Free_Appalachia

If you are looking for stuff to financially support specifically, I think sites that handle leaks are probably your best bet. They always need money between all the legal shit and the infrastructure that requires.

I think what people are trying to tell you in a more pedantic way, is that all media is biased, because all people are biased and all that unbiased really will mean is that the authors share your same bias and blind spots, so it will look fair, when you don’t understand the ways that it might affect somebody with a different perspective. Even reporting strictly facts has the bias of what facts were not included. It’s impossible to include all facts in a story about something, so the only way to get an accurate perspective is to collect experiences. The pictures people in gaza take of their lives will always give you a better perspective of what is happening than the news organization that doesn’t want to unfairly represent anybody. So accept bias as part of media. Try to find your own blind spots in that exploration. To that end it doesn’t so much matter what you read, but how you read.

404media has some deep blind slots in regard to racism and it’s relationship to surveillance. They don’t seem to fully understand that surveillance isn’t just about coercing people to follow laws, but that as identities are criminalized more and more, it is about making people feel uncomfortable supporting and standing up for the people in targetted groups. I feel like this comes from having a predominantly cis//white perspective that forms the understanding of this issue. Just my opinion.

Productivity is such a bullshit idea… Like how do you measure productivity? In GDP? Because in that sense, inflation increases productivity (nevermind that what that really means is that more money moved around simply because everything costs more). Or are you measuring units shipped? What units? In what way could these be equivalent. Output for outputs sake is the definition of bullshit jobs. Most of this productivity people talk about is actually just meaningless toiling for meaningless output. We aren’t building homes or harvesting food or in any way bettering our lives, we are toiling towards tricking rocks into being forced to suffer consciousness or something as closely approximating that as possible. Leave the pretty rocks alone and do something useful, for something other than GDPee growth. In what way is making the number go whirrrrr worth destroying the biosphere? Nobody is happy. The rich are miserable because as it turns out even being the first person to a trillion net worth can’t fill the dad shaped hole in your heart and the poor are miserable because meaningless toil is not a great recipe for fulfillment. This whole system up to and including AI needs to go full sui, so we can get back to picking fleas of eachother’s backs… Or you know, whatever the fuck you feel like doing when society doesn’t have a gun to your head.

Why not get a lenovo for 1/4 the price and either install linux or buy one from them that ahips with linux… I always go on ebay, get a used thinkbook or some such device (dells have also been easy to put linux on), that way I’m not paying money for the windows license that I have no use for. It’s not that hard to put linux and it will have much easier compatibility with your other devices. Mac will lock you into the mac ecosystem and in a few weeks you’ll be back on here for iphone recommendations, because your macbook says fuck you to anything not apple related. Apple is a lifestyle brand. They want you running around with the apple watch and the iphone and this and that “smart,” device and there is just no room for your linux or android compatibility if you want to be in the mac club. It’s really just a cult.

The word “alleged,” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If this was about antifa doing something sketchy, somehow nobody would be thinking about how to word things to avoid a libel suit.

This idea is the logical ancestor of eugenics, which I am sure was not your intention. Parental Intelligence does not determine or indicate their progeny’s intelligence. You can’t really determine beforehand what exactly you are going to get, just that certain things that are dominant ilils are more likely. As far as intelligence goes that seems to be dependent on a lot of genes, not just one intelligence gene, so it starts to actually become more important how you raise your kid to actualize their potential actross whatever spectrum of their expression of their genes. A lot of people fall into this trap of thinking oh we are intelligent(which almost everybody assumes they have a lot more in the bank than they do in that regard), so we will have a smart baby. It’s just not accurate. If you and your partner are in fact geniuses it actually starts to become less likely your kid will be as well when you look at the actual dispersal of geniuses. Its largely random and not common, so just statistically, you aren’t likely to have that many really smart people closely related. In which case, and I say this tongue in cheek, but, good luck getting your stupid baby to reject capitalism. My brother-in-law who is a tech bro that thinks he embodies good genetics, thought he could potty train his kid in under a year and it’s looking like they unfortunately for them, just got an average guy. I can’t imagine how soul cruahing that must be for them. But the average is the average over such a huge sample set, usually because it is just a very common range. So if you do end up having kids, it would be a lot more productive to think, what am I going to do with my average baby. If you get a genius it’ll be despite you, if you get a dummy, well, hopefully you can still love them anyway. Probably just better to spare you and your baby the disappointment that is being forced to share space with people you don’t like due to losing the birth lottery.

