What's the point of being Black and political on Al Gore's Internet?

I wasted around 300 words over the last day in back-and-forths discussions on the Fediverse about the ramifications of "voting blue no matter who", the ideology that voting for Democrats with no means of accountability for their failures, aggressive amnesia and weak follow-through; largely from a wave of seemingly white-presenting folks. It's hard to ascertain as most avatars weren't of themselves or were heavily rasterized but I understand why the such is done. I'm going to waste another 4,000 words explaining why I did that. I'm definitely letting down Scott with this, as I only have so many things I can type in my life. Being a Online Person as well includes my resistance to just ignoring some people and needing to course-correct when the heading's awry.

Preamble

Getting this out of the way, since moving to Florida, I've registered as a poll worker and have been actively working to bring awareness to other political parties in a state that's largely controlled by its wealthier class. This is not easy work as even my accent alerts people to my Northern "not-from-here" nature and requires a level of care and compassion that mirrors that of labor organizing. I don't also expect it to change this year or in the next five. I deeply understand and have experienced that change not only takes time but massive amounts of effort, pain, setback and concessions in some places. I don't have any particular set of labels that can capture me and I'm overly confident that if I did pick, that some of them, like "communist", "anarchist", or "Pan-Africanist"; it'll make those who are ardent supporters of the system of bipartianship clutch pearls and curl lips up in disgust and disdain (You animal! Have you no decorum!). Having these stances taught me that this is a long game, in the same way that Reagen's administration set the blueprint for Obama's which gave Trump his ultimate launching pad. I have to provide this background because the nature and breadth of the replies I've gotten online have mirrored that of the parentalistic condescending that I've seen from those who are effectively die-hard Americans who believe the country can't do any wrong and if any was done, it's for the greater (white male) good for the Nation. And that's actually scary!

I'd like to quote Klein's latest book as she mentioned the need for community building even in sticky moments. She speaks at length about how the rise (or rather, the rebranding) of fascism has enveleoped itself in the Western world as the underlying engine of neoliberalism and because of the safeties many enjoy within it, that it's difficult to see when, we ourselves also embrace these stances. Leftists have been routinely pushed to the side (in the best situations, others are in prison or have been extrajudically killed), not solely because of their stances towards a truly equitable, dare I say equalitarist, society, but because of the need to protect one of the most profitable forms of propery that exist: whiteness. This property transmutes itself even away from racial monikers; it exists in patriarchy as manifesting the conqueuer, the colonizer and the authority of the spaces everyone else exists in. In gender essentialism, it demands binaries as without it, it can't force submission and dominion over others (like women and non-gender-conforming folks). In the realm of bodily autonomy, it robs us all of consent and agency; forcing us to be subject to private governments of many shapes, some in workplaces and others in society's hidden behavioral adjustment instutitons. There's many other angles in which we can examine this but it's extremely dangerous to ignore how these reveberate down into our everyday interactions and exchanges: why women never feel comfortable in gyms or in comic books stores, why Black people will not enter gun ranges or parts of Mississippi or even why the farce of DEI being the means of a few's liberation as it holds the banner of Black capitalism; effectively the modern day reward system for respectability politics after the Black Power Movement.

What's the Beef then?

My disdain is not with liberal people; thought definitely neoconservatives. I do believe that liberal people have bought (heavily) into the Western myth that the only way through is by accepting a number of people to be routinely kept as collateral damage, as long as it's not them. Arundhati Roy, in "Things that Can and Cannot Be Said" said something similar about human rights and justice: "the idea of justice-even dreaming of justice-is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust-and then tries to make it more accountable. But then again, the catch-22 is that violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony". This coupled with the (over)use of statistics to drive change is something Angela Davis, in "Are Prisons Obselete?", as mentioned as "the abstraction of numbers that plays such a central role in criminializing those who experience the misfortune of imprisonment". She expands why even the conversations about prison abolition have diluted down into reform (and the basis of reform gave way to things like the SuperMax prison, making prison even more horrendous of a system). These things can be mapped to many things like poverty, housing, education, health and the swath of systems that routinely optimizes for the safety and protection of whiteness over anything else. Using only numbers allows us to distant themselves from the (in)direct harm that our lack of action, the choice to remain ally in name only, causes on a daily basis. And with the persistent nature of corporations involving themselves heavier into state politics like Microsoft defending anti-humane behaviors for border control under many presidental administrations or McDonalds, among others, using modern slave labor as prisons are allowed to "sell prison labor" using the loophole in the 13th amendment, liberal folks need to come to understand that liberalism enables and encourages this violence. It exploits the already-existing violence of these many axis of oppression and exacerbates it for profit and profit alone. The harm is the foam that's wiped off the dog's mouth.

