WHERE do I find that gigantic USB delete key?

I feel like, having read your comment, I should stop feeling so grumpy about Russia fucking with us. We can’t get thru this late-stage capitalist nonsense fast enough.

Just install Amphetamine on your Mac, duh

Nick Bostrom takes himself waaaaaaaayyy too seriously.

I’m only aware of a lot of what I find distressing because of my superpowers. I can know what’s happening everywhere in the world within minutes of it happening. Somebody I will never, ever meet in person can say something mean about me and put a shadow on my mood, if I choose to pay attention to it.

My day-to-day is idyllic. Modest, urban, a bit ecclectic… but comfy, by American standards. Food, shelter, medicine, recreation, community, art, adventure, mobility, and friendship are all in adequate supply. I’m employed and paid fairly. Accepted by friends and family, valued by my colleagues. If my sphere of awareness and sphere of routine travel were the same, I would think myself a prince.

But my sphere of awareness is vast. So, I know my comfort is a byproduct of privilege, which is withheld from millions of other deserving people because… reasons. I know there are other parts of the world where logic and justice and tolerance are in widespread, societally upheld ascendance, and that those places are far, far away from where I live.

Immediately outside the personal bubble I labor to maintain, there’s pain, violence, fear, hunger, and hatred. One misstep on my part and I could find myself there as well. I know that fear is wielded as a tool by people who live in fortresses made of money, by people who claim to represent the ideals of my nation, but only care that they are the winner and everybody else is the loser.

So yes, there are many nagging feelings. I wish my comfort was more than the byproduct of somebody powerful wanting something from me. Much angst, as I sit in my comfortable chair with my expensive technology, in my lovely house on a gorgeous spring day. I wish I was stupider, less aware, less experienced in the motivations of horrible people.

Scroll through your typical node_modules directory without learning a little something about software bloat. Yikes.

It’s quite a lot, what we expect from our technology now. But we made it this way because the marketplace has deemed there must always be a winner and a loser, so it’s a never ending game of accelerationist oneupmanship.

The market pressures the competitors, the competitors pressure the engineers, the engineers pressure each other to deliver faster and faster. Sometimes they’re backed into a corner and have to focus on more speed and efficiency, which is shortly thereafter consumed by frameworks, languages, and operating systems that are also competing for adopters, and thus supply stuff like JIT compilers and UI frameworks.

Even before we were plunged into the hellscape of vibe coding, you could knock an app together with a kit of parts using a pinch of glue code, having no clue what’s happening underneath the gui. Who cares? My Mac at idle is running hundreds of processes, it can take it. Until of course it can’t.

Back in olden times, a piece of software was painstakingly hand-built in assembler and C over a course of many months. But ain’t nobody got time for that when your manager can shit out an app with Claude in an afternoon.

Narrow down your inputs. Isolate until you feel calm. Yes, this by itself is very difficult and could take a while.

but, if you manage it, begin reintroducing stimuli one at a time and monitor your inner state. Sit with it for a while and see if that experience contributes to a level of unease. Record your impressions. Repeat.

Maybe its too on the nose to say so on Lemmy, but fuck Reddit right in the earhole. Their pearl-clutching, risk-averse, pro-corporate moderation-bot and tattle-tale system was the last straw.

FEAR! FEAR THE DRIZZLY SHITS! OOOOGA BOOGA BOOOOOGA

So, business as usual, then?

100% ^^ this right here.

Valve is one of the very few big companies I am totally fine spending money with. The value proposition is entirely focused on the products and how the customer, me, gets the most from them. No artificial scarcity, no protectionist bullshit, no outrageously exploitative EULA or obvious shafting of vendors. They focused on creating something useful and functional, and they profit from it. Bravo.

And they have been doing this for decades. The first PC I installed Steam on was a Celeron with a Voodoo2 GPU in it.

I have to do business with other companies because they have driven other competitors out of business. I get to do business with Valve.

Money is the best superpower, apparently.

Oh, really. Ya think? In other news, scientists confirm water is wet.

Pay attention. You are next.

Your personal point of view or constitutionally-protected activity are now grounds for criminal investigation that will empower various three-letter agencies to harass you like Mr. Venegas. Lest we forget the content of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7):

• Immigration: Those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement” or supporting “mass migration and open borders”.
• Gender and Social Ideology: Entities described as adhering to “radical gender ideology” or showing “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality”.
• Political and Economic Beliefs: Individuals or groups associated with “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity”.
• Tactics and Actions: “Antifa-aligned extremists” and those allegedly involved in “organized doxing of law enforcement,” “swatting,” “mass rioting,” or “targeting of public officials”.

If you aren’t a high-earning, conservative, heterosexual white anglo-saxon protestant taxpayer… if you have the audacity to honestly interrogate your social role and find it unsatisfactory, if you choose to fully exercise your right of self-determination, you just made the list, buddy.

You’ll be investiagated and harassed. You’ll be marginalized and starved of resources. Conveniences and tools you take for grranted will be inaccessible, through loopholes and legal trickery that you will not have the capability to fight. They’re already hard at work:

• Retroactive Review: Agencies must review all domestic terrorism files from the last five years to identify Antifa-related intelligence.
• Informant Rewards: The FBI was instructed to expand its tip line and establish a cash-reward systemto incentivize reporting on fellow Americans for suspected domestic terrorist activity.
• Focus on Nonprofits: A joint initiative between the FBI and IRS was formed to investigate nonprofit organizations, book clubs, and mutual aid networks for suspected links to domestic terrorism.
• Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs): Agencies are required to refer all “domestic terrorism encounters” to JTTFs for “exhaustive investigation,” including the identification of financial sponsors and donors.

Build up a network of mutual support. Find a way to live below your means. Do not count on the good graces of institutions. Do not expect the law or your local political people to defend your interests.

You are absolutely right, inasmuch as we’re on this ride till it comes off the rails. Our job is to survive with our wits and some resources intact. Unlike the political sphere, we actually have a degree of control over our ability to weather a social cataclysm.

I commend OP for sharing something alarming and then actually including some kind of action plan for countering it. It seems like my limbic system is in a constant state of crisis without any kind of rational outlet or notion that there are sane, rational people at least trying to behave like we live in a civilization. There’s a lot of content out there that sounds the alarm and then offers nothing in the do something category other than feel the way I tell you to feel in my article.

My criticism here is how unlikely the hope is that working inside the confines of the existing political machine will have the desired outcome. Lobbying elected officials, attending demonstrations, making noise, and organizing are all excellent efforts, but probably won’t end up being used as originally envisioned, because as much as we want to believe our political process works, the enemy is doing everyting it can to dismantle it and disenfranchise anybody who thinks it’s a bad idea to do so.

Lobbying, demonstrating, filing writs and suits, etc. are at least useful for registering our dissent in the public record so that later, when things have fallen apart, it can be used as evidence that the people we trusted to pay attention actually did absolutely nothing. It will be useful when some kind of reconciliation based in actual truth and justice can happen. That’s not today, though. We’re just shouting into the void and making sure the papers get properly filed. Organizing and setting up networks of mutual aid are more critical, as they will help us survive to see that day come and replace the safety nets and sense of common purpose that has been so fully undermined.

I caught an interview with him on Chapo Trap House a few days ago and was very interested in seeing this doc.