Lettuce eat lettuce

Yes!

Absolutely!

Not sure this has been said yet, but Neocities is a pretty great throwback to GeoCities and the early 2000’s web.

All a bunch of small, handcrafted websites and personal blogs by individuals and small groups.

Exploring feels like I remember back in the early 2000’s as a teen. Crazy and weird sites, hidden links and easter eggs, ARGs, random annon comments you can post to a wall, .gifs all over, pixel art, hacker manifestos, links to other similar sites, etc.

The Fediverse is pretty great too.

I wish there were more site directories curated by communities, that would reduce my reliance on search engines for sure. RSS is great, I’ve been using that to help build my personal content feed.

Most people don’t care, they won’t even notice sadly. They will walk into Best Buy, get swarmed by 3 sales people, tell them, “I’m looking for a new laptop.”

And the sales people will take them straight over to the laptop section which is all filled with the latest Microsoft swill and sell them one of them.

There will be no discussion of privacy, no discussion of Microsoft’s recent scandals, no discussion of alternatives. They will parrot whatever Microsoft’s talking points are, “it’s safe, encrypted, secure, fast, etc…”

If we want consumers to care, we have to reach them before they buy their new upgrade. This often starts with your family and close friends. You need to inform them, you need to tell them there is a better way.

This is how I got my parents switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint. They were asking me to help with their computer problems, (10 year old computer that was pretty low-power when it was new.)

I told them that Windows 10 was EoL next year and their hardware was way to old to upgrade. I said that I could put on Linux which would be much faster, more secure and private, wouldn’t require a new computer, and would do everything they needed. My mom was nervous, but I went over everything her and my dad used it for, (browsing, email, Word and printing, PDF reading, Turbo Tax, and Spotify.)

Only slight pain point was getting my mom onto Turbo Tax cloud. But she is slightly tech savvy, so it wasn’t too bad.

They’ve been on it for about 9 months now and it works great. Their computer is much snappier, and I don’t have to worry about them getting viruses, (my dad is 0% tech savvy and will click on almost any link he sees.)

Pretty solid extension. It’s wild how nasty click bait algorithms have made the modern web experience.

Artificial scarcity at its finest. Imagine recording a song digitally, then pretending there are a limited amount of copies of that song in existence. Then you sell an agreement to another person that says they have to pretend there is only a certain made up number of copies that they bought, and if they allow more than that number of people to listen to those copies at rhe same time, they will get sued for “stealing” additional pretend copies?

I hope everybody can see how this is the insane and pathetic result of Capitalism’s unrelenting drive to commodify everything it possibly can in the pursuit of profit.

As always, the solution is sailing the high seas. Throughout history, those who created or saved illegal copies/translations of literature and art were important to preserving and furthering human knowledge.

Many incredibly powerful people, empires, and countries have tried very hard to suppress that, but they keep failing. You cannot suppress the human drive for curiosity and knowledge.

Decomodify software. Refuse to respect copyright laws for software, or mandate that all software must be GPL or an equivalent restrictive license.

Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.

If you are a public institution of any kind, you should not be using corporate, proprietary software, no exceptions.

Closed source software and hardware is largely what allowed massive corpos to take over the software and hardware scene, and it’s what creates the incentive for silicon valley tech bros to create new technology solely in the hopes of being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars by some massive megacorp.

Corpos and private equity scumbags wouldn’t be interested in acquiring these companies if they knew all the code and technology was under a GPL-like license, and anybody could take that tech, modify it, redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, etc.

In Minecraft of course…

Yeah, they want to be able to get people totally off Linux as a root OS.

By creating WSL, they now can say, "Oh, you like to develop for/on Linux? Well good news, Windows has Linux built in! Just come on over to Windows and you can use WSL and Linux on Azure for all your Linux needs!

Lol sure, and AI made human staff at grocery stores a thing of the…oops, oh yeah…y’all tried that for a while and it failed horribly…

So tired of the bullshit “AI” hype train. I can’t wait for the market to crash hard once everybody realizes it’s a bubble and AI won’t magically make programmers obsolete.

Remember when everything was using machine learning and blockchain technology? Pepperidge Farm remembers…

The only piece of Microsoft tech that I actually loved, so sad it flopped. I had two Windows phones, beautiful devices. Gorgeous screens, great design, the Windows 8 tiles unironically were fantastic on mobile.

