Not really. There are barely any chips out there.

Oct 2021: 200 billion ARM chips

Nov 2023: 1 billion RISC-V chips, hoping to hit 16 billion by 2030

Nov 2024: 300 billion ARM chips

Cool, but… why not just NixOS?

ARM support. Every SoC is a new horror.

Armbian does great work, but if you want another distro you’re gonna have to go on a lil adventure.

Behind the Bastards had a Christmas special non-bastard episode on the Tupamaros of Uruguay and Pepe Mujica. It does seem like they have some decent politics there.

thousand’s*

Steam on ARM?! Gimme gimme gimme!!!

Wind of change: did the CIA write the cold war’s biggest anthem?

I’m fine with that. That’s how I’d prefer to play anyway. It’s just hard to commit 1-2 hours to completing a run sometimes.

True… but you can sure enable one by not voting.

Also true. It’s scraping.

In the words of Cory Doctorow:

Web-scraping is good, actually.

Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.

Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.

Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

That is the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?

I’ve got two thoughts to frame the question, but I won’t give an answer.

1. Laws are just social constructs, to help people get along with each other. They’re not supposed to be grand universal moral frameworks, or coherent/consistent philosophies. They’re always full of contradictions. So… does it even matter if it’s “meaningfully” different or not, if it’s socially useful to treat it as different (or not)?
2. We’ve seen with digital locks, gig work, algorithmic market manipulation, and playing either side of Section 230 when convenient… that the ethos of big tech is pretty much “define what’s illegal, so I can colonize the precise border of illegality, to a fractal level of granularity”. I’m not super stoked to come with an objective quantitative framework for them to follow, cuz I know they’ll just flow around it like water and continue to find ways to do antisocial shit in ways that technically follow the rules.

What OpenAI is doing is not piracy.

But then you’ll need dog water to deal with the cat water

Need bag water to counteract the mouse water

The dichotomy of “freedom to” and “freedom from” is pretty well-worn territory in philosophy, although there are many different formulations of it (including options beyond just these two), but the simplest model is this:

“Freedom to”: The protected right to do something, like fire a gun in the air.

“Freedom from”: The enforced guarantee that you will not be impacted by the actions of others, like your neighbor’s falling bullets.

An egalitarian society can’t grant “freedom to” all actions to all people while also guaranteeing them “freedom from” the consequences of all others’ actions.

If I have the freedom to drive a monster truck on any public motorway, I necessarily lose the freedom to walk those streets without worrying about monster trucks.

The only way around it is to have a privileged class that has extra “freedom to” do things when the consequences mainly impact the underclass, and extra “freedom from” the actions of the underclass.

Like, most states allow you the “freedom to” openly carry a firearm, but also employ police to protect your “freedom from” people being an immediate threat to your life.

In theory, you can’t have both. So in practice, this means that only white people get to openly carry guns. Black people get disarmed or shot.

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That said, I’d disagree that labor freedom reduces economic security in general, but if you got more specific I’m sure there are some instances where that’s true.

Just specifically don’t take an employer’s word when they say “if you unionize we can’t protect you anymore”.

I’ve been using Orion on iOS for a while. It’s not bad.

So many great opportunities for light rail around here, especially because of the geographical constraints. If there were big subsidies for doing it, I think the city would get interested.

On the contrary. I want people to have their own opinions, and to buy the things that suit their tastes even if they seem silly to me.

And I want those things to have fair, consumer-friendly regulations applied to them.

And when companies try to abuse their consumers, and I want us to criticize the company rather than the consumer.

You’re starting on the wrong end.

People want games that the devs care about making. Whether it has sex or friendship or romance or relativistically-accurate jiggle physics.

People don’t know what they want until it’s in front of them, but devs know what they wanna make.

When you blame consumers for allowing antisocial tech into their lives, you’re doing free work for the tech barons.