I thought drones were just going to be a fad, but they’ve become huge, especially in terms of government and corporate surveillance. I should have realized the way it was going when America started using them militarily. American military inventions almost always end up becoming popular consumer products/applications.

Man I think all of us mistakenly thought this. The early internet had such promise.

https://mander.xyz/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1

I count 25 serious communities just on the first page of your instance showing all communities from all instances (37 on the second page). This is the primary way to find new communities, and it’s relatively simple to use, imho.

Look, people have explained it to you several times in here and at this point you’re being purposefully obtuse. Go subscribe to non-meme communities, only look at your subscriptions, and maybe stop bothering people demanding they cater to how you want to communicate. Your life and experiences aren’t a universal experience, let other people be.

The only memes I see are from meme communities, and I see a bunch of communities dedicated to thoughtful discussion, because I’m subscribed to them. I never look at the frontpage, I only look at my subscribed communities, and I’m only subbed to a minimal amount of meme communities. If I unsubbed from them, I wouldn’t see memes at all.

Also, the world is fucking dark and shitty. Sometimes people would rather make jokes about it than talk deeply about it because they’re trying to not go crazy and end up suicidal from facing too much darkness. Humor is often used as a release valve for painful subjects. Why not let the people who don’t have it in them to get into lengthy discussions just handle it in whatever way works for them.

Just… don’t connect them to the internet? Or if you must connect them for dumb shit like system updates, put them behind some access control where the only access they have is the server they get updates from.

This aspect of it being decentralized is so important to remember.

People sometimes give me quizzical responses when I point them to the repository for the Bypass Paywalls Clean plugin because it’s hosted on a Russian git site (gitflic.ru). The plugin was chased off the Firefox add-ons site/Chrome add-ons site, it was chased off of Gitlab, it was chased off of Github, all over DMCA takedown requests. People act like “well it must be shady because it’s not on a well known git site” and yet is hosted in a country that doesn’t respect the US copyright cabals control over media literally because that’s the only safe harbor for it. The developer even has this snippet on his description of the plugin:

PS although the add-on was removed from Mozilla’s add-on store (AMO) (because of DMCA Takedown Notice) it’s still signed and manually checked for security by Mozilla (hence the delay in signing).

Yet it’s super common for people to be absolutely suspicious of it. Including being suspicious of the traffic leaving the plugin when it’s not being used which turns out to be the plug-in checking for updates every time.

Using alternative gits is so important and is literally what allows programming and especially open source programming, to thrive.

We need a world that recognizes this reality and does everything possible to ensure that there is a very low limit to the amount of power that a single person can accumulate.

And how do you achieve that in a flat structure? That’s basically relying on local communities to all be self-correcting which feels to me like that hippie shit “why can’t we all just hold hands and get along.” Oh I don’t know because some people are going to grow up into Nazis and I am not sure that in itself is a solvable problem about humanity.

Small communities are more likely to make exceptions for people they know closely. Like church groups absolving abusive men in the clergy and grouping around them to pray for them. Groups allowed to self police rarely police themselves successfully.

So to me it sounds like you need power structures to help control the populace and stop them from doing that, and power structures invite corruption.

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.