Untitled

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

you only have to do it

for the first time once.

I actually have Got to talk about this one because its so true and is so hard to learn as an adult because of how hard it's pushed on children, not bc its not taught to kids

so as a child you may have been told to "just try it" and then, once you did, had that No walked all over by the adults anyway. so if you're anything like me you build up a protective shell of refusing anything you don't want to try openly, even if you're...kind of intrigued? even if, under different circumstances, you might actually want to explore that.

once you get into that habit it is so so difficult to break. because its a defensive maneuver during a time when you Have No Autonomy. when a refusal isn't taken seriously and you just... aren't allowed to say no for a petty reason.

There are a lot of intense systems impressed upon us by society with regard to what women should be: maternal, in control, not too pushy, subservient, calm, pleasant, doting, etc. When we women fail at these things, say in the way Lace does by being erratic, cruel, jealous, and controlled, society says that we should be viewed as a failed woman. Lace lacks all of the markers of being good (read: ready to serve the patriarchy). This strikes me as the core from where infantilizing comes from: if you don’t succeed at being a woman then you are a child. And, if you aren’t an actual child, then you are to be reviled. For audience members poisoned by this way of thinking, I reckon the Lace is a child, despite the in fiction insistence that she’s old, is actually trying to solve for this problem. We like Lace but she’s failing at being a woman so she has to be a child or else we have to hate her.

What’s funny is Hornet does also fail at all of these things, but she does not have the same infantilizing done to her, mostly because Hornet does female masculinity in one of the rare approved ways we have for that in our culture: she is masculine in a way that is maternal, I.e. she’s fixing everything and she’s not annoying.

This is the one way we, as dykes, can avoid being infantilized and, to make this a little personal, it’s a scar that runs down the whole of my life. How many decisions have I made about how I present and engage with world that center around not wanting to be a barefoot ass doting mother? How often do I take control of situations because that’s the expectation? It is a sort of motherhood thrust upon us, but I think it’s mechanically different because it’s a bargain the patriarchy gives women with the “charisma” to pay for it. I get to be a sort of accepted woman who isn’t a mother because I’m not annoying to men and I summon a sort of badass, I know how to fix this attitude. But in that way I sacrifice the whole of my identity, the ways I am deeply feminine, the ways I struggle, suffer, want, need, and wish, to not be thrown into the fail woman pit (which is not a consequence any of us can afford to ignore, believe me).

With that in mind, it would be deeply wrong to say I’m mature because I take that bargain. I am not, I’m just trying to survive. Hornet is not any more of a grown spider either: she is just trying to survive. It’s honestly a very fascinating depiction and I’m really enamored with it (even if it is a little bit of TC playing into this facet of misogyny) because it feels so real. It’s for this reason that I am so personally upset at the idea that Hornet should become a mother. It is implying her character growth requires her to switch her bargain from being a butch in a approved way to being a doting mother.

Lace, as the fail woman taking none of the bargains, is left nothing but being infantilized and marked for “needing fixing” and our society does not allow for broken women to find healing in a relationship, especially not with another woman.

Why does this happen? Well if you’re lost in the sauce of this system, struggling to fit into it and not aware of its full scope, then what you have is that innate, wordless discomfort about what is permitted and what is not. I feel like there’s a real insistence in online spaces to defend our beliefs, and so people often fall into the trap of: I feel this and I hope that I am good so the thing I feel must be good. If you feel discomfort at Lace being a failure in her womanhood and still deserving a romantic partner, it is perhaps easier to say “there’s something wrong with this ship” than “there’s something wrong with my entire life and everything about it, and it might be totally unfixable.”

I am sympathetic to the way that this is not anyone’s fault. It is a machine that grinds us up forever. However, it’s also something I am honor bound to lash out at, not only out of desire to carve a world kinder for me and my sisters, but also because mapping this restrictive, brutal, cruel system of good vs bad women leads to extremely boring fiction. The idea that Lace needs to do so much fixing to become good enough for Hornet is a boring and baseless claim. It is not steeped in writing critique or feminism laundered to justify the bad feeling in people’s bellies. It is sexism.

As a woman who dates and loves women on occasion, I can tell you with certainty that there’s a lot to love about flawed women. I’ve loved plenty of them without “needing to fix them” and I’ve been one and been loved and haven’t made much progress on my flaws. I know this is hard and that society doesn’t help us do that, but I do categorically expect everyone to confront this curse a bit and to really think when something makes you uncomfortable.

you can even play it in vr!

