Is every commercial activity not political? Engaging in a commercial activity by definition has some socioeconomic impact(or else this activity would not be viable), and therefore is political in my opinion.

The French came millimeters from electing Marine Le Pen for fucks sake. Practically every far right party in Europe is either in government or close to it. We aren’t going to get anywhere until we realize the call is coming from inside the house of neoliberal failure, decline in living standards, and the harms of the information economy, rather than some country-specific problem.

I agree that the code AI produces is incoherent garbage, but the problem is that 95% of human written code in circulation is also incoherent garbage with zero structure or documentation. Unless you are writing very important software the bar is hilariously low. I personally think the solution here is to treat software with more respect in general, but that would require companies thinking beyond the next quarter, and to end the rats’ race which causes employees to not be incentivized to care about efficient and we’ll structured software.

Genuine question, why is campaigning for the Democratic Party a better use of ones time than learning Marx(or any political philosophy text for that matter). To me this claim sounds absurd, because in no other activity is it seem as reasonable to put action over theory, instead of as inseparable, but I would be curious to hear your justification for your claim.

Matrix is probably the closest in terms of being widespread and well supported by client and server implementations, though it’s not quite the same. It’s a bit finicky in practice too.

You should be aware that people tactically register for the democratic or republican parties in states with closed primaries. It’s a fairly obvious thing to do when you live in a place where the “safe party” primary is the real election. I disagree with the rest of your argument as well but the numbers don’t paint the picture that they appear to.

In my opinion the difference is that any liability for the errors of the elevator are attributed to humans. AI companies are doing all they can to avoid liability for what the machines they create output.

There’s plenty of pieces of shit before and after PewDiePie that have contributed to the popularity(or even existence) of Linux, just because they might be morally questionable doesn’t negate their potential usefulness to a good cause.

This is one of those things where I think that purity might conflict with progress. I am currently using a VPS in a privacy-friendly country to host some stuff, and I am trying to move more of my needs there. I can easily try to host things at my house(and I do to a limited extent, I have a VPN I run through a VPS to connect my devices together to accomplish this), but dealing with the constraints of non-professional hardware management and a residential internet connection is frustrating. This frustration has in the past prevented me from reducing my use of services where I know they are farming my data, and would probably honor illegal and warrant-less data requests from government agencies. At least with IaaS, I give them money in exchange for a virtual machine, vs SaaS where I give them possibly money but more importantly permission to do whatever they want with my highly structured data(far easer to data mine a easily searchable database of PII vs a filesystem of unknown structure).

Even outside of tech, I have often found that my sense of purity gets in the way of actually making progress towards my values. Use the VPS if it will get you to stop using worse things.

This might actually reverse firefox’s decline in userbase at least in the business world. Any shop that already has multi-OS management could probably insta-switch to firefox, and i’m sure that MS locked-in places could too given enough of a push by IT.

I don’t have any evidence for this but purely speculation on my part: racism can explain a good amount of that. Biden has in the 90s voted for “tough on crime bills”, he is the definition of political establishment, and is a white man from Wilmington. Obama definitely is not textbook underpriveleged but he doesn’t have those points that biden does

Its not idiotic, because democrats have had numerous opportunities to enshrine abortion and contraception into law, while controlling both the legislative and executive branch. Republicans are perfectly able to pass their abhorrent laws, but democrats seem to not be able to pass good legislation even when they control the government. Until Roe was overturned, this state of affairs was actually very beneficial to democratic politicians, because they could recycle abortion as a rallying point every single election.

Hot take: the narrative that politicians do not understand technology due to their age is giving them too much credit. They have entire offices full of staffers whose entire job is to explain these things to them in ways they understand, as I am sure they have for some of the more important things. They just don’t care because their purpose is to serve corporations, not the public.

