thejml

The only thing I condemn the French inquiry on is that it should have already happened.

They need to NOT have an LLM. Period. I want a light weight, inexpensive, security focused email/docs platform with zero AI.

“Threat of US-EU trade ware looms as Trump [Plays Golf] in Scotland”

“Immigrants, we get the job done.”

Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I'm talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.

I worry that quickly this will follow this path:

• Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
• Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
• Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
• The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
• They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.

If I was in my 20’s I’d have thought about that 2.5x offer. Now that I’m in my 40’s I can say i wouldn’t even do it for 5x. You can’t buy back missed time, no matter how much money you have.

Part of me says that I’d do it for 20x… but I’d just end up quitting in a few months, take my money and retire early.

I haven’t purchased a new canon in years because my current TS5020 has been a workhorse for years… and I can buy a box with 5 complete sets of 3rd party ink carts (C,M,Y,K & BK) for $15 on Amazon… and they just work.

I’ve heard rumblings that they’re no longer as good, but as long as this continues to work well I’ll keep it. The current printer landscape is a mine field.

“Worst crime of the 21st Century” , so far!

Personally, I hate crypto, but I like the idea of crypto. Like decentralized currency, useable anywhere by anyone, independent of locale/government, is an awesome ideal. What drives me away from it is the fact that it’s not reliable (it fluctuates all over the place, and there’s no guarantee what you have one day will be there tomorrow), it eats more power than a country just to track transactions, there’s tons of different ones, and it’s generally used for scams and illicit purchases. Which I suppose is part of its reason it be, but no legit storefront I use takes it.. probably for the first reason.

It also doesn’t help that it’s got a bad rap from all the crazy crypto-bro/fly-by-night scams and NFT stuff.

It’s almost like people can buy and enjoy whatever they want. If you want to buy a switch2, go ahead, if you don’t, that’s cool to. Gatekeeping has no place here. People are allowed to like what they like.

Man, I almost ran into the piece of shit car you had so many times… what even WAS that thing?!

Honestly, this isn’t a surprise or really a big surprise. Gamification like this has been a thing since the 90’s or earlier. As soon as the web became ad revenue driven, sites figured how to drive clicks and keep people on them. More engagement == more page views == more revenue. Video games have done achievements for decades. AOL even did this in the 90’s. More “you got mail”, more AIM messages, more things available, more engagement, more likely you’re going to pay that hourly charge for access. It’s the same reason there’s clickbait everywhere and everyone has a newsletter the automatically sign you up for. Here Facebook does it… everyone’s slightly different, but all have the same premise. Gotta keep you hooked, give you that dopamine hit and make you keep coming back.

This goes back to the age old “if we could make the internet monetarily self sufficient without ads, how would that work?”