~here we see the triangle in its natural habitat, exploring every point on its unit circle in a regular pattern. it smoothly shifts from vertical to horizontal movement guided by the pythagorean theorem as it slowly rotates counterclockwise, producing sine and cosine as it traces this path.

because of this, the concept of a "straight line" can be generalized to curved surfaces by saying that a "straight line" should still be the shortest path connecting two points on that surface (without leaving that surface at any point). if you formalize this concept mathematically you get what's called a geodesic. once again if you look at it through the lens of a person on earth, you can imagine that if you start drawing a "straight line" on the ground, then it will always appear to you as if they were just drawing a line on a plane - and yet, if you continue drawing for thousands and thousands of kilometers, you could end up drawing a figure like the one in the picture above, including a bunch of triangles whose angles sum to 270° - because the geometry of the surface of the earth might *locally* look like a regular two-dimensional euclidean plane, but it turns out that, because the earth is curved into 3D, the normal rules of euclidean geometry don't apply!

TL;DR: we're leaving the realm of "normal" geometry (euclidean geometry) here, but if you generalize the concept of a "straight lines" to non-euclidean spaces in the most natural way possible you end up with fun things like triangles with an angle sum of more than 180°. fun little extra tidbit: there's also a different type of curved 2D space, called "hyperbolic space", which is curved differently from a sphere and where triangles always have an angle sum of *less* than 180° :D

(someone said they wanted a rant, so they got a rant that is both here and on my website. Readmores are for cowards, hit J or start scrolling now. Here's the screenshot of the section headings on the site so you can get some idea of what you're getting into)

Introduction

Ida Auken's 2016 World Economic Forum essay on sustainable growth has been an easy target for fanatical right wing libertarians for almost a decade. In the brief though experiment, Auken considers how communal access to shared goods might improve an individual's life.

You wouldn't have to wrestle with the expense and storage woes of keeping a stand mixer in your kitchen because you could call for a stand mixer whenever you needed one. And it wouldn't really be your kitchen, it would be our kitchen in our city, used by someone who needed it when you weren't making dinner.

Auken touches on the idea that such a city couldn't be expected to have any kind of privacy, but the reader is left to wonder if the loss of privacy would be such a bad thing if you didn't have to pay for a car, or a house, or medical care - would you let people know all your actions throughout the day if it meant you didn't have to go to work to survive? The lack of privacy is clearly bad, but the liberty that comes with freedom from want is enticing.

It's precisely the kind of toothless futurist drivel you'd expect from the WEF, but it's frustrating to listen to the Alex Joneses and Tuckers Carlson of the world say "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy" in saccharine voices to dismiss the concept of, like. School lunches.

I'm a big believer in the idea of tool libraries and communal ownership and the sharing economy and personal-not-private property and things that are free-like-speech-not-like-lunch and I've been irritated for years as I watch right libertarians aiming kicks at Auken's bland utopia.

Now it's a left libertarian's turn.

You can't participate in a sharing economy when the people you're sharing with are fucking landlords.

The problem with the essay is not its milquetoast paranoia about privacy, it is the presupposition that our world is not intractably captured by people who are burning us alive only because they cannot figure out how to make a dollar by hurling the earth into the sun.

The essay tells a truth but makes it a lie.

The truth: a better world IS possible.

The lie: that world will be delivered by automation and innovation trickling down from the top of society rather than by solidarity lifting up the bottom.

This is an essay about computers. And everything else.

EaaS-y Peasy

I edit photos in photoshop. I have edited photos in photoshop since 2002. Since 2012, I have edited photos in an educational perpetual edition of Creative Suite 6. The discs are sitting in the drawer beside my knee, I've installed them on four computers now, and when I get my next machine I will almost certainly connect it to an external disc reader and type in the product key code to install it again.

This is probably a violation of some sort of service agreement or another, and is absolutely a security risk, as is running all EoL and unpatched software.

But this is my software. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I paid for it.

Except that I didn't. Even in 2012, I paid for a license to use the software, not the software itself. And the license was only active as long as the software was in support. And now that it is out of support, I am doing piracy by using the software that I purchased. If I were to lose my keycode and find another one online somewhere, I would be doing VERY criminal piracy. Because my ongoing use of this 13-year-old software is denying Adobe the sale of a new version of their software.

And, in order to provide the best, most up-to-date product possible, Adobe has been selling creative suite as a subscription for 13 years. You get new tools the second they're released. Your software is patched every time your computer syncs. You can use the images in the licensed library and a wide array of brushes and plugins and you can take advantage of storage on Adobe Creative Cloud, which obviates the need for anything larger than a 256GB SSD on your personal machine.

Adobe wants to uphold its brand, they want to put their best foot forward, they want to give me the pinnacle of what they can offer, for only seventy dollars a month.

