I'm consistently impressed with the performance of my ancient GTX480 card that I have in my "Wintendo" system. I have it hooked up to a TV with Windows 10 and Steam in Big Picture mode. My kids can play any of the games they want to play on it, and so can I. Sure, it doesn't do the latest AAA titles in stupid high resolution, but it plays Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams, Lego Lord of the Rings, and Mickey's Castle of Illusion without a problem, my kids think it's the greatest thing ever. With a Radeon I fear I would have to switch drivers between each game, and that the card would be too old to matter.
I have to agree - I don't live in a little box with just my stuff.
I had a conference room to take care of at my last job - and I was beating my head against the wall with "Why won't it make sound?" Turns out the "correct" Radeon drivers wouldn't do sound over HDMI, I had to find some fossilized ones to do it instead. No - I've had recent Radeon issues to compliment my old wounds.
Yes, but they did it by doing it better, not Microsoft of the 1990's giving a CEO hookers and blow on a yacht trip to get a corporation to ditch Novell for NT regardless of what the I.T. team thought. Doing it better is why they stay on top reputation wise. As far as graphics chips are concerned AMD is better positioned contract wise and even availability wise in laptops. I still go out of my way to get Nvidia due to old wounds from ATI that still hurt and I just am consistently amazed at what I can do with even ten year old Nvidia cards with just a fraction of the AMD driver headaches.
For reference I'm a fossil - I still like the AMD CPU/Nvidia GPU combo despite the death of that tend many many moons ago
I find having a huge amount of possessions actually robs you of your independence.
Stuff takes space. Space is expensive. You either have to live more expensively or with a worse quality of life surrounded by your stuff.
Stuff for storing stuff is expensive and bulky. Cabinets, boxes, shelves all take up space.
I agree completely. It cost when you buy it, it costs when you move it, it costs when you store it, and it costs in frustration when it's in the way. This is why I'm going DRM free digital on things, not using paper books, and consolidating disk media into binders that take less room. My personal footprint is getting reduced, though unfortunately my family has difficulty getting on the bandwagon so my household expands even as my personal stuff reduces.
Tools are not "Stuff" tools are a means of making a living, and a reasonably large percentage of my personal footprint. Having the means on-hand is the difference between making money and not.
Having a balance doesn't change the dependence argument. How much do you want to depend on others? I have my own tools because depending on an employer to have them means I won't have them when I need them - my tools make me more valuable.
My argument wasn't that you should accumulate, my argument was that you should not be dependent - big difference. Ownership is often the opposite of dependence. Even when I was young and didn't own much and loved being mobile I had at least the minimum tools I needed to do my job. The millennials seem to expect everything to be provided by those who need the work done. I couldn't imagine a plumber showing up and asking me to provide the wrenches and pipe adhesive.
This is a copy-paste that I wrote for somewhere else, do as you will with it.
I have observed something, and it has increased with time, having recently brought it up to my father-in-law, who is also a tech field worker, he agreed with me. The people - both voluntarily and at some prodding are giving up control and ownership of everything - slowly.
What brought it to my attention is streaming services. Despite being a quite technical individual I skipped out on the early part of the streaming fad, due in part to living in an area with unreliable web access and literally working in a faraday cage without WiFi access during that time period. I doubled down on the previous fad - ripping and compressing, instead and continue that to this day.
The result - people are lost without access to Spotify. No Netflix, no movies. You unplug the average person from the Internet these days and they no longer have the ability to use their entertainment systems.
We are watching the formation of dependence culture.
Young people aren't driving anymore, which like everything else is a mix of good and bad. Even when I was privileged enough to be able to bike to work and back, and even for my grocery shopping and most everything else I still kept a license and a vehicle. Something I've noted at work - the younger a coworker is the less likely they are to have any damned tools to work with, and it doesn't appear to be tied to not having had enough time to accumulate them. While doing a little research about that tidbit I stumbled across an article about the non-ownership topic from the other perspective written in a way that meets my approval.
It's important after that last article I make myself clear. I am not condemning the passing of materialism culture. Far from it. I personally have reduced my materialism and even the footprint of what I personally own. I am however against submission and dependence culture - both of which are adopted when you give up your ability to do for yourself by depending on services - AKA being served - exclusively.
I want to go back to tools. Even though I've reduced the amount of junk I personally own, something I do own a healthy share of is tools. Tools are to me, a different kind of possession. They aren't possessions that say "Look at me!", they aren't something that I use as a status symbol, they aren't pointless possessions. No - tools are something that says "I've got this." I use my tools to make a living, to do for myself, to teach. My tools give me independence and if used properly can even be used to spread independence.