One doesn't have to go far to see that the impact collective reaction that arose when Black people demanded more from a state versus that of wealthy white people storming the country's capital, how the State immediately saw non-white people as an affront to its safety, whereas state officials aided in the latter behavior. If it's not clear, this is called institutional racism. And on a smaller scale, we see this being reinforced by things like routine attacks on community attempts for autonomy that combat food injustices exacberated by neoliberal politics. What leftists tend to do instead is continue to rebuild, like forming cooperatives around housing, food and services so people have options out of the cursed duopoly that we live under. Roy mentions how instead of governments upholding what existed before, that "this .. rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of corporate social responibility, it's all part of a New Managed Democracy". That it effectively turns "what ought to be people's rights to education, to health care, and so on, into chritable activity avaiable for a few. Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it". This came to be as the natural evolution of neoliberalism in America (and throughtout the Western world as deindustralization in the United States led to FoxConn rising in China and Taiwan and Monsanto in India).

But Biden Is Our Best Hope!

Whenever I read this or it's told at a table, I have to imagine that we, when we go to speak to others about candidates, that we revoke any sense of alignment with feminism and anti-misogynistic stances we parade online in our bios, that the #BLM parotted out is for show and that deep down inside, many want the United States to be the greatest hegemony to ever exist and to spread its eagle wings across the globe, completing the misson of manifest destiny. The nature of electoral politics today are an extension of what Debord calls the "Spectacle", or the use of media by the State, corporations and the elite. We rely on it to not only be heard or seen but to project our stances, beliefs and alligences. It skyrocketed about 60 years, during the belly of the radicalization around the globe and got more controlled by states and companies everywhere about 40 years ago when we had the modern template of anti-immigrant sentiments rise with endorsements of our current president, extended from housing to healthcare. The aggressive amensia (or lack of knowledge, as I had to grow to learn this) that occurs scares me because it makes me wonder about those who are twice my age who feveretly fight to maintain these spaces because it's our "best hope". Who's "we" in that sentence? This administration doesn't even want me dead anymore, it's not profitable. They'll mule cis Black women and men to death but will murder queer trans people at higher rates without acknowledgement, all the while remaining silent on what corporate mechanisms that back this. And with the transmutation of whiteness, anyone can catch the hands of the State, if you're just broke enough. Boeing, Microsoft, General Dynamics, Palantir, Westingtonhouse, Minnesota Mining, and weapons dealers have a deep interest in mass murder, home and abroad, and they rely on neoliberalistic politics to obscure and distant their relationship to government. It's, on one hand, an amalgamation of these things aforementioned, and on the other, the same logic that existed when the country was founded by wealthy slave holders, patriarchial defenders of setter colonialism and everything we love to love about this country. In true millennial fashion, I hate it here.

How does this relate to the Internet?

