Sure professor. Keep digging that grave.

aims to

Aims to. As in, has never once reached. So, you’re suggesting that in a state that has never happened, but theoretically could happen, then it’s OK to have a for-profit business.

What about in the real world?

That’s an “if” big enough to drive a train through.

There has never been a classless society where everyone’s basic needs are met. So, pretending that that’s the starting point for this hypothetical is a sign you’re pretty desperate.

And which of them thought that communism without capitalism allowed someone to run a for-profit business?

You mean, whatever Marx says.

Copyright infringement is never theft.

And, arguably, what they’re doing with LLMs isn’t even infringing copyright. If I look at a copyrighted picture, learn from it, then paint my own impression of it, my painting shouldn’t be infringing the copyright. Do that with an LLM instead of a brain and it’s a similar argument.

The dual standard is really the issue. Meta downloaded terabytes of books from LibGen and loaded them into its model. If that’s not infringing copyright, then anybody should be able to download a book from LibGen and read it without worrying about copyright infringement because they’re just loading them into their brains. But, I have a feeling that Meta will get away with it as fair use, but individual people will still be nailed for “copyright infringement” for loading media into their brains in exactly the same way.

No, private property is things like a coat and shoes.

If someone owns an industrial lemon juicer, that’s part of the means of production, and must be collectively owned. Sorry Jenny, you can’t have a lemonade stand.

In fact, Jenny’s parents are allowed to own a small lemon juicer as part of their personal property. But, if Jenny tries to use that juicer for her lemonade stand and charges money for her lemonade, that juicer is now part of the means of production (as are the lemons) and she’s now operating an illegal enterprise.

The USSR and other supposedly “communist” governments all eventually allowed some capitalism in their economies, because 100% pure communism simply didn’t work.

So, you’re in favour of private ownership of the means of production?

I’m considering getting one. I currently have a nearly silent computer working as a HTPC but I can’t play games on it. I can get around that with Steam Link, but that isn’t ideal. So, it would be an upgrade that would let me play games on my living room TV without needing to tie up the gaming computer.

The other thing it looks ideal for is a travel computer. Gaming laptops suck. Often they’re absurdly expensive. When they’re decently powerful, they’re almost always obscenely loud. That fan whine really bothers me. Plus, they almost always have major Linux compatibility issues. The current laptop I’m using with Linux has weird driver quirks. Like, for example, to re-enable WiFi after it goes to sleep I need to wake it up from sleep, turn on airplane mode and then turn it off again. Only then will the WiFi work again. And getting an external monitor to work after sleep… ugh.

Also, I think it’s easy to underestimate the value of what is effectively a Linux gaming console. I’m almost exclusively a PC gamer these days, but one thing I always appreciated about consoles is that you never had to ask “will this game run well on my console?” 99.9% of the time, if a game was released for a console, it was optimized for that console. Even when a game was multi-platform like say FIFA, each console got a build that was as good as possible for that console. For PC games, I think that means most developers will have a Gabecube and ensure all their games run as well as possible on it. The fact that it’s Linux-first is also important to me. It means any drivers or software updates will be tested and optimized on Linux. It won’t be an afterthought like it is most of the time.

So, this machine is nearly silent, runs Linux, and plays most of the games in my Steam library. It’s expensive, but maybe it’s worth it?

So, no mom and pop shops? No lemonade stands? No independent book stores? No family farms? Nobody allowed to sell homemade quilts or paintings?

Has he had on Timothy Mellon, the second largest political contributor after Elon Musk in the last election cycle? Has he had on the Uihleins or the Adelsons?

Only a small subset of the people making huge political donations want publicity, and only an even smaller subset of those are interesting enough that Joe Rogan would do a podcast with them.

Don’t think that most of them are interesting in a macabre way like Thiel or Musk. Most are old, crotchety assholes who inherited vast fortunes who aren’t interesting, don’t seek publicity, and just want to remake the world without pesky democracy interfering.

How stupid would an employee have to be to think of Meta as a startup?

It’s not like Facebook ever had a good culture.

Zen is a reskinned Firefox. Firefox depends on Google’s funding to stay afloat.

Everything else, other than Safari on Mac is either chrome-based or firefox-based.

The 2026 FBI recommends that you vote for Trump, or else.

This polling seems to work extremely hard to avoid noticing the elephant in the room: a company isn’t going to build a datacenter in the middle of Beverly Hills.

The data from the article seems to suggest that people in the top quartile of income resisted 14 DCs out of the 365 projects considered.

They then decided that that is a resistance rate of 14 / 365 * 100 = 3.836%.

Um. No.

The resistance rate is number resisted / number proposed for that income quartile. If only 14 were proposed in upper-income areas, and 14 were resisted, that would mean that the resistance rate for high income areas was 100%.

Could be 100x fewer, or 10,000x fewer. 5x fewer would mean that rich people and poor people resist DCs at the same rate, but that there are 5x fewer DCs in rich areas. But, my guess is that rich people would actually resist a lot more if someone dared to consider building a DC in their area… but that probably never happens, because why would a company buy up expensive real estate for a DC?

For me: Gnome + extensions.

The default Gnome feels way too locked down to me, and I don’t like some of the choices. But, with the right extensions “locked down” becomes “simplified enough to get out of your way”.

I wonder if there are other " genericized trademark" companies that have failed that spectacularly. You can still buy Frigidaire refrigerators. Vaccuuming is known as “hoovering” in the UK, and Hoover is still around.

It would be pretty interesting if “a GoPro” exists as a word for an action camera and the company / brand no longer exists.

At the beginning they weren’t “kinda crappy” because there really wasn’t anything else you could compare them to. Nobody else made a camera that you could strap to your chest, or your helmet, or your motorcycle while you did something action-ey. They had fully waterproof cases too, so you could take them underwater.

As a camera, they weren’t amazing. But, people weren’t using them to take wedding pictures. They were using them in situations where a normal camera would be too heavy, or wouldn’t stay attached, or wouldn’t survive.

There’s a reason they became a household name. They enabled people to do things that had never been done before, and they changed the way a lot of sports are shot.