I think we're heading down a dangerous path. When most of the people rent someone still has to own what was rented. When people do nothing but stream someone still has control of the source material. When you don't have your own tools you have to depend on someone to provide them for you. When you can't control your own propulsion you can only go where others will take you. In situations where the many are dependent on the few, the few tend to get fewer in time as they are bought out or consolidated after deaths, etc... In turn the fewer the sources of provision are, the more power the providers have. Eventually we all become slaves existing at the leisure of those who control the resources.
I just realized after typing that last line that it sounds like some sort of socialist manifesto - at least when that line stands alone. Quite the opposite - w
It's a 2015, the van is just about perfect for my needs other than the stereo. As soon as I heard MS and Ford were teaming up I thought it was a horrible idea, seriously, Fords have enough problems with crashes without Microsoft products.
So this is almost a thread-jack, but I'll do it anyways.
My Ford has one of those Microsoft factory stereos in it, with Bluetooth. Complete trash. I have to disconnect the battery on occasion to reboot the fucking stereo. I haven't even been able to locate a fuse or relay to pull, and I've checked the three fuse/relay boxes I know of. If I don't reboot it, it won't accept voice commands anymore, and the push-button menu system is horrid, something you don't want to deal with while driving. Even then, the Bluetooth quits working regularly - usually about the time voice commands quit working.
My Volkswagen is a little older - it doesn't have Bluetooth, but it's certainly new enough it could have had it, just one year model older than the Ford. I bought a $15 made in China with stolen patents (probably) dongle from Amazon. It works flawlessly. It connects automatically without the need for voice commands to tell it to (unlike the Ford), it has output you can hear, even on the highway, unlike the Ford especially when using an Aux jack.
I like the $15 dongle better in one car than I do the factory stereo in the other. My wife hates the Volkswagen (can't stand driving stick), except for the stereo, which she's a bit jealous of. I'm seriously considering putting a dongle in the Ford and hoping it has higher output through the Aux jack than my phone does so I don't have to mess with the rest of the Microsoft/Ford issues.
Could my lack of a Facebook account be a big part of what I'm doing wrong? Most of my social media silo activity is on Twitter and Discord, and not with people I knew in person. If these silos didn't exist, such as in the personal website landscape that the author of the featured article and the maintainers of IndieWeb.org envision, it's be even more difficult for someone to announce his existence.
Twitter isn't that great for meeting people - at least I don't think it is, I rarely use it. Twitter is, from what I can tell, all about launching a comment, not interacting. Discord, I use it a little, it appears to be hyper-focused on whatever the discussion group is for. My three groups are the Texas Libertarian Party, the LBRY media platform, and one my buddy started for our circle of geeks. I suppose it could be a good start if you can find something local - local is a key BTW. You need to focus on something that will get you to meet people in the real world. If you want to start with online things try Meetup.com - I actually landed my job at NASA from that website. My buddy started a LUG where he lived close to the Johnson Space Center and some people from the space center showed up, they found out I needed a job and gave me the hookup. I'm pretty much trying to get people off of Facebook these days, but there's no denying what can happen by mingling with your connections and connections of connections.
I'm beginning to gather that you have quite a bit of frustration that originates with your difficulties from being on the spectrum. I'm not going to suggest you go straight into trying to find a partner. Go to MeetUp.com or Craigslist, or possibly something from your local newspaper, radio station, community center, etc... Find something you're interested in and is unlikely to have someone you might be interested in romantically there. Practice socializing a bit. I'm going to suggest doing something physical - some sort of workout group. I can not stress enough how much exercising can boost your self confidence and overall state of mind. There's something about the hormones flowing from doing so that will just really boost you mentally. Warning - if you haven't exercised in years it may not start well. Personally when I've gone a year or two without really doing it I spend between three days and two weeks having to various emergency trips to the bathroom until I get my body back to where it can handle a little. It's worth it. It may not be the first or even the second week, but you will be glad you started if stick with it. Practice interacting with people you aren't interested in. A lot of groups of just about any type start with going around the table, whatever, introducing yourself and saying why you're there. When it's your term say something along the lines of "Hi my name is Tepples, I'm here because I'm interested in [whatever the group is] and I'm on the spectrum, so I suck at interacting with people and so I'm also trying so I'm here to work on that too." You have no idea how much of an impact being honest and brave can have. There will likely be a couple of people who get giddy and proud of you and will go out of their ways to interact with you. There are also likely to be a couple who make wisecracks. Both types are trying to help you.