I've used three different releases of Creative Suite in my time doing layout and design. I started with PS2 and InDesign in high school, then Creative Suite 4 on my college publications, then CS6, one of the last purchases I made with my student ID. The two applications that my high school yearbook used cost something like $300 per license. The full suite ran you about $1200 in 2007. And the student version that I bought as soon as I heard that Adobe was moving to a subscription model was $600. So in about 23 years of using Adobe I've spent just about $100 per year licensing it.

Adobe considers this piracy because it would have cost me about $10,000 to buy creative cloud for the last thirteen years.

Even if I had used it exactly the same way in the intervening thirteen years - generating no additional wealth - Adobe sees it as within their rights to extract payment for me for a service that has not changed tremendously since I last paid for it four presidential administrations ago.

I believe that one could make a solid argument to label this payment model as rent-seeking.

This is, at the moment, one of three ways you can legally use software.

You can use free and open source software, you can use a perpetual software license for the support life of the license, or you can subscribe and pay forever, giving ever more money to Adobe while getting only marginally more in return than they offered for a one-time-fee of $1200 twenty years ago.

Perpetual licenses are getting thinner on the ground and subscription software is everywhere you look.

The Hockey Stick: Part One

If you look at a graph that shows the consumer price index of personal computers from the 80s until now, you are looking at a shocking drop in prices. For essentially my entire life, computers were getting cheaper every year, along with politicians and televisions.

There are plenty of reasons for this (that people have gotten their shit pushed in for protesting), but suffice it to say that manufacturing was cheap and we were cranking out hardware like there was no tomorrow.

Then something funny happened. It happened when I was selling computers for a living, so I saw it happening. The computer prices went up, and they never came back down. Not the way they were before. If you look closer at a graph of the consumer price index of personal computers, zooming in to show the last ten years, the downward slope of the line gets a lot more gradual, and you start to see sustained periods where it's trending up.

You can really see it in six months in mid 2021 (that specific bump was the result of the supply chain crisis caused by Covid and a chip shortage exacerbated by a fire in a Taiwan manufacturing hub).

What you don't see is that in 2019ish the average storage on these computers went from 1TB in the midrange to 256-512GB. If you were looking for a cheaper machine you dropped from around 500GB to around 130GB. 64GB if you were either really cheap or really unlucky.

2019 is when we hit the tipping point on the shift from HDDs to SSDs as the storage standard on a consumer computer. SSDs are much faster and smaller than HDDs, which allows people to game faster and have ever-slimmer machines to slide in their pockets. Booting on an SSD takes a fraction of the time it would take on an HDD. Restarting your computer went from being a several-minute process to something as simple and seamless as unlocking your phone. It's a better technology in many ways, even with the hefty price tag when the tech was new.

But the storage went away. And, even funnier than the hockey stick leveling off - SSDs have dropped in price in the last ten years, but the storage in computers never went back up and the prices never went back down. I'm paying as much now for a laptop with a 256GB SSD as I would have paid for a laptop with a 1TB HDD seven years ago. And a jump from a 256GB SSD to a 512GB SSD costs much, much more proportionately than the jump between a 512GB and a 1TB platter drive cost seven years ago.

But it's not like people had less stuff to store, right? We all carry cameras that take massive, high-clarity photos in our pockets - cameras that can record high-quality video. We're digital hermit crabs, too - when you move to a new computer you aren't just taking what you've got in your hands, you're moving files that have seen half a dozen operating systems and four incompatible file formats. That's not going to fit in the 256GB NVME drive on your laptop, nor on the startlingly-large-but-still-too-small storage on your phone. We've got terabytes of lives drifting behind us, and nowhere to put them.

Who cares, though? Storage is cheap! You can get a 10TB drive for like a hundred bucks if you want to set up your own backup. But why would you want to do that? You get free storage with every service you use.

Other People's Computers

Your 365 subscription comes with a terabyte backup to OneDrive. Your Creative Cloud subscription comes with 100GB of space. Your iCloud only comes with 5GB free but $10 a month isn't that bad for 2TB, that's about what you'd pay for a backup drive the same size, after all, and you never have to worry about hardware failure.

I'm a big Dune fan. In Dune, there's a major plot point that hinges on the idea that control of a thing is defined by the ability to destroy it. Paul can destroy the Spice, therefore he is the only one who can really be considered to own it.

Your photos are psychotropic worm eggs and Google is the Kwisatz Haderach, baby.

You don't have enough storage on your devices to keep all the things that you want to or need to keep. You subscribe to a service that keeps those things for you, and keeps them somewhere handy for you to reach. If your computer gets run over by a tractor your files are safe in the cloud. If your phone falls into the ocean your photos are safe in the cloud. Your life is distributed, secure because it can't be pinned down in one place and popped, many eggs in many baskets.

Question: did you read the ToS?

In 2022, a parent lost access to a significant portion of his digital life because he texted a photo to his child's doctor. Google automatically scanned the image that he sent, determined that it met their definition of CSAM, and locked the father out of his Google account.

What would you lose today if Apple decided you couldn't ever get access to your iCloud account again? Do you have photos of your children? Of your pets? Work you've saved, a book you're writing? A music library?

Where do you have that saved besides your iCloud account?

The Revenge of Windows 8

Like most people, I was not a fan of Windows 8 upon release. Unlike most people, this was because I didn't like the signals it was sending me about the industry, not its terrible interface.

To be fair: I picked up on the industry signals via the terrible interface.

Microsoft wanted Windows 8 to be iOS for the PC. They wanted Microsoft to produce the next iPad. They wanted the Microsoft Tablet to be THE direction in computing. They wanted you to navigate your work on a touchscreen, save your files in apps, and give them all of your data.

To be fair, it only took them ten years after they launched the OS that was supposed to do it.

The modern Windows Desktop is an illusion.

"Complete setup," the unjust OS says. You activate OneDrive. "Complete setup," the unjust OS says, and asks you to enable automatic save on your Excel document.

The modern Windows Desktop is not your computer. If you set the machine up the way that Windows wants you to, almost everything you do on your computer is little more than an interface designed to make you forget that your data is stored and often handled on Microsoft servers. This is common in home environments, but nearly ubiquitous in business environments. And what isn't stored by Microsoft is stored by Google.

Microsoft managed to pull of iCloud and they didn't even have to make a good tablet to do it.

Does not Compute

My office was hesitant to wind down servers. We kept people running local Exchange until the pandemic pushed most of our clients into offsite work and killed the major benefits of the onsite server. We still sold and installed and supported a lot of servers, but with less emphasis in the 2020s than in the 2010s.

One of the things that we really stayed away from, that always struck me as suspicious, was remote compute services.

It's not an intuitive concept if, like me, you grew up cramming more and more resources into home machines over the years. But, if, like a lot of Gen Z, you grew up with school-issued chromebooks and iPads for car rides, it might make a lot of sense to you to think of the device in front of you as a console, and the computer as something somewhere else.

To be perfectly fair: most people do not actually use a ton of computing power on their machines. Gamers do, video editors do, CAD modelers do, but there's no reason that - with a fast internet connection - you couldn't use a cheap machine with very little power to view and manipulate a much more powerful machine remotely.

And if you're not using all that power all the time, there's no reason that you have to access the powerful machine all the time. You can answer emails and do basic browsing on your lightweight office box and pay for time on the forty-core monstrosity with a terabyte of RAM that you use for protein folding.

This could, at least theoretically, save you a lot of money. If you're a college computer lab most of the students are not going to be using a lot of resources all the time, but you need to have resources handy for when the students need a ton of power so you get the Xeon processor on demand.

If you're a business with a huge amount of turnover and a ton of seasonal variation there's no need to buy a whole new desktop with the best specs for your engineers every three years when you could buy something mediocre every seven years and have your engineers compute remotely.

It's not like anything could go wrong there.

Art-I-Ficial

If you are a gamer or are otherwise aware of graphics cards, you're aware that the market for graphics cards crawled up its own ass in 2017 and never came back. This was, initially, because of cryptocurrency and is currently because of the AI boom. Or bubble.

Processing power - graphic or otherwise - feeds the beast. Processors crunch numbers and predict outcomes and consider possibilities and, generally speaking, get things done. For cryptocurrency, this allows the generation of coins in proof of work systems like bitcoin. For "AI" this allows everything. You need a lot of processing power to make LLMs LLM.

Money is, I think we can all agree, a social construct. Money is different in different places, money is not universal across cultures. Money is, like language, something that we depend on. It is, also like language, something that we made up and can change. Money is fake in the way that borders are fake. They didn't exist for the dinosaurs but if you act like they're not real you're going to find yourself having many problems.

Markets - in an economic sense, not in a grocery shopping sense - are fake in a similar way but are subject to a lot more manipulation a whole lot faster than language.

It's pretty obvious that the market for NFTs in 2021 was extremely fake and was being manipulated by a few highly motivated people who knew that they could make a lot of money by getting people to buy into their market. They were correct, and the smart ones got out early and left the rubes holding the bag.

The current state of AI is that there has been a lot of buy-in, but now very large actors are looking around and beginning to wonder if they are holding a bag. Microsoft is looking around and wondering if they're at the top of the roller coaster or if they're late to the party. They have a lot of AI, and they want YOU to have it. Google is in a similar situation, but of the truly Big companies that have bought in to AI, I think it's possible that Microsoft tried to grab the biggest portion of the market that they could, investing both in software development and in hardware production that maybe they're now realizing that the average consumer wants about as much as they wanted a touchscreen desktop in 2013.

