tsylba

Ah yes, the litteral destruction of culture and physical media for a centralised subscription service. I love the liberal world of techno enclosures of our new overlords, viva el free market economy.

The point of capitalism is to accumulate resources and to indefinitely seek growth in a finite world. It means making things cheaper to produce (e.g. via dematerialization, automation, cheap labor through immigration or globalization, mass production, intensive agriculture, self check out, cheaper ingredients for recipes, lowering standards, etc.) and generating higher revenues (e.g. via subscription services, ads, selling your data, shrinkflation, reducing everything to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the masses rather than the niche, etc.).

Even more than being the point of the game they cannot survive without it due to higher stakes and competition.

A comorbidity ridden cancer we might hope to find a cure for someday.

My problem with AI is not that they aren't useful, John. Like everything else in life the question is what we shape ourselves to be as a culture, as a community, what is the path we want to take. It's not on the same scale than ditching assembly instruction for a C compiler.

I get why most people get with the flow of what competition taught us: if you can't fight them join them. Yet I think it's demoralising we're forced to live the life forced upon us by a few techbros without real collective intelligence about the use of our resources and goals for the future. Again, it always has been a bit like that but never at this scale.

We're souless automatons feeding a machine god.

Yeah, but every activity is a human activity, so you could ditch the adjective.

And then the thing with exponential growth is that the last thing is worth than the previous one for its potency for destruction. While it's true that, all things considered, the curve started to explode with the use of fossils fuel we've never limit ourselves with efficiency gain, aka Jevon's paradox.

That's nice however I'll be surprise you can patent a few transformation matrices for an effect present in the public Zeitgeist since more than a decade. The core of the technique being Gaussian Splatting I guess I wonder how you'll get the data, except maybe SFM-ing your way through a worldwide collaborative effort.

I suppose Google could do something like that with their own data.

I am the same, the sad reality is that companies don't (really) aim to change our (old folk tech peoples) behavior, they are aiming to make a new normal for the next generation of consumers.

Like for an espresso machine or a printer, the incentive is put on the consumables. Peoples trust Steam and their frequent sales, not so much XBox and the rest of the platforms, so if you want to frequently buy a plethora of games, old and new and indie and AAA, it would probably still be cheaper to get a steam machine than the next console with their limited catalogue and fixed prices.

Wait, you can't play Minecraft on GNU/Linux anymore? I've bought the things for 10 bucks when it was still an alpha on TIGForum, it's been decade since I played the game but it never required us to be on a proprietary platform then.

That'd be a bummer.

Tangential but I've recently discovered that an app I've written and published on F-Droid has been forked and put on Google Play with ads on by some Chinese forefront along side a lot of other open source apps without any mention of their GPL of course (and Google making it ridiculously difficult to take down thoses for normal folks, having to use a legally binding DMCA form).

Thoses marketplaces are filled with cheap softwares made to make a quick buck by any means without a thought for the whole user experience, with no way to flags grifters for a better community driven experience.

The economy must thrive I guess.

Are you just posting every links you come across everyday without checking them to farm 'karma'?

It's like the fourth entry level computer graphics API tutorial you post in 48H.

The whole piece feel like vibe farming by some youngling piecing together part of the hacker culture as seen by the media in the 90s with some reddit or vintage tumblr trends on top. I resonated with a lot of themes it tries to capture but it ends up looking more like a teen trying to commodify a subculture in a performative way rather than a real tentative alternative to the system, as we saw every generation or so.

I'm all in for lowtech, degrowth, permacomputing, Bookchin municipalism and Illich like "tools for conviviality" but here it seems.. candid and non genuine.

I'm always saying it's better to finish on a good note rather than a bad one, "<Insert Bad Things> but <Insert Good Things>" (eg. "You're stupid but I love you" vs "I love you but you're stupid"), but that's the kind of case where it's clearly better to do the reverse. Huh.

Frugality is a state of mind, feeling guilty about it is not a frugality problem more than a labeling one.

It's the same for climate change, a lot of people want to feel good about themselves labeling them ecological when they're not capable to act on it (eating less meat, avoiding to take an airplane to travel, ..etc). They feel guilty not because of 'it' but because they don't want to act about something they reason is the morally good choice. It's performative virtue signalling.

As a general rule I don't think you can label yourself as anything (eg. a liberal, an anarchist, a frugal, a skeptic, a believer, a punk, ..etc). You either are or you aren't. Chasing a label and an identity is the best way to never be it like a perfume wearing you rather than you wearing it.

I'm under the impression, maybe wrongly so, that every other week we saw a primer on some basic CG stuff: Bézier curves, Fourier transforms, Dithering, Tonemapping, ..etc, of themes being fetched from a pool of maybe 10 items that cycle every once in a while but get upvoted because CG stuffs are inherently cool (and they're often well written like this one).

I think I'm gonna make `primersprimer.graphics` to list them or something.