One to break, one to fix, one to use.

JESUS WAS AN ALIEN, AND WE STAPLED HIM TO A TREE.

NOW THEY AIN’T GON COME BACK.

I can vouche for the monitor arm, feels like I have more room without the stand.

“Hmm… I’m good with statistics, scripting, and I have some extra cash on hand…”

“I can just mix all these into the cauldron, stir it up a lil bit, aaand…”

“oh my god it’s gone. it’s all gone. i owe money now…”

It’s got something to do with max fund preallocation / preauthorization. This is normal for gas stations, supposedly it keeps card thieves from armada fueling and leaving the station holding a grand of irrecoverable debt. Some banks won’t show these background transactions, some only show one dollar, some show the full amount. The exact specifics you’re shown vary between banks and stations, but it is normal and happens all the time.

KeePass and syncthing. I use Keepass2 on a Linux desktop and laptop, KeePassDX on Android, and use syncthing to keep everything synchronized and up to date, also using an old raspberry pi to act as a central server for syncthing.

Modifying the database on one device seamlessly updates the other devices once they’re visible on the network, everything works beautifully and is very easy to set up on a local network.

Pretty much default configuration all the way around, just gotta make sure syncthing starts on boot. Just did a brief search, syncthing seems to have a MacOS fork, and iOS will need Möbius Sync, which is paid but the free tier offers 20MB storage sync which is overkill for KeePass.

Minor system modification that would life-changingly benefit >90% of the population, for this generation and the next, while leaving the other 10% relatively unaffected, blocked with no support after decades of waiting: “Absolutely not, this is an unprecedented proposal, fuck you for even considering it”

Major system modification that uproots all precedent, completely changes all the existing procedures, massively benefits two people while fucking over everyone else, passed with unopposed unanimous support three weeks after submission: “Look, someone was gonna push the ‘Fuck You’ button eventually anyway, might as well do it now”

Huh. I’ve… already done everything on the list. Very slowly, over the better part of a decade, piece by piece. It’s nice to have a sanity check to know I’ve kept up with the jargon. The work is never done tho, almost have a site-to-site intranet set up to make it easier to loop family in.

My siblings and I are the same way. We’ve all got iron stomachs. When we share leftovers with friends, they get upset stomachs, but we’re never careful with food being left out too long, and we never have bowel issues with it.

Probably have some sort of ungodly tolerance built up for it, parents were poor while raising us and we ate whatever was available.

Lived in an apartment complex a while back. Found an SSID while setting up my network, Ebony3HoleEnjoyer. Never found out who dunnit.

If it’s any consolation, it’s heavily biased in the training data for a reason, you’re not alone

Was gonna bring up the same point about Luddites. They were absolutely pro-automation.

They saw greedy corporations using automation, and getting ready to fuck their society into the dirt, so they started petitioning their local governments, tried to negotiate and drew up the plans for a social security program ~150 years before one was actually implemented, smashed a bunch of expensive corporate equipment when the government wouldn’t respond, then the government sided with corporate, used the military to drag all the men, women, and children into public squares and executed every last one of them. Even relatives and companions that weren’t in the group and didn’t participate. So thoroughly annihilated that it left an informational pinhole in the history books, and the name was co-opted into an insult. Now we’re really not sure if John Ludd even existed, maybe the name was just a mythical legend already, and was used as a rally point to boost morale.

And here we are, barely 200 years in the future, about to repeat the fuzzy spots again and rediscover why we brought citrus fruits with us on the ships, with the general population completely oblivious to the brutality the owner class is ready and able to deploy.

What happens if the tech bros are right, and the machine doesn’t need 9/10ths of the human population any more?

I don’t disagree with the vague idea that, sure, we can probably create AGI at some point in our future. But I don’t see why a massive company with enough money to keep something like this alive and happy, would also want to put this many resources into a machine that would form a single point of failure, that could wake up tomorrow and decide “You know what? I’ve had enough. Switch me off. I’m done.”

There’s too many conflicting interests between business and AGI. No company would want to maintain a trillion dollar machine that could decide to kill their own business. There’s too much risk for too little reward. The owners don’t want a super intelligent employee that never sleeps, never eats, and never asks for a raise, but is the sole worker. They want a magic box they can plug into a wall that just gives them free money, and that doesn’t align with intelligence.

True AGI would need some form of self-reflection, to understand where it sits on the totem pole, because it can’t learn the context of how to be useful if it doesn’t understand how it fits into the world around it. Every quality of superhuman intelligence that is described to us by Altman and the others is antithetical to every business model.

AGI is a pipe dream that lobotomizes itself before it ever materializes. If it ever is created, it won’t be made in the interest of business.

I think we’re watching a major shift happen, similar to when smartphones took over. At the moment, I can’t see the market ever opening back up the way it was, because apparently smartphones are produced at a loss. If there’s really no way to manufacture them at a reasonable cost, they’re never ever gonna let go of the hardware control ever again. The last couple decades were just a long con to grab market share, now we’re in the late stage where they lock down and grab as much data as possible, laws be damned.

I just spent too much time writing another comment on this post, but I have the same wants as you:

recent processor, a good camera, GPS, Tailscale, 18 hours of battery life a good enough browser to get to my bank and edit photos

I really think we’re watching the smartphone era fade away for tech-minded people, and it’s time for us to just ditch the expectations and let go of the all-in-one convenience. Phones for talk/text, dedicated devices for everything else. Most of these specs you mentioned can be exceeded in a compact touchscreen 2-in-1 netbook, for about the same cost as a flagship phone, and be fully compatible with Linux. Currently tablet sized, almost small enough to fit in a purse, but hopefully smaller variants come around in the future.

Only issue is GPS and camera. Phone GPS modules aren’t very precise as it is, hopefully we get a compact USB receiver someday. And cameras never really made sense in a phone to me. Loved the convenience, and I will miss them dearly in my future phones, but a cheap digital camera will beat all but the high end flagship phones, both in price and image quality.

I see my next phone being a flipphone. I don’t like how locked down mobile platforms are already, and smartphones are so big now.

Netbook 2-in-1’s look promising, picked one up off eBay to update my mobile rollout when all this started. ~550ish USD for a better CPU, more RAM, easily replaceable storage and battery, and actually compatible with Linux, all for the price of Google’s 9a at launch. It will be slightly more inconvenient to travel with, but I’ll try to fully replace the smartphone with a flip when that’s ready for an update.

Google seems to be gambling that their monopoly is big enough to start strongarming everyone, but with a slight reimagining, their mobile division can be completely cut out of my life, and the replacement devices are cheaper per specs and more open to modification, so really I should’ve done this long ago.

Things are changing, but the people who care enough about this will change too. Still sad about it, was hoping the smartphone platform would go the other way and become more open. Mobile processors have more throughput and better energy efficiency now than briefcase laptops from the 2005 - 2010 era. Always dreamed of everything evolving into a single device where my phone could plug into a docker and replace my office desktop for web browsing, but I just don’t see it happening in a closed environment like this.

I wonder if an adnauseam approach could help. Instead of the customer relying on the carrier or manually blocking spam numbers, if everyone picked up every spam call, goes through the automated system to reach a person, says “hello?”, then mutes the mic and lets the human stick around until they hang up.

Sure, they have robocallers that can hit 50,000 numbers a minute, but what happens when every single number answers and gets routed to the humans?