Andrew Sayman @gnu_lorien@ourislandgeorgia.net

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zHRTkHp0CU

In this video they describe part of why we quit playing, but in a different context. It talks about how once people bought a game in Rock Band they weren't going to buy it again in Guitar Hero. This was even more true than what they said.

New versions of Rock Band wouldn't bring all of your songs. You couldn't convert your songs to new consoles. For a convention we once set up a Rock Band machine from zero and it was almost 1000$ just for the music. It wasn't just that we weren't willing to hop franchises, we weren't willing to pay for the same thing again in the same franchise.

When automation first showed up we said, "Robots are replacing people." This fallacy is at the heart of the conflict between where technology has been going and where capitalism has been going. Robots replaced jobs, not people. That we've equated the two is one of the greatest crimes perpetrated by capitalism.

That these things are in conflict has been obvious since at least the 19th century. Thinking critically about the conflicts between working and non-working classes of people it is clear that this has been obvious for substantially longer.

This is about AI Art, but also every technology that improved productivity. They all have the same thing in common: The wealthy extracted the increased value and convinced the workers they they didn't deserve the fruits of the productivity gain. There are good, moral reasons to dislike AI art, but in the context of art as a job, always remember that the real enemy are the owners and the AI art is just a tool they're wielding to hurt you.

The people who are the least important to the railways are the ones making the most money. I know it won't happen, but I hope every rail worker just doesn't show up tomorrow. Maybe not for the rest of the week. Maybe not until they are paid a fair portion. Hell, maybe not until they're paid a little extra than what they're really worth.

Fuck every one of these owners and fuck Congress treating these workers as if they're slaves to this job.

This is a fun overview of leveraged buy-outs and private equity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5PLEZiSZVw

He goes over some details, but this is one of those things that's obviously a scam on its face. If any of the numbers were real, why would anybody finance that debt? Nobody would because it's such a clear loss in almost every direction. The only way it makes sense is if people are being paid off.

I'm also unhappy to discover that Windows 11 has added a new layer of fuckery to make free software look bad. I tried to install Digikam and the exe wouldn't launch correctly. Every time I double-clicked on it a dialog would pop up saying it needed to search the Store for something. If you said "yes" the Store would simply fail to find something to handle the file extension.

The whole process made it look and feel like digikam was malware. The only way I got around it was to launch a shell and run the exe directly.

I try to remember these things whenever people tell me the problem with Linux is that there's not a smooth user experience. I haven't found an OS yet where I don't start by having to customize everything and launch into a terminal.

Did Microsoft really spend the better part of the last 3 decades using the UI affordance that bottom-left is where you got to get started and then throw that away in Windows 11? That's... amazing.

It's alive!

Time for a new computer!

It's annoying how certain apps make really cool features that are so frustrating to use. Today I broke a rule I'd known for a long time not to click on any of the automatically generated things in Google Photos. This is because I really liked what it put together for me!

The problems are:

• Once I save the thing it generated I have no idea where to find it. Everywhere I think to look it's not there. Advice online is either wrong or using words that don't map to anything in the UI
• I saved it wrong and want to make something almost like it. In this case, I want one less picture. Turns out that there's no way to make the thing again even though the memory is still there, and if you try to make it from the option they provide you there's no way to select the number of pictures that the memory was able to.

I want to be clear that I'm picking on Google today, but most interfaces across most operating systems are utter garbage these days. I remember for years and years that people complained about free software stuff because "the UI isn't good." Clearly that's not actually what people are evaluating their tools on.

I thought Dave Chappelle's SNL monologue was funny. Having said that, it was not a personal conversation between he and I. He was selling me an entertainment product. If I hadn't liked it and chose not to consume further entertainment products from him there is no grand, moral implication on his freedom of speech.

Thinking about the collapse of Twitter, I'm reminded that the old technology these things are all trying to supersede is still around: the email.

In the end, all of these things could be implemented as a specialized UI on top of email. There are a lot of good reasons not to do it that way, but I wanted to make an entirely distributed social media system today I could implement as a fancy interface to email.

There are a bunch of competitors in the social media space, but one people haven't really been talking about is the humble mailing list. The UI kinda sucks, but it has survived many transformations of technology. This is mostly because email was built on a solid, federated foundation and many of the competitors start with, a variant of, "What if we built a version of email where the users have no control?"

None of these represent complete thoughts. It's just been on my mind a lot lately from a technical perspective.

Andor has me completely hooked

Here's a hot take of mine that comes to mind every time I hear about Kanye and Adidas. He could've said a lot of different things and ended with, "and Adidas can't drop me," which would've resulted in Adidas dropping him. It could have literally been gobbledygook and there might have been an executive that went, "Fuck you. We can't drop you? Who the fuck do you think you are."

I don't know if that's how it happened, but I get annoyed on Adidas' behalf when I hear that challenge repeated.

I wandered to the old Whispers site at Georgia Tech and it's not here anymore.

A detailed look at how things can go around in the management of a product. The games industry has a way of getting people to crunch and then making sure it wasn't worth their time to do so.

https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-doom-eternal-5f98266b27ce

I gotta figure out how to report these ads on YouTube. Every break is showing these explicitly transphobic ads against Raphael Warnock. It's pretty disgusting, but I guess I did get to tell Kelvin that people can change genders and the people who made the ad are the assholes.

I love how deep Elle Reeve's "harmless white girl" look enables her to get into white nationalists and other privileged conservative circles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buH7pLdplIQ

https://therokuchannel.roku.com/lp/weird?gclid=CjwKCAjw8JKbBhBYEiwAs3sxN09e2Pi4hgJvBw5bwzB0akwyGBYtPzLuiqZqFOG2JfUv_sMJZTWCmBoCqU0QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

I watched Weird the Al Yankovic story all the way through the credits. That was amazing.