Rob Landley

Rob does toybox and mkroot, writes linux docs, worked with j-core.org, long ago co-founded Penguicon and Linucon, wrote for Motley Fool, taught at ACC, etc. Trying to learn Japanese and make Android a self-hosting development environment.

He/him. Answers to "they/them" just fine.

My blog: https://landley.net/notes.html
Toybox: https://landley.net/toybox
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/landley

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npub1y0mf67kh7v32s0kq37tsh3wgrqgvh9fxq2wnvr84gvfhfnk0hmtste702n

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[email protected]

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nprofile1qqsz8a5a0ttlxg4g8mqgl9ctchypsyxtj5nq98fkpn65xym5em8ma4cpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsca7440

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-08-25 18:49:03 GMT

"With blockchain we shot ourselves in the foot. With AI we're aiming higher."

2026-08-22 00:47:02 GMT

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I'm typing this on a laptop that came out in 2012. It was high-end then and I've upgraded it as far as it can go, but no piece of hardware that's NINE DOUBLINGS behind should still be usable, let alone slightly more powerful than a modern chromebook.
That's why silicon valley's gone septic. Everything they did was pantomime while photolithigrapic die size shrinks did all the heavy lifting. Now the S-curve's bent back down again there's no more growth to be had, and they're in SCREAMING DENIAL.

2026-08-22 00:43:42 GMT

Moore's Law is dead.
Intel introduced the 64 bit "Core 2" processor in 2005 so laptops could access more than 4 gigabytes of RAM.
Moore's Law's 18 month doubling time says the following 21 years should have 14 doublings to 64 terabytes of RAM in each $2000 laptop.
That's why silicon valley execs went crazy: they no longer have free growth. Their business model doesn't WORK. They've done regulatory capture, brute force spending inflating a snake oil bubble, and nothing's working.

2026-08-20 21:54:16 GMT

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I mean if you'd let me go back and REMOVE the embeds after it's posted. Or a config option in my profile? But no.
I don't even see the graphic that the site decides to emit while composing the post, it gets added at some point afterwards.
Open source software sucks at user interfaces. It's a structural problem with the development model.
https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#13-08-2010
Apparently we shouted at grognard about link tweets hard enough that he made us regret them. "You want them so bad? Here!!!1!one!"

2026-08-20 21:50:10 GMT

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Is it a "bond spiral", or is it the same thing we've seen ever since that crazy "judgement day" thing where dementia don tariffed a bunch of penguins?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q3CYkQPVGQ
The US treasury has to issue 6 month bonds (that still auction for a decent price because nobody has a better idea where to put the money) to replace long term bonds (which nobody wants to buy, and which thus pay an enormous effective interest rate because the price you could sell them for is so low).

2026-08-19 20:06:32 GMT

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Dear mastodon: let me disable the big embedded graphic so I don't have unwanted pictures of chibi-hitler in my timeline.

2026-08-19 20:05:19 GMT

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Because countries are pulling money out of US debt and investing in chinese debt instead, and US allies bond markets have historically been indexed to US dollars so get splash damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3RMBBBeCVs
He gets there eventually, just doesn't lead with it.

2026-08-19 04:32:50 GMT

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No they're not "worried about US borrowing": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4a3dYt-wHY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_5Ux9S9UY
Borrowing's been like this since Reagan. Borrowing creates money for other countries to back their currencies with, that's why the EU can't be the global reserve currency: they don't borrow ENOUGH to issue enough bonds. (All fiat currency is just debt. Cash is the original bearer bond, an IOU you can pass on.)
Other countries just don't want to put their money in donnie tariff's guilded ballroom.

2026-08-15 22:07:00 GMT

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The federal reserve is the US printing press, but can only loan money, mostly for a maximum of 90 days.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/regreform/discount-window.htm
It sets short-term interest rates by setting the interest rate it demands on those short term loans.
When the US _borrows_ money, the interest rate is set via auction. "This bond will pay $1000 in 30 years, how much will you give me for it today?"
The government would _like_ the rate it lends money at and borrows money at to be correlated but they can diverge a lot.

