#Integral Personal Computer

[encyclopediamorbidica]

honestly as much as i love red dead i will probably never get over how unwelcome i felt around more than an incredibly small handful of mutuals. like. the difficulty i had in feeling like i was able to fit in and contribute to conversations has hamstrung my own feelings about the game because like. well for one thing y'all are cliquey as shit but on the other hand the meaningful conversations i tried to have about the way black people are depicted in canon and in fandom were largely either ignored or tokenized as a way to prove themselves enlightened compared to other white red dead fans. i know that fandom spaces aren't exactly the most accepting of fans of colour and that i was kinda walking into an opportunity to see the door slammed in my face by being so vocal about the ways racism is perpetuated in the White Man Cowboy Game and its fandom but. whoof

[soursherbat]

forgor ive never posted abt our system here bc we're incredibly private but uh. yeagh hi

[foxpunk]

would like to make a note for mac users: if you can help it do not use avira. it's owned by the same parent company as avast (and avg. both are notorious for shit business ethics, shit customer privacy protection, and shit bloatware). gen digital is good at taking your money and bad at protecting you and it is on purpose lmao. please use malwarebytes it works on mac just fine. if you're broke like me and are fairly tech savvy (or willing to experience a learning curve) use clamAV

Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Replacing a HDD with an SSD

Adding RAM

Graphics cards if you're nasty

Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)

Customizing what runs on startup for your computer

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin

adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading

Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.

Correcting disk utilization errors

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Clearing cache and cookies on your browser

Restarting the computer

Changing your screen resolution

Uninstalling unused browser extensions

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

Deleting files

Registry cleaners

Defragging your drive

Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

[haorev]

I was looking at tech specs for a new MacBook Air (mine is from 2017, the battery doesn’t hold a charge, and two keys don’t work) and everything looks like what I want…except that it comes with Apple Intelligence

It seems like every computer nowadays regardless of brand is coming with some kind of ai bullshit like go away I don’t want this

[interiorergonomics]

Can I Use My Work Computer For Personal Use?

Using your work computer for personal tasks can be a contentious issue. This is largely dependent on your company’s policies and the nature of your job. Many companies have strict guidelines that prohibit the use of work computers for personal matters. In this case, aiming to; Prevent security breaches Ensure productivity Maintain professional standards. Root Cause of Security Risk Engaging…

[techtoio]

How Big Data Analytics is Changing Scientific Discoveries

Introduction

In the contemporary world of the prevailing sciences and technologies, big data analytics becomes a powerful agent in such a way that scientific discoveries are being orchestrated. At Techtovio, we explore this renewed approach to reshaping research methodologies for better data interpretation and new insights into its hastening process. Read to continue

[sourceitpteltd]

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[hrrtshape]

the hardest pill to swallow . . if you don't assume, it won't work

this isn't tough love. this isn't a scolding. this is just the mechanics of reality. this isn't about blame. it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility (i saw this quote somewhere and i really liked it, anyway). reality is malleable, but only if you stop acting like you're at its mercy. stop waiting for permission. stop refreshing the page, stop tapping the glass. it's done. act accordingly.

consider your brain an old, glitchy computer, whirring in the corner of your psyche, choking on its own outdated code. your subconscious doesn't know what's real versus imagined, it only knows the instructions you give it. and if those instructions are "this isn't happening, i don't see it, i don't believe it," well, congratulations, the system registers that as the blueprint. and it prints that out. over and over. like a bureaucratic nightmare, a kafka novel of your own making.

this is not to say that doubt is failure, doubt is human, doubt is a thrum in the background of any great creation. but if doubt is the occasional rainstorm, belief is the structural integrity of the house. belief holds. belief carries. belief is the scaffolding between you and the impossible, and without it, you are just standing in an empty field, waiting for architecture to spontaneously occur.

there's a reason schrodinger's cat remains the most infuriating hypothetical in quantum mechanics, because the cat is both alive and dead until you open the box. the observer collapses the wave function. and in this case, you are the observer. if you don't believe it, you keep the box shut. if you do believe it, the universe is already rearranging itself around your conviction.

this is not new-age drivel. this is not a vision board with a quote about perseverance peeling off in the humidity. this is physics. have you ever thought about someone, and then they text you five minutes later? that's the speed at which reality moves when you don't get in your own way. you didn't sit there clutching your skull, willing them into existence, you just assumed, with ease, with god-tier nonchalance. and because you weren't scrutinising the timeline like a detective with a corkboard and red string and bloodied eyes, the message came through. the only thing standing between you and everything you want is the way you react to its absence. the hand-wringing, the despair, the creeping doubt, it's a full-time job, and it pays in absolutely nothing.

which brings me to my next point: trying. trying is the problem. trying implies effort, and effort implies resistance, and resistance is another way of saying "i don't actually believe i have this." and you know what people do when they have things? they stop worrying about whether they have them. a person in possession of an apple does not pace the room, clutching their chest, whimpering, "but do i really have it?" they just eat the apple.