We can go on about the Nixon administration's expansion of ARPANet, how the apparatus was designed to share information and how today, the majority of the public connected Internet operates for militaristic purposes but that's not "fun", nor is that something we can really grasp (or capture in this post). Instead, we should focus here more on, instead of expanding our sense of understanding of our neighbors (let alone the world, seriously, what the fuck?), how it encourages those who cling to whiteness to reinforce and defend their stances. We've seen this on smaller scales like the creator of Ruby on Rails defending the demise of DEI from a thinly-veiled racist standpoint, founders of Substack defending speech that's the child of the violence of American chattel slavery and Western racial violence or even people going ten-toes down in denial about AI and its (continued) abuse of African people. When these systems work to defend one's alignment with whiteness (which manifests itself with the pursuit of capital by any means necessary, irregardless of the harms it causes for what fleeting or speculative "good" it might bring), it reminds me of how larger systems that we live under, like the means of accounting were derived from Europenn slavery of Africans, Indigineous peoples of Turtle Island and Asiatic people. In Accounting for Slavery, it's made clear how "slavery did not undermine management and accounting. To the contrary, by the end of the eighteenth century, practices on many plantations were becoming heavily standardized". This standardization is what gave us modern accounting. Accounting was a critical component in forming modern computing: the beating heart of managing and distributed the extreme violence that we see in places like Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Haiti, India and mainly non-white-presenting (or semi-white) countries that are used as wells for resources for the West. The Internet has accelerated and justified globalism and the cost of it has been horrendously and ignorantly high.

What does this have to do with the Internet? If I choose to remain on it, to keep using keyboards built with this violence, screens made in places where people get breaks after a few days, motherboards that prevent moms from being home, then I'm going to use every fucking keystroke and volt to explain why this violence exists and radiate the need for people to not only demand more for people but to actually fight for a better world.

"Okay but, Biden's Our Best Hope"

None of the above might immediately make sense in terms of why I'm so staunctly against Biden if it's difficult to see how our work, our involvement and our choices actually matter. Especially when you have more space and authority under these systems, by choosing to obey and comply, you gain some security for yourself - sure - and unintentionally or not, endorse the harm of others. We're seeing more people in the industry return to the critical lens it once had that was dampened by the dot-com boom/bust by labor activists in the space. I find that those pushing against the narrative are the bravest and more honest folks, by choosing not to comply, you're explictly repeating to the establishment that built and created everything mentioned above that you do not consent. The act of reclaiming consent - from where we work to who we vote for - is one of the difficult things we can do and I'm saying this a person who, as a masculine presenting person, benefits excessively from the lack of understanding of this on a broader scale. I'm more likely to be listened to than my fellow queer or trans folks who have been fighting against for longer because I present as a man. So my anger, when I see other men, especially that of white ones, come to me, saying I'm wrong for not wanting to defend an establishment that wants people dead for profit, I'll respond accordingly. But again, I only have so many keystrokes and wasting it on people who are too committed and benefit way too much (until they've experienced some medical malaise, hoping not) from it is an affront to my ancestors who just cut to the chase. Frankly, if I was the head of some public school and repeated these points, the same folks would have pulled a Rufo and the establishment would have cut y'all checks. Keep it a buck.

Who do we vote for?

Deadass, I do not care. At least not as much as liberals do. I don't care because the options provided are the same ones in 2020 as it was for liberals on my case in 2000 and in 1996. What I'm more interested is not what bugs the elite but what matters to real people (wealthy people effectively merge into this big ball of JP Morgan-Chase-BofA-BofE in my brain). People need food, care, housing, safety. Who's making these moves? As I'll repeat and as others have said, I am not voting for Joseph Biden in 2024. I've thrown my energy since 2018 into focusing on local politics and community building. Biden will not know my name when police decides that I fit their Negro quota, but my neighbor will. Biden does not aim to improve the social security nets that my family relies on despite what capital I redistribute from working in tech, but socialists have shown up and provided masks and food to my family's neighbors when Biden decided to "end the pandemic". I'm deeply vested in working with people who understand the crisis at end and I no longer have any air or energy for people who need to pretend that we, and our issues, don't exist because the government said they don't. I'm invested in working with folks who engage people directly and understand their day-to-day. What I tend to notice in what people want is some sort of "quick fix". This shit isn't going to flip over night or even over a year because you voted for "Genocide Joe" to return to office. We need to demand better.

Vote for someone you can see. Someone you can talk to. People who don't have direct ties to corporations to fund policies against the American populace. Be fucking real. And this is specifically for the people who replied constantly saying it's our last, best and final: as someone who's sat on bargaining tables, that phrase means nothing to me when I know that we can win big.

