• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • They will be able to steer entire cultures and countries without ever appearing as if they were sitting in the drivers seat. This is the social control endgame playing out in front of our very eyes. Why use violence to control people when you can subconsciously persuade with bandwagonning and peer influence by tempting people into parasocial relationships with AIs you control. Expect the AIs to offer real benefits, but with hidden catches. Like how rats are killed with 10% poison and 90% tasty treats, we will be steered to our doom by exploiting our desires and weaknesses and our inability/unwillingness to take into account the future effects of our decisions today. This is nothing new, it’s just a larger, subtler, more wide reaching way of doing it.







  • I will remember this, even more so because of the confused drama that preceded it. In general, I find it difficult for me to endorse any commercial entity, but Bitwarden has my admiration and I will continue to offer it as a better alternative to people I see storing their passwords in Chrome or Lastpass. I’m also happy to pay a bit to support a good product and will continue to support the development even if I switch to self-hosted at some point.










  • I had a Google GSuite account from back when they advertised it as a free for life solution for families who wanted to use their own domain. They stopped offering this a long time ago, but kept us around. A few years ago, they tried to end it, but walked that back after facing resistance. We were among the earliest adopters and many of us shilled pretty hard for gmail over the years. Not only would they have gone back on their word, but my app and media purchases would be tied to a crippled no-email account (identity only) because they didn’t have a migration path to normal gmail. That means multiple logins. Also, the gsuite inbox doesn’t have the inline ads or anything while the regular one does. I’ve been working to move away from google because I imagine they’ll try to end this again later, but also just because we understand better who google really is.

    The site the greedy little pigboy runs was instrumental to the resistance but since it’s enshittified, we may not be able to resist again. Its fine to say something is for a lifetime, but you have to honor that or you’ve been dishonest and no one can trusts thing you say.

    The only reason I still have google around is android. When we finally get a linux daily driver phone that meets my minimum needs, I’m migrating the remainder of my stuff. I’ll happily give up some functionality to do it. I just hope they can keep their free for life promise until then.