and before you say, "but look at my reality, it's contradicting me," i will say this once, and you must etch it into your mind like scripture: reality is old news. what you are seeing is just a delayed projection of past assumptions. do not react to it. do not engage with it. it is a rerun of a show you no longer care about. the moment you stop feeding into the contradictions, they wither. the moment you accept that what you want is already done, reality will course-correct. until then, it is an echo chamber of your previous doubts. ignore it like it's a tabloid headline about a scandal that never actually happened.

flip the switch. decide, assume, move forward. no more "manifesting," no more "waiting." you don't wait for what's already yours. you don't question a chair's ability to hold you up before sitting down. you don't send a letter and then agonise over whether the mail system still exists. you assume. you know. and so it is.

and before the panic sets in, no, this does not mean you must be a perfect disciple of unwavering belief. doubt will creep in, as it always does. you will have moments of existential dread, of scrutinising, of muttering "but what if" into your hands at 2 a.m. this is fine. this is human. just don't let it become the dominant narrative. there will be moments where you feel like you're nowhere, like your manifestations have abandoned you and you're left with nothing but the weight of your own effort. do not, under any circumstances, entertain this lie. i will personally resurrect the fear of god just to drill this into you: do not. what you do instead is cry a little, wipe your face, and then lock the fuck in, because i swear on everything, sometimes, all it takes is a stretch of nothing to summon an abundance of everything. let the doubt pass through like an intrusive thought you refuse to entertain, like a pigeon that landed in your cafe but is not, in fact, your problem.

maybe this reminds you of when the soviets tried to scientifically disprove intuition, only to realise they had unintentionally proved it instead. maybe this reminds you of every ghost story you've ever heard, how the only ones who see them are the ones who expect to.

anyways. it's all already happening. 

[txttletale]

Setting aside the copyright discourse for a minute, what do you think is the real, actual wrong with ai? From what I can tell you're anti genAI but in a more rational way rather than going on personal vibes. I've mostly seen defensive posts about ai so I'm curious what you think are the actual harms we should be advocating against

have talked about this here. in general i think the most pressing things that are actually worth caring wrt genAI about are labour issues, both in the training of these models and in how they (like any meaningful advance in technology) are integrated into workflows in a way that immiserates workers (for example, attempts to turn writing credits into 'editing credits' by having writers work with AI-generated scripts that the WGA managed to put an end to). & i think the way to fight these things is, as i often repeat, through industrial collective action and not through yelling at people for generating 'mcdonalds simpsons porn room' lol

when it comes to other types of AI, i think that their role in essentially automating war crimes and providing clumsy cover for what are fundamentally indiscriminate massacres is also obviously deeply evil, but has less to do with any actual feature of the technology itself and more to do with its marketing -- this is the "AI"-as-social-object vs. generative LLM distinction i think people are bad at making. like, i don't think that "we need to bomb this family home because the computer said so" is fundamentally different to its analog version, "we're renditioning you to a concentration camp because our chart said so". the important technology here is the imposition of the aesthetic of technocratic managerialism over nakedly arbitrary violence and cruelty, not anything that the AI is doing per se.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The meritocracy to eugenics pipeline

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).

It's kinda weird how, the more oligarchic our society gets, the more racist it gets. Why is the rise of billionaires attended by a revival of discredited eugenic ideas, dressed up in modern euphemisms like "race realism" and "human diversity"?

I think the answer lies in JK Galbraith's observation that "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

The theory of markets goes like this: a market is a giant computer that is always crunching all kinds of "signals" about what people want and how much they want it, and which companies and individuals are most suited to different roles within the system. The laissez-faire proposition is that if we just resist the temptation to futz with the computer (to "distort the market"), it will select the best person for each position: workers, consumers, and, of course, "capital allocators" who decide where the money goes and thus what gets made.

The vast, distributed market computer is said to be superior to any kind of "central planning" because it can integrate new facts quickly and adjust production to suit varying needs. Let rents rise too high and the computer will trigger the subroutine that brings "self-interested" ("greedy") people into the market to build more housing and get a share of those sky-high rents, "coming back into equilibrium." But allow a bureaucracy to gum up the computer with a bunch of rules about how that housing should be built and the "lure new homebuilders" program will crash. Likewise, if the government steps in to cap the price of rents, the "price signal" will be silenced and that "new homebuilders" program won't even be triggered.

There's some logic to this. There are plenty of good things that market actors do that are motivated by self-interest rather than altruism. When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed their Pagerank algorithm and revolutionized internet search, they weren't just solving a cool computer science problem – they were hoping to get rich.

But here's the thing: if you let Larry and Sergey tap the capital markets – if they can put on a convincing show for the "capital allocators" – then the market will happily supply them with the billions they need to buy and neutralize their competitors, to create barriers to entry for superior search engines, and become the "central planners" that market theory so deplores. If your business can't get any market oxygen, if no audience ever discovers your creative endeavors, does it matter if the central planner who decided you don't deserve a chance is elected or nominated by "the market"?