The title I wanted to use for this was really, "what's the point of not being a white cishet man on Nixon's Internet" but the words "cishet" especially next to "man" tend to upset these people more than systematic violence practiced via misogynoir, transphobia and good ol' Christofascist nationalism. I'm also not expecting to "change minds" or "move hearts" with this. You can reply if you'd like, I don't have to read it (thank Lwa). Like a friend said, "no more manifestos, ... we making demands and teaching each other".

I have to mute anything from mainstream news because it routinely feels like a slap in the face. This recent 'swap' got me really thinking that the whole advent of "representation" worked more to keep people docile than to nudge progress for the people who need it the most (which was one thing you'd hear A LOT). Small progress feels like a compromise, comparing it to everything that's been done in the past.

So yeah, I'm mad that instead of doing something ACTUALLY worthwhile, like making healthcare free or any form of healthcare that was impacted directly by her BODY (it's not lost on me either that she was a disabled Black woman, again people who the outlets REFUSE to listen to) especially to disabled folks, they put up a fucking statue in the same place of a former slave owner. Should have just salted the earth and made nothing there.

Once I get my archive from Twitter, I think I need to actually purge that account and begin truly using my site. I keep saying this, but because it requires so much MANUAL work and I have other interests besides my site, it gets harder. I do sometimes wish more people in the IndieWeb space were interested in directly pooling efforts.

After a while, once you divorce yourself from the "rat race", when you actually begin to center you, loved ones and friends, it becomes a bit clear how much of it exists mainly to keep people feeling "okay". That what they experience is not only normal but expected. It's normal to be in debt to faceless companies that can prevent you from securing a place to sleep, a means to eat or expand your knowledge. And the countless people who like to nudge people towards failing social programs can, at times, fall into the buckets of the "couldnt-be-me"s/"that's-a-personal-failing" to "we need to have SOME poor people so WE can be rich so it's fine" committee.

I feel bad for the next set of people who try me on this idea because they best had been reading.

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Ugh, that Gawker post about capitalism is 100% flat. Like the first paragraph mentions things that happened DIRECTLY because of political action but tries to say "it's not political"? As much as people who don't wanna do things don't wanna admit, almost everything is political. As long as we have to interact with one another, it's going to be. Not spiritual. Not into the void. But political.

I get frustrated when I do read that people avoid any kind of literature because it doesn't engage them the same way video (or just filler content with ads, tbh) does. I understand that (and am a product of) schooling that encourages us to HATE reading as much as possible, especially recreationally. Recently, after picking up Abolish Silicon Valley, I was reminded of how much I was reading before; things like the late David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Will Stronge and Kyle Lewis in Overtime and especially Hadas Thier's amazing book A People's Guide to Capitalism. These books have a common theme, but they validate my lived experiences that demand a better state of being for everyone. It's nuts to keep moving and not wanting better AND not even attempting to look for better options. It's self sedation. I want better for all of us.

I keep wanting to do this my way but then get unironically frustrated when they don't. I want to make nice desktop applications for Elementary and some slick ones for my Pinephone but I feel dumb when I try. I don't feel the quick validation that I get when it comes to making things in a Web browser, which oddly agitates me because I see the "Web browser as an operating system" landscape to be a very confining one. Maybe this restriction is what gives me so much capability? With the plethora of examples that are quick to run in the browser, is easier than downloading the sources of an app and hoping it builds locally?

On rants about laptops for developers

On rants about laptops for developers

Posted  


Today, I saw on Hacker News that HP announced a laptop targeted at developers called HP Dev One. I found that quite intriguing and decided to dive deeper and look into the discussion around that on HN. I kinda knew what to expect there, these threads have always the same shape:

  • Rants about the price vs specs.
  • A ton of people will actually talk about Apple.
  • Rants about it not being fit for some particular workflow.
  • Three people with age-old machines saying their age-old machine works just fine. Which IMO is great, I love older tech being still in use.

For the sake of contextualisation, these are the laptop specs:

HP Dev One Specifications
8-Core AMD Ryzen 7 Pro
16GB of DDR4 RAM
1TB of NVMe M.2 storage
14’’ FHD screen
Running Pop_OS.

