Lol I am so happy about this.

I worked for a classic MSP a while back, barely lasted 3 months. Such a toxic environment, tons of pressure to spread yourself thinner and thinner.

It was one of those places where you were expected to be there an hour early, stay an hour late, and work through your lunch.

Even though that’s illegal, it was never explicit, just one of those, wink wink type things. But the workload was always so heavy, you couldn’t stay on top of everything unless you were working 50+ hours a week.

And of course, all salary, no overtime or double time for weekend work.

I do internal IT now, much better. Trying to get my own one-person shop going to eventually be fully self-employed. Actually, it would be really cool to become a worker-owned co-op, but that’s still a faint dream.

5800X3D is my CPU for the next 3-5 years probs. Maybe even longer, it’s so damn good.

It is if you get your ass spanked hard while it happens, which fairly accurately describes what’s been happening to Intel in the last year or so lol.

I don’t think Microsoft can decrypt your DB file, neither do I think Bitwarden can. Encryption happens locally on their open source clients too.

But I’m not the one disparaging trusting an open source program to securely encrypt passwords, you are.

Something tells me you’re the kind of person who sees a car turn the same direction as you twice and starts freaking out that you’re being followed…

Lol, imagine ridiculing users for trusting an FOSS company to handle their password management, and then storing your encrypted password DB in Microsoft’s OneDrive 😆

We are entering the era of cyber-warfare, nation-state counter hacking, software and hardware sabotage, underground black and grey markets for both hardware and software.

Sanctions now include software and access to networks, not just hardware imports and generic VPN region locks.

Nations are taking more control over their national network infrastructure, China has shown it’s possible to almost completely isolate a modern technological nation of a billion people in their own intra-net with near full visibility and control into everything their citizens say and do.

Other nations are following, and big tech will always play into whatever is the most profitable, which is why companies like Google and Apple will turn a blind eye to the authoritarian governments and comply with their controls in order to gain more market share.

Now let me be clear; fuck the Russian war machine, fuck it hard and fast, and fuck Putin and his pathetic removed bois that support him. But I feel for the Russian people who are oppressed, there is a deep hacker and FOSS culture that has been there since the 80’s, shame that they are getting screwed by their shitty regime, much like the citizens of China, especially gen-Z having terms like “lying down” banned because it opposes their oppressive and abusive work culture.

Open software and hardware is under attack more and more lately. From the capitalist corpos who hate anything they can’t generate insane profits from and that gives workers and end users control over their data and privacy. It’s also under attack from the government neo-liberals and right-wingers because it allows people to be private and safely express their opposition, and also allows easy organizing of mass protests against their abuses of power.

What a precious thing we have in the world of FOSS. The spirit of human collaboration and free expression, across cultures, races, genders, and ages is so incredible, but we must defend and support it.

Fuck Capitalism, fuck copyright, and FUCK war.

https://neocities.org/

Really awesome old school sites. Crazy gifs, web rings, etc.

Ah, so now people will be incentivized to spam more bombastic and extreme content to more and more fanatic groups, brilliant.

Lol, I wouldn’t even use MS Office on Windows, Libre Office all the way.

Thanks for your response. Yeah, I think the issue isn’t the technology, it’s who controls and owns it.

I doubt it would be anywhere near as controversial if it were all fully open source and run by public organizations and communities that were interested in bettering the human experience and reducing mundane work vs maximizing profitability.

I think you’re reading too deep into what I was saying. Perhaps I wasn’t being clear, my bad if so.

I’m not against AI tools to assist people’s work. Using them for grammar/spellcheck, code completion and automated testing, artwork help for filling in repetitive background details/textures, automatically removing background details in pictures like dumpsters or people photo bombing, etc.

What I am against is the grifting, the near religious devotion by tech bros to AI replacing humans in all areas of life, and the fact that the groups and companies controlling almost all of the development of this tech are multi-billion/trillion dollar corpos that don’t make all aspects of their tech open source and are 100% motivated by profit.

It’s all connected, the reasons why it can’t do basic logical reasoning are the same for why it can’t replace human art.

It’s because neither of those activities are mere pattern recognition and statistical inference, which is all LLMs will ever be.

Of course they don’t, logical reasoning isn’t just guessing a word or phrase that comes next.

As much as some of these tech bros want human thinking and creativity to be reducible to mere pattern recognition, it isn’t, and it never will be.

But the corpos and Capitalists don’t care, because their whole worldview is based in the idea that humans are only as valuable as the profitability they generate for a company.

They don’t see any value in poetry, or philosophy, or literature, or historical analysis, or visual arts unless it can be patented, trademarked, copyrighted, and sold to consumers at a good markup.

As if the only difference between Van Goh’s art and an LLM is the size of sample data and efficiency of an algorithm.

Did the same for my parents earlier this year. I downloaded a Windows 10 theme for Mint so it felt and looked more Windowsy for them.

It’s been great for them. One piece of advice, make sure you sit down with your grandma after installing it and have her do everything she normally does on Windows.

Make sure all the shortcuts and bookmarks are in the same spots and called the same things.

I’m so excited for the AI crash

Very true.

Enshittification results from Capitalism. More specifically, it’s caused by corporations seeking to always increase their profitability by squeezing their customers for as much value as they can.

The very nature of the Fediverse is resistant to this for a few reasons:

• The Fediverse and most of its infrastructure is open source and copy-left licensed. This creates an immune response that always allows both devs and users to easily leave bad platforms/services for better ones. There is no vendor/provider lock-in.
• The Fediverse is distributed. Unlike centralized platforms that concentrate power and influence into smaller and smaller groups/decision makers, the Fediverse is spread wide accross thousands of servers in many different parts of the world with no centralized organization or group that controls them.
• The Fediverse is not designed for monetization. The motivation for the Fediverse is in large part, to create an open and inclusive space for communities of many kinds to connect. Most instances and projects are supported in large part or completely by donations.

The Fediverse is like a rainforest. It’s a lush, vibrant, and chaotic ecosystem with thousands of different food chains and micro-ecosystems within it.

There are large fires and die offs sometimes, but new things grow out of them, and every part of the system is interconnected with other parts.

Proprietary social media platforms like FB, Insta, Xitter, etc. Are like a curated garden, where a small team of gardeners wall off a section of land, pick what kinds of plants are allowed to grow, and kill off anything else that they don’t want in there.

Jellyfin for only music streaming would probably be fine, if it’s just you using it. PiHole would be good, you could probably get a low impact distro on there to run Docker containers, but only pretty light services on it.