Microsoft turns off the past

How old do you need? Might have an old windows 7 iso on a drive somewhere

Hi Jim,

This sounds like an opportunity to switch to Linux. Windows has become a bit shit since they started with the advertising.

Did you try the AI stuff yet? It’s getting pretty good, wouldn’t surprise me if there’s already some submarine psyops going on using it. This is too powerful a weapon to ignore, it could turn tides.

Off Topic:
With Disease X potentially coming up, if anyone with some street cred here could recommend a source of bulk Ivermectin, but without possibly self-doxxing, I and surely many others would sure appreciate it.

Off topic.
What do people here think of the “enshittification” drum Cory Doctorow’s been beating for the last two years? This is Cory’s definition:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

He and most everyone else talking about this are ideological enemies of NRx—shitlibs and/or commies who’ll bitch about how Elon Musk is the devil, bitcoin is ruining the climate, muh white male techbros need more diversity and less wealth, etc. etc. The term does carry a lot of that baggage, and Cory’s suggested solution to the problem mostly involves increasing regulations and the scope of government oversight of business—this is to break up monopolies and compel platforms to not suck back consumer surplus into themselves. (To be fair, there are some laws that he suggests lessening the scope of, e.g. the DMCA or the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.)

But I think that despite all that, this particular concept is a useful tool in a conceptual toolkit for thinking about tech business. It’s an accurate description of the lifecycle of internet social media platforms, I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of it enough times as an end user.

I also imagine that, despite the opposing political alignments, the technically inclined portion of Jim blog readers (and of NRx in general) do actually have a small bit of common ground with the sorts of people who are against enshittification, anti big tech company, and pro-things like the Fediverse. This is a ‘vibes-based’ assessment. One reason is that people in this sphere are none too keen on modern social media platforms, as the platforms’ moderation makes them an enforcement arm of the Cathedral, and so are interested in alternative, open platforms, and in adversarial interoperability with the incumbent platforms. Distinct motivations leading to similar outcomes. The Fediverse itself is already split down the middle into all the mainstream, shitlib/commie servers on one side and on the other side, the right wing and/or troll servers that the shitlib server operators maintain big blocklists of.

Another reason I have that vibe is that Jim mentions having anarcho-capitalist sympathies, is familiar with the cypherpunk movement, and used to be active on Usenet. A profile of an ‘early adopter’ of internet technology, just like Cory. In a less politically polarised era, people like Jim and Cory may have violently disagreed about their politics but could still have had productive discussions about, I dunno, encrypting hard drives and communications so the government couldn’t snoop on them. To normies, none of this stuff matters except that they doomscroll twitter or whatever these days. But neither Jim nor Cory are normies, and likewise neither NRx people nor Mastodon furries are normies. There’s common ground in that, if nothing else.