rook

That’s impressively awful.

Was it economically rational to discover America?

I ain’t gonna buy this crap, and I don’t think I can be bothered to steal it, but… I hear that the triangle trade was quite lucrative back in the day. I wonder how they characterise the slave trade in their book, and whether they consider its ending a good thing or not.

I mean, maybe even pause briefly to think about why the west indies were called that. Or think about what empires value. Or to think at all, really.

from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to Moore’s law and Bitcoin

No vaccines or antibiotics, but bitcoin is a world-changing invention? Someone’s been insulated from consequences all their life. Here’s hoping they lose everything in the Great Depression 2: Greater and More Depressing, whilst loudly proclaiming that a the invention of ai waifus was worth the destruction of civilisation.

Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

Not that I want to minimise the problems that open source and tech in general very definitely have, but in this specific case it is a small number of people who are very loud and/or very rich, and sometimes both.

For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).

The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.

Actually, according to grokipedia,

Mercifully image-free article from rolling stone on how easy it is becoming to get grok to generate porn, including deepfakes of real people and bestiality.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-grok-hardcore-porn-1235442715

Includes a relevant quote from musk back in august:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1954791048934244394

I still remember 6th/7th grade debates with classmates about VHS vs Betamax!

VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉

I guess that’s a product “moat” of sorts.

The answer probably looks a lot like “here’s how to install omarchy on your laptop in 14 easy steps! And 88 great apps you can install afterwards!”

Ahh, I just zapped my original comment, because irelephant had posted the same link plus a bit more earlier.

Anyway, it is nice to see that there is pushback on this elsewhere. I doubt it will be enough to change framework’s mind substantially… they’re obviously happy with their sponsorship and it was clearly a very deliberate choice, but they need to be reminded from as many directions as possible that it was a shitty choice by shitty people.

Framework getting into the fashtech game.

They’re a gold tier sponsor of hyprland:

https://xcancel.com/hyprwm/status/1975917930576785581

Apparently they’ve been shilling omarchy on twitter too, though I’ve only found a guide on their website for now:

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Omarchy+Linux+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop+13/564

After the revelation that their desktop machine was going to be aimed at ai bros and had soldered-on ram I was concerned that they might be abandoning the principles behind their laptops. Now I don’t think it matters how great or terrible their next offerings are going to be. What a disappointment.

(h/t to cari, https://sunny.garden/@cari/115336460488524197)

Mildly interesting thread about the progress of blacksky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3m2n62lzbeu2p

They’re aiming for full independence from bluesky, which is a laudable goal though not one they’ve achieved yet. They’re currently getting a reasonable amount of user funding rather than being a typical vc furnace (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) but I’m not sure what their plan is for moderation which is what will carry the project in the long term. I’d like to say it can’t be worse than bluesky, but moderation at scale is a nightmare.

Bluesky going to bad for that poor, downtrodden, victimised and underrepresented demographic, uh, ai slop posters?

https://bsky.app/profile/carrion.bsky.social/post/3m2kf3rottc2h