The Hockey Stick: Part Two

In 2005, RAM manufacturers paid nearly seven hundred million dollars to the US government as penance for creating an illegal cartel that engaged in price fixing to gouge consumers. In 2017, the manufacturers were sued for doing the same.

If you have looked at the price of RAM in the last six months of 2025, you would not be wrong to ask if another suit will be brought against them soon. It's too much to hope that they might stop engaging in the practice, but you'd at least want someone to raise a fuss.

RAM prices have increased from 200 to 400 percent in the last six months; this is true both for the current generation of memory (DDR5) and the former (DDR4). Memory generations have relatively short life cycles, with new generations getting introduced about every seven-ish years. We were on DDR3 when I entered the industry, and DDR5 took over as the main option on the market in the last year. DDR4 is exiting production, which is at least a partial cause of the price increase as buyers hedge against the future.

But what's going on with DDR5?

Scarcity. Not quite artificial scarcity, but scarcity nonetheless.

In 2022 the price of RAM fell sharply. This was the result of a number of factors - the global economy was something of a shitshow, an unexpected demand for computers in 2020 had an impact on consumer purchases in the years that followed, various companies started producing at higher rates than they had earlier in the pandemic. There was a lot of RAM floating around.

And that, as it turns out, is bad for business.

When a business is used to producing something for $20 and selling it for $40, they don't consider selling it for $30 as "making ten dollars," they think of it as "losing ten dollars" in much the same way that Adobe thinks I'm stealing because I'm using old software instead of buying new software.

RAM producers decided that the price of RAM was too low for them to be as profitable as they wanted to be in 2022, so they made plans to slow production in 2023. That brought the price in line with where they thought it should be, and had the added side effect of ensuring that there wouldn't be a glut of RAM further down the line, contributing to what the Chief Executive of Micron described as "cyclical challenges."

Let's talk about cycles for a moment.

RAM generations move in cycles. At the beginning of the generation the price is high because the tech is new and scarce. As the new generation peaks in price, the old generation falls, and right about that time an even newer new generation is brought to market.

Consumer computer purchases also move in cycles. People know about how much life they get out of a machine so they will generally replace their machines on a pretty reliable cycle. There are some variations for the introduction of new tech, which might spur some people to buy early, but new tech is also released on a pretty predictable cycle. That means, in the absence of freak global economic instability and disruptive technology, the market for consumer hardware purchases is pretty predictable.

It's a shame we had a global pandemic directly between the emergence of two disruptive technologies attempting to gobble up massive portions of the worldwide tech market.

What I am getting at here is that RAM producers' unwillingness to tolerate a temporary dip in profits that directly resulted from a market recovering from supply chain upheaval and a planetary financial shock has led to a reduced supply of RAM stocks available in late 2025.

Late 2025 is also when OpenAI signed an agreement with two manufacturers to purchase 40% of the world's RAM production capacity. And when a third manufacturer announced that they would be closing their consumer division to focus on enterprise production.

Which is why consumer RAM prices at the end of 2025 are exploding skyward.

And, because the people who produce chips for RAM are the same people who produce chips for SSDs, the prices on personal computer storage aren't coming down any time soon.

Tinfoil Tricorner

But what's the point? Am I making the argument that AI firms, hardware manufacturers, and software producers are colluding in an unwholesome alliance to manipulate the personal computer landscape into a smoking wasteland where you use your cheaply-made-but-over-priced cellphone to access a virtual machine in a datacenter to run your subscription software while your data is stored on someone else's server and endlessly consumed to feed ever-more-marginally-useful LLMs?

No. That's not really what I think is going on here. I don't think we're in an "optimize the universe for paperclip production" kind of scenario. I think that's giving these dipshits too much credit.

I think hardware manufacturers and software producers and AI companies don't care all that much about consumers and don't care what they do to the market tomorrow as long as they're making money today. I think their goal is to reduce costs and raise prices and capture the entire market, which is everyone, even people who don't want to be in the market.

They all want to create inelastic demand so they can raise their prices forever.

Professional page designers can't use Scribus, they have to pay $23-$70 per month for the privilege of getting fucked by Adobe.

It's already essentially impossible to function without a phone in the modern world, now it's going to be more expensive and less functional.

Nobody wants anywhere near as much AI as is being produced but you're going to swallow it because there's nowhere to get away from it. Shut up and eat your CoPilot processor there are kids in the 90s who would have killed for Candy Crush Saga Five.

Always a Renter, never an Owner

I am writing from the United States, so please consider that my perspective here is skewed by the fact that this place is garbage.

