I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite.

Perhaps not a luddite, but a Luddite.

The actual followers of Ned Ludd weren’t opposed to technology. They were, in many cases, experts in the machinery — sometimes having built the machines they would later destroy.

They opposed the new social order that seemed to inevitably arrive with the machinery. The capitalists would make more money than before, the workers less, and also endure more dangerous working conditions.

Btw, your note about absorbing and repackaging counter-culture reminded me of Rebel Sell by Andrew Potter. There’s a good episode of You Are Not So Smart about it: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/10/08/yanss-podcast-episode-five

The author seems to have fallen for two tricks at once: The MPAA/RIAA playbook of seeing all engagement with content through the lens of licensing, and the AI hype machine telling everyone that someday they will love AI slop.

He mentions people complaining that stock photo sites, book portals, and music streaming services are all degrading in quality because of AI slop, but his conclusion is that people will start seeking out AI content because it’s not copyrighted.

Regardless… The position of those in power has not changed. They never believed in copyright as a guiding concept, only as a means to an end. That end being: We, the powerful, will control culture, and we will use it to benefit ourselves.

Before generative AI, the approach was to keep the cultural landscape well-groomed – something you’d wanna pay to experience. Mindfully grown and pruned, with clear walking paths, toll booths at each entrance, and harsh penalties for littering or stepping on the grass. You were allowed to have your own toll-free parks outside of the secure perimeter, that continue the walking paths in ways that are mutually beneficial, as long as visitors don’t track mud in as a result.

But now? The landscape is no longer about creating a well-manicured amusement park worth the price of admission. There’s oil under the surface. And it’s time to frack the hell out of it. It’s too bad about the toxic slurry that will accumulate up top, making the walled and unwalled parks alike into an intolerable biohazard. There are resources to extract. Externalities are an end-user problem.

Yeah, turning culture into an expensive amusement park was a horrible mistake. But I wouldn’t get too eager to gloat over seeing the tide of sludge pour over their walls. We’ll still be on the outside, drowning in it.

I look forward to the documentary.

“Mastodon: Victory Through Technical Superiority”, available soon on Laserdisc and Betamax

IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.

1. Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
2. Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
3. Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.

Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.

But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.

There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?

upower -d can provide some useful info on-demand. I think there’s a daemon component to it too, which may have variable log levels.

Fourth week of getting NixOS running on an aarch64 laptop here… If I could get the adsp running by the time I get to userspace, you better believe I’d play a tada.

(In all seriousness, it’s not that bad. But it does make you very aware of just how delicate the whole stack of software is.)

It’s okay, Let’s Encrypt only provides SSL certs for… 63.7% of the market?

Okay okay, that is a lot. But what does a CA need funding for anyway? It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send out new certs.

The only thing that could be expensive is if they had to rapidly invalidate thousands of certs to protect the security of the entire internet.

But haha, that’s a pretty outlandish scenario that would never happen.

Don’t use tariffs. Legalize jailbreaking and adversarial interop instead. Disregard American DRM.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/

Meanwhile Nintendo in the 1980s:

Yokoi’s most enduring contribution may have been his product philosophy, often translated to the almost luddite-sounding ‘lateral thinking with withered technology.’

The genius behind this concept is that for product development, you’re better off picking a cheap-o technology (‘withered’) and using it in a new way (‘lateral’) rather than going for the predictable, cutting-edge next-step.

Not really. There are barely any chips out there.

Oct 2021: 200 billion ARM chips

Nov 2023: 1 billion RISC-V chips, hoping to hit 16 billion by 2030

Nov 2024: 300 billion ARM chips

Cool, but… why not just NixOS?

“The ACI allows the European Union to suspend intellectual property rights, it allows some people to use software for free, for example licence fees on things like streaming services or software could be suspended,” said Conall Mac Coille, Chief Economist at Bank of Ireland.

Fucking do it!

This is what Cory Doctorow has been telling Canada to do for months now.

Also worth noting: tech companies would not be “in the crossfire” — they are the primary fire.

On Democracy Now:

And if they do remove these laws, if we do allow domestic tech competitors all over the world to reverse engineer, modify and erode the high monopoly rents extracted by these American tech firms, we do something very effective in this trade war, because the only thing keeping the S&P 500 afloat are these tech monopolists. If you take the Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500, you’ve got a stock market that has been in decline for a decade. And when you decompose their balance sheets and you see where they get all their money, it’s from price gouging on repairs, service, parts, consumables, software.

ARM support. Every SoC is a new horror.

Armbian does great work, but if you want another distro you’re gonna have to go on a lil adventure.

Behind the Bastards had a Christmas special non-bastard episode on the Tupamaros of Uruguay and Pepe Mujica. It does seem like they have some decent politics there.

I know devs like everything to be perfect, but if your business can work around it for 15 years without fixing the bug or replacing the system, I dare say it doesn’t qualify as a major bug.

There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:

1. It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
2. It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago

“If something you see is really difficult then you can leave your desk, but at that moment you have to remember to put on your computer that you are on ‘wellbeing’,” explains Eyvazzadeh. “But if the supervisors think you are using wellbeing more than you should, they will intervene. They would say: ‘Your ‘production’ time is a bit lower than expected, you have been on wellbeing a lot.’ So you are pressured to increase your time on ‘production’ by decreasing your ‘wellbeing.’”

It’s bad enough we make overseas workers spend all day pulling the lever of a slot machine that yields mis-flagged puppy videos and gruesome beheadings with equal likelihood, but then we stack NDAs, legal obstacles, surveillance, and KPI admonishment on top of it.

If you wrote this in a sci-fi novel, your editor would say “that’s a little cartoonishly evil, isn’t it?”

Edit: Oh, health privacy violations and union-busting too. Classy stuff!

What the dumbwaiter hides

those who used ChatGPT for “personal” reasons — like discussing emotions and memories — were less emotionally dependent upon it than those who used it for “non-personal” reasons, like brainstorming or asking for advice.

That’s not what I would expect. But I guess that’s cuz you’re not actively thinking about your emotional state, so you’re just passively letting it manipulate you.

Kinda like how ads have a stronger impact if you don’t pay conscious attention to them.

thousand’s*