Discussion
I used to like computers a lot. Like, a lot a lot!
Then I moved to SF and got a first-hand look at how capital distorts benefit production and distribution towards authoritarianism.
And so much of computers is tied up in the capital cycle and authoritarianism.
It's just deeply deeply disappointing, and makes it hard to find what joy I used to have at computation and the digital world.
Edit: This was prompted by https://authoritarian-stack.info/
And let's be real, I got a sense of that when I was growing up in the christofascist community that birthed the 'send an accountability report of all of your browsing activity so you can stay pure'.
Which... if you look at the _news_ for that particular organization...
Well. Let's say it backfired spectacularly and I will CW the CW because It Is Actually That Bad.
The founder's step-son (who I grew up with and considered one of my friends into my early 20s) got arrested in October for solicitation of a minor and possession of CSAM.
And the founder bailed him out. (I used to _work_ for that man. I made him _fucking rich_.
I solved hard architectural problems with his IBM Alumni VP of Eng and Child Prodigy Son-in-Law Fractional CTO.
I _literally_ [hired their now-President-and-CEO](https://www.linkedin.com/in/davingranroth) when I was manager of their Web Applications department at 18.
So yea, for me? For the software industry? It's been disappointment after fucking disappointment for 20+ years.
(Oh, re: above arrested step-son/former-friend... one of my core-memories was writing a program in visual basic together where clicking made a boot disappear and re-appear. It counted the times.
Neither of us could spell "disappear" so it was called "disoper." We passed the compiled EXE around on 3.1MB floppy disks at our homeschool group and friends would share their "high score".
Like I said, I used to _love_ computers. And that's been deeply and potentially irreedemably tainted)
The hardest part of the last decade+ has been holding onto hope.
I have to hope we will wake up to the cruelty of our society and we will do something about it.
The rot is so deep. So. So. So. Deep.
Anyway, I am thinking of getting a cloud machine so I can fuck around with rust and self-hosting. Partly because I wanna hack on #ConjuredInk when I have hacking spoons again. Partly because I want to have a place I can deploy projects to that doesn't lock me into into Big Cloud.
It looks like #OvhCloud (https://us.ovhcloud.com) offers [a 4 core xeon with 32GB of RAM and a half-terabyte of RAID-1 for $20/mo?!](https://eco.us.ovhcloud.com/kimsufi/ks-1/)
And if you throw it in the Gravelines France data-center, it generates 10% of the carbon per kw/h as us-east-1 per [carbonaware.cloud](https://carbonaware.cloud/)...
Me: "Jesus! 32GB of RAM and 4-cores at 2.2ghz!? That should be able to host half the Internet!"
Also me: "I need 15x Performance M dynos to host this rails app that serves 30 req/s at peak load"
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
