It falls under a greater problem of our time. Everyone thinks they can be clever by becoming a passive income earner. So we get things like middle men which has been increasing the cost of things because every hand needs to grab a cut along the way. We have people becoming landlords slowly amassing rental properties which created a bigger and even life long tenant class. We get economies that revolve around stock markets pivoting industry from productivity to shareholder profit.

I don’t know if this is a trigger phrase like it is on reddit but it’s true that nobody wants to work anymore. Societies require people to work to keep things going. Can’t have everyone sitting on their ass waiting for others work for them.

Nobody wants to talk about it because nobody wants to be the sucker that didn’t get a leg up on everyone else. So everyone plays along with this massive collective cognitive dissonance.

I watched RocketBoom until suddenly they ran out of money. I don’t know what happened but it seemed like they were on the up and up. They even did videos with Sesame Street. If that isn’t a solid endorsement…

Then one day it was announced it was over.

It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.

Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.

He was weak but they couldn’t adjust his mic levels? That was weird.

We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.

It goes to show the socioeconomic differences. The more affluent kids at my school went all out. There was expensive outfits, limos, and after parties at other venues. For others it was just mom dropping them off at the vanilla school hosted event and that’s it.

Holes and dots.

For some reason I memory holed the first distro I used. There’s only vague recollection. I think it was SUSE or something. When Ubuntu came around I tried Linux again. That’s when I started to get the hang of things.

He’s sleepy from all that hard work.

The internet made a whole lot of things a big deal. Then convinced guys they were the victims. Then filled their heads with extremist ideologies. What a wild past 10-15 years.

Reddit is inside the walls of enshittification. Reddit kowtows to the techbro narrative. Dissenting voices do appear there as they aren’t a full blown censorship. By and large the reddit userbase has historically been in aligned with big tech.

Same shit different era. Always gotta be persecuting somebody.

Also when Silicon Valley copies and steals they get praised as revolutionary innovators.

A spooky thing I noticed at one point I could search a rather vague query and Google was returning results in the programming language I was working with when the query was general enough to have been any language.

Maybe instead of Torvalds taking lessons on how to be less of an asshole, he should be teaching developers how to be more like him.

What has reddit accomplished in over a decade? That place has been nothing more than an escalating demoralization psy-op. It’s given the right another central platform to push their ideologies. It’s had the left preoccupied with petty squabbles.

Maybe reddit closer to 15-20 years ago would have been able to use reddit to stage actual coordinated worker demonstrations in cities around America. Over the past decade or so they’ve been keyboard mashing.

The world needed the open internet to bootstrap the digital revolution. It wasn’t possible without the sum of humanity working altruistically to build the Library of Alexandria of software. No private entity could have possibly done it. It truly is an under appreciated marvel of the late-20th/early-21st century. FOSS contains the knowledge of software that runs the world. Now that such a thing exists I could totally see organizations (loosely speaking) wanting to conquer or ransack it. It’s quite clear by now there’s faction of tech with a tyrannical bent. I’d put them whoever they might be exactly as possible culprits.

A president in jail would be disastrous for the reputation of America as a country. That’s been my theory as to why he will never face any real consequence. It seems like an elephant in the room. One that probably doesn’t even split neatly down partisanship.

Yeah everything is broken with anti-patterns meant to kill competition.

I keep a separate Google Chrome install with no addons for government and banking. Websites break things so badly unless you’re leaving yourself wide open to all their privacy snooping and what not.

For random web browsing the annoyances don’t matter as much. It’s unacceptable when it comes to important things. It’s all by (anti-)design.

They already have their own x86 chips. They’re a few generations behind the cutting edge. They’ve been catching up fast which is why the US and EU have been shitting their pants trying to wage cold war. All of a sudden ramping up the China bad narrative out of left field when not long ago they were trying to work with China rather than against them…

Much of the manufacturing difficulty we hear about with western industry is achieving highest yields possible of the most powerful chips to please ravenous shareholders demanding flawless profit gains every quarter. Capitalism problems in other words. It’s much different when your goal is merely to produce computers for government office use. You can still use old computers for the majority of computing needs.

The average person makes under 100k even in reddits favorite high cost of living tech hubs where their six figures is pretty much makes them equivalent to the people on skidrow. It’s amusing how when they were struggling college students the bar for rich was millionaires. Those who’ve made it rich themselves the bar for rich person moved up to billionaires. So now they have to wax philosophic, “what exactly is ‘rich’?”. You got rich. There being richer people than you doesn’t change that.

Explain the same executive compensation minus tech and people will have their pitchforks out. But it’s tech so which has a different set of standards because it’s the internets darling.