I'm over 40, married, and I have three kids. I'm probably not the #1 guy to go to for modern social media advice, even though I was on the cutting edge participating on Slashdot, Userfriendly, and what have you before LiveJournal and Friendster even rolled onto the scene. I know from my most previous job - at a marketing agency - they focused on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook a lot professionally and a lot of the young trendy marketing types (a significant percentage of the company) was on Whatsapp. I'm not even sure what that last one is exactly.
As for social media - I have a line. On one side of the line there's "real world" and on the other there's "geeky online social". Things that pertain
Some have it worse than others. I had it bad for a while, it was about the fifth grade I determined that whatever was wrong it must be me and it was up to me to get past it. It took a lot of effort and thought on my part. Some of it has become easier with time, reflexive and semi-natural even, it wanes with stress and being tired, some of it takes conscious thought always, and this is where social mishaps happen. The fact I've done so well with it is almost a curse, because when the natural part shows through people who don't see me as having these difficulties tend to take it wrong.
My continued connections to people from school are, I'll admit, circumstantial for the most part, my parents remained back home for a few years, and even after they moved my sister stayed behind. Slowly people came online and honestly I have Facebook to thank (sometimes blame) for strengthening connections to those from my past. My wife is from back home, she is quite a bit younger than me so she wasn't an old flame, but it actually was Facebook where we "met again as adults" and our relationship started, now my ties to back home are much stronger than they were, due mostly to the fact her family is still heavily based there. For the most part my old connections find me or happen on accident, I'm really not good at doing my part. I actually like social media for almost automating that for me, I just think it's time that Facebook and the big corporate ones become a footnote in history.
As for the religious question - you're splitting hairs. I can tell you connections through a religious organization are about like any other, there's people who help one another, there's people angry at one another, people form factions, there's in-fighting, the real exception is people usually make an effort to get over it and come back together. Not always - I've been in two churches that have split and one that had some major conflict. That last one I actually sparked the conflict by pointing out science and religion didn't have to be exclusive and I pointed out how the book of Genesis basically described the big bang theory and I drew the parallels. Two camps formed quickly, the rationals versus the theologicals. Yes, there are very rational, very scientific people who practice various religions, and many scientist who are in the closet to protect their funding. One does not have to be part of a religion to find a group. I mentioned I was active in the Libertarian party (I'm on a break having a new child - I took a break for the last one as well), honestly my connections to people in the local part of the party "feel" like the connections I had with church members. We go to the same meetings, we share a more or less common belief and set of values, we socialize together, listen to speeches together, we do a lot together.
As for finding jobs/spouse, look. I can't give you super-awesome advice. I got lots of girlfriends from OKCupid, some long term, some single dates, etc.... In both cases maintaining old relationships helps, those connections create more connections. It is incredibly difficult to maintain for people like us, as I said before, I was fortunate enough that others liked me well enough to do a lot of that work.
You have to make yourself more likable. I have no doubt that someone, either because they loved or because you annoyed the ever living shit out of them and weren't afraid to say so, has told you what your social problems are. Probably more than one someone, I had both unload on me. Pay attention to what they said. If it's something obvious and verifiable - like you smell bad - bathe, wash your clothes, clean up your living space, reduce clutter etc.... I am a pet lover, but I'm going to tell you having indoor cats, especially in close quarters creates a lot of these difficulties. I've noticed a lot of shut-in type geeks are cat lovers and I can often smell the litter box on them, I'm very allergic to cats so it goes double for my detection. If they say it's because you interrupt convers
Though I have never been officially diagnosed, people in my life - including those who have plenty of relevant experience related to other people in their lives agree I'm on the spectrum. An Aspie type, high functioning, but with very well defined definite systems.
I went to school and I still have connections to people I went to school with. I went to church, and still have connections from that. I've had many jobs over the course of my career and I still have connections there, and yes, I've been on many different social media websites including Slashdot, Userfriendly back in the day, I still think LiveJournal is very well structured per my own expectations and needs, it's just not popular anymore and I can understand why my pet-picture sharing relatives don't like it (hint - they probably don't know a single HTML tag).
Having social interaction disorders such as lower level autism related disorders, or even many social anxiety disorders does not prevent one from ever having formed connections. I find it interesting that so many of the nerds I've networked with in meat-space do not seem to have spectrum disorders however so many I interact with online do - it's interesting and I've failed to find a definite cause/effect relationship between the two - it just seems that those of us who spend more time online socialize less in meat-space. I seem to walk the line a little more than most on both sides of it.
