Notices by mike805 (mike805@noc.social)

@kkarhan @AAKL @joeo10 Yes, getting a bunch of cloud stuff shoved in your face, use Google, use Pocket, put sponsored links on your start screen, etc. At least you can turn that stuff off.

Having a sugar daddy in Google search made them think of themselves as a commercial enterprise rather than an open source support organization.

@benroyce @cruftyold @pmonks @draNgNon A LOT of Trumpers were talking just that way after 2020!

"They stole 2020 and they will steal the next one. It's hopeless."

No, elections can be won if you get a margin of victory larger than the margin of cheating.

Demoralization is enemy propaganda.

@inthehands @dalias If Trump wants to blow up the oligarchy-sustaining machine, why not let him? It's a dirty job but someone has to do it.

@ekis @skribe I remember the utopian articles from the mp3.com days. How evil the record labels were and how wonderful things would be once they were dead.

Now artists miss the old days of merely being ripped off by record labels.

A lot of people have proposed utopian schemes to get musicians paid, by counting plays and paying out from some fund. Nobody has figured out how people discover new music in such a system.

@skribe @ekis What would spotify on top of Mastodon look like? Are we reviving Napster here?

Some of us never stopped keeping our own music files. So a better file sharing system sounds interesting.

@patsytheshark @darkuncle @r343l @skinnylatte @pluralistic https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat is the one I use. It gets rid of the ads. Let me know if you have any questions about how to use it.

Windows 11 non-MS local account:
Unplug Internet before doing this.
On the “Oops, you've lost internet connection” or “Let's connect you to a network” page, use the Shift + F10 keyboard shortcut. In Command Prompt, type the OOBE\BYPASSNRO command to bypass network requirements on Windows 11 and press Enter.

@darkuncle @r343l @skinnylatte @pluralistic I am in user support, and I see it every day. I am tired of fighting it, and would not enter the field today.

I refurbish old work laptops, load them up with ad blockers, run debloat on them, and give them away.

I remote support employees' families with TightVNC and clean up their machines.

The tech industry, except for the chip makers, is really not worth saving at this point. It's the 1970s Big Three just waiting for Toyota and Nissan to show up.

@ekis What did Kamala Harris offer to the ordinary working class person who is suffering economically?

What did Trump offer?

There's the problem.

@ekis You too? I slept poorly as the windows were rattling and the wind howling.

@ekis Not attacking, just arguing for my preferred system.

We could fix a lot of things with a universal PKI system. People would scream "big brother mark of the beast" if they tried, but giving everyone a security token would solve a LOT of problems. From IRS fraud to voting.

Offer a prize of one billion dollars for anyone who could crack it.

@ekis There is absolutely nothing wrong with mark sense voting. It does not require electricity or sysadmins. It can be counted at machine speed, and examined by hand if the election is close enough to warrant that. Best of all, it can be supervised using basic human skills like counting and observation. You do not have to trust a machine or an expert.

@Annaeus @HistoPol The South was ready to pack up & go home at the Constitutional Convention, causing its failure. They demanded and got such things as equal representation of states in the Senate.

How would history have been different if the South had demanded an explicit exit clause in the Constitution?

@br00t4c It should have been obvious to everyone, around the time of the Arab Spring, that the American social media companies are intelligence assets of the US and its allies.

TikTok is an intelligence asset of China and its allies.

None of these things can be trusted.

@jenzi @kaye Aliens receive the stock quotes, along with what are apparently videos of our planet, from our satellite transmissions and conclude the Earth is a fantastically wealthy place they cannot wait to visit.

When the first diplomatic mission arrives, they find an entirely dead planet. The stock quotes were from AIs. The videos were advertisements for video games also written by AIs.

@mekkaokereke @jonathanpeterson @noyes @EdSanders @beadsland I actually had some N95s in 2020 because a family member bought some when SARS happened. Good old 3M type. I did not listen to Fauci, and wore them, and did not get a symptomatic case.

Lying to the public is not ok in a case like that. If you have to ration them then straight-up ration them. The public can go ahead and pay $10 a mask to preppers who are scalping them. But do not lie to the public.

@kaye Give it another thousand years.

Aliens land on this planet and find that all humans are extinct and have been for a few hundred years, but this economy is still running and the NASDAQ continues to climb as the bots trade with each other.

Mass transit continues to travel through the empty cities carrying parts to repair machinery.

AI continues to post ads on the Internet.

The aliens decide to make the Earth a museum, where their students can visit to see how not to run a planet.

@mekkaokereke As for racist people, they really don't change their attitudes. The next generation may grow up more or less racist, but the people who are racist tend to stay racist. Social change is like the old saying about scientific progress: one funeral at a time.

@ATLeagle @mekkaokereke For most people the definition of peace is "I can walk down the street without feeling any fear or annoyance."

They would be happy in Singapore or Japan, as long as they don't want to smoke pot or do some other thing that happens to be strongly repressed there.

@mekkaokereke What most people want is peace and security and to get on with their lives. If they see riots and stuff on fire, they will vote for more cops and hardline DAs and a general crackdown.

This whole cycle happened in the 1970s and 80s. Anyone remember the Willie Horton ad? The crack wars and resulting extreme sentences for crack? If history really does rhyme, the backlash is just getting started.

@fkamiah17 The corporate logos put the finishing touches on that one.