sab

A luxury bunker is so wonderfully late stage capitalism.

I'm very happy with Nextcloud notes.

I'm using it with Obsidian on my computer though, so not entirely open source all the way, but there's plenty of good open source markdown editors out there.

This copypasta has done so much more to inform people about GNU than any somewhat reasonable piece of writing could ever have done.

I mean, it's a challenging hypothesis to prove. I might just be pessimistic.

I think there is some reason for valid concern though. The New York Times memoriam for Clifford Nass is an interesting and somewhat worrying read.

Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.

Maybe more practically, it's just hard to argue America wouldn't be in a better place right now if it wasn't for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.

Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.

It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn't stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.

Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That's why it's useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.

I guess it only occasionally makes sense for government web sites and banks. X might have ambitions to become a bank, so in that sense it might make sense.

So another piece of advice: if twitter ever asks you if you want to start using it for banking, nope the fuck out.

I can't believe I hadn't heard of this.

Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files invisible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed.

And then they just paid some settlements, recalled some CDs, and continued to operate as if nothing has happened. Bloody hell.

You've been considering leaving Twitter for a while, and suddenly one morning the bird has flown and Twitter has left you instead.

I think it's also a clear signal that things are really never going to return to normal, it's only getting worse from here. Which is easy those of us on the outside to observe, but maybe slightly harder from the inside when you still have most of the community still intact and posting.

It's such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it's too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn't a de facto browser monopoly.

I'm sure the feedback would be great.