he/him. LARPer, Nerd Organizer, Web Dev.
Mastodon admin, [email protected]
Not the CNBC guy but I’ve got Nihilist Stock Market advice🌻

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Maybe instead of trying to train an AI powered car to deal with the insane chaos that is the road system, what if we designed something to remove that chaos? Maybe like a path that’s just for these self driving cars. There’s a network of paths to get you to your final destination.

    But if we did that, there’d still be our current problems of running out of fuel, or battery power. Which could be solved by electrifying those paths.

    But it’d be very difficult to have each of those individual cars switch between paths. Maybe it would be easier if instead of the cars switching paths, the people switched paths. Maybe we just make really long cars, and numerous people can get in them, and then switch cars as needed. People would need to know where to switch between these long cars. So we’d want to set schedules of when they’re running to where, and then have an app or something that just told you where to get on and off.

    And if they’re really long, maybe we could kickstart this before we have self-driving abilities anyway. We could just have one person in the front driving it.

    And maybe to reduce the need for rubber, instead of regular wheels on a road, they could just be metal wheels on metal tracks.

    Just throwing some ideas out there.



  • Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they’re “green texters” in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage’s connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is “Get your grandma an iPhone”. Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they’ll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.


  • So the premise of the Dune series is the Butlerian Jihad, where humans destroyed all “thinking machines” and declared that no machine would ever be made in the likeness of a human mind again. That’s why everything’s analogue, humans that can do computing in their head, etc.

    But unlike what one might think, they didn’t destroy thinking machines because AI robots had taken over (though his son Brian Herbert missed that memo). They destroyed thinking machines because, after humans had created AI, they were happy to offload any and all responsibilities and decisions. Humans turned to AI to make any decision, and at a certain point AI ran the galaxy, not because it had taken over, but because humans couldn’t be bothered. They stopped learning, they stopped innovating, they stopped doing the things core to being humans.

    So as I watch humans hand over more and more tasks and control to AI, apparently including teaching their children, I expect we’re heading to the same crossroads at some point.


    • Large files I don’t care if I lose (perhaps videos of popular things): NAS. Hard drives are cheap, not worry about losing it, I can download it again if needed
    • Storage with frequent access and security compliance: Wasabi. $6.99 per TB per month, free egress. Compatible with S3. SOC2 and PCI compliance. I use this for work as a backup to S3 for website images.
    • Files I need to store cheaply, redundantly, and access often: Backblaze B2. $6 per TB per month for storage. You can download 3x the amount of storage you have per month for free, or connect Backblaze to a CDN partner like Cloudflare for free egress through them. It’s also AWS S3 compatible, so you can just the AWS SDK/CLI or tools that work with AWS S3. I use this for hosting image files for my Mastodon server. Note that Backblaze B2 also has SOC2 compliance and US region available now, so it should be as secure as Wasabi at slightly lower cost if you don’t have a ton of egress.
    • Cheap long term backup storage: AWS S3 Glacier. $0.0036 per GB per month (so $3.6 per TB). Upload your files to S3, and add a lifecycle rule to migrate them to glacier. Glacier is cold storage, extremely cheap and great for a redundant backup. I use this for backing up photos and other files I’m going to want to store forever.

    For anything I’m hosting, multiple backups. Home NAS is usually the first backup, followed by cloud storage. So if I need something now, I can get it from my NAS. If there’s a problem with my NAS, I can get it from cloud (though with a delay for Glacier)





  • The global south is largely a terrible place because of the wealthy north. Especially the US. First they had to throw off their colonizers. Then they had to suffer the punishments of their former colonizers. Then the US took it upon themselves to attempt to overthrow every socialist leading government in the western hemisphere, elected or not, and replace them with a dictator. Then in the Western Hemisphere the US War on Drugs have made Mexico, Central, and South America a war zone run by cartels.

    So yeah, much of the world is much worse to live in than the US. Mostly because of the US. Western Europe is still a far better place to live.


  • My solution is more complicated but doesn’t require switching browsers

    1. I run a tor client on my home server in docker, the same place I keep my vpn access, torrenting, etc
    2. I run a socks proxy on my home server, that sends all requests through the tor network (and a different socks proxy for when I want to use the VPN)
    3. On my desktop and laptop, I use the FoxyProxy firefox extension (SwitchyOmega on Chrome). I setup the socks proxy (proxies) on it, using URL patterns.
    4. When I go to a .onion link, FoxyProxy uses the pattern, and sends the traffic over my tor socks proxy

  • It’s important to note who benefited from it and how, because it explains why there was such a fight to stop an obviously cruel and barbaric practice. Even the Founding Fathers knew it was wrong, but most of them still did it. They kicked the problem down the road because tobacco wasn’t profitable to grow in America anymore, so they thought the “problem” would solve itself in a generation or two. Then the Cotton Gin made slavery profitable, so it boomed.

    We need to be able to talk how it was beneficial, and who benefited from it, so we can see why it was so hard to end. Because we have a very similar problem with fossil fuels, and capitalism. They’re both destroying the world and causing us to do barbaric things to people. But there’s resistance to ending dependence on both, because they have benefits, even though most of those benefits go to an elite few.



  • Even thinking of it in terms of non-fediverse platforms. reddit often had multiple subreddits about the same exact topic. But the communities were different, often even splinters from each other because of disagreements on content and moderation. You end up with the original sub, Foo, followed by FooMemes, and TrueFoo, TrollFoo, FooJerk, etc.

    If communities start getting merged together automatically, it’s going to end up causing problems. Most likely the culture of someplace like lemmy.ml will end up being marketedly different than some other instances (and already is). I would not want posts from a memes group there mixed with a memes group from elsewhere. Grouping the same post client side, sure. But there’s a reason for separate groups about the same topic.