That’s such an interesting statement.

Irrelevant for my post, since I lived in Britain for over a decade, but interesting.

Thank you for sharing that tidbit about yourself.

The UK is an incredibly Classist society with a long-running “know your place” kind of mindset and very low Social Mobility for an European nation - people very much are defined by their class (all the way to ther being a very specific, non-regional, English language accent for the upper class) and one’s social class is very much inherited.

The 60s and the 70s were the peak point for the result of the post War (that being WWII) increase in social mobility in Britain with lots of Working Class lads and lasses making it big in, amongst others, the arts (and you see it not just in Comedy but also Acting more in general and especially in Music were almost every great British star from that age had working class origins).

All this has in the meanwhile being reversed, hence once again almost all modern British artists are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle and upper classes.

During that golden period the massive mix of people from all origins in the arts created all kind of original and “not knowing your place” art expressions, and I believe the Money Pythons are one of those.

This isn’t a “Is killing a person that insulted you right or wrong?” moral conundrum, it’s a “If you could kill Hitler after he had started exterminating people, would that be right or wrong?” moral conundrum.

Most people who would say “it’s the wrong thing to do” for the first one would say “it’s the right thing to do” for the second.

Mind you, the really right thing to do on the situation with this CEO would have been for the State to do its fucking job and protect the people from mass murderers like him, but it refuse to do so, hence here we are in a bad situation.

Well, in the total picture the best option of all would be Justice System which is Just and hence stop people causing massive numbers of deaths for profit, which is not what we have (especially in the US) and is even getting worse.

Ultimately all Just venues (I was going to say “non-violent”, but “lawful” violence is still “violence”, so even in a Just system, Force would still be used on the ones profiting from mass deaths) seem to have been closed in the last couple of decades.

The more options get closed, the more people will only see as options to either meekly accept the death of a loved one (or oneself) due to the actions of the people leading Health Insurance companies or vigilante vengeance, since the State has over the years removed itself from enacting Justice against the wealthiest in society, which would’ve been the best option of all (not least because it prevents the deaths of both the victims of guys like this CEO and of guys like the CEO)

Indeed, dichotomies presented in arguments are more often than not false, but sometimes they’re true.

Trust in authoritative figures (for example, actual Journalists) was burned for political gains by mainstream parties and their billionaire owners (and by “owners” I mean of both the Media and the Parties) since at least the 80s - the essence of Neoliberalist propaganda was to use convoluted half-truths, purposeful misinterpretation and information flow control (mainly cherry-picking) to deceive people into supporting that which wasn’t actually good for most of them in the medium and long term (who can forget things like “trickle down”?) and the increasing disconnect between what people were told and what they saw happen and felt, ground away the trust people had in those autoritative sources of information (and in lots of other things: trust in experts as autoritative sources of information and interpretation in their own expert areas was also ground away quite likely due to how that Neoliberal propaganda also made heavy use of technocratic speaking “experts” - notice how even the trust on medical doctors for health-related things, such as mask wearing during COVID, was clearly lacking).

Almost everybody can be deceived about things they have no expertise on, but at some point in the past at least many if not most of those people were in some way anchored to objective-reality (-ish) by trustworthy sources of information and interpretation, and that’s not the case anymore because that trust was sistematically abused during at least 4 decades.

In the US both the Democrats and the Republicans were doing it with gusto, so the rise of populists like Trump is really just the reaping of a crop which both those parties sowed.

All this to say that blaming humans for being human rather than everybody that took and takes advantage of that, is at best naive and at worst being a bit of an useful idiot (for still falling for the swindle of excusing the very politicians who put us were we are now).

Yeah, the case with antennas is a good point - when I decided to concentrate various things in a Mini-PC in my living room (TV-Box, Router and so on) I actually looked into these router Mini-PCs as an option and the biggest problem was the lack of a proper antenna, so I ended up going with a generic Mini-PC and leaving out the router functionality which remains done by my old router (which is quite decent, just a bit outdated).

