Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

A trillion dollars disappeared in a day because someone made a garbage generator that uses fewer irreplaceable natural resources than the current garbage generators, and that makes me think about cobblestones.

Remember cobblestones? You could hook your computer up to a big distributed science project, there were tons to choose from, you could fold human proteomes, you could search for extraterrestrial intelligence, you could map cancer markers, develop better solar cell materials, all sorts of stuff. It took the form of a screensaver - whenever you weren't using your computer your CPU fans would spin up and you'd be folding. Move your mouse and it pauses. Great stuff. Something useful for your computer to do when you step away for a minute.

Anyway, you'd get credit for the work your computer had done. Cobblestones, they were called. They were never used as currency, they were just to show off. A cobblestone was a kind of receipt to show that your computer had done something useful.

We never used cobblestones as currency, but we could've. Instead we got bitcoin, which is a receipt that shows that your computer made a bitcoin. What's the bitcoin for? Being a receipt that your computer made a bitcoin.

It served as proof that you'd wasted some electricity.

Proof of waste.

There's other cryptocurrencies as well, some of which work differently to the proof of waste system, and those are worthless, because they're not proof of waste.

The waste is the point.

Now we get this market crash today, money disappeared, because the new AI thing is roughly as pointless as the old one but nowhere near as wasteful.

The waste, is the point. We saw it with cryptocurrencies and we saw it with NFTs and we see it with AI.

The waste has to be the point, because to some people, waste equals scarcity equals wealth equals power. The waste has to be the point because the machines that process the pointlessness have to be expensive, have to be owned by someone, have to be inaccessible to the average person, have to be manufactured and sold and rented out, the means of production of the pointlessness has to be in the right hands. The waste has to be the point, because otherwise we would've decided years ago that a cobblestone was worth a twentieth of a nice sandwich.

The waste is the point.

People like to think Asimov predicted the current technology known as "artificial intelligence". They are wrong. It was Douglas Adams when a computer spent untold resources just to return an answer which is both irrelevant and poses further questions.

NEWS! Pope loses will to live after meeting JD Vance https://newsthump.com/2025/04/21/pope-loses-will-to-live-after-meeting-jd-vance/

"In Trump's first full six weeks in office, the administration removed 27,772 immigrants from the U.S...That's a daily average of 661 removals — an 11% decrease from the daily average of 742 under President Biden last fiscal year. From Jan. 26 to Feb. 8, the Trump administration removed an average of 693 immigrants daily, a 6.5% decline from Biden's last days in office."

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/01/immigrant-removals-deportations-trump

I see that I'm in for another week of explaining that end-to-end encryption will not fix stupid.

@dangillmor I spent years trying to get my business de-listed from Yelp. That is not a service they offer. Sounds like the same scam.

A writer I admire, Benedict Evans, publishes a fine newsletter. I'm glad to say it's not on Substack.

But he's discovered that the company is pulling a fast one on him simply because he subscribes to several newsletter on that site.

Substack, he writes, "has created a public profile in my name and encouraged hundreds of people to follow me there, without my permission or consent. There’s no way for me to control this or turn it off."

Sleazy. Why am I not surprised?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benedictevans_i-dont-use-substack-to-publish-my-newsletter-activity-7319323633888227328-YjFy/

An assault on #science is an assault on ourselves. #trump https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/20/deepwater-horizon-trump-administration-attacks-on-science?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Protesters fill the streets in cities across the US to denounce #Trump agenda - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/19/anti-trump-rallies-protests "Organizers call for 11 million people to march and rally in this weekend’s effort to ‘protect democracy’" great; now ramp it up

I’m super excited to announce something I’ve been working on for many years! Brain: the natural intelligence engine that’s always with you.

Brain works on any platform, with any app. The more you use it, the smarter it gets! Brain trains only on data you feed it and it’s powered by a renewable caloric process. Start using yours today!

Mom: "It costs nothing to be polite."

Billionaire Techbro: "Actually..."

Me: boo 😒 hoo. The environmental impact of this mess is unbelievable and sad

The algorithm belongs to billionaires—your favorite radical voices don’t. Stay connected. Join mailing lists. Join Here: https://blog.pmpress.org/sign-up-for-our-email-list-and-get-a-33-coupon-code/

We sold 4 goats to the Eritreans for their Easter feast. We processed them on-site. No fun at all, frankly. Then, after all that was done, Donkey walked around the woodshed and started braying to beat hell. I went over to check out what he was on about and discovered a slimy, wobbly, kid, not more than a minute old from the looks of it. Turned out the mom had had twins, so the herd yesterday lost 4 and gained 2. Such is life on the farm..and I'm still tired out.

A verified ID is required to access AI models in OpenAI's API to prevent IP theft. 😂 They went from stealing everything from everyone to now claiming it's their original work, despite hundreds of pending copyright cases against them in the courts. Why is this even allowed?

#ai

"We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law.”

New from me: an essay on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and its remarkable 30 yr history of witch hunts & blacklists.

It chronicles how industries & academia went from capitulation to defiance, and what we can take from that today

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/process-as-punishment--an-american-history-of-political-spectacle

Latest comic: Veneer of Normalcy

#authoritarianism #economy #cartoon #comic

Inspired a bit (or a bit more) by @_elena. Okay, and I also like playing around with tech stuff.

https://www.locked.de/myown-unplugtrump-to-more-digital-sovereignty/

#unplugtrump