Came here to say this. All three of the major desktop operating systems have built-in controls to ignore the closing of the lid. Being forced to keep the lid open to keep a laptop on is a rookie workaround.

And I see hierarchy as essential and required for anything beyond a small, isolated community of 50-200 people.

The difference being, through technology we can make despot-proof hierarchies that self-prune away those who hunger for power and influence.

For example, direct-participatory democracy is literally political communism, and totally eliminates all politicians. What remains is a network of functionaries and bureaucrats (invariably in meritocrally-elected boards of limited duration) whose sole employed purpose is to action the will of the populace in whatever ministry they occupy. There literally is no one single person in any position who can take any kind of control, and powerful checks and balances exist throughout the system to permit an effective and efficient but subservient state that can deal with issues at scales that small communities cannot.

The downside being that truly effective direct-participatory democracy requires three foundations to be in place:

1. A well-educated populace, that is drilled in bullshit detection and critical thinking from a very early age, so that it is very difficult to hoodwink any one significant part of the population. Likely under the Montessori style of education that has been shown to be wildly more effective than our current systems. Of course, such strong focus on effective education will also cause the extinction of conservatism, but oh well.
2. A strong social safety net (not even socialism, just close), such that pretty much all people are relieved from the immense stressors of poverty and economic inequality. This allows people to open up their headspace to focus on things other than their own daily struggles to survive. Such as the direction of society.
3. An actual separation of politics from capitalism, in that capitalism is no longer able to affect politics in any way. Powerful laws that outlaw the influence of money and other benefits to any bureaucrats in any position.

Once these three are solidly in place, direct participatory democracy can be implemented, and it is only after it has been, that communism has any chance of surviving.

Real communism has a massive flaw in that it is too idealistic and fails to account for human corruption and the pursuit of power. Especially since communism is all about equalizing power among the people. Which is also how it has always been co-opted and destroyed from within shortly after it has been implemented.

This is why I fight against calling any current country “communist”, because those countries so severely violate everything that makes a state communist. These are authoritarian kleptocracies, nothing more. They use “communism” as a thin veneer of legitimacy over a fetid, rotting carcass of dictatorship that violently oppresses the people.

Which is why these were never communist states, any more than North Korea is democratic, or the old East Germany was a republic.

Just because these states wore the word “communism” like a thin veneer of legitimacy, does not a communist state make.

Communism can very much be decentralized, and in fact a correct implementation tends to be exactly that.

Because that’s where “communism” the term comes from - community, communal, etc…

I could get behind that.

But wealth is power, and power does not corrupt so much as it attracts the corruptible. You would need to work with all manner of sociopaths and malignant narcissists. And these are people who have the least justification for existing in a polite society.

Plus, they would also continue to be parasites on civilization, and continue to pathologically hoard more wealth than they could possibly spend in a million lifetimes.

Honestly, a guillotine is a lot simpler and a lot faster. Take out the top 0.01% of civilization, and the remaining members of the Parasite Class will not fight when you implement 99% top-tier tax rates, close all of the high-wealth loopholes, and build proper social frameworks that benefit everyone.

And this starts with the political system, with a high-tech direct-participation democracy which eliminates all politicians in favour of letting everyone vote on all issues. This requires a foundation with a population that is well educated in critical thinking and bullshit detection (which would destroy all conservatism in the first place), and an economic system (even modified capitalism) that meets everyone’s needs so everyone would have the headspace to deal with societal questions without being forced to always focus on economic survival. Without this political framework, socialism/communism of any form would continue to be corrupted and co-opted by strongmen and tyrants.

Because when you look at any attempt to implement communism in the past, it never survived beyond a few months to maybe a year or so. Sure, Russia had its revolution in 1917, but by 1918 Russian communism was effectively dead; taken over by an authoritarian kleptocracy no different than a feudal system.

Eternally youthful but mortal life.

I don’t mind dying. Death is what makes life have meaning. Let me live long enough and at some point I would be eager to wrap up my concerns and shuffle off this mortal coil.

But I would prefer to die on my own terms, at a time of my own choosing, and in the meantime exist with all the physical and mental vigour of someone between the ages of 25 and 45.

And the key is not being immortal, as I would not want to always survive grievous injuries. I would want to be mortal on purpose – if an accident would kill a normal human despite immediate medical attention of the highest modern quality, I would want to die just the same. I would not want to continue existing as bloody paste paining the interior hull of an airliner that smacked into a mountain.