Here's how self-proclaimed market enthusiasts answer that question: all Larry and Sergey are doing here is another form of "capital allocation." They're allocating attention, deciding what can and can't be seen, in just the same way that a investor decides what will and won't be funded. If an investor doesn't fund promising projects, then some other investor will come along, fund them, get rich, and poach the funds that were once given to less-successful rivals. In the same way, if Google allocates attention badly, then someone will start a better search engine that's better at allocating attention, and we will switch to that new search engine, and Google will fail.

Again, this sounds reasonable, but a little scrutiny reveals it to be circular reasoning. Google has dominated search for a quarter of a century now. It has a 90% market share. According to the theory of self-correcting markets, this means that Google is very good at allocating our attention. What's more, if it feels like Google actually sucks at this – like Google's search-results are garbage – that doesn't mean Google it bad at search. It doesn't mean that Google is sacrificing quality to improve its bottom line (say, by scaling back on anti-spam spending, or by increasing the load of ads on a search results page).

It just means that doing better than Google is impossible. You can tell it's impossible, because it hasn't happened.

QED.

Google wasn't the first search engine, and it would be weird if it were the last. The internet and the world have changed a lot and the special skills, organizational structures and leadership that Google assembled to address the internet of the 2000s and the 2010s is unlikely to be the absolute perfect mix for the 2020s. And history teaches us that the kinds of people who can assemble thee skills, structures and leaders to succeed in one era are unlikely to be able to change over to the ideal mix for the next era.

Interpreting the persistent fact of Google's 90% market-share despite its plummeting quality as evidence of Google's excellence requires an incredible act of mental gymnastics. Rather than accepting the proposition that Google both dominates and sucks because it is excellent, we should at least consider the possibility that Google dominates while sucking because it cheats. And hey, wouldn't you know it, three federal courts have found Google to be a monopolist in three different ways in just a year.

Now, the market trufans will tell you that these judges who called Google a cheater are just futzers who can't keep their fingers off the beautiful, flawless market computer. By dragging Google into court, forcing its executives to answer impertinent questions, and publishing their emails, the court system is "distorting the market." Google is the best, because it is the biggest, and once it stops being the best, it will be toppled.

This makes perfect sense to people who buy the underlying logic of market-as-computer. For the rest of us, it strains credulity.

Now, think for a minute of the people who got rich off of Google. You have the founders – like Sergey Brin, who arrived in America as a penniless refugee and is now one of the richest people in the history of the human species. He got his fortune by building something that billions of us used trillions of times (maybe even quadrillions of times) – the greatest search engine the world had ever seen.

Brin isn't the only person who got rich off Google, of course. There are plenty of Googlers who performed different kinds of labor – coding, sure, but also accountancy, HR, graphic design, even catering in the company's famous cafeterias – who became "post-economic" (a euphemism for "so rich they don't ever need to think about money ever again") thanks to their role in Google's success.

There's a pretty good argument to be made that these people "earned" their money, in the sense that they did a job and that job generated some money and they took it home. We can argue about whether the share of the profits that went to different people was fair, or whether the people whose spending generated that profit got a good deal, or whether the product itself was good or ethical. But what is inarguable is that this was money that people got for doing something.

Then there's Google's investors. They made a lot of money, especially the early investors. Again, we can argue about whether investors should be rewarded for speculation, but there's no question that the investors in Google took a risk and got something back. They could have lost it all. In some meaningful sense, they made a good choice and were rewarded for it.

But now let's think about the next generation. The odds that these billionaires, centimillionaires and decimillionaires will spawn the next generation of 1%ers, 0.1%ers, and 0.0001%ers are very high. Right now, in America, the biggest predictor of being rich is having rich parents. Every billionaire on the Forbes under-30 list inherited their wealth:

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/forbes-billionaires-under-30-inherited-203930435.html

The wealthy have created a system of dynastic wealth that puts the aristocratic method of primogenitor in the shade. Every scion of every one-percenter can have their own fortune and start their own dynasty, without lifting a finger. Their sole job is to sign the paperwork put before them by "wealth managers":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Yes, it's true that some of the very richest people on Earth got their money by investing, rather than inheriting it. Bill Gates's investment income growth exceeds even the growth of the world's richest woman, L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, who never did anything of note apart from emerging from an extremely lucky orifice and then simply accruing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

But Bill Gates's wealth accumulation from investing exceeds the wealth he accumulated by founding and running the most successful company in history (at the time). Doing work never pays as much as allocating capital. And Gates's children? They can assume a Bettencourtian posture on a divan, mouths yawning wide for the passage of peeled grapes, and their fortunes will grow still larger. Same goes for their children, and their children's children.

Capitalism's self-mythologizing insists that the invisible hand owes no allegiance to yesterday's champions. The mere fact that the market rewarded you for allocating capital wisely during your tenure does not entitle your offspring to continue to allocate wealth in the years and centuries to come – not unless they, too, are capital allocators of such supremacy that they are superior to everyone born hereafter and will make the decisions that make the whole world better off.

Because that's the justification for inequality: that the market relentlessly seeks out the people with the skill and foresight to do things and invest in things that improve the world for all of us. If we interrupt that market process with regulations, taxes, or other "distorting" factors, then the market's quest for the right person for the right job will be thwarted and all of us will end up poorer. If we want the benefits of the invisible hand, we must not jostle the invisible elbow!

