America is embarrassing.

The Americans would welcome a change of regime with open-arms and cheering babies. We must invade now!

You’d have to use it and tell us. No one probably uses all of a suite’s features; some users won’t notice a difference whilst others will. If you’re using Google products though… one is made by a titan of surveillance-capitalism and the other is a project with morality. Google works with America’s government to kill and they’re enabling the genocidal Isrealis. In my mind Google and libre-software are diametric opposites. “How does it compare?” in that context makes the question absurd. Using Google software is never ok.

More like a phenomenon. Things come and go though. I don’t play games anymore; I don’t even know what’s popular.

Halo died a long time ago when I was still playing. Halo: Reach felt like the start of its decline.

Computers are literally garbage; there’s so many of them. Get another and use it for 9front. Get another and use if for OpenBSD. These other software projects aren’t immune to AI or whatever this thread is about… video-games are garbage too. Go outside.

It was probably the Russians. They’re too powerful–controlling America and the UK absolutely. Those nation’s are comprised of idiots who just do what Russia tells them to do. Can you believe it? Even communist China is Russia’s fault. They must have a secret brain-washing device. You Americans should ask congress for more money to do an MKUltra 2.0. You’re being left in the dust. Russia’s already figured out how to control foreign nations absolutely. Maybe bomb some more schools in foreign nations and say “I didn’t do it the computer did it.”

No there is not. Peaceful protests are not easy to ignore they are ignored. That’s historical fact. To protest is to intimidate and produce fear of overwhelming violence. A peaceful protest is nonsensical and such a thing has become not a protest but a farce or a form of entertainment–no wonder the Americans love such things!

Protest-leaders will be directing violence to where they think it will be most effective, but these are chaotic environments and self-harm is always a result. The goal is to minimize that, not eliminate it, because it can not be done. It is collateral.

AI is a direct result of mass-surveillance. I’ll repost what I wrote to a previous user:

Something you’re not acknowledging is that this technology stems from surveillance-capitalism and the surveillance-state. Google et al were financed to solve the needs of the state. Google search for consumers was a by-product from the state’s need and desire to make sense of their mass-surveillance programs.

Surveillance-capitalism operates under complete deception. Pokemon Go players didn’t know they were collecting data for autonomous-murder-drones.

Solving Google’s Captchas was unpaid labour: you were creating data for Google’s OCR program and now you’re creating data for autonomous cars or whatever their investors want you to toil on next.

The original iteration of reCAPTCHA was criticized for using unpaid work to assist in transcribing efforts.[40]

A 13-month study published in 2023, “Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2,” found that reCAPTCHA provides little security against bots and is primarily a tool to track user data, and has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of unpaid human labor.

Out of all this theft, unpaid labour and intrusive surveillance what does the working class get? Housing costs are increasing. Food costs are increasing. Poverty is increasing. What is AI going to do for us? It’s not building houses. It’s not harvesting crops. It’s not giving the working class any material benefit, but is further degrading living conditions. Enjoy the endless drone of a data-center! Enjoy breathing the fumes of gas-turbines! Enjoy talking to chatbots and never a human!

AI is deployed as a barrier between the working class and businesses. AI is deployed to decrease labour costs. AI is deployed to kill. The fact you can create text, images, videos and audios that mimic reality only means more surveillance on the working class because digital-signals can be faked absolutely and are now suspect by default.

You can’t eat what AI creates–it is completely immaterial, but it is being used to commit genocide. I’m sure that warms the cockles of the hearts in all of us.

I do not think AI use should be condoned.

The climate crisis is caused by machines and automation. I very much doubt it can be solved by more machines and automation…

Thanks for providing valuable training data to AI corporations. Your labour will never be acknowledged or compensated and your resources will be stolen.

I prefer the term mobile-computer because it’s a more accurate description of what it is. “Smartphone” is a marketing-term that immediately limits users’ perception around mobile-computers. Your post is a reflection of that.

