Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

I am a professional designer with two decades of experience and I gotta admit, you’re smoking crack if you think GIMP (the project that is almost entirely held back by its stupid name) is superior to Photoshop.

It might be able to get the job done for small tasks, but it is not a serious tool for serious people. I’m sorry. I’m as pro-FLOSS as anyone can get, and even I recognize that right now there’s just no competition in the design department. Affinity is Mac-only, and comes with its own problematic aspects.

Meshtastic, baby!!

All my IT and InfoSec friends have called me alarmist for suggesting even the possibility of a GFW of America, but every day that passes, it looks more and more likely to happen, doesn’t it?

Start practicing circumvention techniques now, y’all, while it’s still legal and cheap to do so. Learn amateur radio. Learn Meshtastic. Learn all the different censorship-resistant VPN technology out there. Host your own websites or services for friends, family, or your community. It doesn’t make it impossible, but it does make it hard, and fascism is nothing if not lazy.

AI photography is so stupid. That target’s got legs. Handsome ones, too.

Might not be what it was designed for, but OpenAI claims their newest model is “PHd-levels” of intelligent. I feel like if that were true, it would do that reliably. Instead, sometimes it ignores the tool it’s programmed to know how to use and just, y’know, wings it.

Which, fair, but that’s my job and it’s taken!

i think that these tools will probably be foundational to discovering more about the human mind and how words or images are received, stored, and assembled in the brain, but people like sam altman and elon musk are convinced that there is nothing else to a ‘person’ beyond that.

‘humanity’ is an emergent phenomenon, and that is what makes it special. a few other animals have the beginning of it, but none have all of it like we do. you don’t need a god or any kind of religion to understand this. as far as we know, we might be one of the least likely things to ever happen in the universe, ever.

Congressperson: “Okay, so, let me get this straight. Your company has spent over 20 billion dollars in pursuit of a fully autonomous digital intelligence, and so far, your peak accuracy rate for basic addition and subtraction is… what was it, again?”

Sam Altman: leans into microphone “About 60%, sir.”

[Congress erupts in a sea of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, as Sam Altman is carried away on top of the cheering crowd of Congresspeople wearing a crown of roses and a sash reading, “BEST INVESTMENT”]

Google Pixel 9 Pofessional. It’s the slightly cheaper version, on account that it got a little burned at the factory.

“Aur”? Says here in my notes something about “Pacman” but that can’t be right…

I guess, but you will lead a lonely life if you can’t find common struggle with people in different scenarios than our own. We can easily lose our soul with these endless purity tests — for some reason, Leftists, progressives, and liberals seem to be constantly on the lookout for the next Jesus Christ, who will just simply energize voters by consequence of, I dunno, magic or some shit.

Neil Young is still a working musician who needs to get his face and music in front of as wide and as general of an audience as possible — why wouldn’t they be where people are? That’s what makes this stand so important. Homie needs Facebook and Insta and still said no.

Well, it’s not like Ted Nugent is writing any new music. He probably doesn’t have anything better to do anyway.

That, and, y’know, actually showing up for each other instead of relentlessly torturing other men for having the gall to express any emotions beyond the two approved ones, laughter and rage.

FWIW, this is why AI researchers have been screeching for decades not to create an AI that is anthropomorphized. It is already an issue we have with animals, now we are going to add a confabulation engine to the ass-end?

YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can’t run the middleware, it would just go “oh you must be a printer, c’mon in!”

I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents’ neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p

Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing… Good memories.

Ah I am not sure. I just assumed it was W3C.

My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.

Honestly it’s a little staggering how much better web video got after the W3C got fed up with Flash and RealPlayer and finally implemented some more efficient video and native video player standards.

<video> was a revolution.

You don’t have to explain that kind of stuff, you know. I understand the notion, but, I promise you, it is immaterial to the joke I was making on this shitposting forum.

i am old in terms of internet years, and Bill Gates really is living proof that billionaires can essentially destroy the lives of thousands and thousands of people to gather their wealth, and then spend the autumn of their years choosing which countries or causes get a splash-out of the unfathomable excess, like a little kinglet.

i am happy his money helped fix stuff in the world. but that’s called “catching up to what has been expected of you for 60 years.” he does not get a cookie for working out of the Andrew Carnegie playbook.

the mergers & acquisitions leviathan eats yet another beautiful thing, just like it ate my precious linode.