I have a monthly budget that I pay recurring charges out of, a couple hundred USD a year give or take.

I also do a lot of one-off donations to various projects and creators.

I also have some FOSS software/services that I pay monthly for premium features on, like Bitwarden, Proton, and Podverse.

Similar tactic among all the large tech corpos, switch focus to IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, become the backbone of the modern computing landscape.

It’s basically a slow switch to becoming critical international infrastructure like power grids, water ways, and gas/oil pipelines.

This all while locking you in as much as possible and milking as much value as they can squeeze.

Here’s my twisted life exposed…I have no issue watching 1080p on my QLED 4K TV. I game at 1080p happily, I honestly don’t give a shit about 4K content.

1080p looks good enough for me, and I actually watch 720p on my phone screen half the time too.

And not because of lack of speed, I have a 1Gbps+ fiber line up and down.

And tbh, if it means I get to own and control my media, I would tolerate even worse quality if that’s what I needed to do.

Grunge computing ftw! Quality at the cost of your soul? Fuck that!

It only exists to counter the existing framework. In an ideal world, nobody would honor or respect the idea of “intellectual property” and hence, only fraud would be punished.

You misunderstand me. When I say, “copyright is bullshit” I don’t mean that I don’t like it, or that it doesn’t work. I mean it’s bullshit in the same way that the crystal healing or mushroom cancer therapy is bullshit.

You cannot steal an idea, it’s impossible. So creating laws that punish people for doing things like copying a digital file doesn’t make sense. Copyright supposedly was created to create an incentive for artists and inventors to make cool and enriching stuff.

But what it actually does is protects business savvy people and allows them to game the system, get first mover advantage over all others, and then punish any potential competitors in that space.

As if nobody was creating artwork or inventing useful devices before copyright law came into being.

Just because something is useful doesn’t make it good, atomic bombs are useful, factory farming is useful.

I think the only thing people should be protected from as a creator is fraud. You can copy a person’s works and modify or distribute them in any manner you see fit, as long as it’s clear that you are not the original creator. You cannot claim to be them or to be affiliated with them unless you actually are.

That is what the principle of copyleft is all about. If copyright worked in principle, then you should see millions of individual creators enriched and protected by it.

But you don’t see that, instead, a few giant mega corps and super wealthy tycoons own and control enormous swaths of “intellectual property” and small time creators struggle to make ends meet and are sued into oblivion by the same powerful groups.

Sure it’s great for boosting wealth and GDP, but that boost does not apply to most of the population, it applies to the tiny elite that has now captures enormous segments of the market and fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.

Copyright is structurally flawed, it doesn’t work because it cannot work. It’s fundamentally based on a the nonsensical concept of “intellectual property” which as I said at the beginning, is bullshit.

Copyright is bullshit, so no.

“We won’t train AI on artists’ work…this quarter.”

~Adobe probably

I’m constantly amazed at the longevity of this probe, so awesome!

We’re lucky that the SBC space has gotten really solid over the last couple years. ARM-based, X86-based, and even some RISC-V systems.

The PI isn’t the only only game in town now, and actually gets beat in several different applications depending on use case.

As shareholder value and line-must-go-up takes over the company culture, progress and innovation will happen more and more in the hands of companies and orgs that actually care about their product’s quality and features.

Still disappointing though, the Pi was my first introduction to IoT and low power computing.

Let the enshitification begin!

If somebody shows you who they really are, believe them the first time…

Wild for sure. It’s pretty clear that M$ isn’t interested in making their OS anything more than a portal for their cloud products.

The overall percentage of revenue that Windows produces for them directly has been steadily shrinking for years while their Azure and cloud services/licensing has grown dramatically.

I guess it makes sense from that perspective. Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer my OS to be a platform for me to compute locally on and use as I see fit. Not be a bloated ad-ridden portal to a walled garden of proprietary web software.

Windows has gotten so bad in the last year or so, that I’ve actually started telling people, “Try Linux, but if that doesn’t work for you, just go with Apple.”

Both are scummy, evil mega corps that try to lock you into their platform forever. But at least with Apple, the cage is 24K gold with a little cushion, and you’re fed avocado toast & kombucha.

Windows is a rusty, filthy prison cell where the guards randomly come in to rough you up and you’re fed a steady diet of stale bread heels and gruel.

Go easy on them, they’re only a 3 trillion dollar company. It’s hard for them to get the resources to build well thought out and secure software.

Pathetic, so glad I’ve been on Linux for years. I don’t miss Micro$oft one bit.

…For now…

I know some folks on the SysAdmin discord mentioned it wasn’t working for them anymore. It also stopped working for me about 2 months ago. (I work in IT and set to up new computers fairly often)

But looking online real quick, several sources including Tom’s Hardware claim it still works. So I’m not sure what’s going on with it. Maybe your milage may vary?

I’m pretty sure they have removed this recently.

The concern is for value though. Like, if I’m going to use a massive amount of power and water to compute, I should be considering value to humanity as a whole.

AI is being sold as that, but so far, it’s actually harming instead of helping. Supercomputing was helping pretty much right away.

I suppose you could argue that if general supercomputing was invented now, it would be used for just as superficial uses. Maybe the context of personal computing, the internet, and corpo interests shape that.

The difference is that supercomputers by and large actually help humanity. They do things like help predict severe weather, help us understand mathematical problems, understand physics, develop new drug treatments, etc.

They are also primarily owned and funded by universities, scientific institutions, and public funding.

The modern push for ubiquitous corpo cloud platforms, SaaS, and AI training has resulted in massive pollution and environmental damage. For what? Mostly to generate massive profits for a small number of mega-corps, high level shareholders and ultra wealthy individuals, devalue and layoff workers, collect insane amounts of data to aid in mass surveillance and targeted advertising, and enshitify as much of the modern web as possible.

All AI research should be open source, federated, and accountable to the public. It should also be handled mostly by educational institutions, not for-profit companies. There should be no part of it that is allowed to be closed source or proprietary. No government should honor any copyright claims or cyber law protecting companies’ rights to not have their software hacked, decompiled, and code spread across the web for all to see and use as they see fit.

Let’s use this as a catalyst to support them and similar projects. I’ll be donating a chunk of money to them and also to the Wikimedia foundation and other related FOSS projects.

If you are able to donate, please do! If we all do our small part, we can make a big difference.

Not FOSS? Byeee!