One of the qualities of libre or libre-inspired -software is that it gives users complete control. That control is usually restricted behind technical knowledge though. Thankfully the developers of the Android port of i2pd (hosted on f-droid and github) have created a GUI where users can set limits arbitrarily. The user can even disable transit for their router, but this is parasitic and I encourage all operators to contribute what they can. The notion that you shouldn’t run i2p, i2pd or other such software on a mobile-computer is… nonsensical when you take it out of the consumer-smartphone context.

Mobile-computers trend on being more energy-efficient with larger battery capacities over time. If we’re to take your concerns about data and energy scarcity seriously we need to address the CPU-cycles and data that are forcefully wasted against the users’ wishes. We should tell Google not to transmit any data from the mobile-computer that’s related to ad-networks. We don’t want that and it’s a complete waste of CPU-cycles and scare data that users have to pay for. Likewise we will prohibit Google from transmitting ad related data to the mobile-computer. Imagine wasting wireless networks by transmitting ads in high-resolutions and wasting CPU-cycles to decode it!

The reality is this: mobile-computers are incredibly sophisticated and capable. When corporations abuse your mobile-resources it becomes the norm and is not even questioned. What I suggest is users take control over their property and use libre or libre-adjacent -software to redploy those otherwise stolen resources towards things you actually want. You may want a lot or a little. If you dream big pack a few batteries.

Google does not honour that flag that ‘grants’ permission to specific processes to be long lived. It will kill it.

Something you’re not acknowledging is that this technology stems from surveillance-capitalism and the surveillance-state. Google et al were financed to solve the needs of the state. Google search for consumers was a by-product from the state’s need and desire to make sense of their mass-surveillance programs.

Surveillance-capitalism operates under complete deception. Pokemon Go players didn’t know they were collecting data for autonomous-murder-drones.

Solving Google’s Captchas was unpaid labour: you were creating data for Google’s OCR program and now you’re creating data for autonomous cars or whatever their investors want you to toil on next.

The original iteration of reCAPTCHA was criticized for using unpaid work to assist in transcribing efforts.[40]

A 13-month study published in 2023, “Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2,” found that reCAPTCHA provides little security against bots and is primarily a tool to track user data, and has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of unpaid human labor.

Out of all this theft, unpaid labour and intrusive surveillance what does the working class get? Housing costs are increasing. Food costs are increasing. Poverty is increasing. What is AI going to do for us? It’s not building houses. It’s not harvesting crops. It’s not giving the working class any material benefit, but is further degrading living conditions. Enjoy the endless drone of a data-center! Enjoy breathing the fumes of gas-turbines! Enjoy talking to chatbots and never a human!

AI is deployed as a barrier between the working class and businesses. AI is deployed to decrease labour costs. AI is deployed to kill. The fact you can create text, images, videos and audios that mimic reality only means more surveillance on the working class because digital-signals can be faked absolutely and are now suspect by default.

You can’t eat what AI creates–it is completely immaterial, but it is being used to commit genocide. I’m sure that warms the cockles of the hearts in all of us.

It’s almost like the software that powers the internet was designed for a different time and is only still used because there’s monied interest in keeping it around. We need GNUnet.

I side with the rioters because rioting creates a capital cost that can not be ignored. Peaceful protests can be ignored and are ignored. Smash windows and burn buildings. After the riot capital has to respond. It’s juvenile to suggest political change can happen with none of the advocates harmed. That’s a fantasy. Revolutions are messy–that is the reality. I’d rather advocate and be in a messy revolution than peacefully protest as capital subjugates labour into a poverty state. Assassinate your landlord and every real-estate agent.

Land of the free that made slaves to build [it].

Economists are a religious sect for modern times: divining what will and what won’t happen in a completely arbitrary, selectively enforced system. They’re a class of citizens that attempt to legitimize political want and behaviour.

The year is 2026. Computer users are still “fighting” Microsoft. Battered person syndrome.

I think you’re far too optimistic. There very much are central nodes: DNS registrars, ISPs and data-centers. The prerequisites for participating have increased. Domestic Australian providers now require copies of government-issued IDs (copies which then make their way into America’s private-intelligence spinoffs like Palantir, because it’s these spinoffs that are selling verification services). The West is expanding its capability to surveil domestic and foreign populations. To participate on the open-internet is to identify yourself, provide documentation and have government- or private-databases verify your identity and to pay perpetual gratuity rents.

