UGH. Thanks though, you cured my scrolling. I’m out

And yet I try to get one little grenade into Jeff Bezos’ wedding…

This reminds me of how a buddy of mine used to rename his desktop files from like “Carmaggedon demo” to remove the “demo” because it made him feel rich.

I mean it’s labour day long weekend, I’m sure there’s one near you. I don’t want to dox myself, but I’ll be harassing a local MP with a group sometime this weekend. It’s not the whole war but it’s pretty high impact for what a dozen people would otherwise be able to do with just votes or dollars.

Alright, so what’s the plan?

Saved

My beloved

True. Profit is about the only thing these companies will never generate, but there’s still money being thrown at them, it’s just being spent on bonuses, mergers, and data centers.

Scrapers could peel off 1B of that to pay for what they’re taking (like the pay for antique, print only books—because they can’t physically steal those) instead of just robbing the commons if they really wanted to, if they thought that anything they were doing was ethically defensible or financially sustainable. ___

So… pay for it? It’s not like the money isn’t there

I’ve got mine down to 32 byte string to describe the location, datetime, and people in the photograph, with flags for who’s smiling and/or blinking.

And lemmy is thriving because individuals like you and me gave enough of a fuck to shift over to this place.

But look if someone wants to buy a game they can just do that. I was speaking more generally, like in spots you feel principled enough hell yeah be that nuisance.

I’m not saying like fixate on individual action or think your one part “moves the needle” but that it’s part of collective action. Like how are you going to find your collective if you aren’t out there showing what you’re about.

It’s like voting. Yeah yeah, it makes virtually no different. 1 half-brick in a sock is worth a million votes. But you’ve still got to pitch in and be one of the little drops. There are multiple borders in the war against working class people and you just do what you can in the ones you’re able to.

PS Just to be clear, none of this is meant in a combative tone. I’m reading this as a friendly back-and-forth.

You’re good, I just wanted to make the point for anyone who might just give up and stick with Google because they can’t decide on a perfectly virtuous replacement.

Any change from the mainstream is a good change. But for anyone who wants to dig even deeper, oooo boy is that something you can get into.

I kind of don’t believe in a big “the problem” at least not in a totalizing way, especially if it’s a problem so big people can’t have any impact on it. I feel like there are a thousand of these battlefields, in our personal relationships, working life, civic life, consumer relationships.

I’m not saying tackling your big the problem wouldn’t be a huge help across the board, but we’d still have other problems. Hell maybe some problems are just part of human nature and will be with us forever.

In any case, even if there is one big huge ur-problem from which all problems spread like tentacles we can each only act on an I individual level, so I believe all change starts there—it can’t end there, but there it starts, and from there branches into collective action against the bigger problems in the world.

Does that make sense? I’m not meaning it in a contradictory way. But that negating the importance of individual action can actually disempower people from taking their part in collective action. Like it never gets off the ground because every individual just goes “well I’m just one person, so…”

I think that was always the assumption except people forgot their own power.

I’m not even hating on procgen, I just subjectively started getting sick of it (with exceptions). But for people who like(d) it, game on.

Perfectly put. I’ve expended paragraphs circling this succinct point.

I have access to essentially unlimited local compute at my work. Some of my coworkers use it to run LLMs, some use the pre-enshittified corporate models, and I gave all that a shot—like really went for it, but ultimately would rather just work at my own pace.

In my workplace the people who use them come off as kind of frantic to my eye. Like they’re always making these overly engineered greenfield things no one asked for, which gets them a shout out at quarterly and then no one ever thinks of it again…

I’m not saying there’s 0 legitimate use for the technology if you could divorce it from its problematic origins, but I’m not that smart, and people are increasingly coming to me for help when previously they seemed happy to just talk to their little corporate minder.

I feel like chatbot and text generating models generally encourage dark patterns we don’t even have names for yet and I’m just highly wary of the whole thing.

I mean do you care? It sounds like you do. That’s one people right there. So do i. That’s makes at least two of us.

I’m sure there are enough to cause a stink if we drop this defeatism and start with ourselves

All it takes is a large enough chunk. It’s happened before. There was a time of noble humans where we walked upright, and we could easily step back into that world even just one at a time

Yah like people are talking about a game you say “I own that yeah, haven’t played it yet” not “I have a revokable lease to that experience portal that protects Sony America LLC and partners from disparagement and any damages related or unrelated to its use. I’ve heard it’s good, though.”