That's the justification for abolishing welfare, public education, public health, affirmative action, DEI, and any other programs that redistribute wealth to the least among us. If we get in the way of the market's selection process, we'll elevate incompetents to roles of power and importance and they will bungle those roles in ways that hurt us all. As Boris Johnson put it: "the harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for [big] cornflakes to get to the top":

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/28/boris-johnson-iq-intelligence-gordon-gekko

Which leaves the servants and defenders of the invisible hand with a rather awkward question: how is it that today, capital allocation is a hereditary role? We used to have the idea that fitness to allocate capital – that is, to govern the economy and the lives of all of the rest of us – was a situational matter. The rule was "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations": "The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it."

That's the lesson of the rags to riches story*: that out there, amongst the teeming grubby billions, lurks untold genius, waiting to be anointed by the market and turned loose to make us all better off.

In America, these stories are sometimes called "Horatio Alger" stories, after the writer who penned endless millionaire-pleasing fables about urchins who were adopted by wealthy older men who saw their promise and raised them to be captains of industry. However, in real life, Horatio Alger was a pedophile who adopted young boys and raped them:

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/horatio-alger-hundred-year-old-secret/

Perhaps your life was saved by a surgeon who came from humble origins but made it through med school courtesy of Pell Grants. Perhaps you thrilled to a novel or a film made by an artist from a working class family who got their break through an NEA grant. Maybe the software you rely on every day, or the game that fills your evenings, was created by someone who learned their coding skills at a public library or publicly funded after-school program.

The presence among us of people who achieved social mobility and made our lives better is evidence that people are being born every moment with something to contribute that is markedly different, and higher in social status, than the role their parents played. Even if you stipulate that the person who cleans your toilet has been correctly sorted into a toilet-cleaning job by the invisible hand, it's clear that the invisible hand would prefer that at least some of those toilet-cleaners' kids should do something else for a living.

And yet, wealth remains stubbornly hereditary. Our capital allocators – who, during the post-war, post-New Deal era were often drawn from working families – are now increasingly, relentlessly born to that role.

For the wealthy, this is the origin of the meritocracy to eugenics pipeline. If power and privilege are inherited – and they are, ever moreso every day – then either we live in an extremely unfair society in which the privileged and the powerful have rigged the game…or the invisible hand has created a subspecies of thoroughbred humans who were literally born to rule.

This is the thesis of the ultra-rich, the moral justification for rigging the system so that their failsons and faildaughters will give rise to faildestinies of failgrandkids and failgreat-grandkids, whose emergence from history's luckiest orifices guarantees them a lifelong tenure ordering other people around. It's the justification for some people being born to own the places where the rest of us live, and the rest of us paying them half our salaries just so we don't end up sleeping on the sidewalk.

"Hereditary meritocracy" is just a polite way of saying "eugenics." It starts from the premise of the infallible invisible hand and then attributes all inequality in society to the hand's perfect judgment, its genetic insight in picking the best people for the best jobs. If people of one race are consistently on top of the pile, that's the market telling you something about their genomes. If men consistently fare better in the economy than women, the invisible hand is trying to say something about the Y chromosome for anyone with ears to hear.

Capitalism's winners have always needed "a superior moral justification for selfishness," a discreet varnish to shine up the old divine right of kings. Think of the millionaire who created a "Nobel Prize sperm-bank" (and then fraudulently fathered hundreds of children because he couldn't find any Nobelists willing to make a deposit):

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/07/nobel-prize-sperm-bank-human-tragicomedy-about-eugenics/

Or the billionaire founder of Telegram who has fathered over 100 children in a bid to pass on his "superior genes":

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/26/tech/pavel-durov-telegram-profile-intl

Think of Trump and his endless boasting about his "good blood" and praise for the "bloodlines" of Henry Ford and other vicious antisemites:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/22/trump-criticized-praising-bloodlines-henry-ford-anti-semite/5242361002/

Or Elon Musk, building a compound where he hopes to LARP as Immortan Joe, with a harem of women who have borne his legion of children, who will carry on his genetic legacy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/business/elon-musk-children-compound.html

Inequality is a hell of a drug. There's plenty of evidence that becoming a billionaire rots your brain, and being born into a dynastic fortune is a thoroughly miserable experience:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

The stories that rich people tell themselves about why this is the only way things can be ("There is no alternative" -M. Thatcher) always end up being stories about superior blood. Eugenics and inequality are inseparable companions.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/20/big-cornflakes-energy/#caliper-pilled

[doodlepede]

hey Rain World fans. I'm gonna show you a lore interpretation that I personally have never seen anyone talk about except myself. If you know me as Sliverist, then you know what's up.

Everyone knows the first five Karma glyphs represent the so-called Five Natural Urges. Violence, reproduction, trade and social connection, eating, and self preservation. People generally believe the next Karma glyphs before the tenth are meaningless, but this is WRONG. Understanding this revelation requires seeing the big picture, which I will guide you through.

