A broken propeller toy wrapped in a ripped up plastic grocery bag.

Few things would make me happier than to never log into an Azure instance ever again lol.

Much of what we do and have built is overpriced and useless bullshit that doesn’t make anybody better off.

We are inventing solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to…etc etc.

Websites used to be static HTML pages with some simple graphics, images, and some imbedded stuff. Now, you need to know AWS for your IaaS, Kubernetes to manage your scaling and container orchestration for the thousands of Docker containers that you use to compose your app written in some horrific pile of JavaScript related web stacks like NodeJS, Typescript, React, blah blah blah…

Then you need a ton of other 3rd party components that handle authentication, databasing, backups, monitoring, signaling, account creation/management, logging, billing, etc etc.

It’s circles within circles within circles, and all that to make a buggy, overpriced, clunky web app.

Similar is true for IT, massive software suites that most people in the company use 10% of their functionality for stupid shit.

I’m all for advancing technology, I love technology, it’s my job and my hobby.

But the longer I work in this industry, the more I get this sick feeling that we lost the train long time ago. Buying brand new $1,500 laptops every 3 years so that most of our users can send emails, browse the web, and type up occasional memos.

Get involved in direct action in your community. Linking up with an org or group that does real community service and solidarity can help prevent you from feeling helpless and falling into that depressive spiral.

Help at a soup kitchen, provide homeless care kits, work a food/clothing drive, work with a crew to clean up gang tags from walls, pick up litter, build bird boxes, etc.

Seeing your community get a little better can do a lot for your mental health.

Remember that dispite the horrors of our species, we have accomplished some pretty incredible things. Just 200 years ago, we were still putting leaches on people and not washing our hands before performing medical procedures.

Now, we use microscopic lasers to correct blindness, cure certain types or deafness by implanting magnets into skulls, we can deliver and grow infants that are born several months too early to full term with minimal complications, and we can treat scores of diseases that would have been a death sentence just 200 years ago.

The Capitalist scum would have you believe that nobody would have done those things unless they made money doing it, but that’s a lie and projection. They wouldn’t have done that if it didn’t make them money, because they are evil and without empathy.

But they don’t represent the human spirit, what we are truly capable of when we work together for the common good.

The greatest accomplishments of our species aren’t when we compete and fight each other. The greatest accomplishments happen when we cooperate with each other. Don’t let the rich and powerful convince you otherwise.

Remember two things:

1. Their security are working class, no matter how you slice it. They only way you can avoid them turning on you/abandoning you is if they have undying loyalty to you. And that is very rare and very hard to maintain.
2. Capitalism is inherently unsustainable. So collapse can only be delayed, not avoided. Eventually, the plethora of self-defeating aspects of Capitalism will become more than any of the elite can suppress or mitigate. Hopefully labor is ready at that point to rise up and take back what has been stolen, and recreate the institutions as a socialist structure, owned and controlled by the workers.

I used to call it a “bomb fire” too lol.

When I was little, I thought that “cash back” meant that the clerk literally just handed you money out of the register if you wanted it.

I assumed that most people were honest and only took the cash if they needed it. I didn’t know that it came out of your checking account lol.

Well at least Bitcoin is very decentralized and not subject to powerful wealthy groups that control…oh whoops.

Well at least it is anonymous and protects its users from spying and cyber crime…oh whoops.

Well at least almost all the power used to mine it is renewable so the environmental impact isn’t…oh whoops.

Well at least there are a ton of businesses and organizations that accept and use Bitcoin…oh whoops.

Well at least the crypto community is famously rational, friendly, and very generous…oh whoops.

Can I just get a goddamned monitor? Like, please can my TV just be a damn 70" monitor with hookups for whatever actual tech I want to use to watch stuff?

Is that too much to ask? My TV has to have its own shitty, unintuitive, slow, buggy OS stuffed with ungodly amounts of bloatware and bullshit?

Just picked up 20 TB of storage on a black Friday deal.

Doing a huge upgrade from my 2TB NAS. I’m starting my personal media archive, music, movies, shows, anime, Ebooks, games, YouTube content.

It’s the only defense against the scumbag corpos. The will continue to take more content away without warning, and make what they allow us to still have, worse quality and more expensive to watch.

Storage is cheap, libraries are your friend, fight the power. ✊

Awesome if that ends up happening.

I’m on .ml and I’ve said plenty of critical stuff against China, the mods are chill and in general it’s been a really solid community.

That being said, I’m a hardcore leftist, so even though as an anarchist, I am strongly at odds with many statist solutions, I agree with the vast majority of leftist underlying critiques of sociopolitical issues.

In my ideal world, IP and copyright wouldn’t exist at all, but obviously that won’t happen in my lifetime.

Neither would my suggestion of releasing any defunct software as GPL, sadly.

The codebase the would be a great start, even if it previously ran on proprietary tech, having the codebase at least allows engineers to pull out the proprietary hooks and rebuild them to work with something open source.

We need a right to repair but for software, sadly that also is a pipe dream in our current environment.

All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.

That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.

I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.

Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.

This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️

The penguin is merciful.

Had basically the same exact scenario with my parents earlier this year.

Installed Linux Mint with the default Cinnamon desktop, installed a “Windows” theme. Put icons on the desktop exactly where there old ones were, and never looked back.

It’s been great for them, does everything they need and took minimal effort from me to set up.

Bitwarden

It’s a FOSS password manager that you can self host, or use their cloud infrastructure. Their free plan is more than enough for basic users, and their paid personal plan is less than $1 a month and is packed with features.

Runs in your browser, Android, iOS, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and has native desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Super easy to set up and use, no BS, works damn near perfectly. I’ve been using it for years and I love it, it’s the only password manager I recommend to folks now days.

It’s the ease if use. In Windows, you select an option called kiosk mode, select a user account or create one to use, then tell Windows what webpage/site URL to use for the locked down browser interface. Then you click go and that’s it.

You have a locked down, reasonably secure single-use kiosk for your Company HR portal, in-house web app, or training portal, literally takes less than 5 minutes, and is so simple, I could walk a non-techie through the whole process easily over the phone.

Things like cage are already more technical and tough to setup than that, by a large margin.

It’s great if you need something more powerful, or you want a bunch of kiosks that you can roll out on a low power SBC. But for one-off basic kiosks that use a little mini-tower, Windows kiosk mode is pretty great.