Just torrent that shit while the streaming platforms get their house in order. It’s not acceptable to be racist to Linux.

It feels like you’re asking what value is. Value is a sentiment that depends on many factors but it eventually decomposes to some utility factor. You could argue that water is not valuable because it is abundant but that depends on context. In the desert it becomes extremely valuable for people to live. It’s difficult to make a numerical assessment of value and measurement implies a level of precision and universality that is inappropriate. We estimate value based on contextual factors such as supply and demand. It’s not a great way to assess it but better than nothing.

I’m always pleased when I buy stone construction materials because they deliver 1000kg of material and it only costs £20. I don’t know of any other material that is seemingly so abundant, inexpensive and useful. I’m not convinced I would feel the same way about a tonne of gold, aside from the scarcity. Maybe I would make a gold toilet and get x amount of fame on social media, that’s apparently extremely valuable.

Making a monthly contribution. Who knows where the money goes but I’ve never heard of a wiki project I disapproved of and there is a lot to like about what they do.

This is a sane way to use LLM. Also, pick your poison, some bots are better than others for a specific task. It’s kinda fascinating to see how other people solve coding problems and that is essentially on tap with a bot, it will churn out as many examples as you want. It’s a really useful tool for learning syntax and libraries of unfamiliar languages.

On one extreme side of LLM there is this insane hype and at the other extreme a great pessimism but in the middle is a nice labour saving educational tool.

Use Wolfram Alpha for mathematics

I once used a laptop in a coffee shop to write a screenplay. I had ornate facial hair and wearing a beanie. Shit was tight af. Later on I clogged their toilet.

I spend a lot of time in my workshop. It’s not free but upcycling materials into something new is infinitely satisfying and often saves money.

Scientists intrigued why idiots thinking it’s intriguing that there are rocks floating around in space.

Drug Science. A campaign to improve drug literacy and advocate for novel therapy, harm reduction, decriminalisation and legalisation via podcasts, mass meetings and seminars by experts in neuroscience, psychopharmakinetics, pharmacology and related fields.

Wikipedia, duh. It works because it’s free of advertising and corporate influence. That costs money and I am a happy subscriber.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. A campaign to defend our right to privacy and freedom from exploitation in the digital space.

Sustrans. A campaign to maintain, improve and extend the alternatives to using cars and make a humane and ecologically sustainable transport network.

The only people this effects is people who don’t know how to operate a torrent client or have a friend that does, e.g the old people that dream up these ineffectual laws. They want to put the genie back in the bottle by making it someone else’s problem and it will fail like the war on drugs has utterly failed.

Meanwhile, back in reality, developing normal sexual relationships is much more complicated than abstaining from porn. It comes from a cohesive society that values education, healthcare, community and compassion for others. How are we still trying to make abstinence only methods work despite their horrible track record? Our politicial class are mendacious morons from a bygone era.

Capitalism prevailed during the rise of the internet but correlation is not causation.

Rockets were sent into space and capitalists would surely love to claim that achievement too, unfortunately it was first fascists followed by communists with the capitalists getting the bronze medal. Should we now decide that space flight is fascist-communist? No. Only scientists and engineers know how to do that. Why didn’t Genghis Khan invent the internet? He didn’t have enough capitalists, surely that was the problem.

We can claim anything we like and also retract any statement except when a user claims to be 14. That person remains at age 14 for all time. Is this the logic? What about all the ‘damage’ that was done before they discovered the underage user? Somebody should look into that, they might find themselves face to face with a 51 year old who takes a prescription stimulant every day.

Philosophy gets a bad rap, even by fellow academics sometimes. Commonly cited criticisms are that it has become too prosaic and detached from society at large. Maybe that’s true of some philosophers but I don’t see a problem with people studying something purely for the joy of learning and there are philosophers who do an excellent job of explaining philosophical ideas to lay audiences, Alain de Botton immediately springs to mind. Status Anxiety is among my favourite videos.

The reality is that we have too few people who think about what it means to live a good life and make a wholesome society

Got banned from the stims community after satirically commenting ‘I’m 14 and what is this?’

The moderator demanded that I submit identity documents. I pointed out that the account was twelve years old but they couldn’t back down at this point. I think they were trying to do a good job and were at least active but it was another nail in the coffin. In theory, an unpaid mod could be more objective because there’s no profit motive but the reality is that many are ideologically biased or dumb or controlling and none of them are trained. That any single individual wants to be in charge of the narrative is suspicious. Scale that ambition up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people it’s a red flag. Reddit is completely cooked these days, I haven’t returned since finding Lemmy.

This question is redundant. Evil people choose the evil option, normal people choose the other.

Yes. Have exclusively used rugged phones for past ~10 years. Mostly Cat (RIP), now Doogee S96. My phone is exposed to a lot of particulate matter, metal fragments, sawdust, etc. It needs to withstand fall damage on hard surfaces. The IP rating indicates it’s resistance to anything entering the case, including water.

You could make the same argument about almost anything that is created under our present economic system, it’s void of content. I paid my gas bill so now I can tell my friends that I’m responsible for North Sea gas extraction. People imbibe Joe Rogan’s billionaire koolaid and forget where all this stuff we take for granted comes from.

Capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty and that is a minor miracle. Now it is eating itself like an ouroboros. People are upset and it’s not a good time to defend big capital, ask TPUSA and United Health.

Fat Americans out here standing in the world’s largest glass house hurling rocks with gay adandon.

You could make the argument that nothing can be achieved without being able to dedicate the time required. That was the miracle of the agricultural revolution, we could do something with our time other than gather food. If you said ‘we got the internet thanks to farmers’ that would be indisputable, everything flowed from that. I don’t see why an internet couldn’t emerge in other economic contexts because internet technology depends on physics and those laws transcend any and all economic systems. We already know this because almost every jurisdiction has the internet.

The influence of capitalism on the internet has been a mixed bag. e-commerce: good. App ecosystem: ranging from good to addiction health crisis. Walled gardens and enshitification: bad. Misinformation and radicalisation of political groups: dire, potentially an existential threat.

I feel like we need a rap battle to decide this. We already have the name of our first collaborative album: High Octane Terraforming, featuring Gucci Sweats Planet. Eventually there will be beef with accusations about Gucci Sweats Planet’s environmental credentials.

Civic duty is tough one when you can barely afford rent but all you see on your IG feed is wealthy people blasting off to space and driving Lambo’s, however unrealistic that is. I listened to a pod on voting reform and their thesis was that the US system can be traced back to 1215 and the Magna Carta, when English feudal rule ended and the eventual emergence of first past the post voting. The English exported that shit all over the world.

I believe that switching to a proportional representation system is an essential component of the solution to the current situation. It’s completely insane to have the current level of wealth inequality and concentration of power in the hands of so few. We need some way of voicing our dissent other than the way Luigi and whoever offed Kirk have used.