But barring accidents, I would love to loiter and observe the next few centuries in great health and youthful vigour. Doing what, I don’t know. That’s for the future to determine. But it would be interesting.

…When mentally ill people are put in charge of the nation’s government…

You have to go out of your way to either be extremely bigoted

looks at all the alt-right subs and the fascist users

Uhhhh…

This doesn’t help people for whom their ISP doesn’t even provide IPv6.

I run Telus Business Fibre so I can have whatever port I want open, running whatever service I want, and a clutch of static IPv4 addresses for legacy stuff.

Telus Business has zero IPv6 availability, and is projected to not have IPv6 for at least the next decade.

Like, fuck me.

I know this is an April Fool’s, I’m just lambasting one of Canada’s largest fibre Internet providers for their wholesale inability to remain modern and effective.

Considering that all other alternatives are either

• extremely difficult if not impossible for non-technical users to leverage, or
• much, much worse, up to even eagerly giving out your data

I consider Signal to be the best option out there. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. It simply is the best general option out there, by far, for a general audience.

Yes, you can be totally secure, untraceable, and ultimately unfindable. But being cut into pieces, with each separate piece entombed in its own barrel of concrete, and each barrel dropped into a different oceanic trench, tends to be a bit beyond what I consider to be reasonable to achieve that.

AI is a solution in search of a problem.

The problem being CEOs asking themselves, “how do we acquire labour without having to pay for said labour, in order to maximize our own profit margins?”

AI was always meant to allow wealth to access labour without allowing labour to access wealth.

I, for one, am designing an entire production line of guillotines for when our capitalist system finally collapses. And for those in bunkers: a way of discovering air exchangers and all emergency exits so they can be filled with cement to turn bunkers into tombs. We need an effective method of culling sociopaths from our civilization, after all.

Insurers, he said, are already lobbying state-level insurance regulators to win a carve-out in business insurance liability policies so they are not obligated to cover AI-related workflows. “That kills the whole system,” Deeks said.

If insurers are going through extreme lengths to remove AI output from the list of things they will insure, this says everything about its future.

Because nothing says “effective risk management achieved” like an insurer signing off on, or forbidding the insurance of, an entire class of materials.

It’s a canary in a coal mine, like how insurers are now removing any ability for Floridians to insure against hurricanes or sea level rise, despite flat earthers screaming their heads off that climate change is a conspiracy and isn’t real.

(Note: I have seen the term “flat earther” starting to be used as a catch-all term for anyone who vehemently denies reality in spite of copious evidence that shows they are wholly and completely wrong)

Finland facepalms furiously in the corner, gesturing vehemently at the homeless solutions it has proven as being wildly successful and undeniably effective

Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.

However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.

Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.

However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.

And this is just one of three reasons why I will never own a vehicle manufactured after 2006.

Back in the mid-80s: CHUD. Cannibalistic Underground Humanoid Dwellers.

Being on the spectrum, this really messed me up, even though the special effects were cheesy even for that era. And I mean heck, I was also 15 at the time, and had never seen any kind of a horror movie before…

Just learned a short while ago that the term has been co-opted to describe conservatives in general, and white conservative men specifically. I now find myself in awe at how well-applied that term is.

Honourable mention to The Last Unicorn completely tearing me up with its ending, and throwing me into a two-month existential crisis bender that I don’t think I ever fully recovered from.

If betting on Polymarket, you would actually have to stump up that money first, and the other person would have to do the same with whatever bid they wanted to use. Then, in order to get any kind of reasonable payback, you would need thousands of other people to make a bet for or against, using their own money.

The payout isn’t on someone making a bet on themselves, no-one else would bet for or against that as the stakes are so small. The payout is on large-scale events that are - ostensibly - out of the control of the bettor or bettee.

Polymarket is no different than betting on the outcomes of horse races or sports games, it just opens up the thing being betted on to anything and everything. People will still bet. The key is how “un-rigged” it appears to be.

There are ways for normal home users to bodily rip this shit out, but it takes some work and technical knowledge to effectively rip-and-tear in ways that work for you.

Some of the tools are also not the most user-friendly, expect the user to be a power user with deep familiarity with Windows, and have non-obvious workflows that may confuse a majority of average users.