[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 2 weeks ago

Good he found the right gadget for the job. I'm happy it works and has improved the mother's life.

It's frustrating that subscription-based product enshittification is so ubiquitous that avoiding it needed to be included as a constraint, and even pointing that out feels banal and trite for how much it's the default.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago

They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.

Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexity's business model again?

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago

Wow, it took until 2024 but politics have finally arrived into software. Having politics is not at all in the spirit of the GPL. Not giving these people a privileged access to the codebase is discrimination obviously. What do you have against apolitical entities like Baikal Electronics?

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago

I don't claim to be an expert on nuclear power, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but from what I've seen, smaller reactors don't seem to make much sense. The trend seems to be towards bigger reactors with bigger power output. Some of it thanks to the bureaucracy of getting permits per reactor, but also the physics, engineering, real estate and economics involved. Conventional (i.e. existent) reactors are typically a fairly small part of a nuclear power plant's footprint, so no matter how much you miniaturize them you will have the overhead of security, operations, cooling and electrical infrastucture.

If someone can fill me in on the benefits of smaller, more modular nuclear reactors and how they might outweight those of large installations, I'm interested.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 1 month ago

No, obviously opinions like

  • "if my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epstein's teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consented",
  • "stealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most it's supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fine",
  • "I don't believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? It’s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.^1^ What if you lie about who is dying?",
  • "Overtly sexualizing 'parody' ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there is",
  • "It's fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so it's basically proprietary, right?",
  • "You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>",

are in the same category as "I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting" when it comes to evaluating someone's aptitude as a leader.

I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I'd be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.

1: It's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago

I'll do one more. The three biggest companies by market cap ever have been Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA, the record being about three and a half trillion dollars each.

https://www.investors.com/news/technology/apple-stock-first-to-close-above-3-5-trillion-market-cap/ https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/05/nvidia-passes-apple-in-market-cap.html

Sammy boy here is (allegedly) casually suggesting an investment equivalent to buying 100% of the shares of any two of the three most valuable companies in the world at their peak valuation. If you have that kind of money, you could just skip the pleasantries, buy TSMC entirely and build like five identical copies of the entire company.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 3 months ago

I think killing someone is a pretty major violation of that person's bodily autonomy.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 3 months ago

Appeal to thanatority!

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 4 months ago

What's going on with the header image? You've got Google Chrome, YouTube and Xitter in one hand, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Brave browser in the other and you're bridging the gap by fusing your index fingers together?

Were it not for the illustrator credit I'd assume it was generated. (No shade intended to Alexandra Francis, I wouldn't want to bring my A-game either if I had to work for this kind of bullshit.)

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 10 months ago

It's obvious the hospital security is unfamiliar with even the most famous of 90s anime. I was making an End of Evangelion reference, so it's not like I was seriously jacking off to the coma patients

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 11 months ago

Food, housing, clothes, education, healthcare and leisure? You don't deserve them for just being born.

A Substack account, though? That is your inalienable God-given right as an existing human being.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 11 months ago

When I was a kid my mom told me not to drink from the garden hose and that was totally and completely lame, but the whole millennial generation grew up not wanting to be blasted in the face with a pressure washer. A strange authoritarian impulse.

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bitofhope

joined 1 year ago