A thousand virtual-servers hosted on Microsoft’s or Amazon’s computers. That’s the reality. It already feels as if Cloudfare is MITMing everyone. The internet has become more centralized than it was and that’s a trend that will continue.

It seems to me absurd that the majority of a developed-nation’s citizens carry around pocket-computers that are connected to the internet 24/7/365 yet none of them are allowed to host a blog on their computers (pocket or otherwise). (The reality is your mobile-computer is forbidden by economic-rent-seekers from talking to another mobile-computer even though they may both be in the same room; they force your data to transit over their infrastructure and gate-keep it so that the other mobile-computer is forced also into paying rent so that it can retrieve your data from the economic-rent-seeking entity [that may be located in another country; so that message you sent to a friend may travel half-way across the world even though their computer is three meters apart from yours! What a farce!].) Consumers are behind CGNATs and are barred from hosting by default. I was optimistic about IPv6–everyone could have a unique public-IPv6-address. The market for static IPv4s should have collapsed. It’s still here. It’s still demanding perpetual rents.

I’m an advocate of OpenNIC–a domain should not require a perpetual rent be paid to a registrar. The foundation’s of the internet are centralised. To seek and agitate for de-centralisation is correct, but it’s counter-productive to redeploy the same centralised software that got us to this point we want to move away from. That software was designed for a bygone era and it’s been taken over by corporate interests. Capitalism is doing what it does best: consolidating! You’re not going to de-consolidate by taking their software. We need a new internet. We need GNUnet.

GNUnet’s still juvenile, but I do encourage users to deploy and play with it. We can get to a better internet that reflects all of us. Computers have become locked dumb-terminals for ad-networks and tech-oligarch mouth-pieces. They constrict the user absolutely whilst using your hardware, electricity and data connection to surveil the mobile-computer’s environment and your interactions with it. If you dislike that future you need to participate.

I2P is a mature project and is ready to deploy now. There’s two implementations: one in Java and one in C++.

You need to pay perpetual rents to host on the old-web: you need to pay rent to a DNS-registrar and you need to pay rent for a publicly-routable IP address; you’re also coerced into paying rents for compute-time in a data-center (it’s often cheaper than paying for a publicly-routable IP address which are priced for businesses). These are economic-burdens that exist purely for rent extraction. You can host your own Lemmy instance over I2P (and/or GNUnet) on your own machines on the data-connection you already pay for right now. The additional cost is $0.00 (excluding the increased compute-burden on your machines). If you data-connection already grants you a public routable address you can use OpenNIC for a free or self-administered domain that is accessible over the old-web. The software exists. Users need to deploy it, use it and agitate for it.

I will be using solar-panels, batteries and arm CPUs running GNU/Linux to host content over I2P and GNUnet. The compute becomes free. The only cost that remains is the nominal amount required for a consumer-connection. Using software like I2P and GNUnet on your own hardware on your data-connection–that you’re using to read this–is the closest thing we have to “no-barrier” self-hosting or decentralising. The reality is that’s a significant information barrier and I am surprised that no-one has made a mobile-computer ‘app’ for self-hosting blogs/forums that runs a I2P-router in the background for non-technical users. I type that… but I know why it probably hasn’t been done (if it hasn’t): Google’s Android will kill any long-running background process… and Apple would not let you publish it.

The government has lost legitimacy.

No, it didn’t.

Lawyer sealed Bebe into the capsule in a sink at home and then in the bathtub, with his wife Cher helping test the rig…

No where in the article does it describe the bird as having an active role in any of the activities it was subjected to.

It does document historical abuse of birds though:

It is the same trait behind the old miner’s habit of carrying a caged canary underground: birds are famously quick to show the effects of bad air, long before it would register with the people around them.

This is an abused bird that’s imprinted on a human due to that abusive-environment. Its slaver has a habit of forcing it into novel situations.

Animals should be with their own kind. This is an article about a bird-slaver playing with his “property”. This is most certainly depressing news.