So - in my personal version of the world - most of the people I would cross-link my site with are not people I've met online. My wife has a cousin who is a candidate to build/host one of these sites, I have a close friend who is a candidate and is considering doing so (met at work and have at least four employments in common since then - we help each other out), through being an active Libertarian in the state party - which turns out is about 85% technical workers of one type or another - I know lots of people that I met in meat-space who are capable of doing this and I might convince to do so. Anyone I met online that I would consider cross-linking with, with a few exceptions, are people I've brought into real-world relationships that trump pre-existing online connections.
Yes, I am on the spectrum. I get super annoyed when people move my stuff when I'm away from it, I have times when I have difficulty retrieving words from my head and forming spoken sentences - this is not constant and depends on many variables, but I range from an articulate master of the language to not being able to tell people to bug off and leave me alone. I can - when my responsibilities aren't piled a mile high - play a video game for six hours and not realize I've been at it for that long. When I'm concentrating on something and someone pulls me out of it I have to suppress anger. I got very good at keeping my emotions/reactions under control when I was young and I'm still good at it now, but the instincts are still there. I've worked hard at suppressing the bad things about being on the spectrum while leveraging the focus and thought processes that come with it to further myself professionally. Unless I happen to be in a state where I have trouble communicating at the moment, most people are completely unaware that I am on the spectrum until they get to know me well. I'm proud of this fact, not all of us become slaves to our conditions. I'm over 40, when I was in school - a shit-hole in the middle of the desert - any learning disability was tagged as dyslexia. My school recognized I had a learning problem, and despite reading on a grade level well above my grade level at diagnosis and having reading comprehension to match they put me in a dyslexia class to teach me how to read. I only wish mild forms of autism were diagnosed back then, or that I didn't live in a shit-hole, when I was in school it would have saved me a lot of time grounded.
You're pigeon holing a world of people based on an inaccurate anecdote.
I'm on a "local" social network that is just that - meant for your local neighborhood called Next Door.
I got some scrap furniture to build a desk, bought another desk, and gotten rid of old appliances using it. It's about 80% "I found this dog, have you seen my dog? Who's cat is this?" but since it's truly local it's a good way to find out when the water is coming back on, get pictures of the truck that hit the light pole and took out the power in your area and bitch about the the pothole in the street outside. One dude was moving away from my old nieghborhood, decided to go full cloud/streaming and just set a box full of about 300 DVDs, BluRays, and music disk by the curb. I grabbed that one up. There's some annoying advertising on it - in feed type - and I've had posts mysteriously disappear when trying to do a tasteful, one time only plug for my own business, but if I mention my own business in reply to a post they seem to leave it.
As for family/personal circles I use Friendica, it's got what makes Facebook appealing to family, but my family complains it's too complicate. I don't see it, and I've used a lot of different stuff over the years. Meh, more work....
If the nerd in each family where to do this, then start cross-linking with the nerds in other families in their circles we would have the share your meme, dog, and rug-rat circuit family and low-tech users need!
Oh yeah, even though I know it's supposed to be in its deaththrows I use Hangouts so I don't have to type on a stupid touchscreen for text messages. It takes an annoying amount of time to load and they eventually started making "Chrome only" modifications so you had to use Chrome to do video.
I seem to recall Microsoft telling the world "There's not need to close the table tag" then proceeding to put an open table tag in their pre-CSS server side templates and encouraging others to do the same for no reason other than to break Netscape.
Some of us have memories and don't feel sorry for Microsoft even if we think Google of today is as bad as Microsoft of the late 90s.
In the end it's still open source software running on top of closed source hardware and software.
You obviously didn't look to close.
It's open source software, even the phone is supposed to be SIP, not actual mobile phone. It's pure I.P.
Some of the hardware may be closed source, who cares, the software can be pretty much any Linux distro (or theoretically something else) you can get to run on it, it's an unlocked system. The radio may have some closed-source components, but that's all but mandatory due to FCC rules. Even most other-wise open source WiFi drivers in Linux have closed source components due to this tidbit.
The "Fake News" on Facebook was a real problem - the fix is to educate your ignorant relatives about actually looking at URLs and how to tell what the real URL is, not the deceptive one and how to click around to a site to confirm it's a real one before sharing something that looks too good to be true. Also CHECK THE STUPID DATE of the article. I don't know how many times dead celebrities have died again on my news feed.
That being set aside - yes, Facebook along with the other big media platforms are using the actual fake-news (a.k.a click-bait) articles as an excuse to censor ideas that don't fit the ideas of their sponsors/management. This is a real issue and needs to be addressed not by the government but the users.
