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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • I know people who have had to give them the phone. It doesn’t happen every time, it doesn’t happen to everyone, it doesn’t happen often, but it definitely does happen, and from what I understand, they can refuse you entry if you do not. I’m not in a position to say how common or widespread it is, but there are enough anecdotal stories to convince me it’s probably decently widespread, albeit occasional and possibly targeted. Like you said though, no one knows what they’ll do anymore, maybe just shoot you in the face. And that’s kind of the point. They want that environment of uncertainty and not knowing when the bullet is going to come for you.



  • Yes, they already do that. That said, if you have good op-sec, you’re not going to have your social media on your phone. At least, not your real social media, or if you do, you’ll have it behind a password they can’t break and that you’re not going to give them, so this is not really about getting into everyone’s social media per se, it’s more about providing them more excuses to detain people they don’t like, increasing surveillance of people who they know are probably not really doing anything wrong to begin with, and the chilling effect that surveillance provides in controlling those people who are not really doing anything wrong.












  • Here’s the actual TL:DW (it’s not that long, and I did watch it)

    Steve describes what’s happened (Micron shuts down Crucial their consumer-facing “store brand”), mocks their stupid press release, and discusses the nuances involved, will they still be selling to all the rebadged memory resellers who use Micron as a supplier? Unclear, their reps and defenders say yes, their PR and the context implies not really, unless those resellers want to get into a bidding war with AI datacenters that they’re not going to win. Steve not-so-subtly implies that this seems awfully sort of kind of like more price fixing from a small group of oligopolist companies who have in fact been convicted in the past of price fixing, while explictly stating that he is, of course, for legal reasons, definitely NOT implying that in any way shape or form. Some much deserved ranting about how shitty and frustrating this situation is is mixed in throughout and he goes over details about exactly how much prices have risen already, pointing out all the different devices that require some form of high speed memory that are going to be affected by this. Some further discussion suggests the possibility this might just be a shot across the bow to let the other memory companies who are totally not colluding with Micron and never would consider doing that to let them know it’s absolutely time to not collude about anything like that because of course they’re all paying very close attention right now. So we’ll have to see what else develops, but basically he’s letting everyone know he’s on it, and he’s paying very close attention too.

    I might’ve read between the lines a bit in a few places, I have some of my own strong feelings about what’s going on here, so I apologise if I inadvertently mixed in any of my own interpretation by accident.


  • There are still some factors providing weight on the other end of that lever. Valve is doing good things with Steam Deck and the popularity of it is keeping developers supporting lower spec hardware. Remote play codecs (both Steam’s own and Moonlight/Sunshine) reduce the need to have more than one capable gaming computer as you can just stream from the one you do have to any others. Raspberry Pi is a great way to access non-gaming computing cheaply. Arduino, even though the company itself is kind of doing some shit, still has an ecosystem big enough to survive even if the company itself completely sabotages it. And of course the used/surplus PC market is thriving, even more than ever before with Windows 11 forcing millions of PCs into early retirement for no good reason. They’re still perfectly capable machines that will run Linux without an issue and you get them cheap as a song or even free if you play your cards right.

    I’m not saying any of this to dispute anything you’re saying, I’m just pointing out these resources we still have so that we can take advantage of them while we still can and protect our continued access to them. It’s clear the claws are coming out to start locking down consumer computing, but people need to know there is a resistance to it and there are ways to resist. And we should.


  • No, I don’t think it does that at all. People need to be able to see the world in more than just binary choices, “it is, or it isn’t”. I reject the premise that things can’t be in between, that it can’t be a little bit of slavery, while still understanding that plantations were a whole lot of slavery. Comparing the similar aspects of things and discussing the things they have in common is not the same as equating them and we can have better discussions if we resist the assumptions that drive us to that conclusion.

    I think we also need to keep in mind what slavery actually is, the actual concept of slavery not just the most extensively taught and politically important implementation of it which people tend to confuse and conflate with the concept itself. What happened with the trans-atlantic slave trade is just one example of slavery, it’s not the definition, and as a result we need to be clear which concept of slavery we’re talking about here.

    Slavery is fundamentally about depriving people of their right to choose for themselves. The sadistic violence and cruelty of the slave trade and plantations are the emblematic and possibly inevitable results of that, but it’s not what actually defines it. A slave would still technically be a slave even if all the choices being made for them were to make them comfortable and protected while they live in luxury. If they are not allowed to choose anything different for themselves and do not have any personal autonomy to make the choices they want to make, they are a slave to someone or to something. Even kings have sometimes been described as slaves to their position and that is actually true in some ways. That is not “minimizing” slavery, that’s simply describing what being a slave is. It’s not having the right to choose for yourself.

    If modern technology and digital rights management controls are depriving people of their rights to choose for themselves in important ways, then it’s totally fair to call it digital slavery.