I don't know if it's still the case, but my impression is that public schools teach kids about computers either by teaching about programming, or about office software, but not really about system administration. I arguably have a bias, but I think system administration is a more relevant skill for most people than programming.
This is after I found out that OSI and the Linux Foundation are working on "open source AI" projects, a few days after Red Hat announced it's working on "AI". Mozilla has been sending mixed messages about "AI" for months.
Both Intel and AMD are integrating NPUs into their processors, so hardware manufactured after 2023 is no longer reliable. I'm getting ads for laptops with those processors.
It's looking like the end of general purpose computing.
@silverwizard@hipsterelectron I feel like there's some sort of epistemic closure involved, as well as some sort of unexamined emotional attachment, something like nostalgia. Like all that advertising and marketing has a more profound effect than we realized.
@hipsterelectron In other words, the creation of social alternatives gets framed as a rejection of solidarity, rather than as an expression of it, as many of the people who create them intend and as you describe.
@hipsterelectron I feel like several things are going on, and I don't understand all of them.
Beyond software, I've tried to think how to articulate a basic question of strategy, whether to try to organize people to reclaim a social institution and reshape it, or to try to create a new independent institution that we control directly.
The latter is often criticized as abandoning people who are coerced to use the existing institution, or as cruelly forcing people to use something inferior.
@scottsantens “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ― Stephen Jay Gould, scientist who actually knew what he was talking about
@BeAware It's not beyond a shadow of doubt, but it does look to me like they made a point of letting us know that the Prydwen is still flying and Mr. House is running what's left of New Vegas.
@BeAware I'm not talking about retconning. For one thing, I've not seen anything significant that conflicts with the games. I'm curious what endings they've selected as canonical, but that's not really my focus.
It does strike me, on a moment's reflection, that we are led to sympathize with the three (four?) protagonists, and if they can work out things between them, maybe there can be a good and satisfying outcome.
I'm just worried about more despair in an era of despair.
I've watched five episodes of #Fallout so far, and seen some spoilers. It's striking me that they've assumed canonical endings for the games that would lead to the most conflict. There were two candidates for "good guy" factions, but the NCR has apparently been broken, and we've returned to the original vision of the Brotherhood of Steel as isolationist and violently intolerant. Plus the Enclave is back, as well as Vault-Tec.
What worries me is how this will connect to, "War never changes", and, "Everyone wants to save the world, they just disagree about how."
We've set up for either despondent cynicism, or at best, some sort of last minute plea for pacifism.
It worries me somewhat, how this may play out, given the global threat of fascism and the weakness of resistance to it, and how fascists revel in cynical despair.
And how Fallout fans include some of the best and the worst people around.
@thomasfuchs@mos_8502 Radioactive isotopes were once a new technology. They have some important and useful applications. However, adding them to children's breakfast cereal would be a terrible idea, it will not give any of them superpowers now or ever, and you can't justify adding radioactive isotopes to children's breakfast cereal with the argument that there's no stopping the implementation of new technology.
@gwynnion "Oh, I suppose you'd prefer fascists getting elected?"
Funny, when Trump was president, I saw a lot of liberal city mayors deploying paramilitaries against people demanding an end to police murder of Black people, and not so much as thanking the antifascists who confronted fascists and drove them off the streets with only solidarity and their bare hands.
But thank you very fucking much for slightly reducing my student loan payments. Wow, liberals, you've really got our backs.
In the end, however, we must escape from the debris with whatever booty we can rescue, and recast our technics entirely in the light of an ecological ethics whose concept of "good" takes its point of departure from our concepts of diversity, wholeness, and a nature rendered selfconscious -- an ethics whose "evil" is rooted in homogeneity, hierarchy, and a society whose sensibilities have been deadened beyond resurrection.-- The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin