I am pro-decentralization but the problem I always come to is education: education is inherently a power discrepancy where on person must teach another something. Some people are just bad at teaching, so leaving education in the hands of just anyone means you end up with less educated population, and a less educated population can’t be counted on to be independent enough to be a reliable citizen that can contribute competently, which perpetuates the cycle even further if the uneducated are expected to teach the uneducated. Flat structure is a noble goal, but I’m not sure we’ll ever truly be able to escape power discrepancies existing at all. Children are simply at mercy of the people educating them. Like you said, power corrupts, and plenty of people use that power over children toward selfish and controlling ends.

2. All posts must end with a ‘?’

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

I understand this vent, but unfortunately this is not the community for that, as this post breaks rule 2.

!goodoffmychest@lemmy.world might be a more appropriate community for this kind of generic vent.

They’re learning the hard way that it’s a big club, and we ain’t in it. Rooting out corruption is hard because you basically have to have people to replace literally every person in government literally immediately. Also, you have to make sure those new people can’t be bribed or threatened into complicity. Trying to rely on people who seem to have good credentials isn’t a solution if they’re still surrounded by corruption at every level. How are the small number of trustworthy people going to handle an endless stream of corruption running interference and doing their damnedest to make sure no one is held accountable.

Maybe the old battle cry “don’t trust anyone over 30” wasn’t so wrong at all. Anyone who is already invested in the system as it exists probably can’t be truly trusted to get the job done.

Anyway, quite tragic and I feel for them.

For real, the EU needs to stop playing up this dumb fantasy that the US is still somehow reliable. Rip off the bandaid. I say this as an American. US is cooked, someone else needs to take the reigns and Europe is the best shot of a group of nations that generally want to take care of their citizens and prioritize human rights.

Are we getting the housing bubble in tech hardware now too?

I mean, yes. It sucks for sure, and is absolutely wrecking the consumer market… But it’s not like we can magically change it. Scarcity drives up prices, that has always been the case, and on top of that we have tariffs impacting a lot of these items too.

All I can do is hope these AI companies fail as hard as they seem to be set up to fail.

To be fair they weren’t saying they think it’s fine, they were implying that I do. They are obviously aware of inflated prices.

They’re out of stock at both Canakit and Vilros, but an original Pi Zero is still just $10 for the board.

Sure, that’s well beyond the inflation rate ($5 then would be about $6.89 now), but remember these are licensed resellers of official Pi products, so they have to mark them up at least a little to make a profit, especially now with tariffs affecting the imports. I wouldn’t call being marked up just over 30% all that insidious.

I didn’t compare the board to the full price of a mini PC, I was giving the information for context.

Further the raw power of a Pi 5 with 16gb of RAM is genuinely equivalent to a lot of thin client desktops with a lot more extensibility. I think you’re getting what you pay for, honestly.

I’m not going to say they shouldn’t be a little cheaper, but the Pi 5 is kind of a powerhouse compared to older Pis and you have to push for the 16gb of RAM version to make it actually expensive.

Once again the 4gb kit is $140 and with a lightweight Linux distro that’s honestly more than enough for basic desktop life of web browsing and email.

Chris Hughes sucks almost as much as Zuckerberg. He fucked up his tenure as owner of The New Republic. He’s just as much of a worthlessn rich dickbag.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-collapse-new-republic

He also literally killed a story on Apple’s tax dodging calling the story tone deaf in response to Tim Cook coming out as gay as though those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Probably because $250 is wildy misleading. This is an all inclusive kit which includes case, heat sinks, fan, micro-hdmi cables, power supply and you have to go for the 16gb rpi 5 to reach $230. All the things I want to do with a Pi I would really only need 4gb of RAM max, which the kit is $140.

The 16gb rpi 5 on its own with no extras is $145 and the 4gb on its own with no extras is $70.

Sure that’s still a lot more than the original goal of $35 computing but you can still get a basic kit for the rpi Zero 2 W for $40. They also still sell rpi 3, 3A+, 3B+, and 4 kits for reasonable prices. I don’t necessarily need the full power of an rpi 5 either.

EDIT: Dug up some historical info. Raspberry Pi 4 released in 2019 and was $75 for the 8gb model board on it’s own. Right now just a board for a Pi 4 model B 8gb is $85. The 16gb Raspberry Pi 5 originally released at $120 and is now $145. I think people are really overblowing these price increases.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/raspberry_pi_5_1gb/

The increases hit the entire Pi 5 range: the 2GB model jumps $5 to $55, while the 16GB version rises $25 from $120 to $145. Select Raspberry Pi 4 models are also affected, with the 4GB version increasing to $60 (up $5) and the 8GB to $85 (up $10). The 16GB Compute Module 5 saw a $20 hike.

Lower-density Pi 4 models, the Pi 3 Model B+, and earlier boards remain unchanged, as does the Pi Zero.

The new Raspberry Pi 5 has just 1 GB of RAM and slips in at $45. In October 2025, Pi supremo Eben Upton noted that lower RAM densities weren’t suffering as much as others. The company, therefore, has some wiggle room at the 1 GB mark.