2026-08-15 21:51:10 GMT

Patrick Boyle explains Scott Pissant's "Insane US-Japan currency bailout".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh18YXKMk3g
It's not just japan: long term US treasuries are not selling period.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/oct/understanding-swoosh-shaped-yield-curve-treasuries
Other countries are dumping their long-term (10-30y) US bonds to buy short-term (~6 month) US bonds, which can then expire and be redeemed for cash without a trumpertantrum. Pissant's been "rebalancing" to compensate, issuing new short-term bonds to buy back the long-term bonds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1kxdryg/why_did_the_federal_reserve_quietly_buy_348b_in/

2026-08-13 18:30:44 GMT

Was I too harsh, or not harsh enough?
https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2026-August/006127.html
(tl;dr: the Linux Foundation, on behalf of makers of a chatbot named after the face huggers from aliens, wants OSI to approve a license that says there can be no such thing as a valid copyright claim against them, because AI is special and magic and privileged above all else.)

2026-07-23 02:47:02 GMT

The maga injustice department has terabytes of data harvested fron Signal which they're using to prosecute but refusing to turn over to the defense in a timely manner.
https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/government-says-terabytes-of-signal-chats-are-central-to-the-case-against-minnesota-15/

2026-07-07 22:51:19 GMT

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これは mstdn.jp に影響しますか?

2026-07-02 20:21:01 GMT

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Did you hear about the egg price fixing settlement? https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/crime-pays-the-egg-bandits-made-a

2026-06-16 20:40:57 GMT

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Signal has a global toggle to Not Do That. In either slack or discord (I forget which, migrated off of both because capitalist dickishness) you could put <brackets> around a link to prevent the expansion.
Alas open source sucks at user interfaces in HIGHLY predictable ways:
https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#13-08-2010
You can work around with a BDFL but then you get their preferences and blind spots, which ain't great. Programmer+GUI designer is like programmer+gourmet chef. CAN happen, usually doesn't.

2026-06-16 20:36:51 GMT

I just deleted a tweet because Mastodon expanded a picture of assholes I don't want in my feed, and there's no way to PREVENT that, presumably because Grognard wanted to punish all the people who overrode him on link tweets.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20188

2026-06-10 21:57:19 GMT

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The LLM bubble is the Weekend at Bernies version of the dotcom boom, which happened on DIALUP internet. The first linksys router came out the year of the crash (before which wifi and always-on broadband connections weren't readily available). The first modern smartphones came out 6 years later. The dotcom crash happened with a decade of technological growth left.
But there's no exponential LLM growth, only linear returns for linear cost increases. Silicon Valley beating a dead business model.

2026-06-10 21:47:01 GMT

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Every period of exponential growth turns out to be an S-curve. You can't sell 2x as many phones each year on a planet of 8 billion people forever, eventually everyone already has one.
Moore's Law's S-curve bent down in 2010, and we've had maybe 3 of the expected 10 doublings since then, putting us ~100x behind the old trend line.
That's why they announce data centers twice the size of downtown Minneapolis using water cooled chips powered by a dryer outlet each: Moore's Zombie.

2026-06-10 21:36:59 GMT

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Amazon Web Services was built when Moore's Law was still happening, meaning they knew their data centers would be cheaper to repair and cheaper to upgrade in future.
AI data centers will only get _more_ expensive to maintain as the helium runs out and international shipping faces state sponsored piracy and so on.
They're spending trillions to do what AWS spent billions on because Moore's Law stopped, but their business model depends on it continuing.

2026-06-10 01:59:47 GMT

The AI bubble is a symptom of the end of Moore's Law.
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mnvdzq6mr224
Software capability was never growing exponentially, the hardware that ran it was until Moore's law ended.
If Moore's Law hadn't stopped they wouldn't be spending billions on data centers, your phone would be powerful enough to run it all.
Exponential growth is _always_ an s-curve that bends back down eventually. Software revenue stopped growing when a ~15 year old laptop could run today's software reasonably well.

2026-06-03 23:57:03 GMT

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Well darn it come up with some where if I buy it you get the money. That's half the point of an identity good, it's an "I voted" sticker.