The housing market is fucked and a huge percentage of people are unable to purchase homes, instead spending massive portions of their income on extremely high rents.

To get a job that might cover a one-bedroom apartment or a mortgage in the middle of nowhere, you have to get a college education, which is going to cost you anywhere from one to twenty years of a poverty wage if you manage to pay for it without taking out a loan. If you do take out a loan, you will be paying for your student debt for the rest of your life.

When you get your job that pays enough for your one bedroom apartment, you are going to need a way to get there, and because public transit is terrible you're probably (statistically) going to drive. If you want a reliable car, you're looking at a loan that costs at least as much as your college education that you will be paying for a minimum of five years; modern cars are turning up with shocking issues at that age so make sure to get the extended warranty. This, on top of your rent and your student loans, will likely consume half of your income.

Another large portion of your income will either be invisibly subtracted from your paycheck in the form of a group healthcare plan or will be very noticeably paid out of pocket. If you quit your job, you will not be able to afford this, so you have to stay in your job so that you're not taking the chance of risking permanent poverty every time you walk out your front door. Your healthcare isn't YOUR healthcare, you pay for the privilege of having a doctor order your lifesaving meds or you die. And then you pay a copay on your meds and the visit to the doctor.

After all of that, whatever is left of your income can be put toward food and relaxation. Relaxation often comes in the form of monthly subscriptions to movies you don't own, music you don't own, games you don't own, or gambling on sports. Food can also be something you don't own if you're broke enough, in which case it becomes credit card debt.

Your computer is financed. Your phone is leased. Your music is a subscription.

The only thing that is perpetual are the payments.

You will rent everything, and you will hate it.

Vienna

I am not precisely suggesting that we nationalize education, housing, healthcare, and the tech sector.

I'm just sort of vaguely gesturing at it.

The problem with Auken's essay, as I stated earlier, is that it snips the Microsofts and the Adobes and the Microns out of the picture. It is true that Microsoft wants you to own nothing and be happy, it is true that Microsoft wants you to have no privacy, it is true that Microsoft wants you to call for anything you need when you need it, the issue is that Microsoft wants you to ask Microsoft to provide it and they want you to pay. In our world Auken's city is not Our city, it is a company town.

We need to reckon with that if we want to have the kind of world where you don't have to own your house or fear homelessness.

It's the kind of thing that other people and other places have found a way to handle, and it makes some sense that the initial essay was written from the perspective of a person who lives in a country with at least a marginally functional social welfare state. Denmark is certainly much more of Our country to Auken than the US is Our country to me.

But we live in a global economy. Microsoft is sold in Denmark and California, three producers make the majority of the RAM on the planet, and tech is dense with anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices. If we are not going to nationalize Adobe (we should nationalize Adobe. C'mon. It would be funny) we need to do something else.

RTFM

Hardware is going to suck for a while. I'm not a gamer, and I don't do any heavy computing so I am going to be less impacted than people who actually need high end equipment, but we're all going to end up paying for the choices that the industry leaders have made. We're paying in energy prices, we're paying in hardware costs, we're literally paying in subscription fees.

I am tired of giving a single fuck about Bill Gates and I'm tired of giving him any money.

Not to be entirely predictable, but you should probably install Linux.

I have been working in the tech industry for fourteen years. I have seen a lot of changes to how people approach personal computing and I think I have reached the official curmudgeon stage. Kids these days need to get off their dang phones and build a desktop.

That may sound wildly out of line with the rest of what I've written here - 4800 words in and I'm telling you to buy computer hardware? Well. No. Not exactly.

I'm telling you that the vast majority of computer owners use their machines as a word processor and youtube display system and I'm telling you that you can accomplish that very effectively on a ten year old machine from Ebay running Linux Mint with LibreOffice and Firefox.

I think the industry is fucked and I don't think it's particularly likely to unfuck itself any time soon and it is definitely not going to unfuck itself if it has 100% market capture, so the best thing you can do is to become unmarketable.

If you know how to set up a NAS from secondhand parts, you don't have to buy cloud storage from Apple. If you know how to use a thrift store desktop to set up a PLEX server and how to share movies on a thumbdrive, you become immune to netflix. If the global market for DDR5 quadruples in price you can be in your lane, thriving and moisturized with your 32GB DDR3 and a stripped-down OS.

Computers are actually pretty easy to work on. A desktop system is about as complicated to assemble as a set of legos and installing Linux is easier than changing the color settings on a smart TV. Used computers are so cheap that people will literally pay you to throw them away, and there is a constant churn of devices that people consider ewaste that will make a perfectly functional non-microsoft, non-apple, non-cloud device. It won't run games very well, and you probably can't use it for a ton of video editing, but if you need someplace to do budget spreadsheets and you don't want to give Microsoft your money and you don't want to give Google your data and you don't want AI built in to the hardware and the operating system, there is a better way than a 365 subscription and a tablet.

