Discussion
Hi Internet! I'm Drew and THIS IS MY FACE.
If this GIF has ever brought you joy in the past, I humbly ask you to consider making a donation to the National MS Society. It would mean a lot to me and to those I know affected by the disease!
Donate at blinkingguy.com
The US making an enemy out of Canada is as stupid as Denmark making an enemy out of Sweden — something we quit doing 306 years ago, back when The United States did not even exist yet.
I watched a thing earlier that I've been thinking about since.
The basic thesis of the piece was, essentially, that the goals of modern fascist leaders and CEOs are not to make more money or to consolidate more political power, but specifically to make things more expensive and create more precarity for working people.
As has so often been said, the cruelty is the point.
The bigotry and xenophobia and racism and whatever, these are all excuses or scapegoats or tools, but the *goal* is to keep people from fighting back, by keeping them busy and keeping them scared.
The dude started with the private equity financial shenanigans that brought down Toys R Us (among other companies), and then to blackrock and how private equity has fucked the housing industry, and then brought comparisons between those mechanisms and the "AI" bubbles.
Basically, he made the argument that "AI" economics are designed to be self re-enforcing, citing the RAM and storage shortages as specific examples of engineered scarcity designed specifically to raise prices for the sake of raising prices, consolidating the power of existing players and crowding out everyone else, not because they need the RAM and storage, but because they want them to be scarce.
@swampgas Also Diabolical Masquerade's 5th Movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNAAPp_IYws
@swampgas I'm on a roll, on the wheel of time! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8PVBbxoRHk
YouTube
Today I learned that #ImageMagick has been slopped for some time. Like many tools, it's been load-bearing infrastructure for decades.
Meanwhile, the #GraphicsMagick fork has been quietly chugging along for 24 years. For most of that time, it's been maintained by a single human being.
That person has been asking for additional developer help for years now. While I don't have the skills to help directly, I can talk about it while I take their kindly offered toys out for a test drive.
I'm a sucker for replacing a fusty old wizard with a friendly amphibian.
@codinghorror Wait — are you saying They Live will stream then?
0_0
@femme_mal I'm giving you a choice.
@LabSpokane There's plenty of actual stuff to worry about. There's really no reason to dig for speculative fantasies of worst-case senarios.
What if Trump orders the national guard to shoot all registered democrats before the election? What if he starts firing judges he doesn't like? What if he loses California to Mexico in a bar bet?
All these things COULD happen, after all.
Breaking | Three Palestinians were injured following an attack by extremist Israeli settlers on the village of Aghrin in the town of As-Samu, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.
MOAR NOTEBOOKS! Hopefully these will last until the end of the year @elzbethmrgn
bluesky is horrified to discover Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the fanfic the rationalist cult created and used as a recruitment method and that led in a straight line to the Ziz cult. Everyone at the AI bubble companies has read this thing.
https://bsky.app/profile/clairewillett.bsky.social/post/3mtpvatugsc2z
https://bsky.app/profile/panic.gay/post/3mtoakgupgk2x
(threads may require bsky login, sorry)
EDIT: https://skyview.social may let you through if you don't have a reader account
@davidgerard I started reading that. Based on my kids' ages and a memory I have of where I was reading it, I'm gonna guess that was 15 years ago. I forget how far I read, but I do remember going, in a single day, from thinking it was a neat concept to rolling my eyes here and there to actively arguing out loud with how annoyingly stupid the text was (yet so assured of its own genius). I mostly forgot about it (and rationalist wiki) until a few years ago.
@decryption does it save you 400 per year relative to the best stable deal, or vs that providers full price?
For me I can't be fucked constantly churning and just stick with something stable and reliable that isn't exorbitant. Helps that my current provider fucked up and I'm only paying for 50/20 despite getting 100/20.
@mattdarveniza $400-ish/yr compared to the best stable deal (they're all almost exactly the same price after the promo, give or take $5/m)
A Technology of Unlearning https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/a-technology-of-unlearning/
Only having sandwiches for dinner tonight. If you ignore the pizza I had before.
“More like insecurity” I say as I’m escorted from the premises
I logged onto my HMO site to renew a prescription, but it said to contact the doctor who prescribed it, not them, so I logged into that other system and it said do not message your doctor about prescriptions, instead contact your health provider.
Machiavelli would *killed* it working in healthcare
Neither of these pieces mention that the Australian government's plan to mandate renewable energy growth for data centres involves the purchase of offsets that will almost certainly not actually result in a renewable build-out.
Deeply frustrating how this extremely important fact has just been wholesale erased from discourse on this.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/data-centre-power-hungry-demand-2036/107070852
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/25/albanese-seeks-to-quell-datacentre-disquiet-as-climate-expert-warns-weve-got-one-shot-to-get-the-rules-right
@decryption I’d love to know how much more profitable the “real” price is, and if they’re running at a loss during the 6 month promo period.
@sendai that's what the ISPs pay NBN https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/media-centre/media-statements/Wholesale-Price-Changes-from-1-July-
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