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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • Here’s the actual TL:DW (it’s not that long, and I did watch it)

    Steve describes what’s happened (Micron shuts down Crucial their consumer-facing “store brand”), mocks their stupid press release, and discusses the nuances involved, will they still be selling to all the rebadged memory resellers who use Micron as a supplier? Unclear, their reps and defenders say yes, their PR and the context implies not really, unless those resellers want to get into a bidding war with AI datacenters that they’re not going to win. Steve not-so-subtly implies that this seems awfully sort of kind of like more price fixing from a small group of oligopolist companies who have in fact been convicted in the past of price fixing, while explictly stating that he is, of course, for legal reasons, definitely NOT implying that in any way shape or form. Some much deserved ranting about how shitty and frustrating this situation is is mixed in throughout and he goes over details about exactly how much prices have risen already, pointing out all the different devices that require some form of high speed memory that are going to be affected by this. Some further discussion suggests the possibility this might just be a shot across the bow to let the other memory companies who are totally not colluding with Micron and never would consider doing that to let them know it’s absolutely time to not collude about anything like that because of course they’re all paying very close attention right now. So we’ll have to see what else develops, but basically he’s letting everyone know he’s on it, and he’s paying very close attention too.

    I might’ve read between the lines a bit in a few places, I have some of my own strong feelings about what’s going on here, so I apologise if I inadvertently mixed in any of my own interpretation by accident.


  • There are still some factors providing weight on the other end of that lever. Valve is doing good things with Steam Deck and the popularity of it is keeping developers supporting lower spec hardware. Remote play codecs (both Steam’s own and Moonlight/Sunshine) reduce the need to have more than one capable gaming computer as you can just stream from the one you do have to any others. Raspberry Pi is a great way to access non-gaming computing cheaply. Arduino, even though the company itself is kind of doing some shit, still has an ecosystem big enough to survive even if the company itself completely sabotages it. And of course the used/surplus PC market is thriving, even more than ever before with Windows 11 forcing millions of PCs into early retirement for no good reason. They’re still perfectly capable machines that will run Linux without an issue and you get them cheap as a song or even free if you play your cards right.

    I’m not saying any of this to dispute anything you’re saying, I’m just pointing out these resources we still have so that we can take advantage of them while we still can and protect our continued access to them. It’s clear the claws are coming out to start locking down consumer computing, but people need to know there is a resistance to it and there are ways to resist. And we should.


  • No, I don’t think it does that at all. People need to be able to see the world in more than just binary choices, “it is, or it isn’t”. I reject the premise that things can’t be in between, that it can’t be a little bit of slavery, while still understanding that plantations were a whole lot of slavery. Comparing the similar aspects of things and discussing the things they have in common is not the same as equating them and we can have better discussions if we resist the assumptions that drive us to that conclusion.

    I think we also need to keep in mind what slavery actually is, the actual concept of slavery not just the most extensively taught and politically important implementation of it which people tend to confuse and conflate with the concept itself. What happened with the trans-atlantic slave trade is just one example of slavery, it’s not the definition, and as a result we need to be clear which concept of slavery we’re talking about here.

    Slavery is fundamentally about depriving people of their right to choose for themselves. The sadistic violence and cruelty of the slave trade and plantations are the emblematic and possibly inevitable results of that, but it’s not what actually defines it. A slave would still technically be a slave even if all the choices being made for them were to make them comfortable and protected while they live in luxury. If they are not allowed to choose anything different for themselves and do not have any personal autonomy to make the choices they want to make, they are a slave to someone or to something. Even kings have sometimes been described as slaves to their position and that is actually true in some ways. That is not “minimizing” slavery, that’s simply describing what being a slave is. It’s not having the right to choose for yourself.

    If modern technology and digital rights management controls are depriving people of their rights to choose for themselves in important ways, then it’s totally fair to call it digital slavery.




  • Sure, but a name is just a name, they still work just fine even when they only reflect their origins and don’t reflect the current reality anymore. NATO’s already got a handful of members that are a stretch to consider under anything but the broadest definition of “North Atlantic”. Tim Horton’s used to be about a hockey player, now it’s just, passable coffee and shitty food. Sometimes they don’t even reflect the origins either. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea hasn’t ever been very Democratic, has it?

