Once again the ownership class pirates freely while disparaging the common folk for violating copyright.

It’s almost if it’s not a real law, rather something by which to disparage the proletariat.

I’m sure AGI is far off and AGI is impossible is exactly what AGI wants us to think.

Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.

These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.

Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.

Yeah, having sponsored women gamers in the gaming community, but am otherwise a recluse, I know three women who aren’t family. Though family also includes wife and stepdaughters.

I strive to be trustworthy, though it’s risky to leave fresh baked goods near me unattended for very long. (There have been incidents.) But even when I’m on good terms with wifey friends, I can’t say they trust me.

I have a bad habit of quoting lyrics and expecting everyone to know what I’m talking about.

It’s a sea of blank faces.

Also having been trained in design, I think it’s appropriate to wear well-designed logos or shirts, even if the product advertised is shoddy.

We don’t serfdom well. Rich techbros can expect feces in their food and spittle in their drink, and eventially a guillotine party. Maybe armies of patrol drones will slow it down but the opportunities for mischief will be exciting.

FDR’s New Deal was to prevent a communist revolution. And here we are, again.

Now serfdom would work if they recognized people need bare minimums that keep them warm, fed and comfortable. But aristocrats always take thr serfs for granted.

Essentially robots will become the front line and will front the attrition war. Once enemy robots tear through friendly robots they’ll go after any other friendly units, including human ones.

Robots can’t tell soldiers from civilians, so they’ll act as area denial. You have five minutes to move a hundred meters back to a safe space after which robots will kill anything on this side of the red line. Lather, rinse, repeat until there’s no safe space left.

Video of this would embarrass the international community, so for now we’ll have to garrison civilian centers with human beings, which is still messy. When we have robots that can garrison, then all-robot armies will become viable.

Embrace despair! Embrace existential dread! When the abyss gazes into you, gaze back and smile! The abyss is my buddy!

Have tea with mortality and your inevitable demise!

I get that a lot.

Which only adds bas relief to the point. Linus has no personal or commercial motivation to get people to get the hot new trendy thing. Linux isn’t motivated by built-in obsolescence the way Windows and iOS are.

In fact, their higher iteration indicators are a symptom of a disadvantage of the operating system, not an advantage.

We don’t have a consistent convention as to what changes qualify for a version increment rather than update increment. A new kernel? A new interface convention? New icons for the mini-apps?

Windows 10 has more plug-and-play drivers than Win7 and Win8. It can recognize newer hardware and it can be installed natively from thumb drives. So a lot of features that were third party are now offical… long after I had access to the third-party libraries.

But then it combines the metro and the start menu. I never found a use for the metro.

Win11 is less operability and more DRM and more spyware.

For Apple and Microsoft, a new version is a new marketing season. It’s the same as the new iPhone, the new Subaru.

I assume Linux builds increment with significant operability additions, especially if they’re not fully backwards compatible. Since they’re released without charge the capacity to do more stuff is the only reason to upgrade to a new increment rather than preserving a stable version.

Reviews of Dobbs revealed that principle is dead in SCOTUS, that the Federalist Society judges are more interested in autocratic despotism to please their plutocratic masters.

Every lost of life traced back to an ideological court ruling further delegitimizes the courts in the eyes of the public. This is not just a matter isolated to women denied medical care, though the loss of abortion rights raised a lot more awareness, than the civil rights that have been getting carved and stripped since the PATRIOT act in 2001. In the 2020s the forth- and fifth-amendment protections we once took for granted are conspicuously absent whenever we have to engage law enforcement.

The question is, what happens next? We’re not going to go quietly into Gilead. It’s never appropriate to consider violence until the hour it is. Is it a matter of deciding which incident is our Mahsa Amini? Do we organize sabotage teams and consider targets before that hour?

Peaceful protests are already treated by law enforcement as riots, and tend to be ineffective in moving policy forward. We, the public, are already regarded as terrorists, as enemies of state. While I don’t have answers, I am curious at what point to we acknowledge peaceful engagement with the establishment has been neutered and exhausted.

With the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 we already know they’re not waiting for the public to strike first.

That would be the hydrogen bomb. If we created a sizeable MIRV of cobalt bombs and pointed them at Jerusalem on an automated system that tracked the rate of violent death, suddenly all the religious types would get really polite.

(Obviously this is a supervillain example. we’re considering alternative vectors towards peace and humanitarian aid in the holy land before holding it hostage. We’re also running out of saner ideas.)

(Also, the Soviet Union did consider a doomsday device a la Dr. Strangelove as a cold war nuclear deterrent before the politburo decided it would never authorize a retalitory strike for sake of the species and moved on to Мирное сосуществование. Nearly eighty years without a nuclear war shows us even religious fanatics and madmen don’t want to extinct the human species. Their heart’s not in it.)

The problem is, smaller interests can’t get the bomb yet. It takes too much complex industry to make. As a result, we still have huge swaths of powerless population to be bullied, enslaved and exploited.

Once the superweapon made from fir wood, Indian ocean tuna, granite and parafin becomes public we’ll have to negotiate with even the smallest faction and arrange for the welfare and contentment of everyone… that is if we survive the intermediary tensions. Our plutocrats may choose extinction over giving up their power.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to.