To that end, capitalism has stolen our lives and I feel like I’ll be damned if I give them another generation of slaves. I’m not doing that. Ever.

Not using it as an insult has only allowed liberals to temporarily cosplay anarchism before betraying the real reason they get involved in things, which is to convince people voting for their Blue MAGA candidate will some how be a lesser evil and it never is.

I have been able to install ad blockers into Chromium, but I can remember if I had to change something somewhere. The point is, that it can be done… But overall I do agree that we Chromium is not fine overall. It needs to be forked to have full community control. FF has been forked a lot and I think that is the only reason we currently have functional browsers. Apparently this is a big problem, because you don’t see other much work in this area apart from servo, which would be great if it could get enough traction to be a full blown browser soon. I will switch on day 1.

Google is mask off now. It’s 100% a spyware company and jn AmeriKKKan crapitalism, caveat emptor.

Could we get a non YouTube link, since YouTube is owned by google and is causing the problem discussed by this video?

It’s funny, I hadn’t noticed, maybe because any site aleeady using reCAPTCHA or cloudflare alreadt gets blocked by my ad blocker… If those sites can’t do better on their own, its just another thing you don’t need. This is kind of a nothing burger. Stay strong and let google commit suicide.

I think we could use that sort of curation on the fediverse. For me, even mastodon has too much slop. I even had to stop being involved in some lemmy communities because there was too much slop. I have a very low tolerance for this shit. I am at a point where I don’t even want to read books written after 2025 due to the propensity for publishers to be putting slop into books. A bunch of comments on here seem to end up equivocating and saying oh but AI is cool for this or that other thing… I don’t see a single area where my life has been improved by the slop. I feel more isolated from other people, I feel the quality of information dropping and the ability to find genuinely helpful information (which was my main use case for things like youtube and a lot of the internet at large) is being rapidly destroyed, I can’t trust news articles that generate slop images, so it’s become very hard to find reliable news about the world where that used to be easy… I just don’t see the upside at all. We are nuking the environment at record speed in order to have an idiot liar machine spew largely indecipherable drivel into every context of our lives. I think my options for maintaining my own sanity are now down to pursuing a fully off-grid hermit life for real, or probably become so isolated and miserable that I eventually kill myself… And I used to really enjoy the internet. I am starting to actually and viscerally hate it… Even a lot of the fediverse. I don’t see any upside. I think computers peaked as an extension of human abilities probably in the early 2000’s and since the migration to Meta and Google platforms it has regressed into a mirror of that time you would get a cd in the mail for 2000 free hours on AOL and it had some custom browser where half the screen was ads with just content in the middle, not unlike the movie idiocracy. Half the internet I can’t even see because of my ad blocker and the assistance that more and more of our lives be lived in our houses staring at screens, while the outside world is literally on fire, just seems to be an overpowering and dissonant note in the orchestra of our lives… Why anybody would want to live like this I can’t imagine… And everybody wanting to live like this makes me feel like there is a huge gulf between myself and the rest of humanity that I am not sure I have the energy to try to cross anymore. I can’t seem to find the ability to equivocate on this like others have and say, but AI makes this or that better… AI makes it easier for people to be lazy about certain things, which is also bad. I am anti-work and would love for people to live a life filled with enjoyment and leisure, but that’s not what AI brings to the table. Anybody using it so they can be intellectually lazy is inherently destroying their own problem solving skills in whatever parts of their lives where they haven’t already done so. We work harder now than we ever did before, with AI assisting us and there is no sign of that trend abating… All it’s done by preying on intellectual laziness has been to remove even more of our leisure time and turn us into people incapable of solving problems for ourselves and embed us in a life of meaningless toil towards pointless goals that seem further and further from solving the problems of the world, many of which are being caused exclusively or at least exacerbated by AI. So personally I would prefer useful toil to the endless and meaningless life of toil created by our co-existence with AI slop.

