Old Androids Never Die, They Just Have A Few Screws Loose
Turns out, tech corporations produce MORE pollution from banking and investments than they do from operating their business.
The Carbon Bankroll is a new study from the Climate Safe Lending Network, the Outdoor Policy Outfit, and BankFWD that attempts to quantify the banking industry's role in contributing to carbo...
When you're right, you're right:
There are not enough shoes in the universe to respond to this correctly.
Source: On Bush's Freudian Confession - by Caitlin Johnstone
To be fair, this is the most American boomer thing possible, but it does tell you everything you need to know about our self-dealing, corrupt, and utterly heartless government under the worstest generation.
Listen to a reading of this article: ??- We are once again witnessing history being made, folks. Today, in the Year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two, we get the great privilege of bearing witness to the single most American thing that has ever happened.
Source: The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened
*laughs in personally owned website*
The honest truth is, 90% of the web is a variety of ways for people to exchange short bits of text and images with each other, so any one person owning a single website is pretty much meaningless.
If this kills Twitter, great, someone else's website will become the "hip spot" (or, more accurately, concentrated doomscroll hub). It won't fix the root problem, which is centralization caused by advertising money.
Twitter's board is negotiating with CEO Elon Musk over his bid to buy the social media platform and a deal could be announced as early as Monday, according to media reports. Twitter and Musk negotiated into the early hours Monday over his bid to buy the social media platform, The New York Times reported, less than two weeks after the billionaire first revealed a massive stake.
Source: Reports: Twitter in talks with Musk over bid to buy platform
Thanks to the newest GloriousEggroll custom Proton release, two of my favorite series now have fully playable games (though P5S is missing audio from cutscene videos). The problem with these games was Direct3D shared resources being used to overlay video on top of surfaces, and as you can see below, this has finally been implemented. For those familiar with P5S, the phone scene now works perfectly, and Fatal Frame uses video overlays in several places, which also now work.
gamers be like "NFTs are a scam!!111" right before they blow $372.48 tryna pull Raiden Shogun and bumming an hour on your charger because their phone is at 3%
No tweaking required, looking good on Proton/NVidia 370/Ubuntu 21.10. If you've never played the LIS games before, this is a great way to start.
Caitlin is a very insightful writer whose writing often hits an issue directly on the head, but in this particular case I think she's interpreting a symptom of a problem as the problem. Speech Is Only Free If Dissenting Voices Get Heard is about big-tech suppression of people's speech online. While what she says in the article is true - businesses definitely suppress speech - her point misses the forest for the trees.
The internet is the platform. FB, YT, and Twitter are oversized businesses build on centralization. We could have had a fully distributed internet where everyone has their own easy to find personal site, but users willingly gave that up in favor of monetized content. The lure of being an "influencer" and raking in cash from advertising dollars drove users to these sites. It is no different from the exploitative artist-publisher model used by the music industry. Most people never see a dime. Do well, get paid. Go against it, get silenced.
It was easy to create, too - with MS's monopoly, it was nearly impossible for other businesses to compete, save for on the WWW. No personal web server, no distributed search, no control over your own news feeds even, all of this can be traced back to the desktop choke. This led to even more monopolies - search, instant messaging, video hosting - and the loss of user control over their own data. Controlling your own data is owning the means of production, and we can't have that, after all.
And, as it turns out, the cloud is mostly poison, and if you say the wrong things, you'll vanish. The old ways - personal websites, RSS, IRC, even very old things like USENET - these worked, and were controlled by the people that used them. Just not profitable for businesses. You cannot have a free internet when every single system attached to it is a choke point for someone else's business. You definitely cannot have a free internet when even the systems are owned by someone else.
It's kind of sad, really - most conservatives would never surrender their gun, but they readily hand over total control of their speech to someone else's business, and whine like muzzled dogs when the business silences them. Same with leftists - your words and data ARE the means of production, but who really owns it? Youtube. Google. Twitter. Substack. Facebook. All because it was profitable to have easy point-and-click clients, but not easy point-and-click personal servers.
Listen to a reading of this article: ??- How many journalists are capable of doing what Julian Assange did to expose the criminality of the powerful? Not many. How many are both capable and willing? Fewer still. How many of those are now willing after seeing what's being done to Assange? Even fewer. And that's what his persecution is all about.
Source: Speech Is Only Free If Dissenting Voices Get Heard: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
So you've probably heard by now that well-known and SUPER trustworthy company Microsoft has cut a deal to buy up that scion of feminism Activision Blizzard, for the bargain price of $69 (nice) Billion dollars in cash.
Honestly, I couldn't really care much less, as Overwatch has been sliding downhill slowly and I'm not invested in any of Blizzard's other games, but it's scary to watch convicted monopolist MS consume yet another company while the feds just sit there and watch disinterestedly.
On the other hand, if (and it's a BIG IF) the people at MS have any actual interest in fixing the abuses going on at Blizzard, they'll be doing all of the people that work there a big favor, and I'll give them credit for that when it happens. MS is not exactly a shining example of feminism either, so I don't have high hopes for it.
As far as gaming is concerned, Sony has been expanding its PC offerings quite a bit recently, and nearly all of them run quite well with Proton, so there's still plenty of hope for the Steam Deck riding to success on a bunch of top-quality titles who've got good reason to at least take testing on Linux seriously, if not targeting it directly the way they would any other console.