Rain World really likes to blur the line between organic and inorganic, with the most obvious example being the Iterators themselves, these biomechanical superstructures whose function in large part is outsourced to their "microbe strata" (Purple SL pearl), but it goes even further, into the very world design.

Five Pebbles' internal structure resembles a brain with its many sections all divided into specific regions with specific purposes. His chamber makes the resemblance even more obvious, where you can clearly see the brainstem.

Within Five Pebbles' dark interior swim swarms of colorful neurons which turn white in broad daylight, each one a carrier of information. Often, they are brushed along by cilia lining the computer halls.

The Void Sea writhes with a swarm of beings enormous beyong reckoning which closely resemble real neurons. The void worm that takes interest in the slugcat uses a dendrite to make a tether to drag the slugcat to its final destination.

As the slugcat swims and swims, it is joined by countless many just like it, and together they swim toward the light, referred to in the code as "TheEgg" (VoidSeaScene.cs)

This is the table of Karma, showing every level above Five. Doesn't it look rather like..

dividing cells being crossed out?

In Rain World, birth and life, cognition and enlightenment, death and ascension are all inextricably connected concepts. You might even say they're connected in a cycle. The imagery and themes are rich and complete, integrated fully into the world. This is even without mentioning the voidspawn which also resemble sperm, swimming to the same place. This is why Ascension is the best ending :artiyoy:

[woso-dreamzzz]

New Girlfriend III

Lucy Bronze x Ona Batlle x Teen!Reader

Summary: You make a game

When Lucy cracks open your door, you're as you always are.

You're hunched over your computer, clicking around some game level aimlessly with your tongue sticking out in concentration.

Your mice, like they always are when you're in the room, are running riot in their pen.

Outside of their cage and on the floor, you've set up a little pen for them to roam around and play in.

Lara and Zelda are wrestling like always as Clementine tries to work through the enrichment puzzle full of food. Ezio is asleep, flopped over on your shoulder as you study whatever new game you've found.

"You ready for dinner?"

Now that it's gotten colder, you've managed to get even moodier than before and even more of a shut in.

"One sec," You say. You click around the game level a bit more before pulling up a separate tab to type a long string of something Lucy can't even hope to understand. "Alright, I'm done. What's up?"

Lucy rolls her eyes fondly. "Dinner. Now. Ona cooked."

You push your chair out from your desk and stretch, your back cracking from the long hours you've spent hunched over.

You put the mice back into the cage, each of them getting a quick snuggle and kiss before you bolt it shut.

"Is it good food?" You ask as you go down the stairs.

"It's better than your mum makes!" Ona calls out and you grin.

"Yeah, but anything's better than Mum's cooking!"

Lucy grumbles, shaking her head. "One nice meal is all I ask. One meal where I don't get horrifically bullied!"

"We don't bully you," You say," It's character building!"

You and Ona laugh and Lucy just rolls her eyes. Sometimes, you think she would prefer if it went back to what it was like when you were first adapting to Ona.

"Oh," She says," I sent you those audio files you wanted."

"Thanks."

Lucy frowns. "She's been making you do those too?"

"Yeah, it's for a school project, right?"

You nod. "Uh-huh. It's for programming."

"I know I shouldn't have let you sign up for that," She says," It's all you ever do. I think you're losing sleep over it."

"You'll like it," You declare," What I'm working on. I promise."

"I'm sure that I will but it doesn't mean I think you're sleeping well. Put it down for once, that's all I'm saying."

You roll your eyes.

Lucy's always like that about your programming. Sometimes she lays asleep at gone three in the morning and can still hear you typing away on your computer for hours on end.

You return to your room after dinner ends and briefly come out to show Ona what you're working on while also denying Lucy the same opportunity.

"You've love it," Ona assures her at training the next day.

"Love what?" Keira asks," Oh, y/n's game? Yeah, you'll love it, Luce."

"Am I the only one that hasn't seen it?!" She demands, glancing around the room at people who are trying to not make eye contact with her. "Seriously? Raise your hand if you've seen it?"

Slowly, everyone raises their hand.

"This is so unfair!"

When you first got given the project, Lucy had been the first person to be clued into your plans. You showed her all your design sketches and all your ideas as you jumped between them.

At one point, one of your bedroom walls had been covered in concept designs and you would stand in front of it and point out certain aspects you liked and things you didn't think were quite perfect yet.

Lucu had been integral to your thought process and then all of a sudden she was shut out. You'd ask her to record voice lines or demonstrate doing something but you'd never explain why or what it was for.

You all but unplugged your computer when she came in unexpectedly and tried to get a sneak peak.

"Alright," Lucy says when she gets home to see you and Ona giggling on the sofa together," I've had enough. Show me your project."

You sit upright immediately, eyes wide.

"No-"

"I'm not taking no for an answer. I've had enough of the secrets."

She's serious. You can tell by the clench in her jaw and the way her arms are crossed over her chest.

Lucy's stubborn but you inherited from her so you're stubborn too.

Your cross your arms in the same way as you stand. "No! It's not finished! You can see it when you're finished!"

"Hey," Ona intervenes before the argument can truly get heated. Her hand rests on your shoulder. "It's okay. Just show her."

