People still gloat about piracy being a hydra where you cut off one head and more pop up. Except it isn’t any where close to that. Probably hasn’t been in at least 10-15 years. Piracy has been gradually chipped away at. People don’t seem to want to admit that. As if that would be siding with anti-piracy or something.

In its heyday the catalogues of content was immense in breadth and depth. Just about any obscure thing could be found. These days even popular TV shows become more difficult to come by even a short while after the episode has been released. Unless you have access to more private parts of the web then you’re left trying to source some low quality trash tier download.

Which brings me to the next point. Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down. Opportunists came in trying to monetize it which drew the attention of authorities. Which drew the attention more opportunists which drew the attention of authorities. It snowballed.

What piracy used to be was the spirit of the original internet. It was the library not just a library but the library of humanity. People catalogued and shared because that’s what librarians do.

If I had the power I’d take away its popularity. Make it obscure again. It was better when it was ruled by snobs and autistic perfectionists.

It’s kind of crazy how swiftly Occupy was wiped off the zeitgeist. A key cultural event of the 2010s gone as if it never happened.

Evidently given the state of affairs whatever share of “most people” has been tipping away from a balance.

Call it unchecked greed. Call it nobody wants to work anymore. It’s two sides of the same coin. The framing is just hurting someone or others feelings. The underlying problem is the same. Too many greedy people don’t want to work.

It falls under a greater problem of our time. Everyone thinks they can be clever by becoming a passive income earner. So we get things like middle men which has been increasing the cost of things because every hand needs to grab a cut along the way. We have people becoming landlords slowly amassing rental properties which created a bigger and even life long tenant class. We get economies that revolve around stock markets pivoting industry from productivity to shareholder profit.

I don’t know if this is a trigger phrase like it is on reddit but it’s true that nobody wants to work anymore. Societies require people to work to keep things going. Can’t have everyone sitting on their ass waiting for others work for them.

Nobody wants to talk about it because nobody wants to be the sucker that didn’t get a leg up on everyone else. So everyone plays along with this massive collective cognitive dissonance.

I watched RocketBoom until suddenly they ran out of money. I don’t know what happened but it seemed like they were on the up and up. They even did videos with Sesame Street. If that isn’t a solid endorsement…

Then one day it was announced it was over.

It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.

Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.

He was weak but they couldn’t adjust his mic levels? That was weird.

We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.

It goes to show the socioeconomic differences. The more affluent kids at my school went all out. There was expensive outfits, limos, and after parties at other venues. For others it was just mom dropping them off at the vanilla school hosted event and that’s it.

He’s sleepy from all that hard work.

The internet made a whole lot of things a big deal. Then convinced guys they were the victims. Then filled their heads with extremist ideologies. What a wild past 10-15 years.

Same shit different era. Always gotta be persecuting somebody.

Also when Silicon Valley copies and steals they get praised as revolutionary innovators.

No politics was a rule on many forums. One of the things social media did away with.

A spooky thing I noticed at one point I could search a rather vague query and Google was returning results in the programming language I was working with when the query was general enough to have been any language.

What has reddit accomplished in over a decade? That place has been nothing more than an escalating demoralization psy-op. It’s given the right another central platform to push their ideologies. It’s had the left preoccupied with petty squabbles.

Maybe reddit closer to 15-20 years ago would have been able to use reddit to stage actual coordinated worker demonstrations in cities around America. Over the past decade or so they’ve been keyboard mashing.

A president in jail would be disastrous for the reputation of America as a country. That’s been my theory as to why he will never face any real consequence. It seems like an elephant in the room. One that probably doesn’t even split neatly down partisanship.

They already have their own x86 chips. They’re a few generations behind the cutting edge. They’ve been catching up fast which is why the US and EU have been shitting their pants trying to wage cold war. All of a sudden ramping up the China bad narrative out of left field when not long ago they were trying to work with China rather than against them…

Much of the manufacturing difficulty we hear about with western industry is achieving highest yields possible of the most powerful chips to please ravenous shareholders demanding flawless profit gains every quarter. Capitalism problems in other words. It’s much different when your goal is merely to produce computers for government office use. You can still use old computers for the majority of computing needs.

I think I’ve comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.

spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That’s if reddit inc isn’t being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.

We’re in the middle of a technological cold war.

We forgot for a while because the zeitgeist went back to the geopolitics of “Russia and China bad”.