Mind you, this one also wouldn’t work for me because I’m using 4 Ethernet ports (1 for the external connection and 3 internally) whilst this one only has 2 (a weird choice for a router).

IMHO, this isn’t really better than just getting an SBC with 2 Ethernet ports and WiFi and put it in a box with an antenna), a setup which suffers from exactly the same problem as this one: not enough Ethernet ports.

The very example I provided comes with an mPCI-e slot to install a WiFi card of your choosing.

Also they have SIM card slots so you can install a data SIM card and set-up a fallback configuration that switches to it if your landline internet connection goes down.

Whilst that’s a nice slogan, in Electronics “open source” doesn’t mean anywhere as much as it does in Software because it’s generally just knowing which components go into the circuit, which is but a fraction of the work (laying out the board is a massive chunk of work, in some cases most of it, and at high enough clock speeds circuit design is an art in itself).

Mind you, I like the Orange Pi and Banana Pi guys, and the idea of an SBC designed for being an open source router is pretty appealing, though nowadays maybe pfSense would be a better choice than OpenWrt.

Finally this thing having only 2 ethernet ports + WiFi makes it little more than a regular $70+ SBC board + a box - something easy enough to put together by any technically inclined person - which isn’t exactly exciting.

So, how is this any better than the Router Mini PCs you can find in Aliexpress (random example)?

In my country, to crack down on tax evasion by small businesses people can give their tax payer number when they buy something (say food at a restaurant) and a copy of the receipt automatically gets passed on to the taxman (there’s a lottery on those and people can get some money from it, which is how the State incentivises people to do this, plus you can get some tax discounts on some kinds of expenses such as medicine).

All this to say that the idea of the taxman getting a copy of an itemized receipt for sex work services is just delicious.

PS: Around here sex work is unregulated, meaning not illegal (though profiting of other people’s sex work is illegal) but not explicitly legal and regulated.

Having moved fully to Linux some months ago, I look at this kind of thing both with with a feeling of smug satisfaction and with cold chills of somebody who only now starts to fully realise just how massive, heavy and fast the incoming train they just dodged is.

The country moved to the far-right, the Industry I was working in - Finance - lost 40,000 jobs, Britain got general Economic stagnation worse than the EU, the value of the British Pound fell significantly against the Euro after the vote (fortunatelly I moved all my savings out of Pound-denominated assets evern before the Leave vote, so I personally was alright) all of the sudden as an EU immigrant you became a second class citizen with lots of extra hassle for living there (inside the EU, EU immigrants have the same rights as the locals, so when Britain left, they lost that), significant decay and problems with their National Health Service, really bad mishandling of COVID (especially in the beginning) and so on.

In some ways the place turned into a mini Trump’s-America, only with the extra nastiness of already being very classist country with very low social mobility from the start and a heavy “know your place” mindset - which is extra hard for immigrants because Britons see themselves as superior to all foreigners but Americans, so “Immigrant” is the lowest “social class” for them - and without the upsides that American has (mainly space and scale, natural resources and at least in some places good weather).

Mind you, most of those things are trends predating Brexit which were heavilly accelerated by it.

As an EU immigrant, left the UK after the Leave vote but before Brexit and Covid.

It’s not a bullet but more like a whole lot of bullets.

Mind you, most of it was entirely predictable back then.

I’ve been playing Kerbal Space Program again (it’s one of those games you tend to come back to after a while without playing).

You can buy it from stores like GoG or even the maker itself.

Same thing for Factorio (jokingly called Cracktorio by many).

Both are about finding ways to create complex functional things from simpler elements to achieve goals.

Yeah, but they’re great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-“moderate” political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won’t do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would’ve been it if, it wasn’t that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:

• I think the “neutral” majority shift more to one side or the other depending on who dominates society and the main sources of culture and information in it.

So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.

The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.

Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.

The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).

It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.

Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.

Yeah, but that happens only once per person, whilst the other one happens every day.