Sorry I’m late for work, I got sucked into a black hole again. No, I didn’t take a picture of the event horizon, you should just take my word for it. I wouldn’t even be late if it weren’t for the time dilation.

I’d call it a success, in that as I was scrolling, before I saw the title, I thought, “Is that meant to be Danny Pudi?”

One thing that they are confirmed to do is when someone you interact with a lot searches for something, that person may be interpreted as a family member and results from their searches may show up in your ads. Devious af.

I’m planning on getting the iPhone 15, now that they’re switching to USB C. My last iPhone was an iPhone 4.

To be honest, some of the cultish gimmicks have swayed me. The “in group” mentality of having the right color of text messages. The ability to send videos that aren’t garbage quality. The ease of having shared photo albums with people in my family who also have iPhones. I know these are mostly underhanded tactics from Apple to make their product a status symbol, but I’ve grown tired of being on the outside. Still, I’m keeping my Android as a second line for various reasons.

There are a few hardware components that made me consider spending the money on an iPhone. The biggest one is the Lidar sensor. I don’t know of any other phone that gives you the ability to combine Lidar and camera technology to create full color 3D models of your surroundings. I can’t wait to 3D print my cat.

I imagine with inflation causing an increased frequency of relabeling and relabeling costs causing an increased rate of inflation, it’s only a matter of time before I become too lazy to finish this joke.

And I’ve just made my own source which says it’s already launched.

My favorite games on Android:

1. Shattered Pixel Dungeon

• [Endlessly replayable roguelike. Clear each floor, identify potions, drink the right one to level up so you can use better weapons and armor, keep your health high and see how deep you can get in the dungeon. Game time only advances when you move.]

2. Slay the Spire

• [Deck building game. Use attack, skill, and power cards to beat enemies and earn new cards, use your choice of cards, relics, potions, and card upgrades to create synergies in your deck and make it past all three acts to win the game. Deck resets when you lose (or win).]

3. Infinitode 2

• [Tower defense game. Stop enemy shapes from advancing to earn gold, use gold to buy new towers, upgrade your towers, and swap out various types of tower to maximize your efficiency. Keep an eye on how close enemies are getting to your base or it will be overrun before you notice.]

4. Super Auto Pets

• [Pocket monster-style battling game. Use a limited amount of resources each turn to buy new bitmoji animals and watch your team face off against a random opponent at the same stage of the game, keep hearts if you win, lose hearts if you lose, get better quality pets each round you progress. See if you can win ten rounds to claim victory.]

5. Tomb of the Mask

• [Classic-style 2D arcade game. Use the four directional controls to zip past moving obstacles, collect all the dots on your way to the exit if you can, enjoy the snappy movements and fun retro sound effects. Very reflex-driven.]

6. Antiyoy

• [Turn-based hexagon-tiled conquest game. Buy houses to get more income, buy soldiers and towers to protect your land, upgrade soldiers and towers to face off against enemy assets, careful you don’t upgrade them more than your income supports, enjoy the many hundreds of user-submitted maps. Single player by default, or get Antiyoy Online to compete against other players.]

7. Mindustry

• [Realtime strategy. Research new technologies, build mining drills, create weapons, face off against enemy forces to control the map. Steep learning curve.]

8. Dungeon Cards

• [Tile-based strategy game. Pick a card, help your card survive on a 3x3 grid by using the four directional controls to swap places with any adjacent card, while being careful not to pick fights you can’t win, be strategic about when you pick up weapons and potions. Don’t get caught surrounded by poisons, explosives, or enemies at the wrong moment.]

9. Atomas

• [Science-themed matching game. Distribute atoms around a ring, watch atoms merge and transform into larger atoms when they match, set up chain reactions of many atoms each finding their mates at the same time, careful not to fill the ring beyond its capacity. Learn the periodic table in the process.]

10. I Love Hue

• [Relaxing color matching game. Get a mess of jumbled tiles on a grid and swap tiles around until they form pleasing gradients along both the y and x axes. Breathe in. Hold… Breathe out.]

