I mean, you could attach a pi (and a Kafkaesque combination of USB hubs and adapters) to run a ramdisk make a sort of scratch disk ChristNAS

That’s a bit sad

They were kinda little time capsules of various corners of YouTube adjacent internet culture over time

The chances of a true philanthropist beating out the psychopaths currently at the top of the chain, is basically nil. They will always fight dirtier.

You need to ensure a government can exert power over the largest organisations in its country. If that ever becomes an issue, the organisation might start behaving as a de facto government of its own and start treating the actual government as a vassal.

Basically we need to kick corporatist politicians out of our governments before they finish rolling out the red carpet for the end of democracy, and start chopping up and/or nationalising these proto-megacorps. If only a few control the tools that put us all out of work, we’re not getting anything close to utopia.

And I suppose I’ll continue my plan of staying the hell away until this administration is long gone

This feels pretty hard to enforce, are they gonna let people self select what they provide or are they perhaps going to give a list of services to give accounts for? The latter would have me looking either like a ghost that disappeared about 7 years ago (for most public social media) or one that disappeared about 3 years ago (if Reddit is included)

What happens to people who don’t use social media at all? Are they going to be treated with suspicion?

Hmm, well the latter part is still standard monitor controls (contrast, brightness, colour temperature)

For the former, limiting how fast brightness can change would effectively be the same as a poor pixel response time. This tends to manifest as image ghosting past a certain point and is usually seen as pretty undesirable given it means you lose a lot of detail around anything in motion

You’re describing image contrast, high contrast pushes the pixel intensity out to the extremes (black & white), low contrast pushes it to the middle* (grey).

I’m pretty sure every monitor I’ve ever used has a setting for it, which is about as close to the end of the pipeline as you’re going to get.

*The brightness setting means it might not actually be a middle grey

I’m not recommending it, I’m describing why saying it adds no security is silly.

The keys being compromised on some motherboards doesn’t mean the whole concept is suddenly inert for every single user

If everyone has a copy of my passwords and authenticator keys, that wouldn’t suddenly make 2 factor auth a compromised idea.

Hell, even if you are one of those people running a machine with the compromised keys, it’s still going to block malware that was written before the keys were leaked unless malware authors have also figured out time travel.

Well boot sector viruses used to be all the rage in the 90s, they’re entirely impossible under secure boot

Malware rootkits were a pretty big problem about a decade ago, I understand the techniques those mostly used are more or less impossible under secure boot now too

Then we could go into all the government and adjacent industry use cases where state-sponsored targeted attacks are a real concern. Measures like filling USB ports with super glue and desoldering microphones on company laptops is not unheard of in those circles, so blocking unknown bootloaders from executing is an absolute no brainer.

Saying it provides no security is just not true. Your front door isn’t only secure if someone has failed to break in

You don’t have to

If you only need it for 90 days before it expires, Microsoft will give you the VM for free (and if you’re particularly industrious, you might write a script that then installs a load of your shit for you to run after you fire up a fresh one)

If you don’t care about potentially breaking the law you can run it forever with a couple of scripts you can find on GitHub

If you don’t want to break the law but also don’t want to pay full price you can get a dubious but working key from sites like G2A and cdkeys

If that’s still too sketchy there’s the OEM licenses (honestly not worth it since they can only activate on a single machine ever)

Or finally you might feel sorry for Microsoft for some strange reason and want to go full retail price.

Basically the same experience with all options for a lot of cases, they’re just happy to have users it seems

It technically does add security in that it prevents a load of attack vectors that would dodge most anti malware tools (i.e. the ones before the anti malware tool can start)

But you’re right in that the execution of the idea is unnecessarily painful for Linux

Briefly saddened as I thought for a second there was somehow a game involving the YouTuber with the same name (is he still going?)

This looks cool regardless though, will give it a look

Kinda funny how much media is out there warning about the folly of allowing this kind of mega conglomeration, yet we’re still gonna just do it anyway

The point of life is to enjoy it

You seemingly made the choice to make your life less stressful for about the same compensation as you got before for a stressful job.

I don’t think you need to be particularly smart to understand that’s a pretty great trade off. Just from what you’ve written here, I completely understand your reasoning and it makes complete sense to me.

Your colleagues are giving crabs in a bucket energy. You never agreed to work harder than you need to, you don’t owe it to anyone.

And those assets ultimately are tied to something physical.

We’re talking about the ultra rich, not just your average lucky rich guy earning a big paycheck

If hypothetical tax fleeing rich guy has £5bn invested in some American company and they are running from a tax on that asset, what do they do? They have to sell off the asset to someone who wants it (good) or they still face the tax (especially in America where uncle Sam will follow you to the end of the earth to get your tax bill).

Imagine they manage that and don’t make too much of a loss doing so (which is already not realistic, but anyway). Now what do they do with that? Keeping cash as cash is basically flushing money down the drain, so they need to quickly reinvest it in something roughly as financially performant as what it was in before. Problem is if they are a rational investor, their money was already in the best place so wherever it goes next basically has to be a compromise.

The ultra rich are a different breed to what you’re thinking of, even their market investments are big enough it’s generally pretty hard to move them between borders for the purposes of avoiding tax

Especially back before online shopping existed

It’s a recent kid meme

South park did an episode that featured it a few weeks ago

…

No, of course they can move, they typically have a lot of money, they physically go where they like.

Their assets can’t though, and if you look at anyone who owns a majority of assets in a given country, they typically do everything they can to put their weight on the government there

And, of course, they typically have to be a citizen of said country, where they pay tax. (Or if you’re American, you just pay tax regardless of where you are, because fuck you, apparently freedom isn’t free—not a yank btw, just have some mates that suffer this particular pain)

We’re not talking about the kind of rich guy most people immediately think of: high income & flashy wankers,

We’re talking about the literal handful of bastards that are breaking the world economy right now by simply existing.

Ultimately they own ground and stuff on that ground. Maybe via middlemen (and currently a shitload of vibes), but wealth ultimately comes from assets.

None of that is practically moveable

Even literal gold bars are really hard to move across borders in any kind of quantity

All of that is what ultra wealth really is, and in every real sense, only that is wealth in a capitalist economy. Everything else is an abstraction over a physical asset or just negligible.

The percentage of wealth owned by he ultra wealthy is on the rise. That means the percentage of wealth for literally everyone else is shrinking.

You wanna know how we can watch that happen? Just wait. You’ll be able to tell we’re fucked if the prices of assets (like, idk, houses) go up quicker than the average person’s pay

… Wait… Fuck.

Edit: tbf I was too pessimistic in my previous comment, it’s not 30 families, it’s actually 50, so I’m glad we’re actually living in such an egalitarian society

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/may/19/uk-50-richest-families-hold-more-wealth-than-50-of-population-analysis-finds

They just don’t want to.

Because they can’t

If you’ve ever heard a “wealthy” person say otherwise, you’re talking to a deluded clown.

30 families own over half of the UK

Those assets are not mobile

Edit: not 30 families, but the much more reasonable number of 50. More detail below

My lights are broken…

My lights are broken…

Sorrow, sorrow… sorrow… Sorrow!

It’s funny that people keep forgetting wealth is tied to assets

Most valuable assets can’t really move

The rich typically live near their assets so they can keep a finger on the politics around them

Tax those assets and if they want to dodge the tax, they have to give up the asset we want anyway

They.

Can’t.

Just.

Run.