Indeed, and I’m glad you highlighted these things. It’s something I have been trying to do, as well as increasing people’s awareness of these choices. It feels like it makes so little difference, but it’s not nothing.

This goes way before the Spotify thing. This is just a court ruling that took a long time to come through.

At a certain point, if your entire raison d’être is to do illegal things, you might as well fully commit

“My 11-year-old, who is autistic, keeps talking about it,” Destiny told Kare11. “He was talking about it all night. I couldn’t sleep because I was scared.”

When I was a kid, someone threw a brick through my bedroom window as I was heading off to sleep. It scared me so much that I had trouble sleeping for literally years after that. I can’t imagine how much worse the trauma of this must’ve been.

God, my heart hurts to hear these stories. I’m not in the US, so all I can do is spectate with growing dread and horror.

I’ve been trying hard to not let myself become numb to this though, nor become too focussed on the big picture of thinking about US’s descent into fascism. I’m equally powerless on that scale of things as I am when witnessing stories like this, but I’ve found it’s better to keep my focus on the small stories. It hurts to hear them, but that hurt is one that is fundamentally good, because it is compassion for my fellow humans. In an odd way, the hurt feels grounding because it’s meant to hurt, because what is going on are crimes against humanity. I’d rather feel this than nothing because it reminds me of the humanity I share with the people who are being oppressed.

I’m the same. I was telling a friend the other day that despite how grim modern tech often is, I feel hopeful when I see how many people are taking solace in making cool things for them and their community, as well as doing valuable infrastructure work to try and make tech a useful tool for liberation.

A good example of the latter thing is this encrypted messaging app that works via a Bluetooth mesh network, providing a way for Palestinians to stay in contact even when the internet and cell service are turned off. The UK is closer than I would like to needing to use tech like this, so it bolsters my resolve to be able of such efforts to resist.

That sounds super cool! Do you have any pics?

So many features like this have gotten so much worse over the years. Google assistant is the big stand out one for me. I first switched to Android in 2014ish, and I got heavily into tinkering and automating stuff. I could say “Okay Google, make a coffee”, or “pop a coffee on please”, and Google assistant would hear this, parse it and understand that this wasn’t a command it knew. This would lead to that input being passed over to Tasker, the app I used for automating stuff, and that would then do the behind the scenes magic of turning on the coffee brewer as I was on my way home (It was very funny, because I didn’t have a fancy smart coffee pot or anything — I just used a ball bearing on a track to hit the on button)

Nowadays, I say something simple like “Okay Google, make a note” and it will say “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that” more often than not. The speech recognition used to be so good, especially after training it on your voice for a while. Now it’s just shit.

It makes me disproportionately sad. Like, enshittification is everywhere, but this is something distinct, even if it is linked to enshittification. If they were gating better voice recognition behind paywalls, I’d be annoyed, but much less sad, because at least that functionality still exists. Modern software, especially that produced by the tech giants, has gotten so complex that I wonder whether even the most proficient engineers in Google understand their software nowadays.

Everyone reacts differently, and I’ve known people who don’t find medication helpful, but personally for me, they saved my life. I was going through some real bad depression at the time, but being medicated felt like a big boost to my mental wellbeing. It was much easier to do all the things that they say that depressed people should do to get better, such as personal care, dragging oneself out of the house, and engaging in hobbies.

It wasn’t a miracle fix — and I did need to work at developing new skills to ensure that I wouldn’t forget to eat, or spend an entire day organising my music library rather than anything I’d actually want to spend that much time on. So be cautious about expecting a miracle. Medication didn’t solve any of my ADHD problems, it just transmuted them into easier to manage forms. It was like a ladder dropped into the pit I was in, but climbing that ladder still took a lot of work

Something that feels notable to me in your comment is “will they help me read books again?” “Again” sticks out to me, because if you used to be able to read books but now no longer can, then it might be something in addition to ADHD that’s blocking you — burnout, for example. If you are struggling with burnout, then be careful because if you go into meds with the wrong mindset, you could do yourself more harm. Like, if the meds help you to be more productive at running yourself into the ground, that would not be good. My sympathies if this is indeed where you’re at. Personally, I would find it hard to recover from burnout without being on my meds, because they help me to focus on things that I want to do as well as the things I have to do, so they definitely do help overall. I just need to work hard to be kind to myself, and that’s easier said than done

Seconding the coffee shop recommendation. When I found a place near me that was nice and not overwhelming, I really enjoyed being able to be a regular there. There were days when I was not well and knew that it would help me to get out of the house at least once, and it was nice to have a place like this that could act as an achievable goal.

