It is a perfectly valid approach, and there are also many other perfectly valid approaches. “Better” requires a definition of what you want to be better. If there’s something that’s making you uncomfortable about the process, let us know what concern or issue you’re seeing with it and maybe we can guide you to a better way for you. But there’s nothing wrong with the way they’re doing it. Others may have different preferences (including you, YOU might have different preferences!) but they’re just preferences. It’s not right or wrong, even if some people argue that it is, they’re always going to have some preferences embedded in that judgement. There’s always more than one way to do it. That’s the joy of it, really, and sometimes you’ll have to experiment yourself to find out what ways YOU like the best, that make sense to you, that are comfortable for you, or that do things the way you want to do them.

It’s your own self-hosting setup, you get to make the choices. Sometimes the number of choices can be intimidating and lead to analysis paralysis but the only way out of that is to realize that there really is no way of finding the “best” until you’ve tried many different ways and figured out the “best” yourself. That’s why the only real advice I can give you is to just go through the tutorial you’ve found and do it the way they do it for now. You can change later, as you learn more, when not if you decide you want to do something differently. Because you will. We all do. It’s part of the process.

This is unfair. Maybe “crypto-bitch incel” IS their personality. /s

He should finish up what he’s already got by writing “Actually I just don’t care anymore. The End” and leave the last quarter of the book blank pages. Probably better than anything else he’s going to come up with at this point, and as a bonus it will fit perfectly with the ending of the show.

When the antichrists leading the formerly-free-world attempt to crucify Gaming Jesus we’ll know the end times have truly arrived.

This is unironically why I want them to get their shit utterly kicked in. I am really tired of the beautiful places and people of Russia being oppressed, indoctrinated and ruined by a violent criminal kleptostate that has genuinely ruined their lives and futures and simply convinced a large number of the ones that matter that “the West” did it, while actively designing their economy to create masses of peasants fit only for the war machine they plan to inflict on the rest of the world.

And yes, I realize they claim much the same about us. Fuck that. I don’t buy it, not nearly the amount of it they’re selling at least. We’ve done plenty we should be ashamed of, we’re not perfect, but the fact that they’d almost all rather live here in “the west” than there tells us that we can’t have gone too far wrong. The Russian Federation needs to die, and the lands formerly called the Russian Federation need to be rebuilt into something we can coexist with. We’ve seen that happen from a conquered and subjugated vassal, but they must gradually return to strength, not looted and colonized like a prize but shown how to find Russia’s rightful place as the leader they clearly so desperately crave to be on the world stage – as a leader, like Germany is now. This will not happen through military means, not with nuclear weapons in play, but the economic and political efforts to topple their regime and protect the formation of something better are necessary and must continue. We have often failed terribly at nation-building in the years since the end of WW2, to the point that it seems we are now reluctant to ever again try, but that is not a good excuse not to try nor to not try to learn from our mistakes and do better. The stakes are very high, we must try, and I desperately hope we can do better.

We’re living in a horrible comedy

It’s not even a bailout, it’s a financial potemkin village we’ve built to obscure how bad the recession actually is, and how much of a long-term depression it is likely to be.

A very reasonable and sensible perspective, but what if that’s still not going to be a fair trial either? We all have pretty strong opinions about torture, so I think we may need to go the extra mile in this case. If no unbiased jury can be found anywhere on planet Earth, then we’ll have to send them to Mars for a fair trial instead. It doesn’t even have to be elaborate, we can use the rules of the good old fashioned “trial by ordeal”. If you can survive on Mars, that demonstrates you were innocent all along and you can come right back home. Otherwise this is going to get dragged out for years and years while they dig up even more evidence and who knows what else may get discovered. This is really the best option for everyone. All aboard to Mars.

I agree with you. I like the things he’s saying, the problem is I don’t believe them. Even if I were to believe him as an individual and his own intentions I still don’t believe in the others in his big tent, the party, the organization, the apparatus, the system, the environment. I don’t think his intentions will translate into real change. Trust has been shattered. Only real and significant actions will start rebuilding bridges and trust, and there is no obvious framework available that would allow those real and significant actions to start to occur. I don’t see any realistic path forward.