Everything was butter smooth, I never had them crash or freeze up. Zeiss cameras, they took great pictures.

But there were almost no apps for them. It was basically the Microsoft mobile office suite, and a few random ports like Evernote. Nobody bought them because there was zero ecosystem for them.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r38Epj6ldKU

His sources are in the description.

Dark Reader on Firefox mobile works well for me!

Capitalists: So you’re telling me I can build 1000x more AI data center infrastructure now?

I’m already more sick of hearing about AI than NFTs and Crypto. At least those largely stayed within their own separate spaces where they could be ignored.

“AI” is infecting everything. Even Duck Duck Go has it now. The web has become so enshitified. Search engines are just ad-link spam and the results are largely poisoned by AI generated sludge so even when you think you’ve found a useful article, you realized partway through it’s LLM garbage.

What a depressing dystopia, it’s not even sexy like the movies, it’s just a bland, sludge-filled wasteland.

Trying to avoid it has becoming so tough. For months now, I’ve been painstakingly building my own content feeds from trusted sites, forums, and content sources. It’s like the old internet, I’ve literally started buying books for tech topics because finding reliable help and documentation is getting harder every day.

I’ve seen the same thing. IT departments are less and less interested in building and maintaining in-house solutions.

I get why, it requires more time, effort, money, and experienced staff to pay.

But you gain more robust systems when it’s done well. Companies want to cut costs everywhere they can, and it’s cheaper to just pay an outside company to do XY&Z for you and just hire an MSP to manage your web portals for it, or maybe a 2-3 internal sys admins that are expected to do all that plus level 1 help desk support.

Same thing has happened with end users. We spent so much time trying to make computers “friendly” to people, that we actually just made people computer illiterate.

I find myself in a strange place where I am having to help Boomers, older Gen-X, and Gen-Z with incredibly basic computer functions.

Things like:

• Changing their passwords when the policy requires it.
• Showing people where the Start menu is and how to search for programs there.
• How to pin a shortcut to their task bar.
• How to snap windows to half the screen.
• How to un-mute their volume.
• How to change their audio device in Teams or Zoom from their speakers to their headphones.
• How to log out of their account and log back in.
• How to move files between folders.
• How to download attachments from emails.
• How to attach files in an email.
• How to create and organize Browser shortcuts.
• How to open a hyperlink in a document.
• How to play an audio or video file in an email.
• How to expand a basic folder structure in a file tree.
• How to press buttons on their desk phone to hear voicemails.

It’s like only older Millennials and younger gen-X seem to have a general understanding of basic computer usage.

Much of this stuff has been the same for literally 30+ years. The Start menu, folders, voicemail, email, hyperlinks, browser bookmarks, etc. The coat of paint changes every 5-7 years, but almost all the same principles are identical.

Can you imagine people not knowing how to put a car in drive, turn on the windshield wipers, or fill it with petrol, just because every 5-7 years the body style changes a little?

Magic Earth works really great for me :)

Straw man. I’m encountering sys admins and systems “engineers” who don’t know how to spec out a server, don’t understand how certificates work, don’t understand basic IP addressing principles, don’t understand basic networking topology.

They just know how to click a list of specific buttons in a GUI for one specific Corpo vendor.

Maybe that is fine for a Jr. Admin just starting out, but it isn’t what you want for the folks in charge of building, upgrading, and maintaining your company’s infrastructure.

There’s nothing wrong with making interfaces simpler and easier to understand. And there’s nothing wrong with building simplified abstractions on top of your systems to gain efficiency. But this should not be done at the cost of actual deep understanding and functionality.

The people you call when things go badly wrong will always be the folks that have that deep understanding and competency. It already has started hitting the developer community in the last few years. The Jr. Devs that did a 3 month boot camp where they learned nothing but how to parrot code and slap APIs together, are getting laid off and cannot find work.

The devs that went to school for Comp Sci, that have years of real world experience, and actually understand the theory and the nuts and bolts of the underlying tech, they are still largely employed and have little trouble finding work.

I think the same will happen soon in the IT world. Deep knowledge and years of dirty, greasy hands will always be desirable over a parrot that only knows how to click GUI buttons in a specific order.

Let’s hope that people will start to favor on-prem solutions and smaller independent cloud providers vs the massive trillion dollar corpo clouds that control so much now.