"I can't! It's not ready!"

"Come on," Ona says," Show her."

You glance at your Mum, who is staring at you with that same stern look and crossed arms as the one that she came in with.

"Fine. Give me a sec."

Lucy sits on the sofa as Ona hooks up a laptop to the tv.

You come back in with a disc and nervously put it into the dvd slot.

Lucy doesn't know what to say when the opening credits appear.

'Lucy Bronze: The Game' with a little pixel version of her holding the Champion's League trophy up on her head.

"We were meant to make a game about a hero," You say," And you're my hero."

[copperbadge]

I have a lot of feelings about the use of AI in Everything These Days, but they're not particularly strong feelings, like I've got other shit going on. That said, when I use a desktop computer, every single file I use in Google Drive now has a constant irritating popup on the right-hand side asking me how Gemini AI Can Help Me. You can't, Gemini. You are in the way. I'm not even mad there's an AI there, I'm mad there's a constantly recurring popup taking up space and attention on my screen.

Here's the problem, however: even Gemini doesn't know how to disable Gemini. I did my own research and then finally, with a deep appreciation of the irony of this, I asked it how to turn it off. It said in any google drive file go to Help > Gemini and there will be an option to turn it off. Guess what isn't a menu item under Help?

I've had a look around at web tutorials for removing or blocking it, but they are either out of date or for the Gemini personal assistant, which I already don't have, and thus cannot turn off. Gemini for Drive is an integrated "service" within Google Drive, which I guess means I'm going to have to look into moving off Google Drive.

So, does anyone have references for a service as seamless and accessible as Google Drive? I need document, spreadsheet, slideshow, and storage, but I don't have any fancy widgets installed or anything. I do technically own Microsoft Office so I suppose I could use that but I've never found its cloud function to actually, uh, function. I could use OneNote for documents if things get desperate but OneNote is very limited overall. I want to be able to open and edit files, including on an Android phone, and I'd prefer if I didn't have to receive a security code in my text messages every time I log in. I also will likely need to be able to give non-users access, but I suppose I could kludge that in Drive as long as I only have to deal with it short-term.

Any thoughts, friends? If I find a good functional replacement I'm happy to post about it once I've tested it.

Also, saying this because I love you guys but if I don't spell it out I will get a bunch of comments about it: If you yourself have managed to banish Gemini from your Drive account including from popping up in individual files, I'm interested! Please share. If you have not actually implemented a solution yourself, rest assured, anything you find I have already tried and it does not work.

[intrusivethoughtsblog]

How to be a Solar Punk (And a Leftist) ☀️🌱:

1) Stop buying fast fashion and boycott.

I use Depop, Etsy to support small businesses, and you can purchase from small businesses or organizations via other channels. You can also transform your clothing. If a t-shirt is too small, make it a crop top or wear a long shirt underneath! Also look up boycott lists (e.g. BDS movement list) so you know which companies you can or cannot support.

2) Censor and Spread.

Carry around a sharpie or a tube of paint to cover ignorant (e.g. racist) graffiti and scribbles. (I’m not going to refer to it as art). You can also spread information via graffiti.

3) Reuse and Recycle.

I use grocery bags as garbage bags, tin cans to hold things, boxes from online orders, you can even get more creative and make pins out of bottle tops!

4) Get involved physically (if possible).

Volunteer to help people who are lower income, get involved in “beautifying” the community (e.g. displaying the cultural backgrounds of the community, gardening, and protesting).

5) Get involved online.

I sign and repost GoFundMe campaigns, donate what I can, and post information regarding current events. Don’t be apolitical. This is a leftist ideology.

6) Educate yourself.

Go to trusted sources to educate yourself on facts regarding certain matters so you can dispute false claims. There are many PDFs online, podcasts, and overall resources you should take advantage of to increase your awareness and to also help develop a better understanding of those who need your help. Education is what will set us free.

7) Support your local library.

There are so many resources and programs they offer that people are not aware of. And because people are not aware of them they are shut down and underfunded. People who can’t afford computers need to have them available free at cost. Not only to enjoy them leisurely but to do things like job search. Children also have reading assignments which brings them to the library, seeing activities and programs they offer children will help to cultivate a love for learning. The next generations are our future.

8) Learn languages and about cultures.

Certain issues are not limited to certain communities or areas. We need to unite in order to make an impact that will enact change. You will also understand how to positively influence certain people that would otherwise not be receptive due to a different communication style.

9) Take care of your mental health.

“A sick person cannot help a sick person.” -AA saying

You also need to take care of yourself because, simply, you are valuable. Being healthily selfish exists.

10) Be confident.

We unfortunately have to enter spaces that will make us uncomfortable and it will be difficult to be vocal, but it is necessary. In this area, focus on practicing efficient communication methods and building your self-confidence.

11) Confront your own bias.

Everyone is biased in some way shape or form. It is our job to rid ourselves of these biases. Take moral inventory (as they say in 12-step programs) and analyze areas you need to work on.

12) Credit artists and writers.