2026-05-30 06:33:41 GMT

Culture is full of persephone eating pomegranate seeds, beware of greeks bearing gifts, don't eat fairy food, don't accept favors from demons because you'll owe them, monkey's paw wishes...
And then all these "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" fuckers tell you to check in LLM pull requests, and mock the reluctant as fools. STRINGS ARE VERY MUCH ATTACHED. This crap is fucking sticky at nuclear contamination levels. You pivoted from NFTs to this, we watched you do it.

2026-05-28 18:06:07 GMT

The problem with Bruce Springsteen inheriting Bob Dylan's mantle is he's only about 4 years younger.
https://apnews.com/article/bruce-springsteen-trump-music-festival-e25a975c10214bafd855709b0c3125cb

2026-05-04 19:06:43 GMT

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The first numbers are out on the solar canals. Water evaporation reduced by 70%, algae growth by 85%.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/05/04/solar-on-canals-reduces-water-evaporation-by-70-and-algae-growth-by-85/
Plus you generate electricity without using extra land, and nobody cares if the "roof" it's installed on leaks in the rain.

2026-04-24 03:32:17 GMT

German rooftop solar company's sales tripled in march, expected to triple again this month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rklp7CB55-U
Renewables met all new demand for electricity in 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMsjUM4cEq0

2026-04-19 21:30:11 GMT

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California's solar canal cover segments have ribbon cutting ceremonies.
https://bsky.app/profile/dustinmulvaney.bsky.social/post/3mjtcite7qk2s
Generate power while reducing evaporation, and to any fish or plants in the canal it's like being under tall trees.

2026-04-15 17:28:05 GMT

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How is #netBSD going to deal with https://social.coop/@cwebber/116408556882122186 do you think?

2026-04-15 17:15:27 GMT

The Linux developers have started removing 486 support.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start-removing-support-for-37-year-old-intel-486-cpu-head-honcho-linus-torvalds-says-zero-real-reason-to-continue-support
I really need to get netbsd installed on a laptop...

2026-04-01 21:58:17 GMT

Rutherford County Library Board fires director after she refuses to relocate 132 children's books.
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/rutherford-county-library-board-fires-director-after-she-refuses-to-relocate-132-childrens-books
Dr. Lu-anne James called the board's order to move books with LGBTQ+ themes to the adult section an unlawful act of viewpoint discrimination.
Here's the gofundme for her:
https://gofund.me/f7704eb98

2026-03-27 18:55:26 GMT

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The University of California didn't just explain how they're covering their exposed canals with solar panels to save billions of gallons of water from evaporating, they interviewed the woman behind it rather than appointing a man to take the credit.
https://youtu.be/EtJzOtOpYdo

2026-03-25 16:33:15 GMT

This is a shakedown. You bribe him to get on the approved list.
https://mastodon.social/@tiffanycli/116290215015902127
Next up is raspberry pi class devices.
They're eliminating general purpose computing devices so next ice deployment the resistance can't anonymously coordinate on signal because your government ID is tied to your device and it's legally required to dox you in all communications.

2026-03-23 19:15:26 GMT

Any time women make something lucrative, men push them out of the field. A 1983 MIT paper documented that purge in computer science: https://simson.net/ref/1983/barriers.pdf
See also https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109545727584656667 for "beer brewer" becoming "witch", Julia Child giving way to Gordon Ramsey, Sarah Taber's great thread about "egg money", the origin of the word "spinster" and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire...
Once there's money in it, douchebros terf out the founders then claim to have discovered what others invented.

2026-03-06 18:19:20 GMT

"Today’s news was about the stock market crash of Duolingo... this is one of the few positive things about “AI”: It accelerates the enshittification cycle so much that it may end up killing stuff that is detrimental to society in the first place."
https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge

2026-03-03 16:53:42 GMT

"Giving more rights to people who don't have the leverage to defend them is like giving bullied kids extra lunch money."
https://www.youtube.com/live/M9H2An_D6io
@npub1fdr…lvhs on why hollywood writers being unionized is important for them to benefit from AI output generating no new copyrights.

2026-01-10 04:45:45 GMT

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Rice pudding keeps in the fridge for weeks, and made with whole milk freezes well. I've multiplied up to use a gallon:
2.5 cups milk
1/3 cup dry rice
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 cup sugar (or splenda)
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
(1/2 cup raisins and/or nuts)
Combine milk, rice, salt, sugar in pot. Cook just at barely boiling, stirring regularly, until it turns into glop. (Somewhere between 15 mins and 1/2 hr.) Add remaining ingredients, cook ~5 more minutes, cool and serve.