I personally have addressed this issue by looking at why I go to Facebook. The fact is for social media having to do with my interest I've mostly moved over to decentralized IPFS/Crypto platforms. The reason I go to Facebook is those dumb assed relatives who share click-bait but I love them anyways who would have their minds blown and eyes glazed by trying to explain decentralized IPFS/Crypto concepts to them.
My solution? I made my own social media site. The tools are out there and they're simple. I experiment with quite a few, I gave Wordpress a good solid try, but the plugins I needed to make it work right were flaky and needed exact versions of one thing or another to work. Libertree looked promising, but required a tool-kit that I just didn't approve of - I'm not going to use anything that requires me to establish an account and connect to a third-party API just to keep it working. I settled on Friendica. I like it, it's got post-previewing (something that's very important to me) and decent support for just about any kind of media you want to link to/embed. It's still a bit shy of what my family/users want.
My plan if I can get anyone else on-board, I'll host my friends and family, and I'm hoping another nerd is a circle that crosses with mine will start their own server. It works fine on it's own, but Friendica is designed to network with a bunch of other nodes. Mine is removed from the public nodes, I just want it to connect to other friends and family, and I'm not posting pictures of my kids, including my seven week old that has never had his picture put on Facebook by me as a bit of a prod to get friends and relatives on-board with deligitimzing Facebook. You're a bunch of nerds here - the rest of you should pick up on this trend. Instead of a decentralized cluster-fuck of each person for themselves of truly decentralized social media like Minds (which is available and source and was considered instead of Friendica - but was ruled too difficult due to the crypto-not social media stuff) or Akasha, we can make social media look like a relational cluster grid. Not decentralized, not centralized, something with a lot of different centers working together with nerds acting as shepherds of their own nerds.
(After I setup Friendica Hubzilla was recommended to me and will be my next attempt should everyone completely give up on my Friendica site.
It did seem to prefer Russian over English, even site versions, which I understand completely, they are offering a patch so I as an English speaker can use it, they are Russian at the core. I still use it some. I've often wondered how much it must suck to speak any language other than English and try to use the web. I know there's stuff out there for speakers of other languages, but English seems to be where it's at online.
I understand DDG used to be more of what you're describing, but it's got it's own spider now. I'm not 100% sure of the particulars, but I'm liking it.
Sailfish has caught my interest before, and the pure-Linux phone on the horizon definitely has my attention. Google is following Apple into the void and I don't want much to do with it. Apple just got an award thanking them for their censorship, and Google is working with the Chinese bother there and here.
I want to be as far away from that crap as I can be.
I've of course been ridiculed for choosing Russia above. Honestly, Russia for all their spying and what have you isn't out to get us like China is. I'm not going to get too close to Russia, but overall I think their current media image is being intentionally and unfairly skewed toward evil.
I started using Yandex when it became obvious Google was biasing its results politically.
As far as U.S. politics is concerned it looks like Yandex was probably neutral. Unfortunately as a Russian search engine, even though I was using the English interface it gave way too many Russian language results so I've mostly abandoned it for DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
Yandex, I have to say was solid and well made. I do believe there's more here than another "Fire Phone".
However our courts also work on precedent - what has been done in court before becomes the guidelines of what courts should do thereafter.
There's also an argument to be made that if any part of the federal government used something like Mail Chimp for broadcast communications, combined with Hillary getting away with it, that the law is now a Symbolic Law and no longer has any real standing.
Slashdot Mirror
I could admin LANtastic as well, but I still thought Novell Netware was about the best thing going for small offices back then.
I'm consistently impressed with the performance of my ancient GTX480 card that I have in my "Wintendo" system. I have it hooked up to a TV with Windows 10 and Steam in Big Picture mode. My kids can play any of the games they want to play on it, and so can I. Sure, it doesn't do the latest AAA titles in stupid high resolution, but it plays Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams, Lego Lord of the Rings, and Mickey's Castle of Illusion without a problem, my kids think it's the greatest thing ever. With a Radeon I fear I would have to switch drivers between each game, and that the card would be too old to matter.
I have to agree - I don't live in a little box with just my stuff.
I had a conference room to take care of at my last job - and I was beating my head against the wall with "Why won't it make sound?" Turns out the "correct" Radeon drivers wouldn't do sound over HDMI, I had to find some fossilized ones to do it instead. No - I've had recent Radeon issues to compliment my old wounds.
Yes, but they did it by doing it better, not Microsoft of the 1990's giving a CEO hookers and blow on a yacht trip to get a corporation to ditch Novell for NT regardless of what the I.T. team thought. Doing it better is why they stay on top reputation wise. As far as graphics chips are concerned AMD is better positioned contract wise and even availability wise in laptops. I still go out of my way to get Nvidia due to old wounds from ATI that still hurt and I just am consistently amazed at what I can do with even ten year old Nvidia cards with just a fraction of the AMD driver headaches.