Being an artist and/or writer should not be a struggling profession. They are an integral part of our society. It’s easy to forget, especially when we take so many screenshots a day, so keep this in mind! I sometimes forget so I can attest it’s not the end of the world but it is a good habit to form.

13) Be anti-A.I.

It is not possible to incorporate A.I. into a leftist environment. It inherently promotes late-stage capitalism.

13) Be a good human. :)

Please comment what I missed! Thank you for reading.

Flag credit: @Starwall@radical.town

[anonmonitor]

For things on fanfiction dot net there's ff2ebook dot com that will download and convert fics to ereader compatible formats. Which can give you a quick way to download them before converting them to another filetype for physical printing and/or backing up to another drive. Ao3 has a similar feature built in (the download option at the top of the page)

Personally I'd treat it like I treat CDs, rip the mp3s off of the disc, create multiple backups digitally, but still keep the physical disc around. If digital copies get corrupt/go missing I can rip them again. If the CD fails I can burn another one with the digital files. If you have the ebook you can reprint your physical copy if anything happens to it, and you have the physical copy you can scan it and run pdf wordmatching software to restore the digital copy

Or alternatively you can do what I did when I was 13 and just copy paste it into a text file on a USB, just make sure you back that up as well (I'm still so upset that I lost that usb eons ago) 16GB usbs are incredibly cheap nowadays, if you can even still find them, the lowest capacity I've seen lately is 32GB, at nearly just as cheap, which either way is plenty for a text and image archive (my ancient usb was only 4gb and still had room to spare!)

If KOSA passes

Or if any other form of censorship (there are many in the works!) ever succeeds at stepping in to impede our ability to communicate online:

We have to make plans.

Now, I dunno who'll even see this post. The few followers I have are TRON fans (who despite the fantasy we live in, tend to have realistically dismal views IRL about Disney and the various corporate uses of software).

And this fandom, on average, is pretty tech-savvy. It's where I've encountered the most people under 20 years old who actually know how to use a desktop or laptop computer.

So, if there's any hope for what I'm thinking about, this is prolly a good place to start with it.

(As with all my posts, I encourage reblogging and containment-breaching.)

(Gifs are clips from TRON 1982, mainly the "deleted love scene," from the DVD extras.)

Anyway.

Current society has moved online communication much too far onto major social media sites for my comfort. Whoever you communicate with over the internet, chances are you do it through a service owned by a big company: Tumblr, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Facebook, whatever. Even TikTok (shudder).

These sites, despite their many flaws, can provide experiences that are valuable and hard to get otherwise. And once all your friends are on one site, you can't just leave and stay in touch with them all, not unless they all go the same place. It's easy to see why it's hard to abandon any social media platform.

But a backup plan is important. Because, as we've seen over and over, social media sites can't be relied on. They change their policies suddenly, without good reason-- and are inconsistent, even discriminatory, about enforcing those policies.

If they're funded by ads, the advertisers are their main customers, and your posts are the product. Their goal is that the posts most valuable to the advertisers get seen by people the advertisers consider desirable customers.

Helping you communicate-- making your posts get seen by the people you want to communicate with-- is optional to them.

Not to mention that the whole business model of an ad-funded website is generally unsustainable. Many of these sites are operating at a loss, relying on shareholders in a fragile bubble, doomed to fail soon just from lack of real profit.

And the more restrictions --like KOSA-- that the law puts on freedom of online speech, the likelier they are to go down or just become unusable. Every rule a site is required to follow is another strain on its resources, and most of them are already failing badly at even enforcing their own self-imposed rules.

If we want any control over our continued ability to stay in touch with our online friends-- we need to have a backup plan. Maybe it'll be simple at first, a bare-bones system we cobble together-- but it's gotta be something that will work. For a while at least.

There are lots of really good posts about ways to build your own website, using a service like Neocities. I VERY MUCH recommend learning this skill-- learning to make websites of the very simplest, most stable, glitch-resistant type, made of html pages-- which you can upload to a host while you store backups on your home computer. If you value the writing and art that you put online, this is probably the safest you can keep it.

But that's for making your own creative work public.

As for communicating with others-- for example, receiving and answering other people's comments on your work-- that gets more complex. I personally haven't found it worthwhile to troubleshoot the problems that come with having a system that allows visitors to comment publicly on my website.

But what we do still have-- and likely will for a long time-- is email.

Those of us who came of age before social media's current hold... well, we might take this for granted. Email was the first form of online contact we ever encountered… and thus it can seem to us like the most ordinary, the most boring.

But in the current world, it is a rare and precious thing to find a method of communicating that doesn't require everyone in the chat to be signed on with the same corporation.

Email is, as of now, still perfectly legal-- as much as social media companies have been trying to herd the populace away from it. I'm sure there are other ways to share thoughts online that are not bound by laws. But I am not going to go into that here.

Email service is provided by law-abiding companies, which will comply with subpoenas if law enforcement thinks you are emailing about doing illegal things. So, email is not a surefire way to be safe, if laws become dystopian enough to threaten your freedom to talk about your own life and identity.

But it's safer than posting on a public social media page.

For now.