The last couple decades we’ve gone from fighting to install Linux on a laptop to having multiple vendors focused on Linux laptops such as System76, Tuxedo Computers, Framework, and many others. Larger vendors have been offering Linux laptops for developers for a while as well. You can buy a Linux machine from Dell, Lenovo, and soon HP.

This new announcement by HP should signal that the industry is kinda listening. That they’re accepting that at least the development audience wants good Linux machines, and are responding positively by launching specific SKUs. Still, what you see every time one of such laptops reach the news is a gazillion complaints. I’m not saying that the complaints are not valid, heck, one is free to complain about whatever they want. What bugs me is that there appears to be no winning scenario. There is no endgame for such complaints, I’m starting to believe that there is no way to make this audience truly happy. Or maybe rants get more engagement and people are ranting mostly to feel good.

I’ll not enter into the discussion of price vs performance. There are a lot of variables that go into calculating the price of a laptop, it is not as simple as just summing the bill-of-materials. Some intangibles can’t be quantified well, things such as branding and so on. In the end it kinda becomes something more to the tune of what can we get away with than some equation you can put on a paper. Pricing is hard. What I’ll say about that price is that developers in major tech cities are not usually a struggling class in terms of having a good salary and being able to come up with enough funds to pay $1000 for a machine like this. Of course there are a thousands of other developers who are elsewhere and struggling, people who are in countries where the exchange rate makes $1000 laptop impossible to acquire. There needs to be a different product for every one, that is why there are many SKUs. This laptop is clearly not targetted at those situations.

For such price, you’re getting decent specs. If the build quality is great and all the drivers work out of the box, I can see the value in that laptop. People underestimate how useful it is to have a it just works Linux laptop. Of course you can dive into forums, mailing lists, patch a driver or two and get something more powerful and cheaper to work. That is the nature of Linux. But some people just want to buy something and have it work from the first hour. Paying $1000 for that is OK.

What bugs me in such threads is that there is a group of Linux aficionados who think that Linux is the pinnacle of computing and that everything under the sun will be better when running Linux. This is the main topic I want to address in this post. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely think that running Linux everywhere is a desirable goal, machines should be yours to tinker. What I want to highlight is that for some people (including this author) running Linux on some machines make them less useful than whatever they begun with. This is what I want to unpack going forward because a lot of criticism in these threads are focused on macOS, M1 machines, Windows, etc.

Disclaimer

If your workflow requires you to run Linux. Or better, if you *WANT* to run Linux, that is fine. You can do it in any machine you fancy, no one should tell you what you should do. This is not a post advocating you change your preference. This is a post trying to explain why preferences are not universal.

First is the idea that a machine that is not with the top-of-the-line AMD or Intel CPU and at least 64GB of RAM is not useful. Some people need to understand that their particular workflow that demands such specs is not universal. Some developers are just fine with much less powerful machines. The HP Dev One specs might not be useful to you, but that doesn’t mean that other developers are not going to have a great time with it.

I’ve seen comments from people running all sorts of containers from MongoDB and Redis to complex Machine Learning workflows denouncing the specs on this machine to be useless. That is a desktop-class machine, a simple workstation, it is enough to do desktop development tasks. It is not a server or spec’d for those workflows. Go grab a beefed up Xeon desktop + NVidia gizmo and you’ll be happier.

Just because one has a desktop-class machine and is doing these demanding workflows in it, doesn’t mean that all desktop-class machines should be expected to handle such workflows. That is a very specialised setup when you need to run the equivalent of a company’s production environment inside your small laptop. There are laptops geared towards such workflows, they’re a different SKU.

The HN thread is full of rants about Apple and running Linux on M1 machines. I don’t think some people realise that other people actually prefer macOS over Linux. There is a very tight integration between Apple hardware, the operating system, and the official toolkit for developing desktop apps. When you’re running a native macOS application on M1, a lot of gears connect just right for you to have amazing performance and battery life. Running Linux on such machines will not have the same benefits. It will have other benefits such as running a FOSS stack, but it won’t have the same performance/energy magic that makes it so impressive.