Honorable classic game mentions:

• Chess [It’s chess.]
• Rummikub [“Rummy-cube”, compete against other players, using tiles from your hand to form “runs” (red3, red4, red5) and “sets” (red3, blue3, black3) in the playing area until a player wins by using all their tiles. At least 3 tiles per set/run, must play 30 points from your own hand on the same turn before manipulating tiles played by others.]
• Rommy’s Gauntlet [Level-for-level remake of the Windows 95 “Best of Windows Entertainment Pack” classic, Chip’s Challenge. Tile-based puzzle game.]

“Hey, you want to play some YYWTGRSHYGNLSYCT tonight?”

“Yeah, I’d love to play some YYWTGRSHYGNLSYCT, bro.”

“Cool, let’s get our YYWTGRSHYGNLSYC on.”

“Wait, what game?”

Tharnks!

Thanks! ❤

Congratulations! Certainly feels good when you tell a less-than-equitable employer you’re leaving and all the weight just magically lifts off your shoulders. I’m in a support group on discord for people who used to work for my old employer, where we unload some of our post- traumatic stress. Feels good to no longer be in that place. Glad you found a new opportunity and hope it all works out great for you!

Thanks for the kind words! It’ll be an adjustment for sure, but I feel super lucky to have found a place where everyone seems kind and knowledgeable and I’m being compensated (more than) fairly. Feels like a dream, and it’s motivating me to make the best impression and do the best work I possibly can. Funny how fair wages can do that. 😅

I’m a DevSecOps Engineer. I worked at my old job for about 10 years, but I was being drastically underpaid by the end. So, I’m about to start making nearly triple what I used to make. As you can imagine, I’m completely full of good jitters at the moment.

Thanks! 😊

Thank you! Am 100% stoked for it.

It’s an uphill battle for sure. We gain resiliency from decentralization, but you’re right that there is a cost in efficiency. Long-term, we should work to achieve collective ownership of centralized data centers, to literally seize the means of our content production.

But we can’t currently afford the upfront cost such an endeavor takes, even collectively. The ruling class has gone far to ensure our collective means reach not much further than the ends of our own tables. But I still have hope for what we can achieve.

Even if we don’t yet have the resources or the efficiency, one thing we can start working on already is the political infrastructure. Obviously, the official government is laden with corruption. And we can dream about overturning Citizens United, but we shouldn’t be holding our breath. While we must keep fighting that fight, we can simultaneously devote time to learning how to govern ourselves.

What is fair? What are rights? What is the value of a person’s time? Of a person’s life? What is a person? When does an idea stop belonging to an individual and start belonging to everyone?

We can codify these things, and we can even make algorithms that compare our opinions on these subjects and build up logical governing rules over time to maximize fulfillment for everyone. But one thing that’s almost impossible to do is to protect our new society from corruption. We can make the perfect voting system and even if we manage to successfully detect and remove bots, the influence of capitalist ideology penetrates our zeitgeist deeply. Our TV, music, religions, and games while often poking fun at the beast are all intrinsically part of it.

So, what do we do? I think we should accept that part of ourselves. The part that corrupts us, that loves the wars, the pollution, the lack of education. The side of our society that glorifies the billionaire class and will lash out if in mortal danger.

Because I think you’re absolutely right. The more of a threat we appear to be, the more they will come after us. So, we need to make our endeavors look and act like theirs. Real businesses with a real regard for efficiency and profit margins.

But instead of a CEO and a board of directors, we place an artificial intelligence. And instead of trying to maximize profits for investors, we train our AI to maximize profits for workers. And each worker gets a say in the design of the AI, in proportion to the amount of work they do for the company. The work they do is measured as a calculation of how much success they make for the company. Success being a combined metric of estimated financial profit merged with quantifiable improvement in quality of life for our customers.

