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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • No game has ever affected me as much as Outer Wilds. Out of every life changing piece of art I’ve ever experienced, whether it be film, television, music, literature, or videogames, this is the first and only time I’ve ever gotten chills by the end.

    The story isn’t super deep and it isn’t necessarily profound – it’s not really a belief-changer, outside of, perhaps, your idea of what a videogame is – but the experience itself is beautiful and rewarding and I’m not sure it can be recaptured.







  • Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he’s saying profits have been decoupled from a company’s value, and that it’s no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition – his example is while a landowner’s neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner’s property value also increases).

    Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don’t actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They’re effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.

    It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven’t had much time to chew on it. What’s your take on that idea?





  • Ideologically Ubuntu makes me cringe, but I also use Google and a host of other technologies that fuck my privacy, so I guess I have accepted the world we live in.

    In the same way that I think it’s noble when people try to live waste free, I think it’s noble to use things like GrapheneOS, or selfhost all your services, or de-Google your tech. But it’s unrealistic for all of the world to live waste-free or customize their tech so as to be private. In the end, the government needs to step in and force these giant-ass companies to behave better, because they are the primary forces pushing forward the destruction of the environment and personal privacy.



  • jwiggler@sh.itjust.workstolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSeen this countless times
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    2 months ago

    Hate saying it, but Ubuntu just works for me. I’d rather focus my computer configuration and maintenance efforts on clients rather than my own laptop. If I have to reinstall for whatever reason, its pretty easy because I’m already very familiar with the (shitty) installer, and I don’t do much customizing because I’d rather not have to go through that every time I reinstall.

    Granted I’ve never even bothered to run Arch, or any really other desktop distro for that matter. Ubuntu + Gnome looks nice, seems to just work, all I need to do is apt install nvidia drivers and firefox post-install and I’m up and running. I don’t want to do work on my laptop, I want my laptop to enable me to do work.







  • But the person above said

    While technically true for some but not all places, in reality it’s just not a practical thing anymore as it has been displaced by motorized transportation and social media being where 99% of the people are, respectively.

    You’re allowed to try to make people notice a website with no social media presence in the same way as you’re allowed to run for congress as an independent with a budget of the necessary registration fees plus $5.

    Aren’t they pretty much saying the exact thing that you’re claiming nobody is saying? That in practice it’s still easy to create your own website, but nobody will use it because 99% of people are on social media platforms, instead

    I dunno maybe I’m missing something.


  • I agree with you and the original guy – the web is still just a collection of interconnected computers, and it’s still open and mostly inexpensive anyone to host a website on. The trouble for the individual is the maintenance cost, especially if their site sees high traffic. But that brings us back to the idea that you’ll pretty much never see the same userbase as the large social media platforms.

    This isn’t to say that the power held by Google, Meta, Snapchat, or TikTok to direct information any which way they would like doesn’t need to be dismantled. It’s just that the web is still free, in the sense that it is just a road to another computer, and you can still prop up a house with an address on that road for relatively cheap.