Considering the massive leap in RAM prices, these don’t seem like obscene increases to me. People are getting their fucking panties in a twist because they want the model with more RAM and seem to have forgotten that the Pi 3 maxed out at 4gb of RAM and the Pi 4 maxed out at 8gb of RAM. The Pi 5 is the first model to sport 16gb and it was $120 on release and has risen $25 due to RAM price increases, which is far less than consumer price for RAM has spiked. If anything the RPi company is doing a damn fine job of keeping prices down despite the RAM shortage. Considering that an 8gb stick of DDR4 is $60 and a 16gb stick of DDR4 is $125 yet you’re pissing your pants over a $10 increase in 8gb models and a $25 increase in the 16gb models which is fucking stupid.

Anyway, fucking cry more, god damned babies. It’s not like the Raspberry Pi company is the group at fault for the fucking high prices of RAM, get over it!

We don’t have small scale LLMs running on personal machines (even if we could, that’s not how it is now)

Uhhh, it’s pretty trivial to set them up. I have a local Ollama instance set up on my PC with several different open source models available right now. Just because not everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I don’t even have an especially fancy computer, either. Ryzen 7 3700X, 32gb RAM, Radeon 6600XT 8gb video RAM, not exactly top of the line. I struggle with programming logic sometimes, so I use it to help me figure out if I’m doing something right or not when I can’t find an answer online, an activity I wouldn’t exactly classify as “evil.”

I also wouldn’t consider a shrapnel bomb a tool, it’s strictly a weapon just like a gun is strictly a weapon.

Asking “so what do you do for a living?” when meeting someone new as if their job defines them. It’s one of the first questions Americans will ask someone when meeting them for the first time. I am American, but as I understand it, this question is far less common elsewhere in the world.

Everything ends with carcinization. It’s just evolution, bro.

Oh of course, I’m not saying we should dump open source, closed source is so much worse, it just sucks how much the great ethics of open source are exploited by those with no ethics.

Rust enjoyers are Crab People.

It always horrifies me a little bit how much open source has been exploited by large corporations for profit while much of the open source tech they rely on they do not invest in. Meaning by and large it often feels like open source has been unintentionally the largest transfer of the wealth created by labor to the corporate class in human history because labor had lofty ideals and capitalists are happy to exploit that.

Linux has the majority share of corporate servers and has for a long time, and yet is barely cracking 3% of the desktop (consumer, laborer) market. Corporations profit wildly from open source while the general public has not.

I mean really they despise anyone with skills because the reality is they have hardly any themselves as they’ve spent their lives paying for everyone else to do everything for them. They can’t make a meal, they can’t drive a car, they can’t do basic appliance repair, they don’t know how to actually use a computer other than social media, they can’t wash their own clothes, they can’t do anything for themselves. They despise every skilled person because it betrays their egotistical view that they are simply born better than everyone else and deserve to never have to know how to do anything at all. It reveals they know nothing and are useless to society at large, just a drain on the rest of us.

Secondly, I did say “knowledge workers” and I personally think authors and artists are a type of “knowledge work” as they require knowledge coupled with skill to do the work, just as people managing servers and databases also require a combination of knowledge and skill. Poetaetoe pohtahtoh.

Thus it’s also why they are all pushing hard for humanoid robots because they want to automate the human body after they have automated the human mind.

I mean… it seems painfully obvious and doesn’t need much of a thesis behind it.

The wealthy want their slaves back, but they want slaves that don’t push back, never ask for more, never need a day off, don’t need sleep, don’t need breaks, and are needlessly sycophantic to stroke the egos of the wealthy. It’s no more complex than that: the promise of LLMs was that they could have deeply exploitable knowledge workers without any of the fuss or mess of humans who want a life outside of their fucking jobs.

Like what else has this ever been? It’s been transparent since day one that this is why every business pushes AI adoption so hard, for them it has to work, they’re willing to bet the future on it because they think their sheer belief in it and throwing money at it will eventually “make it work.”

On the plus side, anyone who understands LLMs understands their limitations and the problems that are baked in to how they work and how those issues can’t be “fixed.” So this dipshit ass all-in plan that the wealthy have is doomed to crumble because it’s never going to work the way they want it to. So we’ve got that going for us.

Anyway I hate tools being described as “tools of the ruling class” because it often misses the point of how such tools can be useful to the proletariat as well. Class solidarity is a tool of the ruling class, but class solidarity would be golden in the hands of the proletariat, who vastly outnumber the wealthy class and ruling class. All tools are useful, what makes a tool dangerous is who wields it and what they choose to use it for. A hammer can be used to build and it can also be used to smash in someone’s skull. Tools aren’t the problem: specific dangerous humans are. I don’t actually have huge problems with AI LLMs providing they are open source and rolled out small scale on home PCs, I just have an issue with their industrial applications at scale and the attempt to use them to consolidate power and control. They don’t have to be used that way.

Yes

Apathy