    Even if they really are attached to the limitations self-imposed by the name, I feel like they need to consider whether Europe is strictly just a place or can it also be a state of mind? Alternately, we can just surrender to Denmark and become a territorial extension of Greenland (which isn’t even green!). It’s fine either way.

    I promise I’m only being like 65% tongue-in-cheek.





  • Canada hasn’t really been preparing for this, it caught us very much by surprise. The dramatic nature of our response has more to do with utter shock and which prompted a thorough reading of all the writing that has previously been put on the wall, than it does with decades of serious preparation, but it will be no less consequential in the end. Reducing our reliance on the US is something Canada has talked about for at least the better part of a century, but never very seriously and whenever we tried even modest moves in that direction, we would find them thoroughly sabotaged or some other immediately looming threat to our economy would inevitably appear and take priority and force us back towards the US (none of which was the fault or intention of the US of course, they were just helping us, being our friend and trusted ally!). There are some very quiet, but very serious geopolitics going on, and peaceful, inoffensive Canada is in much more dangerous position than I think most people realize. But some Canadians are starting to realize it. Ukraine is an example of what happens when you get in the way and deny one of the so-called “great powers” something that they want and feel entitled to, and I don’t think any of us imagine the US is going to take this completely sitting down.

    It took a direct threat to our sovereignty as a free country to finally spur us into action, but spurred we have been, and I have little doubt Canadians will forget that anytime soon. The hockey analogy we’ve adopted is that our elbows are up, we’re now committed to going for the hit and being sent to the penalty box if that’s what it takes. This is not even about scoring goals or winning the game anymore, this is about sending a message to the opposing team that we’ve had enough and we will not let them push us around anymore, and if they do they will pay the price whether it’s within the rules or not. We’re ready to fight until the refs step in and make us stop.



  • if you are a creator and you’d prefer to not make use of JS (there’s dozens of us) then forcing people to go through a JS “security check” feels kind of shit. The alternative is to just take the hammering, and that feels just as bad.

    I’m with you here. I come from an older time on the Internet. I’m not much of a creator, but I do have websites, and unlike many self-hosters I think, in the spirit of the internet, they should be open to the public as a matter of principle, not cowering away for my own private use behind some encrypted VPN. I want it to be shared. Sometimes that means taking a hammering. It’s fine. It’s nothing that’s going to end the world if it goes down or goes away, and I try not to make a habit of being so irritating that anyone would have much legitimate reason to target me.

    I don’t like any of these sort of protections that put the burden onto legitimate users. I get that’s the reality we live in, but I reject that reality, and substitute my own. I understand that some people need to be able to block that sort of traffic to be able to limit and justify the very real costs of providing services for free on the Internet and Anubis does its job for that. But I’m not one of those people. It has yet to cost me a cent above what I have already decided to pay, and until it does, I have the freedom to adhere to my principles on this.

    To paraphrase another great movie: Why should any legitimate user be inconvenienced when the bots are the ones who suck. I refuse to punish the wrong party.


  • The executives should not have any immunity to prosecution, we need to start holding them accountable. The technology is never the problem, technology just provides us with tools, like any tools sometimes they can be dangerous and deserve immense respect, but it’s the people using them and deciding how they are used who are making those tools and technologies actually hurt and kill people, not the technology. A tool is not inherently good or bad, it does not have intentions or motivations. People do. Let the technology be a technology, and hold the people accountable.


  • They both have their place. WebDav is an established standard, by implementing it you are collaborating with all the other implementations that already use and are compatible with WebDav in some way. You join a growing ecosystem of many choices and people can easily plug your software into their architecture and plug their architecture into your software with an absolute minimum of work on their part, potentially allowing it to become widely used. This is good.

    Having a socket and API allows anyone who wants to, to collaborate with your software specifically, allowing them to be able to do things highly specific to your software, but requiring more specialized work to implement. These kind of implementations can deliver great functionality but they’re likely going to be few and far between because they are more work to develop and maintain. These are very different situations, being sought by different people with different goals.