowing, and have private conversations, and to own and make things secretly is important to me. They don’t have to be nefarious or even embarrassing, a person on principle can just want something to be private, rational or not that should be allowed by default.

If I went on a hike alone to clear my mind, and then stumbled into a tracking camera on the trail, my mood would be changed. I would feel compelled to play a performative role and manage my appearance and actions and regulate what I say and do in a way that I wasn’t before that feeling of privacy was broken. Even more so if I knew that camera was live reporting with ai identification and analysis to the government.

This privacy is already barely existing anymore, I feel compelled to oppose any new invasion of privacy and to make attempts to carve out new privacy where I can.

The crazed goal to turn all of America into a high security prison.

No need to ask questions that a person could invoke their rights on when you can pay our capital overloads our own tax money for records instead.

What websites, what locations, what friends, what we buy, and everything else you could care to ask.

Soon we’ll have sensors installed on our toilets to make sure anyone with a dollar can know what we eat and what medicines we take and how regular we are.

Land of the free

I fucking hate Spring.

The quickest way to get a team of 10 contractors to turn 100 lines of basic code from a decent engineer into 2k, with 50 janky vulnerable dependencies, that needs to be babied with customized ide’s and multi-minute+ build times and 60m long recorded meetings.

Fuck Spring.

I haven’t been paying attention, what was the original drama there?

It sounds like good things have come out of it with a more community aligned governance, and nixOS is very interesting tech that could solve some of my headaches with Linux

Plants respond and react stressfully to being cut and chewed and digested.

To ignore this is just as bad as ignoring the plight of animals.

You don’t have to be thankful for the food that you eat and sacrifice for your life, but I will. If you are vegan then you are already aware of some of this plight of life, especially the cruelty of factory farm animals, but I ask you to expand your mind to the plight of all living things.

I know that when I thank my food, especially fresh plants, that I can feel a warmth of gratefulness radiate from my stomach. I recommend you try it with your next salad and when you are at your garden.

I want my animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and all life that I interact with to live happy and fulfilling lives.

The ones I eat to continue my happy and fulfilling life I am especially grateful for.

It will be a constant struggle to ensure my food and all life I interact with is happy and fulfilled, and to reflect deeply on what I can change and improve when it is not.

Humans are uniquely capable to manage and ensure quality of life for ecosystems . The water, the soil, the air, the plants, the fungi, the animals. We can choose the well trotted path to exploit, or we can choose the harder path to heal and maintain.

My solution is to operate a homestead where I can ensure the food I eat and use have a quality happy fulfilling life, and a simple swift painless transfer of life to me and those I can provide for.

Plants and fungi are alive too.

The only way to stop killing, is to stop living.

The solution is to be mindful of our food, to respect it’s life, be thankful in its death.

What I eat, I sacrifice to me, and it lives on through me.

I will maintain ownership of the repository, but I won’t pass it down to anyone else. First, because I feel it’s not up to me to decide who to pass the project down to, and second, because there is no one else to pass the project to.

“But I want and can maintain it, can I take it over?” Let me put it plain and simple: No! I don’t know you, I don’t trust you! Fork it and carry on!

Bravo

Starting with a simple idea that could theoretically be completed by a simple task, but as you implement it, reality complicates and sends you off on many deviations from the original straight and narrow path.

Yak shaving could be required and unknown at the beginning, or it could be a lack of discipline leading to scope creep - often it’s both

The famous Malcolm in the middle scene for ref: https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0?si=Pchmbf3509l1CbeQ - but the term was originally coined from elsewhere: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving