Free_Appalachia

I think we could use that sort of curation on the fediverse. For me, even mastodon has too much slop. I even had to stop being involved in some lemmy communities because there was too much slop. I have a very low tolerance for this shit. I am at a point where I don’t even want to read books written after 2025 due to the propensity for publishers to be putting slop into books. A bunch of comments on here seem to end up equivocating and saying oh but AI is cool for this or that other thing… I don’t see a single area where my life has been improved by the slop. I feel more isolated from other people, I feel the quality of information dropping and the ability to find genuinely helpful information (which was my main use case for things like youtube and a lot of the internet at large) is being rapidly destroyed, I can’t trust news articles that generate slop images, so it’s become very hard to find reliable news about the world where that used to be easy… I just don’t see the upside at all. We are nuking the environment at record speed in order to have an idiot liar machine spew largely indecipherable drivel into every context of our lives. I think my options for maintaining my own sanity are now down to pursuing a fully off-grid hermit life for real, or probably become so isolated and miserable that I eventually kill myself… And I used to really enjoy the internet. I am starting to actually and viscerally hate it… Even a lot of the fediverse. I don’t see any upside. I think computers peaked as an extension of human abilities probably in the early 2000’s and since the migration to Meta and Google platforms it has regressed into a mirror of that time you would get a cd in the mail for 2000 free hours on AOL and it had some custom browser where half the screen was ads with just content in the middle, not unlike the movie idiocracy. Half the internet I can’t even see because of my ad blocker and the assistance that more and more of our lives be lived in our houses staring at screens, while the outside world is literally on fire, just seems to be an overpowering and dissonant note in the orchestra of our lives… Why anybody would want to live like this I can’t imagine… And everybody wanting to live like this makes me feel like there is a huge gulf between myself and the rest of humanity that I am not sure I have the energy to try to cross anymore. I can’t seem to find the ability to equivocate on this like others have and say, but AI makes this or that better… AI makes it easier for people to be lazy about certain things, which is also bad. I am anti-work and would love for people to live a life filled with enjoyment and leisure, but that’s not what AI brings to the table. Anybody using it so they can be intellectually lazy is inherently destroying their own problem solving skills in whatever parts of their lives where they haven’t already done so. We work harder now than we ever did before, with AI assisting us and there is no sign of that trend abating… All it’s done by preying on intellectual laziness has been to remove even more of our leisure time and turn us into people incapable of solving problems for ourselves and embed us in a life of meaningless toil towards pointless goals that seem further and further from solving the problems of the world, many of which are being caused exclusively or at least exacerbated by AI. So personally I would prefer useful toil to the endless and meaningless life of toil created by our co-existence with AI slop.

Fascism is here. It requires no acceleration. I am talking about sabotaging it, not accelerating towards some unknown end. I don’t think it serves anybody to pretend the democrats are just failing at socialism and not actually also in favor of fascism (which is their actual position). People went looking for the solution to Neoliberalism and as is the historical precedent, they landed on fascism. That already happened. That is not something that may happen in the future. So currently the appropriate response to this strengthening and consolidation of fascism is to try to sabotage that process any way you can… Even if it hurts everyday people at times. We are no longer in the battle for hearts and minds, we lost that battle in the US. We are in the resistance and sabotage stage and from your response, I am reminded that people still don’t seem to know that yet for some reason. I knew that when Elon gave the Nazi salute and Democrats came out of the woodwork to defend that. Helping fascism limp along helps nobody. We need to give it’s collapse a hand. While fascism’s biggest enemy is the misery of the conditions it creates on its own. Left to fail on its own could take a century or more. I don’t have that kind of time, because for me and the people I know enduring some of the worst parts of this, we need this to end much more quickly. Economics is the best way you could choose to fight that unless you just want to armchair forever as it seems supposed leftists are quite content to do. Progressives are being pummeled and all they ever have done when they win elections is just not accelerate fascism, but look where we are. We currently have concentration camps… If thats progressives winning leave me out of that bullshit.

Most corporate social media is already overrun with AI slop. Even Mastodon has too much slop for me. People don’t seem to mind as much as we do over here on the fediverse and even that is a gross generalization, because most people here don’t seem to mind it anywhere near as much as I do… They just are data center nimbys. So, my guess, to be honest, is people will just engage with it the same way they do with other content for 90% of people. Maybe 10% get disgusted and leave. The children pine for the crypto mines.

I think the more economic harm this does, the better. Trump can’t expand an empire that can’t hold itself up under the weight of his stupid decisions. Does it hurt us back here in the US? Absolutely it does. But this is the politics we have done everything in our power not to change, so I think we clearly need to be hurting as a result of our decisions if we want any chance of people starting to make different ones. This pain is nowhere near deep enough yet, despite the fact that GDP adjusted to consider inflation has been worse than flat. Despite the impending bond market collapse. Despite the K shaped economy and the very clear AI pump and dump that will become a dump any day now. We are on the precipice of several unavoidable economic crises in the US… We will not see different decisions until people stop making money from the things that are a cash cow for them currently. AI is being hyped as having the ability to change our lives and everything will be better (despite only apparent negative consequences visible so far)… Eventually that is going to fall out, just like crypto did. People should be heading for the proverbial hills, but they aren’t. AmeriKKKa has been propped up for so long by subsidies for oligarchs that we can sort of coast through a crisis for a while before being forced to course correct. I would say we have reached the confluence of these crises already and the gas prices just make all of these crises intensify more quickly. The sooner it crumbles… The sooner we can change it. So I think this coasting we are doing now, actually serves to make for a much deeper crisis later. For those of us that know that nothing will get better until we can knock down all of these structures first, that is a good thing. To those who were hoping to retire with what used to be the AmeriKKKan standard of living… Probably might want to consider moving to a country with single payer healthcare and standards of decency for their citizens. Our prioritization of capital has ensured that the people in the US will have no safety net while all of the systems they thought they could rely on violently collapse. I’d be pulling my money out now if I hadn’t already done that when Trump got elected. Everything they do is a pump and dump that relies on you following them into bad investments that they get out of once sufficiently pumped and you get left with a bunch of worthless stock or crypto or whatever. Gas prices are going to be the least of your worries soon.

I would hope to see a massive shift towards e-bikes… I have heard people talk about them. Have i seen anybody shift in that direction? No.

baahahahahahahahaha. oh… uh. Wait, are we the joke?

I would certainly not post questions like this about it online… To start.

This looks really rad. I have been trying to build a leftist search engine using searxng and it has a lot of issue because of things getting blocked over tor due to the amount of background requests you have to be making to those sites. I have thought about building something like this to deal with that issue, but just had my hands full with other projects. Quite obviously (for those who like to come online to shit on really cool project people are building) the use case is people looking to build their own privately indexed search results without it having to get polluted by shit that comes up in other search engines. I feel like that was immediately apparent to me, because I have that use case and I immediately saw the utility here. For those who don’t get, just because it doesn’t fit the use case you have for internet related projects, doesn’t mean it’s not extremely useful to others. You literally don’t have to come on here just to shit on what other people are doing simply because, “you don’t get it.” This project looks really cool and I am going to look into replacing my searxng instance with this soon. I am super stoked that somebody has done this work. It has needed to be done for a long time. So thank you!