When I need to check something on Discord I do it with a browser anyway, I tried installing it on linux but every time I would run it I would get a demand to manually install a new binary because there was an update, and I don’t want it having that level of access to my computer anyway.

I had some bad luck with buying a SAS harddrive on ebay, bought like 3 in a row from different sellers that turned out to be DOA. To be fair, I was going for the lowest cost I could find for the capacity I wanted and ignoring seller reputation, and I did get full refunds after returning them, it was just a pain to keep installing broken harddrives, documenting how they were broken, repacking them and making trips to the post office. The fourth I bought used from Amazon for a little more money and that one worked, I noticed it was also packaged better, in its own harddrive shaped styrofoam thing instead of crammed in a small box with a thin layer of bubble wrap. The whole elapsed process took months. If I had to do it again I’d probably try more non-Amazon sellers again and try to find one that does packaging better and doesn’t try to sell broken shit because I hate Amazon but that is how it played out.

Given the Snowden leaks, it seems inevitable that if that data is being recorded and collected into the servers of a small number of US companies, that it will end up being used to enable nationwide searches regardless

initially meant to protect against corporate/capitalism over reach like this

The article makes this argument much better than I can summarize, so I really recommend reading it, but the idea is that the promise of intellectual property rights as a protection for creative workers is fundamentally flawed and is not fit for that purpose even if it seems to be on the surface, rather than being an otherwise good idea that has been corrupted by corporate influence.

Better to push for something difficult that could actually help workers than something some corporate factions are ok with precisely because they know it won’t.

You might also look at https://peer.xyz/, which seems to have a roughly similar concept to Payram. The website seems a little sketchy in some ways but at least the git repo has code in it and there’s a chatroom that was active last I checked.

The closest example to that given in the blog post is the writer’s guild strike:

If we’re workers, then we derive our power from labor rights. The Writers Guild – the only creative workers in world history to have comprehensively beaten AI in their workplace – won their AI fight with a strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

The Hollywood guilds are able to pursue a limited form of “sectoral bargaining” (where all the workers in a field bargain with all its bosses) called “multi-employer bargaining.” Bosses hate sectoral bargaining, and in 1947 they got it banned outright through the Taft-Hartley Act.

In general it makes the argument that it would make much more sense for people to be fighting for labor and privacy rights related to AI instead of IP rights which will ultimately fail to prevent it from harming their livelihoods.

Just imagine a world in which the only products manufactured are exclusively chasing the dollars of wealthy investors. So like yachts, custom giant statues, kill drone perimeters, etc.

At least if more people ended up doing this on their own hardware with open source software, it would cut off a lot of the opportunities it presents for companies to abuse people’s privacy and manipulate them.

I looked up haybox cookers, seems like a neat idea to insulate already boiling water, but a wood fire doesn’t seem like the most convenient or efficient choice if what you want is to efficiently heat something up a specific amount but no more.

Wood is a potentially scarce resource, access to it is situational, it requires significant storage space, wood smoke is bad for you, fire is dangerous and requires skill to manage that can take a long time to learn, same goes for the process of preparing the wood.

You don’t think frontier AI models are leaving some out deliberately?