Email is beautifully decentralized. You can get an email address many different ways-- some reliant on a company like Gmail, others hosted on your own domain. And different people, with all different types of email addresses, hosted in all different ways-- can all communicate together by the same method.

Of course any of these people, individually, can lose their email address for some reason or other, and have to get a new one. But as long as they still know the email addresses of their contacts, they can reconnect and recover from that loss. The structure of a group linked by email is reliant not on a single company-- but on the group itself, the friends you can actually count on.

This is why I am trying to promote the idea of forming email lists, as a backup plan to give people a way to stay in touch as mainstream social media sites prove to be unsustainable.

I'm envisioning a simple system of sending emails to several addresses at once, and making each reply visible to everyone in the chat by using "reply all" (or, if desired, editing the To field to reply to only some).

If enough people get used to using email in this way, it could fill most of the needs met by any other group chat or forum …without depending on a centralized social media company that's taking dystopian measures to try and make the business profitable.

So here are some thoughts about how I personally imagine it could work.

(Feel free to comment and bring up any thoughts I haven't addressed, or suggestions to customize how specific groups could set it up. This is meant as more of a starting point for brainstorming than a catch-all solution.)

As I see it, here are the basics of what you and your friends would each need to start out:

An email address. Any kind, hosted anywhere. You should use a dedicated email account just for this group, one that you do NOT use for other communication. Being in this group will result in things you don't want happening to your main email address-- like getting a TON of email, one for every post and reply. Or someone could get your email address that you really don't want any contact with. Use a burner email account (one that you can easily replace) and change it if needed.

The knowledge of how to "REPLY ALL" in your email. This will be necessary in order to add a comment that everyone in the group can see.

The knowledge of how to EDIT THE "TO" FIELD in your email, and remove addresses from the list of all recipients. This will be necessary if you want to CHANGE WHICH PEOPLE in the group can see your comment.

The knowledge of how to FILTER WORDS in your email. This will be necessary if a topic comes up that you don't want to see any mentions of.

The knowledge of how to BLOCK PEOPLE in your email. This will be very important. If someone joins this email group who you do not want to interact with, it will be up to you to BLOCK them so that you do NOT see their messages. (If they are bad enough to evade the block with multiple burner accounts, that's what you have a burner account for. Change it, and share the new one only with those you trust not to give it to them.)

Every person in the group will be effectively a "moderator" of the group, able to remove people from it by cutting their email addresses out of the "To" field. Members will all have equal "moderator" privileges, each able to tailor the group to their own needs.

This means the group may naturally split, over time, into other groups, each one removing some people and adding others. Some will overlap, some won't. This is good! This is, in my opinion, what online interaction SHOULD be like! There should be MANY groups like this!

In this way, we can keep online discussion alive, no matter WHAT happens to any of the social media websites.

If the dystopia got bad enough to shut down email, we could even continue with postal mail and photocopies, like they did in the days of print-zine fanfiction.

If it looks like the dystopia is gonna come for postal mail too, we'll use the connection we have to preserve whatever contacts we can with people who live near us.

Not saying it's GONNA get that bad. But these steps of preparation are good no matter exactly what kind of bad stuff happens.

As long as some organized form of communication still exists, we'll have a place where it's at least a little safer to be your true self…

to plan events and meetups…

and maybe even activities a little too risque to make the final cut of a 1982 Disney movie.

They're trying to censor us. We want a Free System. So we're gonna fight back.

For the Users. Not the corporations.

Peace out, programs. <3

[ursula-legun]

idk man i don't think anti-civ shit should be nearly this controversial.

"some societies, including most if not all contemporary societies, require slavery, state coercion, and/or environmental devastation to maintain the benefits that they provide to their citizens. we think that this is bad, and should not be done, and are willing to give up the benefits that require slavery, state coercion, and/or environmental devastation." -> generally admirable even if people don't put it into action that much; few would say somebody is a bad person for feeling this way.

"most modern technology, including motor vehicles, cheap computers, disposable plastics, our entire global transportation chain, and like half of 'renewable' energy solutions require either environmental devastation, capitalist coercion, or slavery to produce and maintain; i.e., they either cannot be made without destroying species or ecosystems, OR nobody is willing to do them except under threat of death - at least in the ways that we currently know how to produce these things" -> not considered to be in good taste to point out but generally hard to argue; usually handwaved with notions of "green tech" coming in to make things better, that we just need new engineering improvements, that we can harvest from the moon(??), that we can just stay inside all the time(???), etc.

"combining the first two things, we think that the production of these things should stop immediately, and that society should learn how to survive only on things that we know how to create and maintain without slavery or ecocide; at least until such a time as we develop means of production that are communal, and well-integrated into the rest of life on earth" -> generally considered naive and unrealistic but still admirable

"no, seriously, the slavery, societal unrest, psychic flood, and environmental devastation are all real, and directly responsible for the apocalypse that we literally all now acknowledge to be happening right now" -> also generally accepted, generally handwaved with weird "well what can you do?" responses

"so we really think we should stop making these things NOW instead of waiting on more far-fetched solutions that will come too late to save most life on earth." -> well now you're just the fucking devil. I guess.