This is not the End

I mean, this is the end of this essay, but this is not the end of this problem.

This is not the last time that a tech company or cartel of manufacturers or an AI conglomerate will do something infuriating that fucks up the system for the rest of us.

They get away with it because of consumer compliance. People buy what they're selling.

You could be one less person buying their bullshit.

You deserve better than what they want to sell you, and you have the ability to do better for yourself than they would for you.

They want you to rent everything, and be happy.

I want you to own something, and be proud.

If you don't know why Foss is awesome its not just that its free. Open source software has a huge set of advantages. Most software is proprietary meaning that its code cannot be viewed by other people. Open source softwares code can be viewed by everyone and people can contribute their own code to make it better. Open source is often more secure than proprietary because more people have more eyes on it and more people have contributed to it's security. Its also easy to know how much privacy you have with every software because you can read the code. No more "trust me bro I'm not harvesting and selling your data" you know if they are collecting and selling because the code is publicly available.

In the last two months I have been switching almost completely to Foss. I was worried at first because when I stopped using Foss over 10 years ago the average Foss software was genuinely worse than the paid proprietary alternative. Thankfully things have really come full circle. 90℅ of the software I have tried in the last 2 months works better than the proprietary alternative and is 100℅ less obnoxious.

So here is a list of every Foss software I have tried and recommend. There is way more than this available. This list is just what I have used and like personally. Anyone can feel free to add and we can turn it into a master list. Please just take these as a place to start and do your own research to see if these softwares will work for your use case before you fully ditch your proprietary software.

Operating systems

Graphene os: android alt. Security and privacy focused. The most secure and private smartphone currently available.

Linux mint: easy to use linux, 100℅ better than windows.

Pop!: The Linux distro you should use if you have nividia hardware and want to play games using said hardware. Very intuitive and easy to use.

Kubuntu: Ubuntu Linux with KDE desktop. This is the linux distro one I am currently using and I don't have any plans to jump ship again. Better than windows and better than Mac. The companion app for your phone makes life soooo easy. Its pretty and easy to customize to a ridiculously granular level. No fucking notes.

Kindle jailbreak- ko reader: use jailbreak to free your kindle from the tyranny of the bezos. It will download ko reader which is a Foss OS that has every fucking feature you always wished kindle had and let's you read whatever the fuck you want, and have whatever the screensaver you want (no more ads!). Soooo fuck amazon and use this. I genuinely cannot recommend it enough.

Linux FOSS: (some available on windows and android as well)

Calibre: Foss desktop eBook library. Packed with features. You will want to use this with koreader to make managing your kindle easy.

Manuscript: skrivner alt. Does absolutely everything I need.

Bitwarden: password manager (use a keepass fork if you want self hosted)

Next cloud: private google drive and cloud alternative that you can self host if you want but it's not required. App available

Proton VPN: to the best of my knowledge it is the only Foss no log VPN you can get. You can pay for higher speeds. App available

Quad9dns: free encrypted DNS provider. App available.

News software:

Use any Foss RSS reader and for the love of god stop getting news from social media. Take control of your feed!

Apps (I only know for android)

Fdroid: great app store to find Foss android apps and download them.

Antennapod: you can get all of your podcasts fetched to one feature rich app via RSS feed. No need to rely on spotify or music steaming services.

Openreads: it's good reads but private and 100℅ stored locally. No amazon, no social media aspect, it just tracks your reading, you can import your good reads but if you want to import from storygraph you have to make a good reads burner account, import to good reads, then import to openreads. The menus Navigation on this one is a bit cumbersome but honestly good reads app is worse.

Newpipe: YouTube frontend that let's you have YouTube subscriptions, watch YouTube in the background, and blocks all ads, without logging in to YouTube. You will want to use this one with a VPN set to Canada (or any other country) so YouTube doesn't keep blocking it in order to force you to sign in. But even with that extra step its worth it for the privacy and the lack of ads.

Proton mail: one of 2 more private gmail alts. But you should note that email cannot be 100℅ anonymous or private.

This past month, Parks & Rec has been doing a lot of work on the field adjacent to my school. They have trucks with flatbeds, mowing/tree-cutting/postholing machinery, etc. And when they arrived, I (campus monitor) was told I would need to herd the kids away from the trucks/machinery and basically prevent them from creating a dangerous situation.

