Destroying perfectly functional tech really bothered me too from an environmentalist standpoint. I am always trying to rescue old but working tech and trying to find a use for it or fix it up to pass on to someone in need.

Appstinence is just one of a seemingly growing constellation of groups, mostly led by young people, advocating for reduced reliance on technology, either for one’s own mental health or as a protest against powerful tech companies that have an ever-growing hold on all aspects of our lives.

I’ma be real with you. Choosing to dump technology entirely instead of learning to use it responsibly and finding things that aren’t dominated by corporations looking to control us seems really short sighted and leaning into false promise of things being different at best.

It’s quite like the whole Climate Change movement and how we won’t do anything to constrain giant corporations or billionaires in how they impact the planet, but instead individuals (often poverty stricken) are expected to shoulder the burden through recycling programs that don’t even end up recycling what those individuals take the time to sort.

It’s also eerily similar to the anti-AI movement which focuses on all the most negative aspects of AI generation, ignores the benefits of locally-hosted models as opposed to giant models owned by corporations run out of energy and water hogging data-centers, and similarly ignores that the AI that consistently is a failure is general purpose AI whereas highly specialized AI is often very successful. I am by no means an AI lover, I don’t use it at all in my every day life, but I think it’s foolhardy to write it off entirely instead of making regulations that prevent this kind of environment-destroying investment in endless data centers for profit. Much like the Climate Change issue, it’s the smallest and weakest among us shouldering the burden, making our own lives harder, while nothing materially changes and AI advances anyway.

These modern Luddites are not wrong that some aspects of the modern era are terrible, but some of the things they decry are the same things that are so beautiful about it. When I was a young person, finding LGBTQ+ or atheist groups was basically impossible without the internet. As someone who grew up in a relatively rural area, it was hard to make friends and connections even in a mostly unconnected world (I am in my forties, for reference, so I grew up in the era of CompuServe and AOL being the only “online” options). Having the internet suddenly opened me up to finding people who I could actually be open and vulnerable with, something I couldn’t say was true about most of my IRL peers at the time. Returning to that, especially at a period where Christofascism is taking hold, is asking to let the Christofascists dictate how society looks and functions and removing those footholds of access for people who are queer or atheist or disabled. It returns us to an unconnected world where people suffer in silence for decades not knowing that there is nothing wrong with who they are deep down as they are regularly shamed and abused by their IRL peers for not appearing or acting the “right” way.

Especially with the likelihood of modern communication methods being clamped down upon, embracing the technology and finding ways to use it to benefit humankind instead of deciding it’s all evil is the way forward. The world was, for example, a better place with Fred Rogers in it, who leveraged the technology of television, often villainized as terrible for children, as a way to connect with children and educate them in a healthy, humane, and loving way. I see shades of that type of villainization in this movement, equating screen time with being unhealthy.

All tools are able to be misused. All tools are able to be used positively. It’s all in who is using those tools and what their aims and intents are. A hammer can be used to both create and destroy in positive ways in the trade of construction. A hammer can also be wielded as a violent, dangerous weapon. It all depends on whose hands it is in, and what they aim to use that tool for.

Dropping technology instead of standing for using it in positive ways will always be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It’s not like the economy isn’t purposefully being wrecked by the current government administration or that they’re not trying to purge as many workers as possible to pump up unemployment and reduce the number of people who can patronize a small business and it’s not as if the government isn’t picking winners and losers and it’s not as if the tariffs don’t impact small business more than big business and so on and so forth.

But sure, believing stupid shit like you can fight and survive in a rigged economy where competitors a hundred times your size want to crush you economically and legally totally makes sense and isn’t moronic at all. /s

This post references this is [USA] in the title and even when it comes to Wall Street the entire economy is hinging on a small number of massive businesses with absurd valuations at the moment.

The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: “I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc.” Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti‐Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.

He has chosen also to be terrifying. People are afraid of irritating him. No one knows to what lengths the aberrations of his passion will carry him — but be knows, for this passion is not provoked by something external. He has it well in hand; it is obedient to his will: now he lets go of the reins and now he pulls back on them. He is not afraid of himself, but he sees in the eyes of others a disquieting image‐his own‐and he makes his words and gestures conform to it. Having this external model, he is under no necessity to look for his personality within himself. He has chosen to find his being entirely outside himself, never to look within, to be nothing save the fear he inspires in others.

-Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew

I have seen condensed versions of this quote, but the pieces surrounding the oft repeated quote are worth including.

In other words, in respect to how the current Republican and conservative groups communicate:

Always has been. 🌎🧑‍🚀🔫🧑‍🚀

It happens anytime between a few seconds after the OS loads, to hours or days later.

That will tell you relatively quickly if it’s a hardware problem or a software problem.

I mean, potentially not that quickly if they have to wait days for it to happen. Good low-investment-of-personal-time-and-effort suggestion though.

Oh look at that, another reason why I don’t want to be forced to use the same Public Ledger of Credentials as everyone else. I want to use a PLC where these motherfuckers don’t get to have an account.

Get more decentralized, Bluesky and AT protocol, or get fucked.

It’s not even worth talking about how all the Republican party stands for anymore is triggering others while acting like they’re not actively trying to trigger others. It’s the adult equivalent of someone waving their hands in your face and invading your personal space while going “I’m not touching you!”

What needs to be discussed is how to kick them to fucking curb and force them to stay on the fucking curb instead of letting them bring their childish fucking behavior to every service under the sun just so they can harass other people.

the /var/log/ folder would be the best place to start.

