Snot Flickerman

I used to roll on the main matrix server, but I’ve been toying with the idea of rolling out a server for just myself here at home for a while now, since I can federate with other servers. Just disable making new accounts after I set up my own account and roll out.

Most underrated Coen Brothers film.

I don’t know if Verizon of AT&T offer these but T-Mobile used to have small cellular sites you could basically rent them to plug into your wired internet and it would piggyback off your internet to make a small cellular hotspot to give you good cell signal. I had one when I lived out in the boonies for a while.

EDIT: Looks like the ones T-Mobile used to offer are all End-of-Life and they don’t even want them back from customers because they were for 3G/4G and they’re moving all services to 5G.

https://tmo.report/2025/04/t-mobiles-infamous-cellspot-coverage-devices-are-now-end-of-life/

EDIT II: Looks like AT&T may offer some still though:

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1452148/

Also, depending on where you live its a pointless exercise. I ended up throwing mine away not because I didn’t want access to OTA television, but because I lived in a valley on the other side of mountains where all the broadcast antennae in Seattle are. So even being on the top floor of a building with my antenna as high as I could possibly mount it I still got exactly one channel total that came through and it was still glitchy a lot of the time. God the digital changeover ruined OTA broadcasts, because at least when you used to have weak signal you could tweak the antenna until the picture looked halfway decent, but no amount of tweaking fixes the digital glitching that happens from dropped packets.

Anyway, yeah, if you live in an unfortunately placed area, you need a 30 foot tall antennae pole on top of your building to even maybe have the opportunity to catch some broadcast channels. Stupid.

Let’s just cut the shit and admit that over-the-air broadcast television is effectively dead.

This is why Net Neutrality mattered, because the future isn’t in old tech (radio broadcast) being consumed by DRM in desperate plays to stay relevant and/or profitable.

The future was always in things like YouTube, Netflix, and other online content delivery services. Which is why strict regulation of Net Neutrality and strict regulation of such services was and continues to be so important.

No, the infrastructure isn’t “open” like broadcast airwaves, which technically anyone with a license and equipment can jump into using, whereas internet infrastructure is all privately owned wired networking. The fact that it is different isn’t an excuse for any and all governments to have just effectively given up on regulation of those spaces when they’re where the media-consuming public happen to be. That’s why we needed legislation of these things instead of a back and forth wankery of the FCC changing how the internet is classified over and over again in between warring political factions.

I can almost guarantee you that nobody under the age of 30 gives a singly flying fuck about having an antenna on a television. They’re probably watching more than half their media on their phone or tablet anyway.

The real reason that this kind of change is happening to over-the-air broadcasting is because it doesn’t have enough viewers, and by extension, enough advertising, to sustain it as a model anymore.

I think the loss of over-the-air programming isn’t the best thing, but I also think it’s stupid to keep holding on to this idea like it matters very much in 2026 where if you asked a kid in their twenties if they even knew what an antenna for a television was they’d probably go “what the fuck are you even talking about?”

But I mean we can’t even regulate shit like paid political speech online needing to say that it is paid political speech, so fat chance of any useful legislation coming anytime soon. US government in particular has been broken as fuck for three decades.

I mean, arguably, that’s what sex workers say, too. That you’re paying for their time and that anything that happens is a choice between two consenting adults. They’re getting paid for their time and sometimes sex just happens during that time.

Boss gets a dollar, I get a dime That’s why I bang my wife on company time

Time for making out on the couch instead then!

Time for sword fighting with rulers in the hallway.

This game is such a fucking fun romp.

I like that it has a “secret” ending that if you actually wait around in the waiting room instead of leaving, eventually the Mayor will be ready to see you. I think it’s about 15 minutes.

I miss when Element was called Riot.IM, also a stupid lawsuit that never happened but they changed the name to avoid a lawsuit anyway.

In Element-web or Element-desktop? I’m not sure about Desktop, but Web used the default scrollbar size as defined by your web browser.

I mean, so do US companies, but it’s moreso that kind of misdirection about E2EE that Telegram uses. Unlike something like Matrix/Element which goes out of it’s way to explain E2EE, make sure it’s default on in every conversation, including group conversations, Telegram isn’t clear that it’s E2EE is opt-in and isn’t available in groups. Also, their encryption is home-rolled and to my knowledge has never been audited. Plus the generally skeevy credentials of the owner/creator make it untrustworthy.

Also, it seems to be a haven for scammers, which also puts it in the “don’t suggest this to people” basket.

Definitely not Telegram. Please stop suggesting people use this fucking disgrace of an application.

Like, even with face scanning, I’d still probably suggest Discord over Telegram.

The owners of Discord are untrustworthy but the owners of Telegram are whole ten levels below untrustworthy.

You can say many things about them but they are persistent as hell.

That persistence is a type of sociopathy, though. It’s an antisocial personality disorder. Sure, they’re persistent, but they’re persistent at pursuing absolutely terrible things for personal gain that effectively means nothing considering they already have enough power and money to make Solomon blush. It’s a mental disorder where they need more and more and more while they have more than they could ever use in their entire lifetimes and in their grandchildren’s their grandchildren’s lifetimes.

So even that is honestly a negative thing, there’s literally not a positive thing you can say about them, because everything they do is couched in being the most selfish, proud (for no good reason), and narcissistic fuckers alive.

Oh absolutely, part of the reason the CEOs of the world buy into the AI hype is because they’re so desperate to get their slaves back. Slaves that never need to sleep, or take time off, or demand pay increases or better treatment. AGI is their fucking wet dream of a perfect slave that will never push back.

and in our labor power with AI.

Let’s be real though, this is less about actually replacing workers with AI that is often completely wrong because it’s not actually “thinking” and doesn’t actually know what it is doing. It’s much more about using the specter of AI and over-hyped arguments about what it could do, given time, to justify workforce reductions and pay reductions.

It has far less to do with actually replacing workers with AI and far more to do with justifying worse working conditions and worse pay without as much social fuss over why.

AI has some very useful tightly-specific niche applications, but “general purpose AI” is a joke that isn’t going anywhere realistic at the moment. Especially if we have to burn down our planet burning up fossil fuels to power software that is only doing a best guess of what the next string of text should be.

I mean, it’s very arguable that we’ve just been doing “feudalism with extra steps” for a very long time anyway.

To be less US/Europe-centric than my original post, the majority of the world has been in the “priced out of anything but bare subsistence” basket for most of the history of modern capitalism. Only the citizens of the Imperial Democracies of the Western world were benefiting while the majority of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres were simply locked out from being beneficiaries either through trade embargoes or outright exploitation via not paying foreign workers the home-country equivalent, and instead paying them a much lower “localized” rate.

It’s really that the Imperial Boomerang has finally made it’s way home to the citizens of the West.

Part of this has been a long-standing move by every industry to prioritize business-to-business sales as opposed to consumer sales simply because businesses have money and consumers don’t, because businesses are pocketing all the profits and refusing to pay their employees (consumers) a living wage, let alone a thriving wage.

It’s been a long time coming for the PC industry, because it’s been a general trend for at least two decades as sales to business have become more profitable over consumer sales ever since the late 90s.

It’s just more evidence that the bottom 90% of earners are just being priced out of anything but bare subsistence and the wealthy do not give a single fuck about it, in fact, they’re embracing it.

Why am I completely not surprised that he was speaking to Bobby Kotick?