For reference I'm a fossil - I still like the AMD CPU/Nvidia GPU combo despite the death of that tend many many moons ago
Instead of Win 10 I compare it to "early Zune prototype".
I find having a huge amount of possessions actually robs you of your independence.
Stuff takes space. Space is expensive. You either have to live more expensively or with a worse quality of life surrounded by your stuff.
Stuff for storing stuff is expensive and bulky. Cabinets, boxes, shelves all take up space.
I agree completely. It cost when you buy it, it costs when you move it, it costs when you store it, and it costs in frustration when it's in the way. This is why I'm going DRM free digital on things, not using paper books, and consolidating disk media into binders that take less room. My personal footprint is getting reduced, though unfortunately my family has difficulty getting on the bandwagon so my household expands even as my personal stuff reduces.
Tools are not "Stuff" tools are a means of making a living, and a reasonably large percentage of my personal footprint. Having the means on-hand is the difference between making money and not.
Having a balance doesn't change the dependence argument. How much do you want to depend on others? I have my own tools because depending on an employer to have them means I won't have them when I need them - my tools make me more valuable.
My argument wasn't that you should accumulate, my argument was that you should not be dependent - big difference. Ownership is often the opposite of dependence. Even when I was young and didn't own much and loved being mobile I had at least the minimum tools I needed to do my job. The millennials seem to expect everything to be provided by those who need the work done. I couldn't imagine a plumber showing up and asking me to provide the wrenches and pipe adhesive.
This is a copy-paste that I wrote for somewhere else, do as you will with it.
I have observed something, and it has increased with time, having recently brought it up to my father-in-law, who is also a tech field worker, he agreed with me.
The people - both voluntarily and at some prodding are giving up control and ownership of everything - slowly.
What brought it to my attention is streaming services. Despite being a quite technical individual I skipped out on the early part of the streaming fad, due in part to living in an area with unreliable web access and literally working in a faraday cage without WiFi access during that time period. I doubled down on the previous fad - ripping and compressing, instead and continue that to this day.
The result - people are lost without access to Spotify. No Netflix, no movies. You unplug the average person from the Internet these days and they no longer have the ability to use their entertainment systems.
I originally contemplated the pros and cons of going all online versus what I was doing - are we really missing anything by not owning our media? In time I began to realize it didn't stop at media.
Younger people don't want to own anything.
We are watching the formation of dependence culture.
Young people aren't driving anymore, which like everything else is a mix of good and bad. Even when I was privileged enough to be able to bike to work and back, and even for my grocery shopping and most everything else I still kept a license and a vehicle. Something I've noted at work - the younger a coworker is the less likely they are to have any damned tools to work with, and it doesn't appear to be tied to not having had enough time to accumulate them. While doing a little research about that tidbit I stumbled across an article about the non-ownership topic from the other perspective written in a way that meets my approval.
It's important after that last article I make myself clear. I am not condemning the passing of materialism culture. Far from it. I personally have reduced my materialism and even the footprint of what I personally own. I am however against submission and dependence culture - both of which are adopted when you give up your ability to do for yourself by depending on services - AKA being served - exclusively.
I want to go back to tools. Even though I've reduced the amount of junk I personally own, something I do own a healthy share of is tools. Tools are to me, a different kind of possession. They aren't possessions that say "Look at me!", they aren't something that I use as a status symbol, they aren't pointless possessions. No - tools are something that says "I've got this." I use my tools to make a living, to do for myself, to teach. My tools give me independence and if used properly can even be used to spread independence.
I think we're heading down a dangerous path. When most of the people rent someone still has to own what was rented. When people do nothing but stream someone still has control of the source material. When you don't have your own tools you have to depend on someone to provide them for you. When you can't control your own propulsion you can only go where others will take you. In situations where the many are dependent on the few, the few tend to get fewer in time as they are bought out or consolidated after deaths, etc... In turn the fewer the sources of provision are, the more power the providers have.
Eventually we all become slaves existing at the leisure of those who control the resources.
I just realized after typing that last line that it sounds like some sort of socialist manifesto - at least when that line stands alone. Quite the opposite - w
It's a 2015, the van is just about perfect for my needs other than the stereo. As soon as I heard MS and Ford were teaming up I thought it was a horrible idea, seriously, Fords have enough problems with crashes without Microsoft products.
So this is almost a thread-jack, but I'll do it anyways.