Even on good days, I find it useful to have somewhere I can go and exist and feel safe in a place that’s not my home. I find I get more work done this way sometimes, so I’ll often take my laptop, my headphones, and just spend an entire day working in a café. My regular place had a few tables that were sort of tucked away in a nook, and had a plug socket nearby, so it was great.

The thing with Trump is that he has no reason to want to kill the heads of organised crime. He benefits from cartel violence because it helps him to rhetorically justify US imperialism, so he has no reason to eradicate them.

If the US invades Mexico, the cartels will scatter like cockroaches to take shelter from the action, and then in the aftermath, they will leverage their efficient organisational infrastructure to cement their power even further. If the US invades Mexico, there is no way that this ends well for the Mexican people.

To Trump and his ilk, you look the same as any cartel member — except you’re a lot easier to kill.

I linked it in a top level comment, but if you’re someone who likes watching long, thoughtful video essays, this is an excellent one on the precise topic of your comment, from one of my favourite science communicators

Ooh, an opportunity to share a video from one of my favourite science communicators, the inimitable Dr Fatima (an ex-astrophysicist): “Einstein Was a Socialist; Should We Care?” (Duration: 1h16)

Indeed, and non-citizens aren’t entitled to due process, apparently. And I can’t imagine how many citizens must’ve been deported due to being denied the opportunity to show that they are citizens. Lawyers have been finding it super difficult to stay in contact with the clients even when they’re being held in detention in the US. It’s fucking terrifying

It might depend on how we define “good faith”, but I think some of them are probably posting in good faith — though good intentions don’t negate the harm they do, of course. I get the sense that some of the people trying to incite violent action are feeling overwhelmed and powerless due to being so far away from what is happening. I say this as someone who isn’t an American, and thus can only spectate with horror as American politics continues going to hell, with ripple effects on the rest of the world.

It’s easy to rile people up when it’s not your neck on the line though. However uncomfortable it is to be spectating what’s happening in the US, you guys have it much worse. It would be nice to imagine that this is the kind of thing that could be solved through one, big push of violent resistance, but with how deep MAGA cronies have gotten their talons into US politics, resistance will necessarily require thinking of the long game. Violent resistance, when deployed unwisely, can end up serving the ends of the oppressor.

I hope that you never find yourself opposite an asshole cop who doesn’t care whether you actually pose any danger to them.

Though the Nazis will certainly be able to distinguish between full throated Nazis and centrists, when it comes time for picking the new outgroup. It’s part of why centrists annoy me so much — tolerance towards Nazis is literally a slow motion suicide

They already had a big target on their back. Sure, scraping Spotify made that larger, but given that their aims are explicitly political, I think there’s a lot of value in not being overly cautious and using takedowns as a way to bolster the resiliency of your service.

Domain takedowns are inevitable, even if they’d just continued with their existing archival efforts. That’s why, when I found I wasn’t able to access the .org domain over the weekend, I just went to https://annas-archive.se/ instead.

Edit: wrote one of the old domains (.gs) because I just use what’s bookmarked and got mixed up. It was .se that I used

Makes such a useful piece of software, and is also wise enough to set boundaries to protect himself from the toxic pressure of open source development.

What a G.

Yeah, that was my understanding of things too. What I’m curious about is how the Indie Game awards define it. Because if games that use ((Procedural Generation) AND NOT (Generative AI)) are permitted, then that would surely require a way of cleanly delineating between Generative AI and the rest of procedural generation that exists beyond generative AI

Can someone help me to understand the difference between Generative AI and procedural generation (which isn’t something that’s relevant for Expedition 33, but I’m talking about in general).

Like, I tend to use the term “machine learning” for the legit stuff that has existed for years in various forms, and “AI” for the hype propelled slop machines. Most of the time, the distinction between these two terms is pretty clean, but this area seems to be a bit blurry.

I might be wrong, because I’ve only worked with machine learning in a biochemistry context, but it seems likely that modern procedural generation in games is probably going to use some amount of machine learning? In which case, would a developer need to declare usage of that? That feels to me like it’s not what the spirit of the rule is calling for, but I’m not sure

It’s not faked