Dang that’s pretty big for this time of year. They are just starting to grow around here. I call them watermelons, because that’s what they smell like to me. lol.

Fascism is here. It requires no acceleration. I am talking about sabotaging it, not accelerating towards some unknown end. I don’t think it serves anybody to pretend the democrats are just failing at socialism and not actually also in favor of fascism (which is their actual position). People went looking for the solution to Neoliberalism and as is the historical precedent, they landed on fascism. That already happened. That is not something that may happen in the future. So currently the appropriate response to this strengthening and consolidation of fascism is to try to sabotage that process any way you can… Even if it hurts everyday people at times. We are no longer in the battle for hearts and minds, we lost that battle in the US. We are in the resistance and sabotage stage and from your response, I am reminded that people still don’t seem to know that yet for some reason. I knew that when Elon gave the Nazi salute and Democrats came out of the woodwork to defend that. Helping fascism limp along helps nobody. We need to give it’s collapse a hand. While fascism’s biggest enemy is the misery of the conditions it creates on its own. Left to fail on its own could take a century or more. I don’t have that kind of time, because for me and the people I know enduring some of the worst parts of this, we need this to end much more quickly. Economics is the best way you could choose to fight that unless you just want to armchair forever as it seems supposed leftists are quite content to do. Progressives are being pummeled and all they ever have done when they win elections is just not accelerate fascism, but look where we are. We currently have concentration camps… If thats progressives winning leave me out of that bullshit.

Most corporate social media is already overrun with AI slop. Even Mastodon has too much slop for me. People don’t seem to mind as much as we do over here on the fediverse and even that is a gross generalization, because most people here don’t seem to mind it anywhere near as much as I do… They just are data center nimbys. So, my guess, to be honest, is people will just engage with it the same way they do with other content for 90% of people. Maybe 10% get disgusted and leave. The children pine for the crypto mines.

I think the more economic harm this does, the better. Trump can’t expand an empire that can’t hold itself up under the weight of his stupid decisions. Does it hurt us back here in the US? Absolutely it does. But this is the politics we have done everything in our power not to change, so I think we clearly need to be hurting as a result of our decisions if we want any chance of people starting to make different ones. This pain is nowhere near deep enough yet, despite the fact that GDP adjusted to consider inflation has been worse than flat. Despite the impending bond market collapse. Despite the K shaped economy and the very clear AI pump and dump that will become a dump any day now. We are on the precipice of several unavoidable economic crises in the US… We will not see different decisions until people stop making money from the things that are a cash cow for them currently. AI is being hyped as having the ability to change our lives and everything will be better (despite only apparent negative consequences visible so far)… Eventually that is going to fall out, just like crypto did. People should be heading for the proverbial hills, but they aren’t. AmeriKKKa has been propped up for so long by subsidies for oligarchs that we can sort of coast through a crisis for a while before being forced to course correct. I would say we have reached the confluence of these crises already and the gas prices just make all of these crises intensify more quickly. The sooner it crumbles… The sooner we can change it. So I think this coasting we are doing now, actually serves to make for a much deeper crisis later. For those of us that know that nothing will get better until we can knock down all of these structures first, that is a good thing. To those who were hoping to retire with what used to be the AmeriKKKan standard of living… Probably might want to consider moving to a country with single payer healthcare and standards of decency for their citizens. Our prioritization of capital has ensured that the people in the US will have no safety net while all of the systems they thought they could rely on violently collapse. I’d be pulling my money out now if I hadn’t already done that when Trump got elected. Everything they do is a pump and dump that relies on you following them into bad investments that they get out of once sufficiently pumped and you get left with a bunch of worthless stock or crypto or whatever. Gas prices are going to be the least of your worries soon.

I would hope to see a massive shift towards e-bikes… I have heard people talk about them. Have i seen anybody shift in that direction? No.

baahahahahahahahaha. oh… uh. Wait, are we the joke?