My Ford has one of those Microsoft factory stereos in it, with Bluetooth. Complete trash. I have to disconnect the battery on occasion to reboot the fucking stereo. I haven't even been able to locate a fuse or relay to pull, and I've checked the three fuse/relay boxes I know of. If I don't reboot it, it won't accept voice commands anymore, and the push-button menu system is horrid, something you don't want to deal with while driving. Even then, the Bluetooth quits working regularly - usually about the time voice commands quit working.
My Volkswagen is a little older - it doesn't have Bluetooth, but it's certainly new enough it could have had it, just one year model older than the Ford. I bought a $15 made in China with stolen patents (probably) dongle from Amazon. It works flawlessly. It connects automatically without the need for voice commands to tell it to (unlike the Ford), it has output you can hear, even on the highway, unlike the Ford especially when using an Aux jack.
I like the $15 dongle better in one car than I do the factory stereo in the other. My wife hates the Volkswagen (can't stand driving stick), except for the stereo, which she's a bit jealous of. I'm seriously considering putting a dongle in the Ford and hoping it has higher output through the Aux jack than my phone does so I don't have to mess with the rest of the Microsoft/Ford issues.
Could my lack of a Facebook account be a big part of what I'm doing wrong? Most of my social media silo activity is on Twitter and Discord, and not with people I knew in person. If these silos didn't exist, such as in the personal website landscape that the author of the featured article and the maintainers of IndieWeb.org envision, it's be even more difficult for someone to announce his existence.
Twitter isn't that great for meeting people - at least I don't think it is, I rarely use it. Twitter is, from what I can tell, all about launching a comment, not interacting. Discord, I use it a little, it appears to be hyper-focused on whatever the discussion group is for. My three groups are the Texas Libertarian Party, the LBRY media platform, and one my buddy started for our circle of geeks. I suppose it could be a good start if you can find something local - local is a key BTW. You need to focus on something that will get you to meet people in the real world. If you want to start with online things try Meetup.com - I actually landed my job at NASA from that website. My buddy started a LUG where he lived close to the Johnson Space Center and some people from the space center showed up, they found out I needed a job and gave me the hookup. I'm pretty much trying to get people off of Facebook these days, but there's no denying what can happen by mingling with your connections and connections of connections.
I'm beginning to gather that you have quite a bit of frustration that originates with your difficulties from being on the spectrum. I'm not going to suggest you go straight into trying to find a partner. Go to MeetUp.com or Craigslist, or possibly something from your local newspaper, radio station, community center, etc... Find something you're interested in and is unlikely to have someone you might be interested in romantically there. Practice socializing a bit. I'm going to suggest doing something physical - some sort of workout group. I can not stress enough how much exercising can boost your self confidence and overall state of mind. There's something about the hormones flowing from doing so that will just really boost you mentally. Warning - if you haven't exercised in years it may not start well. Personally when I've gone a year or two without really doing it I spend between three days and two weeks having to various emergency trips to the bathroom until I get my body back to where it can handle a little. It's worth it. It may not be the first or even the second week, but you will be glad you started if stick with it. Practice interacting with people you aren't interested in. A lot of groups of just about any type start with going around the table, whatever, introducing yourself and saying why you're there. When it's your term say something along the lines of "Hi my name is Tepples, I'm here because I'm interested in [whatever the group is] and I'm on the spectrum, so I suck at interacting with people and so I'm also trying so I'm here to work on that too." You have no idea how much of an impact being honest and brave can have. There will likely be a couple of people who get giddy and proud of you and will go out of their ways to interact with you. There are also likely to be a couple who make wisecracks. Both types are trying to help you.
I'm over 40, married, and I have three kids. I'm probably not the #1 guy to go to for modern social media advice, even though I was on the cutting edge participating on Slashdot, Userfriendly, and what have you before LiveJournal and Friendster even rolled onto the scene. I know from my most previous job - at a marketing agency - they focused on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook a lot professionally and a lot of the young trendy marketing types (a significant percentage of the company) was on Whatsapp. I'm not even sure what that last one is exactly.
As for social media - I have a line. On one side of the line there's "real world" and on the other there's "geeky online social". Things that pertain
Some have it worse than others. I had it bad for a while, it was about the fifth grade I determined that whatever was wrong it must be me and it was up to me to get past it. It took a lot of effort and thought on my part. Some of it has become easier with time, reflexive and semi-natural even, it wanes with stress and being tired, some of it takes conscious thought always, and this is where social mishaps happen. The fact I've done so well with it is almost a curse, because when the natural part shows through people who don't see me as having these difficulties tend to take it wrong.
