While AI offers transformative potential, significant criticisms highlight its drawbacks. Current systems often perpetuate biases embedded in training data, leading to discriminatory outcomes in hiring, law enforcement, and lending. The environmental cost of training large models—like massive energy consumption and carbon emissions—raises sustainability concerns. Automation driven by AI threatens job displacement, exacerbating economic inequality, while opaque “black-box” algorithms undermine accountability in critical domains like healthcare or criminal justice. Privacy erosion, through pervasive surveillance and data exploitation, further fuels distrust. Though AI’s capabilities are impressive, its unchecked deployment risks deepening societal inequities and prioritizing efficiency over ethical considerations.

Nowadays with Apple, the bigger issue is the ARM Linux ecosystem being neglected in terms of support rather than the hardware compatibility (that is for M1/M2). The hardware for the most part works except for USB-HDMI and fingerprint (which didn’t work on my HP laptop either).

They should tariff Israel a lot more

“The corporations own the government” made sense for a while, but Trump has done enough to hurt said corporations lately that I’m actually starting to question that idea (it’s definitely true for the majority of Democrats though). The only real reason I can think of where it would make sense to do stuff like this is to cause a crisis making it easier to abuse power later on.

The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you’re able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they’re worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you’re going to need to trust something somewhere unless you reinvent everything on your own).

For instance, in the US if you’re a middle class cishet white male citizen who ignores politics, you’re biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it’s convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you’re working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you’re a minority, there’s not really much that can be done that doesn’t severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you’re being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you’re an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn’t touch anything else you own and doesn’t cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other “paranoid” security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you’re trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.

Spotube is decent for playing Spotify playlists you come across or people send you

How the fuck is banning people in certain countries for something they don’t have control over from contributing to small projects like this doing anything but shooting the FOSS ecosystem, which already has a severe shortage of developers, in the foot?

If you’re a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don’t show up in the document.

If we go the electoral route, I think the main first focus needs to be on local elections in cities since those have the biggest proportion of progressive voters and less obstacles to fuck them over. In this case, probably the biggest problem aside from far-right conservatives is progress being inherently more divisive than keeping the status quo so winning over trust is difficult and Democratic voters are still biased toward voting for conservatives, as shown by the amount of people I’ve seen voting for conservative Democrats over progressives because they’re afraid that the progressives will lose elections, which then ironically leads us to people losing trust in Democrats because they don’t do shit and ignore problems that impact most people (or even worsen them). Competing with fascist candidates and their successful marketing would require very careful/well-coordinated and intense outreach to motivate people and also focusing primarily on offering solutions to domestic economic issues over stuff like LGBTQ and Palestine while simultaneously keeping strong stances on those issues as well (which is the opposite of what most Democrats are doing) and dodging attacks from the far right. Considering how badly the Democrats fucked up their reputation, I’m not sure if it would be better to run as Democrat or third party at this point. I do know that my local PSL chapter is interested in running candidates if they can find people who are interested in running and know how to navigate this sort of stuff, and PSL, while still being relatively obscure, has won a few local elections in the past.

Even with this there is still a long way to go, since even the most “progressive” parts of the country are still capitalist racist shitholes with most of the same problems as more conservative cities. Federal politics is extremely fucked and the people currently in power will do everything they can to prevent an actual leftist from peacefully gaining power, even moreso with Republicans controlling all branches of government. So it doesn’t address the immediate issue of Trump/Musk genociding Palestinians, deporting immigrants left and right and sending them to concentration camps in remote areas, stripping away LGBTQ rights, and privatizing public services while worsening the state of the economy while a third of the country cheers it on.

If they’re pushed away from harming property owned by the relatively well-off but not from committing genocide on actual people, then that’s on them

If these are the best ideas and people that the left has to offer we are never going to win this. Ugh.

Do you have any better ideas?

those 90% of Americans don’t own an expensive Tesla

I was also raised in a conservative family, and leftists vandalizing stuff didn’t stop me from arriving at socialism, at most it delayed it slightly since I wasn’t yet aware of what the driving factor was, which I ended up connecting later. Everything leftists do pisses off conservatives who have different motives, I don’t think vandalizing cars from fascists running our government is exceptionally different and I don’t think most people who are still developing a baseline political framework can afford them anyways so it doesn’t directly affect them.

The damage done to the Teslas costs insurance companies money. Insurance companies hate paying for stuff, so if this is sustained, insurance rates for Teslas will increase. That combined with dealing with the vandalism itself gives customers a reason not to use a Tesla, which means car dealerships and rentals will sell less, who will then purchase less ultimately losing Tesla money. People who buy expensive cars from fascists who are actively controlling our government aren’t innocent, and IMO the people vandalizing Teslas are doing more for society than the peaceful parades and book clubs are since it actually costs them something.

https://archive.ph/iKxfy

There’s also Kiwi Farms targeted harassment involved as well

I have a friend here in the US who is on a visa and is planning on leaving the US after undergrad and doing grad school in Europe somewhere

Street Complete lets you walk around and answer questions that go to OSM

Helix because it’s simple and works without tweaking it.

Right now I use mainly Firefox, not because I like it but because it comes with my distro (whereas LibreWolf requires Flatpak) making it work well with the PWA project and it supports weird hacks necessary to install Widevine on my system so I can listen to Tidal. I also have LibreWolf installed with data set to delete on close and set up to proxy over Tor and I2P using privoxy and has LibRedirect installed which is set up to redirect to the corresponding onion/i2p domains. I was trying to install Zen Browser using the Guix package manager earlier but had problems, but I might try again later.

On Android, I use Vanadium for sites I stay logged into, Cromite with auto clearing history for other stuff, and Ironfox for Kagi and to use plugins like LibRedirect.

That’s Instagram in its normal state, right now my Instagram feed basically turned into LiveLeak