1. When a random freeze occurs note the time. Try to be as accurate and close to the time it happened as you can, including day, hour, and minute.
         A. If possible, do this for multiple instances of this happening

2. Check various log files starting with syslog and look at the times noted above. Look for any relevant errors being thrown by the system at these times.

She says that if I can’t even have the courage to “go outside often and be a ‘normal’ human being”, I wouldn’t be able to handle/manage the assets/investments they have. (Small bussiness, won’t go into detail about it)

Your mother is a giant fucking asshole. Neither of those things have anything to do with one another. Nerds have created whole businesses online while barely seeing the light of day and have become millionaires and billionaires from it while barely seeing the light of day.

Secondly, if she really think their “small business” is going to survive the purposeful collapse the wealthy are going to put us through, she’s not just an asshole, she’s also a certified fucking moron.

I ran into the same issue and after some digging around found this nasty looking hack that seems to work at preventing the auto-formatting of links in markdown (still looks a bit wonky on mobile like Jerboa tho):

https[]()://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s

appears as:

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s

For Firefox on Android (which TenBlueLinks doesn’t have listed) add a new search engine and use these settings:

Name: Google Web

Search string URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

as @[email protected] learned before I did, strip the number 25 from the string above so it looks more like this:

www .google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

Edit: Lemmy/Voyager formats this string with 25 at the end. Remove the 25 & save it as a browser search engine

EDIT: There’s got to a Markdown option for disabling markdwon auto-formatting links, right?? The escape backslash seems to not be working for this specifically.

EDIT II: Found a nasty hack that does the trick!

https[]()://www.example.com/search?q=%s

appears as:

https://www.example.com/search?q=%s

As stupid as it is: Faith is what keeps bubbles afloat. Faith can go a long way towards forcing reality to what you want it to be, and if you have the wealth, you can play nearly endless money-games to make it seem like you’re ahead when you’re actually losing your shorts.

The reason there is so much faith is because this is a make it or break it moment for late stage capitalism. The businesses (including non-AI businesses) viscerally need it to work so they can get rid of human workers. If they can’t make humans slaves, they will make digital slaves. This may be a last gasp for the old order if it fails because so many entrenched companies from automobile makers like GM and Ford to airframe makers like Boeing to general electronics like General Electric have finances that are literally upside down because they have been using stock buybacks to fake growth for the better part of two decades now absolutely need it to happen to stay afloat.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

This quote by Upton Sinclair is usually used to describe lower level employees who don’t understand how unionization could be good for them, but it applies here as well. The faith persists because this is their “salaries” that depend on this working so the bottom doesn’t fall out from under them. They have to believe it will work and as such will keep dumping money into it as long as humanly possible.

AI is like Theranos but bigger and affecting numerous industries who are all betting the future of their companies on this all working out. For their livelihoods and their plan to continue ignoring all the little people in the world, there is no losing state they can or will accept until they are on the edge and about to leap from the top of their buildings to avoid the consequences.

Once the faith breaks, it will be like a dam breaking and flooding out too fast to escape.

Agreed on that, it’s not the best solution, but for people who need access to computing and whose devices have aged out of other support, it’s pretty much the only option available.

I’m in the minority who thinks Linux isn’t for everyone and that people who approach computing from that standpoint should really stick with macOS or Windows. Linux gives you more freedom to be in control, but that freedom to be in control also demands more knowledge and involvement to be able to be in control. “With great power comes great responsibility” kind of thing.

For an analogy Windows is like being a passenger in a car with someone else driving, and Linux you’re in the drivers seat of the car. You simply are required to be aware and involved in driving more because you are in control, and that control requires knowledge. You don’t get to sit back and go “I don’t need to know what all this stuff does because I don’t want to.” Understanding how the pedals and steering wheel work is a requirement for driving, as is paying attention to what is going on around you on the road. As a passenger, you aren’t required to know or pay attention to as much because you’re not being given the freedom of control, you’re just along for the ride. Linux is giving you that freedom of control of being the driver, but you have to know a lot more to do it than you need to know just being a passenger (Windows).

I know everyone else thinks Linux is ready for the prime time and ready for regular users who don’t want to have to learn and just want something that works… but I personally don’t. Simply because Linux is a lot less guaranteed to “just work” than the other options.

It’s basic in the sense that Linux is always a work in progress and no matter how hard you try, you’re going to need it at some point.

When your system randomly turns on to a black screen and there is seemingly no way to log in, knowing how to switch to the command line and at bare minimum back up your settings and documents before you wipe and start over is pretty key. To be clear, I have been in that exact situation and even more confusing situations where the PC has basically become unusable but I was able to fix it via CLI.

Just imagine losing months or years of work because you don’t know that you can probably fix it all from command line and likely don’t even need to wipe your computer and start over if you can narrow down what is going wrong and remove it via the command line.

I dunno seems pretty important to me.

Graphics driver installation is pretty key on any system but AMD graphics systems.

For example if your parents want to watch any videos without them stuttering or being weird, whether Intel or Nvidia, they will need the non-free graphics drivers installed so it doesn’t run like shit.

To my knowledge nearly every AMD chipset already works out of the box on Linux.

At least a basic primer about finding your way around in Linux in command line, and where various configuration files live.

When shit goes wrong (and it likely will at some point) knowing how to dump to another tty and log in via the console and fix issues via command line is pretty key. This has saved my ass more times than I can count now.

Having trouble finding a CLI focused course, but this is a free course that covers a lot of basics:

https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/

Taybuntu 25.10 (Taylor’s Version)

to be fair, shitty dumb memes is probably the best use of AI slop there is.