Which is why I dislike “it’s said”. By whom? Your racist granddad? Your imaginary friend? Anyone trustworthy? Nah

Sorry for the Facebook link - it is a brushtail possum, broke into a bakery in Australia. Was ‘rescued’ and recovered fully from gorging out on pastries

You don’t need to pass a test or read the road law books to buy a bicycle. It’s not a motor vehicle. Therefore it is not bound by motor law.

Omg yes!

I understand you, I do… And often the rich and (in the case of the US president, or) powerful pull this shit anywhere in the world. That Dubai palm tree-shaped beach nobody lives in, the Trump golf courses in Scotland… I’m not American and I have grievances against capitalist pigs destroying good land.

Aside from being a circlejerk for the companies competing their bots, I’ve never understood why they use humanoid bots for most tasks. Are they all really that vain to believe the human body, a bipedal body, is the ideal for jobs like this.

I recommend moving to .odt and such, Microsoft altered the supposed-to-be-standardised formats they use, probably to lock people into their ecosystem. You could instead select all and copy from the docx into a fresh .odt, and fix the formatting differences.

Mad props. I can do that to a degree, but there are some things I’m not willing to sacrifice yet. 100% upholding your principles – respect

I dont know how much of this is sensationalist peddle, but there’s a barely disguised advert for entrepreneurs by a YouTube channel called Statrys that mentions China’s plan to destroy the competition by doing what a dictatorship not held back by bureaucracy does best; investing fucktons of money into the industries. Link

In my attempt to drive a wedge into the ideal of unconditional government faith:

I have deduced that there are five laws of society:

1. State - national or regional regulations, uses prisons, sometimes to protect themselves rather than the community
2. Religious - based on the perception of guidelines of how to live, as per holy scriptures
3. Moral - the societal, generally accepted rules to not be a dick, such as harming others in malice, stealing. Not to be confused with subjective, personal morals
4. Ethical - a broader, more easily agreeable set of regulations, almost exclusively to protect life, the way of it, and the generally accepted ideas of rights for fauna and flora
5. Corporate - enforcement of copyright and intellectual property, a capitalist creation, often used to socially and financially destroy individuals rather than battle other businesses, in some regions utilising state law

The state legal system is sometimes the absolute enemy of the people and morals, especially when combined with corporate law, and shouldn’t be treated like it’s unconditionally justice.

Well, in one respect it’s humans - always humans - that cause destruction in one way. Even if some of us try, like backing a carbon offset program that plants trees (in correct places that historically support trees), there’s the rich and powerful creating some other hyperfixation like fast fashion, space races, greed wars, religious wars and witch hunts like the one against AI to cock it up again

On the other hand, I as a builder of tech fucking hate what the obsession with AI has done to the current global economy, and how generative AI is a complete waste of existence as its meaningful use is dwarfed by its cost…

But I do see value in developmental AI, and while it’s little more than a standard algorithmic program with memory, parameters and developer bias, it is useful at doing some work better than us, and much faster. And since the dawn of humanity we’ve been inventing things to make life tasks easier. I do believe that form of AI will persist. In a way, vehemently opposing the AI programs that make calculations or accurate code is about as righteous as refusing to use a hammer to nail together some wood, or making fearmongering pamphlets about the advent of electrified cities.

There’s a motivational app someone I know uses that has this very idea - I think it’s Finch (little Tamagotchi type deal, reels you in with cute interactions, and gives you little app-based rewards for achieving little goals). One day in a given week its like ‘Clean the bathroom sink day!’ or ‘Time to wipe down the skirting/baseboards!’

bitcoin isn’t cheap

Well, you dont have to buy whole digit BTC (or any other cryptocurrency), you can convert like €50 into the wild and sketchy world of unstable currency which will be around 0.0026436362 BTC, but is enough to cover the cost of the transaction. I’m not sure I recommend it, only that it’s technically not expensive because you’re still using the equivalent of your currency, with a transitional currency.

things like search that limits options

And you can self host SearXNG, metasearch engines are much easier to handle than search engines, and I believe they are private enough – no tracking or sign in data is communicated through each search API – but I do not know all there is to know.

They asked GPT 4o to peer-review the choice and they trust it because they pay US$10/m for it

In my journey to remove myself from as many unethical companies as possible I was hit with one of several hard lessons, that even if I remove my dependency on corps like Google, I may not want to sacrifice services who themselves depend on it. For example, I use Home Assistant. I value several (external) community made integrations and therefore use HACS. Well, HACS is a frontend for all these extras, which are exclusively hosted on Github. So I ‘can’t’ delete my Git account, rather keep it around for API access.

I have some other services like Shopify, who I don’t really trust but who are frequently the only adopted sale point for many merchants, who themselves are ethically sound or, subjectively, the ‘best’ source. Who better to host a throwaway email account for services I reluctantly connect with than Google, aha.

What I’m saying is, I’m finding total deGoogling a challenge, and I wish you the best of luck. At least there’s alternatives to the Play Store; Aurora, F-droid, and ApkMirror||ApkPure

I installed Termux for reasons I’ve forgotten, and was surprised to discover the base is a distro called Alpine. Learned more about this seldom talked-about fourth Linux distro. I tell you, if nothing else it’s nice to be able to install apks I’m familiar with on PC, and SSH into my server directly from the phone

Yeah nah that makes sense. I’ve got a weather integration in Home Assistant and chose to add relatively accurate coordinates for the API calls. That at least was entirely under my control, whereas their implementation was “use it this way or not at all”, demanding location access or no weather.

And that’s just America.

But to defuse the paranoia a little, they said the same about the most recent, disturbingly powerful, global PMC: G4S. Not much actually happened yet as a result of G4S power. Which, as it turns out, also uses Palantir systems.

And that’s just America.

The next contractor is debugging why the upstairs cloakroom has a breeze running through it, only to eventually realise it should probably have four walls