See this kind of shit is why I pirate, not because I can’t afford to pay $10 a month. When the $10 for a lot of content becomes $10 per month per piece of media you like, and you can’t watch it on your platform of choice, and you can’t watch it on a flight without paying more or not at all, this makes the $5 per month I pay for a VPN sound like a far better service.

Why is it rooted in Nazi propaganda?

Mate I don’t think most russian people are reading an obscure, western primarily english speaking social media site, and the ones that are are probably more likely to be against the war.

A lot of transit can just be electrified with overhead wires

Another interesting point is whether we attribute the successes and failures of a state on it’s particular social, economic and political situation or it’s ideology as the root cause of anything. Most people, when they agree with an ideology, will attribute the good things to the ideology and the bad things to specific circumstances, and the opposite with ideologies they do not agree with. The more nationalist Americans will tell you that Cuba is poor because it is communist, and that Bush invaded Iraq either because he was corrupt or because he was promoting freedom. However there’s also the argument that Cuba is poor because it is sanctioned to hell by the US, and that Bush invaded Iraq because of American capitalist imperialism. Which one of these you agree with pretty much entirely depends on your ideological opinions rather than what actually happened, and as far as making a valid argument either one is at least a coherent point.

The reality is that you have elements of both the fundamental ideology and the specific political circumstances in every social outcome you see. Which is an idea quite fatal to most of the rhetoric you see nowadays and part of why it’s impossible to have any political discussion with people you have fundamental disagreements with.

My stance on this starts with the things that a lot of people for the most part can admit are problems. Corporations with the power and wealth of small countries, concentration of money in the hands of a few, absurd costs of living, decreasing access to education, the environmental crisis, constant wars that destroy poorer countries, and in many countries poor healthcare outcomes. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Now why do these things happen? In my opinion the origin of these issues comes down to private ownership of vitally important organizations and infrastructure, and the resulting profit seeking regardless of the consequences. This also is how I would define capitalism, because capitalism is at its core only a way of organizing the economy.

There are then multiple answers to how we should address them. Regulating companies and reforming capitalism without addressing the root issue are a common one, and in some cases somewhat effective. However, in most cases such movements(which I would call social democratic) have a tendency to quickly walk back their achievements. For example, Tory attacks on the NHS in the UK have contributed to its reduction in quality. Or the walking back that the Mitterand administration did in France. Or the deregulation of trucking in the United States which led to substantially lower wages. This is also a western-centric argument on my part, because social democracy also relies on ruthlessly exploiting poorer countries’ workers but that’s a whole separate can of worms.

One could think of this backtracking as faults in the political system, which they perhaps are, but I think they are inherent to capitalism, because when you have such overwhelming power in megacorporations, they will inevitably eventually get their way as long as they exist. It’s the equivalent of being surprised that you will eventually burn up if you try to stand on the sun despite your thermal shielding or other mitigations. Which isn’t that absurd of a comparison because the sun’s surface is only ~15 times hotter than a human if you measure from absolute zero.

The next answer is to try to, through monopoly breaking or other means, to revert capitalism to a former state of less concentrated capital. This is a fool’s errand and a reactionary stance in most cases, because monopolization is inherent to capitalism, especially now that companies’ fixed costs are immense, but the marginal cost of each new unit(be it a package sent through a carrier or a complex electronic device) is nearly negligible in comparison, making a monopoly the inevitable outcome.

And about at this point in my political development I found out about Marxism and it’s overall proposal for an alternative to capitalism, and I found it the most compelling. The history of Marxism is also a whole separate can of worms so I won’t go too far into it, but I agree with the Marxist class analysis that there are owners(most of which aren’t even individuals anymore) and workers, and that workers’ main political strength are their numbers. And a lot of capitalism reform proposals do actually rely on mass political organization of workers. Now what I say is, I think we can be more imaginative as to what that power can be used for. I don’t think what comes next after capitalism will be perfect, but I think we can do much better.

I loved electronic snap circuits when I was 5-8 or so, so that’s definitely a good one if they still make them