In my opinion people who really want to run Linux, should focus instead on getting laptops that are great with Linux. Heck, the Framework laptop is really well built. A friend of mine has one and I got to see it for the first time last week, it is beautiful. There is a lot more bang for your bucks when you pick a Linux-focused SKU than when you force Linux onto new hardware that was not built for compliance.

A good example is my beloved Microsoft Surface. When the Surface Pro 4 was current, there was a lot of activity about running Linux on it. People been running Linux on Surfaces for a long time, if you’re curious about it check out the /r/SurfaceLinux on Reddit. At the time, running Linux on that machine had the following consequences (which are probably no longer true):

  • You lost the keyboard hotplug. You couldn’t instantly go from tablet into laptop.
  • Touch and Pen input just became mouse clicks. The Surface was no longer a multi-paradigm machine with keyboard, touch, and pen working in harmony.
  • Battery life sucked. Your “all day” machine became “couple hours” machine.

At that time, all I could think was: Why did you get a Surface then?!. If you really want Linux just grab a ThinkPad. The Surface and M1-based Macs are what they are because they were built to provide a specific experience.

The Surface is a unique form-factor, it is more than a tablet summed with a laptop, it is versatile in a way that no other device is. It is your portrait ebook reader, your tablet to consume media or draw, a laptop for development, etc. The Surface Pro X running Windows 11 can run native ARM32 and ARM64 Windows and Linux applications, and emulated x32 and x64 Linux and Windows applications. It is a wonder.

The M1 Macs are a game changer for people like me who are always away from home/office and don’t want to sacrifice performance. I can edit my videos on battery and have DaVinci Resolve work the exact same way as if I was connected to the wall socket. I can do my programming from a park and compile things just fine. When I prioritise running native macOS apps over Web Apps, I get 10 or 12 hours of battery. I’ve never run out of juice on that machine. Heck, one day I was coding at a library and saw that the battery was at 48%, I got really angry annoyed that the battery was draining too fast just to realise that I’ve been coding there for six hours already. That is how good they are when you use them in the way they want to be used.

Some developers like me prefer these experiences over Linux. I’ve run Linux as my primary OS for years, I was never happy with it. I’m a developer and I ship FOSS stuff. I like open-source, I felt that I needed to run a FOSS system. I was mostly running Linux due to self-imposed expectations and peer pressure. I was not happy with it at all. That was not because there is something wrong with Linux, it was because what I wanted was something different. It is OK to want something different.

I hate this arrogant and prejudicial mindset that some FOSS advocates spew out in all threads about Linux laptops. Some people genuinely think that running Linux makes them better people, it is very strange. As if it is a crime to run anything else and gasp be happy with it.

“The Macbook is not really yours!!!” they cry out. Well, it is mine in all ways that it counts for me. I can run the OS I want, I can develop the apps I want, and I can write my books. There are firmwares and locked stuff in it, yes, so does your phone and probably the laptop you’re running. If your laptop is blob-free, then tell me again how does this makes your work better than mine, because I don’t see it.

These are just tools. What matters the most is what you use them for. Want to use a Surface running Windows to create amazing art that will inspire people everywhere, do it! Don’t let someone tell you that if you were running Linux your art would somehow get a shinier aura. Are you using macOS or anything else to write software, and you’re happy with it? Ignore the people saying that without Linux it is not a true development machine.

Heck, I don’t know how people can think that their subjective personal experience running Linux can simply be extrapolated to be applicable to 100% of the developers in the world. There is no pinnacle of computing, there is no perfect machine for developers. Each person will have a different idea of what they want and what is good for them, let them be.

Instead, why not cherish that yet another major vendor is looking at Linux in a positive way? Why not be happy that Pop_OS! is being taken seriously by other companies. That acquiring a laptop with Linux no longer requires checking compatibility lists against every chip inside the machine.

Why can’t people be happy that a new Linux laptop exists even if it doesn’t fit their workflow.

I guess people just enjoy complaining.