So when recess came around and the kids stampeded out the door I held them up and I said (being funny but at the same time serious, you know how it is, kids listen better if you're funny)

"Okay, I know that you're all smart AND mature, right? And talented and good looking? Definitely the smartest and most talented class in this school? (I say this to every class, they're all 'my favorites'.) And because you're SO intelligent and mature, I don't need to actually TELL you that these guys have vehicles and machinery that you need to stay clear of, right? Because I know you figured that out already, and I also know that YOU know how sad I would be if any of you were run over, or squashed, or had a pole fall on you. I would be SO SAD, like, I would probably have to lie down on the floor and cry. So you're not going to make me cry, right? I can trust you to stay away from the trucks and machines no matter where they are on the field? Because you're wonderful and amazing? My favorites? My inspiration?"

And they're laughing at me of course, because I'm being so dramatic. Some of them are "Yes, and-"ing my dramatics and inventing more involved mourning processes I should undertake if any of them get run over. Some of them are yelling at me that they are NOT mature yet and they are VERY STUPID and I should know this.

It's been three weeks. We had one conversation about it. None of them have gone anywhere near the trucks. This is actually in excess of the typical elementary-schooler's working memory and I'm very proud of them. I haven't had to blow the whistle at ONE person for getting too close even when the trucks were literally 40 feet from the actual playground.

THIS IS HOW. they knew I wouldn't ask them to do anything unless I had a reason, I'd always explain why, I always treated them with respect.

People SAY that your health 'suddenly' starts to decline in your 30s but that's not really a good way to put it A) bc that's not really accurate and B) bc it frames this decline as something inherent and unavoidable, which does nothing to convince you that you have some agency about this.

So I'm going to explain this in LOOSE NON-SCIENTIFIC language:

When you are an infant or child, you are actively growing. Nature is throwing tons of new cells into you bc your body needs to BUILD BUILD BUILD. What you're able to do, eat and heal from is all largely dictated by this-- for example little kids often LOVE sweet foods or dairy-like foods and are relatively less interested in anything else. This is bc their body is running on HIGH all the time since building body parts is very energetically intensive. They can eat a fistful of sugarcubes and burn them off in an hour. Ask me how I know.

When you are a YOUNG ADULT you are actually still developing to a secondary extent, but your bones and such are fused and now that development goes into solidifying the structure and also finetuning its reproductive capabilities and features-- these, too, are HIGHLY energy consumptive when they first come online. Nature is STILL, thus, throwing tons of energy and new cells your way hoping you'll do something cool with them. You regenerate very quickly, and recover from harm rapidly-- But please note: swift recovery from harm is not absence of harm. This most relates to the consumption of 'junk food' and alcohol-- many people say they could 'eat whatever they wanted and nothing would happen' when they're in their 20s or that they could go out drinking and 'not be affected'. You were affected. You didn't notice.

Once everything has come online you go into maintenance mode. Nature stops throwing excess cells and energy your way bc you don't need that-- your body is yours and you are now responsible for maintaining it...hopefully with what you learned by experience in your 20s. IF YOU WERE NOT PAYING ATTENTION, you did not learn this, and are in for a surprise in your 30s bc your 'free recovery' subscription has ended. Recovery and maintenance- processes that are constant in the human body- now cost MINERALS & ELECTRICITY. You can go into DEBT now, and that debt will come in the form of joints that pop, inability to recover well, lowered immune function, and feeling like shit.

This debt accrues interest RAPIDLY once you hit 36-- the age of around 36 to 46 or so is a kind of reckoning stage where Nature assesses how well you've managed your body and you will be SWIFTLY downgraded if the result is you were just winging it.

So how do you build this account? 2 main things ( LOOSELY SPEAKING this is so not 100% scientific but I have to be general here): MINERALS -- you get these from eating well, mostly. You might want to take supplements based on your unique needs. But you need Minerals & Vitamins (i'm lumping these two together) bc they are the chemical building blocks (currency) your body uses to rebuild and fix up cells. ELECTRICITY is- again loosely speaking- having the proper chemical voltage throughout your body. This 'voltage' drops when you don't move enough, or when you're dehydrated. The building and repairing process your body wants to do may have the materials (minerals and vitamins) but there's not enough power in the factory, or the AC isn't working and the workers are overheating and can't work well. To fix this, drink lots of water and MOVE AND STRETCH your body. The action within your muscles and bones GENERATES ENERGY and it keeps your cells happy.

So the thing is, it's not that you suddenly find yourself taking damage after 30+. You were taking damage the whole time. You're just kept from really feeling it bc you're young and full of extra juice and given time to figure things out.

But at some point Nature expects you to do that, and you will pay if you don't.

Best to start out giving a shit, even if none of your friends think you're cool, even if you get called a 'health nut' bc you will still be able to frolick at 45, 50, probably so on while everyone who said it was dumb to have 'balanced meals' shares memes about how they wake up feeling like shit every day.