Fourth week of getting NixOS running on an aarch64 laptop here… If I could get the adsp running by the time I get to userspace, you better believe I’d play a tada.

(In all seriousness, it’s not that bad. But it does make you very aware of just how delicate the whole stack of software is.)

tar nation

No, zip nation. You just said so.

Don’t use tariffs. Legalize jailbreaking and adversarial interop instead. Disregard American DRM.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/

“The ACI allows the European Union to suspend intellectual property rights, it allows some people to use software for free, for example licence fees on things like streaming services or software could be suspended,” said Conall Mac Coille, Chief Economist at Bank of Ireland.

Fucking do it!

This is what Cory Doctorow has been telling Canada to do for months now.

Also worth noting: tech companies would not be “in the crossfire” — they are the primary fire.

On Democracy Now:

And if they do remove these laws, if we do allow domestic tech competitors all over the world to reverse engineer, modify and erode the high monopoly rents extracted by these American tech firms, we do something very effective in this trade war, because the only thing keeping the S&P 500 afloat are these tech monopolists. If you take the Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500, you’ve got a stock market that has been in decline for a decade. And when you decompose their balance sheets and you see where they get all their money, it’s from price gouging on repairs, service, parts, consumables, software.

I know devs like everything to be perfect, but if your business can work around it for 15 years without fixing the bug or replacing the system, I dare say it doesn’t qualify as a major bug.

There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:

1. It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
2. It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago

“If something you see is really difficult then you can leave your desk, but at that moment you have to remember to put on your computer that you are on ‘wellbeing’,” explains Eyvazzadeh. “But if the supervisors think you are using wellbeing more than you should, they will intervene. They would say: ‘Your ‘production’ time is a bit lower than expected, you have been on wellbeing a lot.’ So you are pressured to increase your time on ‘production’ by decreasing your ‘wellbeing.’”

It’s bad enough we make overseas workers spend all day pulling the lever of a slot machine that yields mis-flagged puppy videos and gruesome beheadings with equal likelihood, but then we stack NDAs, legal obstacles, surveillance, and KPI admonishment on top of it.

If you wrote this in a sci-fi novel, your editor would say “that’s a little cartoonishly evil, isn’t it?”

Edit: Oh, health privacy violations and union-busting too. Classy stuff!

What the dumbwaiter hides

those who used ChatGPT for “personal” reasons — like discussing emotions and memories — were less emotionally dependent upon it than those who used it for “non-personal” reasons, like brainstorming or asking for advice.

That’s not what I would expect. But I guess that’s cuz you’re not actively thinking about your emotional state, so you’re just passively letting it manipulate you.

Kinda like how ads have a stronger impact if you don’t pay conscious attention to them.

Let’s Encrypt handles over half of the certificates on the web.

If there’s another Heartbleed-style attack, CAs need to be ready to do mass revocation of certificates. That will take a ton of resources.

Defunding them places the entire internet in a precarious position.