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I definitely agree that there's a level of righteousness that F/LOSS advocates have. I do think it comes from a long thread of frustration and general inability to be productive on those closed ecosystems. For me, I came into F/LOSS because my family couldn't afford the license for Microsoft Windows (my parents didn't understand it either—they thought we bought it, and it just worked, until it didn't). That experience hasn't changed with Windows now with their requirement to be online to get things done (something that isn't the case universally). I do agree that the F/LOSS environments has a LONG way to go before it's a feature-for-feature contender with the things seen in operating systems like Apple's macOS.

To all the people complaining about needing to run Linux everywhere or make Linux/BSD/etc better: prove it. Improve docs. Add more tests. Develop more paid software for F/LOSS. Let's show people what this ecosystem can do. It's already provided the world with so much.

Once in a while, I'd think about how we could house and feed everyone in the world, but we spend more money on war, convincing people that luxury levels are a “thing” we should aim to have/go for and that it's always a good idea to take from people versus working with them. Thanks, Adam Smith and Satoshi Nakamoto, y'all done so much “good” for the world.

alt=""A picture of a PinePhone within a PinePhone keyboard case with a very dim screen.""alt=""A picture of a PinePhone within a PinePhone keyboard case with a very dim screen.""

This thing is bigger than I expected. It might be the use of smaller devices over the last ~6 years that'd require this to feel okay to me. In the attached photo, it's using a darker screen brightness, that's (the ambient light detector and adjusting) been quite buggy since I got the PinePhone, so I usually just tweak it manually (and I prefer it low).


A picture of a PinePhone within a PinePhone keyboard case with a very dim screen.
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Side-note: @Twitter, what is this? There's more text but in this pop-over, it's truncated?! Guess that's why it's good to POSSE - then you know it works as intended.

Twitter's tooltip/dialog for showing ALT text truncating the ALT text of my last photo post.

I don't understand why the need to have some be the “leader” in “changing things” when the change usually boils down to reading, taking some time to reflect and then making choices to adjust one's own heading. I'm trying not to be overly descriptive here. This comes from circles I'm loosely associated that keep claiming that something shiny is definitely the way to change “the thing”. It's wild when there's evidence that the biggest thing holding things back is a lack of commitment to SEE things through and a need to de-center oneself (in terms of vanity, 'success' metrics tightly coupled to capitalism and the like). Focusing on the community (not the metaphorical aspect of it—like actually asking people what is it you need, observing how people use things and what they end up doing with it) will save us too much time versus running ahead and making something that's solely and purely an ego trip.


Long story short: read more anti-capitalist literature, let go of the idols put before us—they're meant to maintain the (broken) status quo and slow down.

↑ byhttps://jacky.wtf • posted • archived copy • current

Maybe this is a side effect of a creative society under capitalism—it requires people who don't lead with their craft to be “over the top” when it comes to talking on their work and attempt to present it as if it's ushering in a new era. When it's doing nothing more than reinventing a lot of the same wheels and moving capital away from people and into their hands. It's gross, and I think it's really just me hating the concept of wealth accumulation for the sake of it is what makes my stomach turn.

I don't understand why the need to have some be the “leader” in “changing things” when the change usually boils down to reading, taking some time to reflect and then making choices to adjust one's own heading. I'm trying not to be overly descriptive here. This comes from circles I'm loosely associated that keep claiming that something shiny is definitely the way to change “the thing”. It's wild when there's evidence that the biggest thing holding things back is a lack of commitment to SEE things through and a need to de-center oneself (in terms of vanity, 'success' metrics tightly coupled to capitalism and the like). Focusing on the community (not the metaphorical aspect of it—like actually asking people what is it you need, observing how people use things and what they end up doing with it) will save us too much time versus running ahead and making something that's solely and purely an ego trip.

Long story short: read more anti-capitalist literature, let go of the idols put before us—they're meant to maintain the (broken) status quo and slow down.

I think I hate intentional laziness. Like if you're going out of your way to be lazy just because you know you can—not if something's preventing your willpower.

I really don't like being asked things that are designed to stoke a fire. Like, why is that the only things you feel comfortable saying to me are inflammatory? What is wrong with you?