2026-01-10 01:45:15 GMT

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I dunno how eggs are near you (Aldi in minneapolis has them for $2/dozen) but turning a whole loaf at a time of cheap white bread into french toast and sticking it in gallon ziplock bags in the fridge, then if they don't consider it a snack as is instead of syrup just spread jam on it.
French toast is sweet/savory agnostic, you can do all kinds of sandwiches.
Speaking of: https://mstdn.jp/@landley/112248292101028692

2025-12-11 19:18:14 GMT

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Can we use that as leverage to push https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy

2025-10-07 18:40:28 GMT

Arguing with codeberg. Created an empty repo, generated a new 4096 bit rss key for ssh, pasted the .pub into the server... cannot push: pubkey denied. Half an hour of reading docs and staring at stuff. Tried their "verification" thing, which failed.
Sigh. Dowanna do another toybox release to github, but don't want to hold up the release either...?
(Given a choice I'm GOING to use the algorithm from 1977 nobody's publicly broken yet, rather than the NSA's "trust me bro" replacements.)

2025-09-30 03:16:39 GMT

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you "got" what I'm saying but expect the average reader is dumber than you, you expected a stream of consciousness thread to be a well-edited essay (despite https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/03/270680304/this-could-have-been-shorter), you (so far uniquely) felt the need to complain at me about it, and your own complaint was not sufficiently articulate to successfully convey your intended meaning.
*shrug* Ok.

2025-09-30 02:57:05 GMT

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Golems predate frankenstein (1818) by centuries, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk toured from 1770 to 1854 (and was revealed as a hoax in 1857), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok_(Oz) was 1907, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film) was 1927, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_the_Robot was 1956, C3PO was 1977, Tron was 1982...
You could argue golems are medieval not biblical because there was no shortage of slaves back then, they just used humans. When a Bible says "servant" the greek word was generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doulos

2025-09-29 22:27:12 GMT

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Humanity has thought general AI (instant slaves) was coming soon for THOUSANDS of years. When pottery was high tech people wanted golems. When irrigation was cutting edge people thought the brain ran on a mix of "humors". Early dissection/voltaic experiments gave us Frankenstein. When clockwork was cool we had the mechanical turk (and "tik-tok the mechanical man"). When radios ran on wall current "metropolis" had an electric woman, then Robby the Robot was solid state, C3PO full of microchips...

2025-09-29 22:19:52 GMT

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No AI company has been remotely profitable so far. They play up their gross revenue but never talk net revenue. Their argument is basically "we lose money on every transaction but make it up on volume". (And they fudge even the gross revenue with "annualized" numbers that take their best month and multiply by 12.)
It's all loss leader free samples so far even when they're charging for it. They keep saying technological advances will fix that, but don't explain how.

2025-09-29 22:15:18 GMT

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Newer LLM training data unavoidably includes LLM output in what they scraped off the internet, which is like sticking a microphone into a speaker. A fairly small amount poisons the process and the math collapses, making newer models are worse than old ones, despite throwing more compute at the problem.
Plus each query costs multiple dollars to answer: humans are so much cheaper AI companies have cheated and employed them (ala the mechanical turk).
https://www.pcmag.com/news/this-companys-ai-was-really-just-remote-human-workers-pushing-buttons

2025-09-29 22:09:52 GMT

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When OpenAI launched GPT5 recently it took away access to its earlier models (which people preferred) because an LLM can't learn new things.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittification-of-generative-ai/
If you ask GPT3 about anything that happened in 2025 it doesn't know, which spoils the illusion.
An LLM is basically lossy compression for the google cache, with hallucinations being a bit like jpeg artifacts. Each LLM is a snapshot in time from when "training" slowly and expensively compressed a historical dataset.