I don’t know how to reconcile this with the fact that I desperately want a peaceful, non-violent path forward. I want a white knight in shining armor to ride to the rescue and fix everything. But I don’t actually believe they’re going to come, and if they did I am starting to understand that they would simply be cut down immediately and wouldn’t actually win the battle single-handedly the way my naive imagination thinks they would.

No, it’s just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn’t something that should be controlled by anyone who’s in it for a profit.

What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?

Release game for free on Steam. Surprise! All war objectives complete in 3 days.

You’re close to the real idea, but you’ve got it backwards.

Billionaires’ perspective: “Gradually reducing the human population over the coming century by 99% with wars, drugs, starvation, suicide, poverty while we develop life extension technologies to preserve and ideally immortalize the most deserving (*qualifications TBD) will ultimately reduce humanity’s long-term impact on the planet and be much more sustainable and leave us a lot more resources and land once we replace any jobs we might need with faster and more efficient AI and robots…”

They’ve completely thought this through to their conclusion already. We’re the ones who haven’t. They think they’re simply long-term thinkers and thoughtful environmentalists doing what must be done to save the planet. What they really are is power-mad eugenocidal technocratic maniacs who place no value on human lives or the lived human experience. Other than their own. Their technological utopia is built out of utter horrors and like many utopians they have fallen so deeply in love with their dream that they will accept any cost to reach it, and they have accepted this as the cost. Therefore, they must not succeed. Utopia is an illusion. But the cruelty they will do in pursuit of their utopia is real.

you can throw away the whole bowl of punch.

Ok. Let’s do that.

Journalism is dead. Capitalism killed it, because they did not want any reliable witnesses to or records of what they are going to do to humanity and the planet. History is written by the victors, and they have already crafted their own narrative of technological enlightenment. And we’re not in that story. At least not in any way we’ll recognize ourselves.

Neither capitalism nor socialism are a universally applicable perfect solution. They both have noble goals on paper, and horrible failings in practice. Balancing the two, using elements of both, within limits, with regulation, with moderation, is the only approach that makes sense to me given what we know about both approaches. Like any balancing act, staying on top of the balance takes continuous effort and will never remain stable, sometimes you need to push in one direction, sometimes the other, sometimes you overcorrect. We overcorrected way too far towards capitalism during and after the cold war, and now we’re falling and I don’t think we’re going to be able to catch ourselves. But we’ll still have to get up after the fall and try again. I don’t know if there’s a better “third way” but if there is, I’m confident the path to it will be found somewhere in between the two, not at the extremes.

Obligatory “fuck spez”

Eventually people might learn why they should not just prefer to have, but actually require open systems for all the computers in their lives, even the ones hidden inside of their appliances, instead of buying these locked down, pre-programmed, remote-updated internet-of-shit devices.

If you can’t get root and boot access on your device, decide what you’re updating it with and when, you don’t own it or control it in the first place. You’re just letting some shitty company (and maybe anyone at all with the amount of security flaws these devices have) directly into your home and network to decide what you can or can’t do with your product (and when and how much it’s going to cost), while they take advantage of every opportunity they can think of to spy on you and extract money from you. Any device with microchips in it isn’t just an appliance anymore, it’s a trojan horse full of gross and creepy salesmen and they’re going to be there forever, watching you and figuring out ways to get more of your money.

Some of them come up and show me “cool” or “funny” videos that are straight AI slop and I just have to grin weakly and give a courtesy chuckle.

Don’t pretend you like it. As someone with a still-functioning brain, you have a responsibility to use it to educate people on how harmful this shit is, not just to themselves but to society.

I’m not saying launch into a full blown tirade about it unless the person is receptive and interested in why you feel that way, but you don’t have to pretend you see any value in it either, the only message you really have to convey is something like “I’m pretty sure that’s AI and I don’t like or watch AI videos if I can help it”. You can be a single voice of reason, one casual dismissal at a time. People are social animals, they often take even subtle cues from the people around them to heart. It’s one way to try to get them thinking again. Be comfortable to be seen as the person with no sense of humor if that’s how you think people will take it.

Even if all it does is make them a little more hesitant to freely share their lovely AI slop with other people, because they are worried the other people might react like you did, that’s a huge win. Help stop the spread of the slop: Be judgy and judge someone for it. It’s an activity that deserves to be judged.

…pop!