Sargon of ACAB

I had a difficult evening yesterday and really needed a laugh before going to bed. This definitely delivered.

This book can’t be recommended enough.

If you’re an experienced activist you’ll probably know a lot of what it says already, but it’ll do so in language that helps you teach it to newer people looking to get involved.

You’ve already gotten good answers so I just wanted to reply that I indeed wasn’t joking.

You can have decentralized planning. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

Decentralization doesn’t mean you can’t have organization, communication or coordination.

What do you think makes it hard to combine planning, decentralization and democracy?

Living in Europe this is fairly easy te remember. None of the choices are great, but they definitely exist.

Installing something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu is fairly easy. The hardest part is probably creating the install media and that’s not particularly hard ei her.

If you don’t rely on specific software (like Adobe), using Linux is a good idea. I’d still advice not to mess with a computer you rely on and wait until you have sufficient time to troubleshoot something. Even if nothing goes wrong a new OS can still take a little getting used to.

Maybe “automation” wasn’t the correct term to use. I mostly meant predictive text suggestions, or your IDE handling boilerplate code and stuff like getters and setters. Maybe even auto-bracketing.

We’ve had predictive text and automation of boilerplate code for years without needing any generative AI.

Hostility towards what is now colloquially called AI seems very justified to me. The costs to society, especially the environmental ones, can’t be justified by the meagre “benefits” it purports to offer.

The biggest boons of generative AI I’ve see its champions mention (other than making horrifying imagery that makes someone feel like an artist with zero art involved) are cost-reduction and automating the “boring” parts.

The cost-reduction seems unsustainable and mostly exists because these companies are operating at an enormous loss. A lot of the automation already existed and those “boring” tasks where also opportunities for junior coders to learn their trade.

It doesn’t respond to what’s going on around me, but bone-conduction headphones do help me stay focused and can be used when interacting with others if you don’t make the music too loud.

I should probably take some time to think why my instagram feed is full of non-binary people, shouldn’t I?

My local anarchist collective has already decided to donate and is currently looking at how we can do additional fundraising.