jwiggler

Hackers acting as if they're doing a public service by bringing down a free publicly accessible tool is a new level of assbackwardness.

If the goal really was to force IA to increase their security, they would've tried to consult with them. This is more about notoriety and chaos and the hackers have no moral ground to stand on.

Playing guitar. I'm bad, can't really play with others, couldn't play live, but being able to sing and play along to songs I love, putting my own spin on them, or getting into a rhythm and making up silly lyrics is one of the most valuable things I ever learned to do. Probably the single best thing I've done in my life is learn to play.

The proof is in the pudding folks

I would recommend reading or listening to Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power. It is a compilation of several of his Q and As about his ideas about the US political and media systems. He has a whole book about the media called Manufacturing Consent, but Understanding Power will give you the lowdown.

Essentially, all mainstream US media is beholden to capitalistic (for advertising) or state (for funding) forces, so a person should always be aware that news sources are never going to print something that is against its own interest. Things like LGBTQ rights and right to abortion don't put news outlets sources of money at risk, so they're safe to print, but you'd be hard-pressed to find something that challenges, for example, the military industrial complex.

I'm not doing it much justice but that's a very very general and incomplete jist of why it's good to be skeptical of the mainstream media in general.

These right wing-ass fuckers ruin everything you love, and now they've come for LOTR.

If you aren't comfortable doing that then you aren't comfortable "working on" your car.

You've written a whole lotta junk to essentially end on, "if you can't jack up your car and remove the wheel, you shouldn't be changing your headlight in the first place."

Which is quite a dumb take.

I discovered Mastodon the night the Wagner group started marching toward Moscow, and was seeing live updates. From telegram or something. That was crazy.

Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he's saying profits have been decoupled from a company's value, and that it's no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition -- his example is while a landowner's neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner's property value also increases).

Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don't actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They're effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.

It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven't had much time to chew on it. What's your take on that idea?

Sorry, buy-it-for-life

I kinda like the idea of a phone that is usually small, but I can make big by unfolding it if I want to. But I do agree that the fewer moving parts, the sturdier and more BIFL. It's just that BIFL is not really attainable anyways in the current state of the phone market due to software support obsoletion.

I'd like to see a small eink phone or the tiny matchbook from Her.

That's too bad, but if you didn't enjoy it then there's not much point in continuing.

I guess my point was you don't really have to deal with UG or be very skilled to enjoy playing, but if you didn't like it (calluses are kind-of a must, tbh) then it's not worth sinking time into, imo

Aw:( I dont think an annoying website design should shy you away from playing music. Being able to express yourself with guitar is more than worth having to deal with UGs shittiness, or calluses for that matter, even if it just means playing your own rhythm of G-C-D, or some simple chord progression.

Maybe if you pick it back up one day, try not to think of it as a chore to learn songs you like from tabs, and instead just explore the instrument and the sounds you can make with it.