As a European person I don’t want to drive an exploding car built by a nazi, so this company has nothing to offer me.

I think, AI quality aside, it’s mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA’s market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society’s ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.

And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn’t think we’d get this far - the 2008 crisis didn’t do it, COVID somehow didn’t do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don’t deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that’s where the trick is going to be.

TBH this is just how petitions in the UK work: enough people sign it, it goes to parliament, they say a bunch of stuff about it that often sounds reasonable enough, then they do nothing about it. It’s just a way to give the public the illusion that they’re being listened to without having to actually do anything. It was the same with the digital ID petition, which I still signed but with 100% expectation that it wouldn’t actually achieve anything.

I just checked and I apparently have 137 apps on my phone. I think most of that though is just reading about some FOSS app, installing it to try it out and then just forgetting. I seem to have 4 different maps apps for example lol

Any of the Minds from Iain M. Banks Culture series, because that would mean the Culture was real and I want to live there.

I guess for a specific one, maybe the Arbitrary? That one seems pretty chill and knows where Earth is:

Also while I’d been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC’s World Service, asking for ‘Mr David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.’ (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth’s entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn’t get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.

Yep. As fun as it is to see this headline, the fact is that he was complicit in war crimes and in the torture and murder of countless thousands of people, and got to live to 84 years old in fabulous wealth and comfort not giving two fucks what we all thought of him. Unless there’s some sort of cosmic retribution waiting for him in the afterlife, he fully won.

Out of morbid curiosity, I’d like to see the reality where Obama ran for president, but doing and saying exactly everything Trump did to see how far he would get. I think “Grab 'em by the pussy” would have been the end of it, but I’d also like to see the reality where he made it this far, had shut down the government and bulldozed the East wing of the White House just to see what Fox News would be saying.

I like Betterbird, I find it slightly more less worst.

I just go around looking for other people who post their problems, then aggressively tell them to read the wiki and report the thread so it gets closed.

DNA is one that concerns me quite a lot. I can see some arguments in favour or retaining DNA on file for a longer term in certain cases - persistent sex criminals comes to mind - but I really think there should be tighter controls about just indiscriminately gathering DNA, and if you’re not found guilty of anything that info should be expunged and this should be independently audited IMO.

Also facial recognition for similar reasons. This feels like it should be the sort of thing to me that needs a warrant to be used, like searching a person’s home. Governments shouldn’t be allowed to just endlessly trawl through the faces of everybody who’s out in public for whatever reason they like. And using it to just sweep protests to (presumably) make a database of protestors should be a big no-no.

Yeah I like Strawberry too. It’s not flashy looking but it does everything I need.

I really liked the first game, hoping this one doesn’t take forever to come to Steam.

Satisfactory has me fully in it’s grasp right now lol. Current project is a giant vacuum tube to take me back and forth to where the coal miners are, because the steel ingot supply has become erratic.

My cat will lock in on that stuff if you do it just once! I have to be really careful not to feed her early even if she’s being a pain about it, because if she gets fed ten minutes early once, that’s the new time forever lol.

One time she was being bonkers at 5am so I gave her some treats to keep the peace, it took about 2 weeks to get her out of the “I get treats at 5am every day now” mode.

As a KDE user, I have long ago accepted that no flatpaks will ever follow my system theme, and they will all look completely different from each other lol.

My most hated thing is when I have a computer problem, I search for it, I find a thread from someone with the exact same problem as me, and it ends with them saying “nm I fixed it.”

TELL ME WHAT YOU DID

As a Gen X person, this is kind of my response to any sort of right-wing nonsense now. Especially that thing where you say something that’s obviously true and they ask what your source is for that so they can nit-pick it and exhaust you with irrelevant bickering until you give up.

“Society seems to be degenerating into fascism again”

“oH yEaH wHaT iS uR sOuRcE”

“Outside.”

Or I’ll just be like “no” if I even bother responding at all. You’re probably just arguing with a bot to drive up engagement that benefits some rich dickhead somehow anyway. 100% not worth it IMO.

Not American, but I totally didn’t see someone shoplifting a couple of weeks ago and I just carried on with my business, but on the way out I heard another customer grassing them out. What is the world coming to?

You know what you hardly ever see - billionaires telling on each other for their crimes for no reason. Solidarity, people!

According to King, at the height of his cocaine use he wrote the entire novel Cujo and doesn’t remember writing it at all.

You could also make a strong case that the director credit for the movie Maximum Overdrive should go to cocaine rather than King lol.

Yeah you don’t have to go full prepper but some of it just comes under common sense emergency stuff I think. Like where we live we have a reasonably sized garden so we grow stuff to eat, and have a big rain barrel to collect water. Normally that’s just used to water the plants but you could presumably boil it up and make it potable if you really needed to. Between that and just having a reasonable amount of dry food in the pantry it’s probably enough to see us through for at least a week or two if anything serious happened.