Its just so tiring. Now a rather prominent KDE dev is also valiantly defending the fashtech flagship projects from being accurately described as fascist.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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AI slop has been discovered in an anatomy textbook (the news originally broke on TikTok, but I discovered this through Bluesky):
Obituaries are being run for John Searle. Most obituaries will focus on the Chinese Room thought experiment, an important bikeshed in AI research noted for the ease with which freshmen can incorrectly interpret it. I'm glad to see that Wikipedia puts above the Chinese Room the fact that he was a landlord who sued the city of Berkeley and caused massive rent increases in the 1990s; I'm also happy that Wikipedia documents his political activity and sexual-assault allegations.
And in related news, worldwide ecosystems are already getting perma-fucked by billionaires' repeated and relentless wrecking of our planet for personal gain.
I mention billionaires specifically because the average Joe, the 99% of humanity being told to cut down their carbon footprint and delete emails to save water, is completely fucking blameless in this.
They didn't choose to have car-centric architecture forced on them for the past goddamn century, they didn't choose to have planet-wrecking crypto farms/NFTs forced on them a few years ago, and they sure as hell didn't choose to have planet-killing AI slop extruders forced on them, either.
(Anyways, unrelated hot take of the day: taking responsibility for something you're not responsible for is a moral failing, and needs to be treated as such)
this has been previously sneered on, but only now i've clocked this: AI2027 is another name for, or elaboration* of "san francisco consensus", from april this year or so, "named so because everyone who believes in it is in san francisco", more precisely timeline roughly matches and it hinges on iterative self-improvement
* which might just mean it was laundered through chatbots to bulk it up initially. what i mean to say is even openai's dooming might not be original
so if anyone's counting then this thing is a couple of months older
and apparently spotify has found a new low
I killed my sub years ago because of the rogan shit along with disliking what they were forcing the product to become (and clearly indicated all of this in the why-leaving input field) but this makes me wish I could kill it even harder
This has been a problem for a while esp with podcast providers, who put ice ads in podcasts and then the podcasts get blamed. (Despite having very little control over it, and the control also often being ignored).
I fell off Spotify years ago and never subbed, nice to see I made the right call.
I’ve been wanting to go back to some sort of DAP full time but I’m not a huge fan of Android being the experience. Anyone got recommendations of a non-Android based DAP so I can cut the streaming services out for good?
I miss my Creative Zen back in 2008.
I miss mp3s being widely available. The lack of easy piracy also coincided with me just spending less money on music at all. (Lot of other factors as well).
However I think some of those other streaming services provide lot better rates per song for the artists than Spotify.
If you buy from BandCamp, you get lossless and lower quality audio files. Only really good for smaller newer artists though. Also you can get a seedbox for like 10 dollars a month and then pirating is easier than ever.
I just got a cheap-ass Sandisk MP3 player, as part of my efforts to both stop streaming and stop depending on a phone so much when I'm outside. It has an audiobook function which didn't work but after a firmware update it does, mostly. It's not a good device by any stretch but it cost me 20€ and I consume a lot of audiobooks, and it's extremely calming to not be exposed to a smartphone when I read.
On the music side of things the biggest change wasn't so much the devices but getting more into bandcamp, with a healthy supplementation of stuff downloaded from soulseek, torrents, and on a pinch, youtube. I make wishlists of small bands I like and buy full albums on bandcamp friday. Listening to these offline made me able to listen to entire albums again, like in the physical media days, which again I find to be incredibly calming compared to hopping between the same favourites on shuffle.
Spotify actually helped me discover music, both through user-created playlists and algorithmic suggestions. I hear it's all full of "AI"-generated music and lists, though, and I found a much more powerful algorithm to discover music, called "asking people".
Got a couple of these sandisk players for my boys. Theyre solid!
Tangara is an open source project made by a fediverse hardware hacker with contributions from other fediverse personalities. it’s reputedly pretty good, though all the reviews I’ve seen are from other fediverse posters so it may be worth looking at some independent reviews to confirm it’s not just homegrown optimism.
at the risk of going open source reply guy and making a recommendation you can’t follow up on, I’ve had a lot of success with Jellyfin as a media library/local streaming host and the beta version of Jellyfin as an app that lets me stream FLACs on my local network and seamlessly download them onto my phone. a VPN or a Jellyfin library on a VPS can let you stream your stuff almost anywhere in much higher quality than Spotify.
I don’t own a Tangara though I do want one, and I’m fairly sure they don’t support the Jellyfin API yet, but if you end up missing a more Spotify-style listening experience then it might be worth inquiring if there’s any Jellyfin client projects in progress.
I can speak for the tangara, lovely hardware but it is an mp3 player first and foremost. the hardware is technically capable of network stuff but their software stack is mostly focused on recreating that iPod experience and keeping the battery life to days of playback. It does take some getting used to if you've been living in musical algoworld for a minute
I feel that if you are an USian who thinks that accepting US government contracts has become morally incorrect then fretting over swedish audio streaming companies is a waste of your time.
edit: free market solutionism as a response to having a dollarstore sturmabteilung running the streets in the USA just rubs me the wrong way. Sorry if the original post reads a bit coy, I just feel it would be incredibly cringe of me to make overt recommendations on how to handle things from the relative safety of living in a first world country on the other side of the world.
Swedish audio streaming companies who recruit for ethnic cleansing militia squads, and whose profits are reinvested in "AI" murderdrone arms dealer Helsing.
This wasn't a pro-spotify post, it was a your government isn't something you can just boycott away post.
Like, your taxes are already paying for ICE directly.
That's like "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism so I'll get an Amazon Prime subscription" thinking.
You can't boycott away a government, you can't even boycott away a corporation for that matter. That doesn't mean we should just give up and be complicit.
Governments are toppled, not opted out of, is all I'm saying.
Also not sure I agree that all consumer activism is inherently in vain.
@Architeuthis @froztbyte if someone built, say, social housing with money from the US government, I wouldn't care who was currently president. Guns guns guns, WMDs and Gestapo recruiting, OTOH 😬
(As long as they deliver, and aren't just lining their pockets, ofc)
I see that wedging Copilot into Excel is going just swimmingly:
Honey, I invested $100 billion in AI, and all I got was 1 + 2 + 3 = 15
a very “oh no. anyway,” kind of post
turns out the rest of the owl is the hard part! what a surprise!
Apologies in advance for the infohazard
Tucker - Every Tech Billionaire Is Having the Same Haunting Vision. Demonologist Explains Why
Nick Land Responds to Tucker Carlson
WTF. how is he going mainstream.
e
LAND: I mean, I'm obviously skeptical of the fact that large chunks of Silicon Valley are engaged in occult rituals involving involving a numogram. But I mean, it's not something I guess I have any authority to to talk about. Well, I mean, I can only say that they they certainly aren't in contact with me if if that is happening. They're they're doing it very, you know, if not privately at least. It's my involvement is is actually zero in that.
Insert gif of lemurs here.
The $10K Existential Hope Meme Prize: A celebration of creativity, optimism, and big-picture thinking.
And none other than friend-of-the-pod Steven Pinker is a judge!
(Via)