It’s not a corruption-proof system, but I think allowing real workers to collectively train an AI boss is a good way of combating the effects of corruption in realtime. If I were a worker in such a system, I would implore our AI CEO to classify any livestock in our farms as customers and workers with rights proportional to their brain sizes when compared with our own. So, making lives better for cattle on farms would directly affect the perceived value of the worker who made those changes. This might make our products more expensive when compared to a capitalist model, but if a worker implements the innovation of livestreams from all our livestock to show how fulfilled they are, and the biodiversity/ carbon capture solutions we have crafted into their environments, customers may be willing to pay for a food with less attached guilt, especially if they are entitled to larger profit shares from their own AI employers than in the capitalist model. And if our customers are perceived to be happier as a result, the workers who implemented the livestreams would be rewarded in kind.

If capitalists can game that system by creating bots which produce quantifiable work and are compensated in kind, we can still utilize that labor. If we set the initial conditions correctly, this should result in a workless society where no human has or needs money. Because at the end of that road, no humans can find any appreciable amount of work to do, so the only purpose they serve is to be customers for the perfected AI companies. And because all efficiencies have already been carved out by the capitalist bots, the only way for the bots to make additional profit is to make quality of life improvements for the customers. We become the livestock, with all our needs met. The rich become the workers, toiling to find something to do with their money.

And that may not seem like the perfect end, but maybe it’s the best we can hope for. The capitalists finally have all the money. But they’ve unwittingly taken part in our utopia. And we didn’t have to eat them after all. We just have to find a way of quantifying fairness.

If we can train an AI to determine what compensation is a fair reward for any given task, both now and in the future, everything else falls in line. But maybe that’s as tautological as saying if we could only root out corruption from the US government, we could get rid of Citizens United. The horse isn’t anywhere near that cart. But hey, it’s fun to dream.

It’s funny, I thought of the exact same metaphor to describe tech giants, just a few weeks ago. It was in the lead-up to reddit pulling the plug on their API, as I was thinking about the ideal alternative to the current model of social media. Sometime around March, I saw this video: https://www.tiktok.com/@endangeredecosystems/video/7226846526713171205?lang=en

I thought about how current platforms quash diversity similar to how huge sections of rainforest are replaced with endlessly mundane tree farms that produce only palm oil. Instead of different levels of canopy for big communities, medium communities, and small communities, the tree farm just has one level which uniformly blocks almost all the light from making it to the forest floor.

In old growth forests, the biggest and oldest trees naturally fall and leave gaps in the canopy for new life to emerge. Right now, we have some new trees reclaiming portions of the homogeneous zones. Where parts of Facebook are burning, we have Friendica moving in. Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube are slowly being encroached upon by Lemmy, Mastodon, and PeerTube.

I think that ActivityPub is a big step in the right direction, but it’s also just the first step of many. In the future, I want to see a full ecosystem of applications that are not just replacements of existing platforms, but living, growing, and evolving platforms of their own. We have pieces of that now, but communication between different fediverse platforms is not fully integrated. It would be great to eventually have an online world where the barriers between platforms are largely symbolic and any idea can spread anywhere with minimal effort.

Meaning, we’ll all be passing around snippets of code, digital assets, and textual ideas, allowing us to create new subplatforms on demand, which naturally intermingle and breed with everyone else’s subplatforms to produce dynamic macroplatforms capable of delivering desired content and behaviors quickly, accurately, and securely. We can crowdsource efficiency into every action in our society and everyone can benefit from our collective successes, while still programmatically rewarding those who work to push the progress bar forward.

Ultimately, I think that is the way to beat both climate change and income inequality. Find ways to achieve rampant decentralized success, so that resource hoarders cannot game the system to the detriment of others, but they can use their resources to take part in building a better society if they so wish. And if they don’t opt in, the rest of us will get it done behind their backs, and we’ll just have to find out whether capitalism or technosocialism works better.

They banned a player from tournament play in Hearthstone for saying “Liberate Hong Kong” in a post-match interview.

I work in devops as well and while Windows is easier and more convenient for many things, some processing-heavy tasks are better left to Linux. Doing generative AI stuff, for example, I don’t want to be loading a bulky OS on top of the task at hand.

I thought about dual booting, but it would make multitasking nearly impossible. So, instead, I’m using Linux whenever possible and I have a Windows VM I can enter at a moment’s notice or hibernate if I need the resources. And then there’s the MacBook, but we don’t talk about the MacBook.

And take off your shoes.