Out of all those I only ever used Solaris and the most polite thing I can say is: I have no nostalgia for that time.

OpenAI said it aims to “create a family of products for the AGI era”

A family of products that no one will be able to buy, sounds great Sam! 👍

So, I make things for myself to replace commercial software that either doesn’t exist or that is becoming (or will become) enshittified like all commercial software.

I like to cook, for instance. It’s a hobby of mine. Cooking, BBQ, grilling, baking, all of it. So of course, I have recipes and they are important to me. I could spend all my time painstakingly entering all my recipes into recipes dot com or whatever, right? But of course, as soon as I do that, their barely usable app that does almost everything I want (and a hundred things I don’t give a shit about) gets updated in the third update of the week (rolleyes) and they have completely changed the UI and on top of that, they removed a feature that I used daily.

OR - I could just make my own fucking app. Which I did. It’s awesome, it does everything I need and nothing I don’t. It also doesn’t update every thirty seconds and become less and less usable or require me to completely overhaul my workflow because the programming staff and middle management need to justify their existences.

I also recently made a wishlist extension for Firefox, because Amazon removed the ability to add non-Amazon items to their wishlist. I have probably a dozen other ideas I’m working on at any given time. None of this is to make money, but just to make my life more convenient and unplug myself from the wider (bullshit) Internet as much as possible.

There are full-on doctors who are conservative wack jobs though.

sudo touch grass

Why do they keep calling this a “plan?” “One side must unilaterally give up everything” is not a “plan,” it’s surrender.

And boy it sounds expensive.

Kudzu is edible, which I’m guessing will come in handy for the South about halfway through the Trump administration.

Tbh this is what AI used to sound like prior to GPT-2.

AI is turning us into the stupider version of itself.

I’ve seen this movie before.

Yep. Oh it will open down bigly. But I expect the day to end up sideways or marginal. If Cramer ends up being right about anything, then I’m certain I’ve switched timelines.

I’ve not read Spinoza, but this idea has for most of my life seemed fairly self-evident. Something clearly seems to exist, I’m not the biggest most important thing in the something, though I am a part of it. Do I believe in God? Not per se - but I do believe there is something incomprehensibly larger than I am, and that in and of itself deserves a little respect and contemplation.

My religious parents didn’t see it that way of course.

♬♩ barely getting by ♩♫

Algorithms are not universally good and helpful. They should be designed to boost engagement only in that they serve to find content you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise, not to boost engagement at all costs by feeding you things they think you will click on. It’s an important distinction.

Discord is bad because its forums are not world-readable, therefore not indexable. It’s very useful to the rest of the world to have conversations be public. The youngest users here may not even remember but searching Google in the 2000s before Facebook went huge and when forums were all world-readable, it was a different experience altogether. You could find somebody who was talking about your niche issue/product - no matter what it was. It was kind of magical. No matter what thing happened to you, you could be pretty sure it had happened to someone else and they were talking about it somewhere and Google would see it and point it out to you.

Not anymore. Everything’s on Facebook now and Google can’t see it, nor can anyone else - except Facebook. All that legacy knowledge just tucked away in Facebook’s data vault and essentially useless to anybody but Facebook, which makes it less than useless.

That was just the warmup. They got serious about it on January 21, 2010.

The Ensoniq ASR-10. Fuck, that thing is heavy.

It’s not like Reddit stopped existing. Lemmy will (hopefully) never be Reddit. That means that some itches Reddit will still have to scratch.

Frankly, whatever secret sauce it is that makes social media popular is also what drives them to be such shit and be so shit for society. I like Lemmy way more than I like Reddit, and even though I have to go back to Reddit from time to time to fill the needs of my niche interests (which can get no traction where there are not mobs of participants in the greater whole) I never ever look at my interactions there and go “I wish Lemmy was more like this.”

It’s a conundrum.