Yeah the ‘idk’ part is the important one because as a generation we’ve been so dependent on devices for everything from entertainment to productivity that we have no fucking clue what to do AFK. This has been a bitter struggle for me lately. I feel my life slipping away from me click by click but whenever I try to go offline my dopamine system SCREAMS at me to dig up the tablet I buried in my car’s trunk.

You were talking about data ownership, not intellectual property.

Oof. Was not aware of that one.

According to legend, Alexander the Great came to visit the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. Alexander wanted to fulfill a wish for Diogenes and asked him what he desired. As told by Diogenes Laërtius, Diogenes replied, “Stand out of my light.”

One day while he was eating a frugal dish of lentils, he was challenged by the philosopher Aristippus, who, for his part, led a golden life as he was one of the king’s courtiers. Aristippus scornfully told him: “See, if you learned to crawl before the king, you wouldn’t have to settle for rubbish like this vulgar dish of lentils!” Diogenes replied: “If you’d learned to make do with lentils, you wouldn’t have to crawl before the king!”

Big dick energy. Love this guy.

Your heart rate. Your step count. Your location. Your searches. Your browser history. Your call history. Your contacts. Your transactions. Your credit history. Your medical history. This is data that you didn’t choose to create or share, but that you exhaust in the day-to-day things you do.

Surveillance capitalism has grown too unfathomably huge and ingrained to choose not to share this data; that would be akin to checking out of modern life wholesale in a lot of ways. Guarding this data takes not only the realisation that it needs guarding, but changing law and culture such that the parties that have to have all that data to provide you with services cannot take it from you to sell.

In Yanis Varoufakis’s words: Techno feudalism.

Rotate the left display 90 degrees clockwise. Now they’re both in landscape. Ta-da!

Sorry, I’ll see myself out.

Forgiving yourself is difficult. You have grown enough to realize what you did was dumb. Whenever your brain decides to throw a random cringe memory in your face, consciously tell yourself you’re better now and you forgive yourself for your mistakes. It helped me.

Yeah I don’t see 8K delivering any value. My eyes can’t resolve past 4k anyway, it’ll just be heavier on the GPU and it won’t get me a damn thing.

Sure, 64k ought to be enough, yada yada. That doesn’t apply when you’re running up against biological limits though.

Why bother with X? Just do l33t CLI h4xx0rs

Yeah, that’s easy to miss since Apple removed the super helpful tutorial shorts in the touchpad settings. The new menu is less clear imo.

I’m a schizophrenic that switches between Apple and FOSS regularly. It’s gotten to the point where I have an iPhone and a 14" M1 Pro MBP, and also a FairPhone and a Thinkpad T480 upgraded to the gills.

Yes, the Apple ecosystem is like a warm blanket. If you use it the way Apple intended it’s smooth as butter, a completely seamless experience that generally does what it says on the tin with a great user experience. The screens, speakers, build quality and integrated software experience are the best on the planet if you ask me.

However, you live in Apple’s fortress and they can turn that into a prison any time they want. Also if you’re not particularly happy with some way MacOS, but especially i(Pad)OS, does a thing, you’re either shit out of luck or you have to install a paid app that breaks standard workflow. I guess a good way to put this is that Apple has been making appliances of late, rather than computers. Less so for MacOS which is still pretty open to configuration.

The reason I keep switching to FOSS is idealism; I want my hard- and software to belong to me and only me. That also means I am responsible if things break or they don’t work as well as they should. It’s up to me to fix or improve. That sometimes annoys the hell out of me at which point I will switch back to Apple until such time I read a post or view a video that rants about proprietary bullshit and how surveillance/late stage/attention capitalism is ruining the world and round and round we go.

For this latest stint I bought the Thinkpad and upgraded the hell out of it (I figure if Linux is going to run well on anything it’s a Thinkpad). Hope it sticks this time.

Much cheaper, no electricity required, no ChatGPT generated clickbait horseshit AND you can kill flies!

Thanks USA, for fucking up so hard the rest of us can slack off on improvement because you’re pulling the average so far out.

So their amazing management platform ultimately manages the pile of horse shit the end user will have to deal with. That is shit with extra steps.

Funny, I’ve always thought of them as terms of honour. At least that’s why I called my father old man. He called his captain that back when he was a sailor. (second edit: fun fact, his last captain was my grandpa on mom’s side. Guess he liked the captain’s daughter.)

edit: I guess it’s a way to acknowledge seniority.

Except for the larger companies you still need a bunch of trained experts in house to manage everything.

If you work remote, just don’t. That’s what I don’t. Works great.

Don’t let the intrusive thoughts win

For bullshit like spinning rims or golf clubs that wouldn’t surprise me but it’s not like I can just choose not to eat. I HAVE to buy food.