2025-09-28 21:54:11 GMT

The AI "infinite money glitch" is called a wash trade: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lzjprizgc224
[@molly0xfff](https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff ) did a good podcast about how FTX and Alameda sent the same money back and forth, booking it as revenue each time. "My friend and I each received $1000 today... by passing the same $20 back and forth." See also Enron. Microsoft's "investment" in OpenAI included $billions in Azure cloud computing credits, yet OpenAI's use of Azure is part of Microsoft's revenue estimates:
https://medium.com/@venugopal.adep/the-2-6b-azure-credit-how-microsofts-cloud-became-openai-s-secret-weapon-1f7e2f9b0330

2025-09-28 18:24:59 GMT

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FDR gave his "I welcome their hatred" speech 3 days before the election where he won 98.5% of the electoral vote.

2025-09-23 19:34:23 GMT

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We're in an s-curve where new advances in solar and battery technology are a regular occurrence: https://youtu.be/yWMxM8YQcN4?si=fF1c_BCG-5KPY9By
Plus all the adjacent tech in the rest of the electrical ecosystem: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/
Especially "the electrification of demand": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE6eBXnb5TU&t=75s
Heat pumps and induction stoves not only replace fossil fuels with potentially renewable electricity, they're SO much more efficient burning gas to produce electricity is cheaper than running gas stoves/heaters.

2025-09-19 13:21:48 GMT

Africa is electrifying with solar and batteries, precluding projected fossil fuel demand growth:
https://youtu.be/dnjsGuiK7YE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaExwcNmpXA
The same way countries that could never afford to run cables for phone or internet service went straight to cell towers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging#Leapfrogging_in_developing_countries
Here in the US solar is 91% of new demand:
https://youtu.be/YgvgLqbZgO4
The difference is in countries without an existing fossil installed base there may never be economies of scale for fuel distribution.

2025-07-21 10:41:07 GMT

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The existing ruling party was loudly telling young people not to vote at all 6 months ago, so they did not vote for the existing ruling party, and people are surprised?

2024-11-06 22:24:59 GMT

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so worshipers cut their ears, and... lean over?

2024-11-06 20:44:53 GMT

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From whose ears?

2024-10-26 01:53:33 GMT

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Asking "who are you calling for?" is another easy filter.

2024-10-25 01:06:54 GMT

I've taken to answering the phone "Potato" instead of "Hello", because a human will go "what?" and a robocall will fail to determine what language it should start its script in.

2024-09-18 10:02:38 GMT

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Why doesn't Colbert have famous actors do dramatic readings of this stuff? A slow, sonorous version done by Samuel L Jackson for example. Or a shakesperian reading from Ian McKellen.

2024-09-17 11:36:25 GMT

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So copyright covers use and not just copying. Good to know.
If you load this spreadsheet into Microsoft Excel, you have placed Excel under the GPL. Good luck with that, it should totally end well for you.

2024-08-18 19:17:43 GMT

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I'm not sure China state media, the country that's the explicit target of the trade war and Russia's largest trade partner, is entirely unbiased here.
That's like saying the US defense budget doesn't turn a profit. The point of the tariffs was to counter "wolf warrior diplomacy", kill the belt and road initiative, and wean US supply chains off china before they invade taiwan and we blockade them.

2024-06-23 16:44:11 GMT

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The same way Linux people are pushy for wanting a non-windows alternative? Didn't want to move to GPLv3, didn't want to move to Python 3.0...
*shrug* I "male opt out" of every TSA scan, still in 2024, which screws up the system for everybody forcing them to make an exception for me. I'm funny that way.

2024-06-15 18:40:28 GMT

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Growing up, "if Rome had books, indoor plumbing, paved streets, tenement housing, retail bakeries... how could they just let everything fall apart so we didn't recreate that for a thousand years" was a hard question to answer.
Now? Not so much. Plutocracy+gerontrocracy. Rich bastards burning everything down for personal short-term gain, poor people sublimating envy into worship, "the status quo is too big to fail, it's been around forever, I literally can't imagine it collapsing"...

2024-06-15 15:29:01 GMT

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The "missing billion" (iceball earth) may also be because of a globally invasive species setting off runaway climate change. Not a lot of evidence left to reconstruct that one's causes from.
But even the dinosaur asteroid impact left birds alive. ("Tastes like chicken" is really "tastes like dinosaur".) As George Carlin remarked, "the planet's not going anywhere: WE are."