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https://avedoncarol.blogspot.com/2026/03/it-was-time-when-strangers-were-welcome.html
#WritersCoffeeClub 17 Jan
What’s frustrating you, writing-wise?
Cataracts. Eye 1 was operated on, but has a retinal occlusion. Eye 2 … they're waiting for the cataract to ripen, but that's the one I rely on for reading/writing. So screen work is currently extra-fatiguing! And I have two books to finish editing/rewriting ASAP!!
@thedarktangent The technofeudalists are trying to price individuals, families, SMBs, and smaller organizations out of the market, in order to force everyone permanently into renting compute time and storage from them, and to donate all our data to their slopware training in the process.
It will take an organized international campaign, comparable to the model advocated by @pluralistic at #39C3, to forcibly counteract this. Ultimately, we'll need to restore competition in our IT parts supply chains. That may require state-level investment by economic peers of the US and China, which itself may require sustained organized civic engagement.
Meanwhile, in the USA (and elsewhere, but especially there), everything that can be done to reduce demand for technofeudalist corporations' products and services, hence everything that could expedite insolvency of the #genAI sector, would help return affordability to PC parts.
From @pluralistic : United States #BigTech now poses the same risk to the world
"that China hawks warned of when it looked like Huawei would provide all of the world’s 5G infrastructure: allow companies that are absolutely beholden to an autocrat who is not restrained by the rule of law to permeate your society, and your society becomes a prisoner to the autocrat’s whims and goodwill.”
This should destroy the US as a global tech power.
RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115912030065954538
Not all heroes wear capes...
"WhiteDate had more than 6,500 users, of which 86% were men and 14% women. 'A gender ratio that makes the Smurf village look like a feminist utopia,' Root wrote."
Charlie Stross
David
Brian Gordon
hamhamm
Volker Weber
Charlie McHenry
josh buermann