My continued connections to people from school are, I'll admit, circumstantial for the most part, my parents remained back home for a few years, and even after they moved my sister stayed behind. Slowly people came online and honestly I have Facebook to thank (sometimes blame) for strengthening connections to those from my past. My wife is from back home, she is quite a bit younger than me so she wasn't an old flame, but it actually was Facebook where we "met again as adults" and our relationship started, now my ties to back home are much stronger than they were, due mostly to the fact her family is still heavily based there. For the most part my old connections find me or happen on accident, I'm really not good at doing my part. I actually like social media for almost automating that for me, I just think it's time that Facebook and the big corporate ones become a footnote in history.
As for the religious question - you're splitting hairs. I can tell you connections through a religious organization are about like any other, there's people who help one another, there's people angry at one another, people form factions, there's in-fighting, the real exception is people usually make an effort to get over it and come back together. Not always - I've been in two churches that have split and one that had some major conflict. That last one I actually sparked the conflict by pointing out science and religion didn't have to be exclusive and I pointed out how the book of Genesis basically described the big bang theory and I drew the parallels. Two camps formed quickly, the rationals versus the theologicals. Yes, there are very rational, very scientific people who practice various religions, and many scientist who are in the closet to protect their funding. One does not have to be part of a religion to find a group. I mentioned I was active in the Libertarian party (I'm on a break having a new child - I took a break for the last one as well), honestly my connections to people in the local part of the party "feel" like the connections I had with church members. We go to the same meetings, we share a more or less common belief and set of values, we socialize together, listen to speeches together, we do a lot together.
As for finding jobs/spouse, look. I can't give you super-awesome advice. I got lots of girlfriends from OKCupid, some long term, some single dates, etc.... In both cases maintaining old relationships helps, those connections create more connections. It is incredibly difficult to maintain for people like us, as I said before, I was fortunate enough that others liked me well enough to do a lot of that work.
You have to make yourself more likable. I have no doubt that someone, either because they loved or because you annoyed the ever living shit out of them and weren't afraid to say so, has told you what your social problems are. Probably more than one someone, I had both unload on me. Pay attention to what they said. If it's something obvious and verifiable - like you smell bad - bathe, wash your clothes, clean up your living space, reduce clutter etc.... I am a pet lover, but I'm going to tell you having indoor cats, especially in close quarters creates a lot of these difficulties. I've noticed a lot of shut-in type geeks are cat lovers and I can often smell the litter box on them, I'm very allergic to cats so it goes double for my detection. If they say it's because you interrupt convers
Well, let me bust your bubble.
Though I have never been officially diagnosed, people in my life - including those who have plenty of relevant experience related to other people in their lives agree I'm on the spectrum. An Aspie type, high functioning, but with very well defined definite systems.
I went to school and I still have connections to people I went to school with. I went to church, and still have connections from that. I've had many jobs over the course of my career and I still have connections there, and yes, I've been on many different social media websites including Slashdot, Userfriendly back in the day, I still think LiveJournal is very well structured per my own expectations and needs, it's just not popular anymore and I can understand why my pet-picture sharing relatives don't like it (hint - they probably don't know a single HTML tag).
Having social interaction disorders such as lower level autism related disorders, or even many social anxiety disorders does not prevent one from ever having formed connections. I find it interesting that so many of the nerds I've networked with in meat-space do not seem to have spectrum disorders however so many I interact with online do - it's interesting and I've failed to find a definite cause/effect relationship between the two - it just seems that those of us who spend more time online socialize less in meat-space. I seem to walk the line a little more than most on both sides of it.
So - in my personal version of the world - most of the people I would cross-link my site with are not people I've met online. My wife has a cousin who is a candidate to build/host one of these sites, I have a close friend who is a candidate and is considering doing so (met at work and have at least four employments in common since then - we help each other out), through being an active Libertarian in the state party - which turns out is about 85% technical workers of one type or another - I know lots of people that I met in meat-space who are capable of doing this and I might convince to do so. Anyone I met online that I would consider cross-linking with, with a few exceptions, are people I've brought into real-world relationships that trump pre-existing online connections.
Yes, I am on the spectrum. I get super annoyed when people move my stuff when I'm away from it, I have times when I have difficulty retrieving words from my head and forming spoken sentences - this is not constant and depends on many variables, but I range from an articulate master of the language to not being able to tell people to bug off and leave me alone. I can - when my responsibilities aren't piled a mile high - play a video game for six hours and not realize I've been at it for that long. When I'm concentrating on something and someone pulls me out of it I have to suppress anger. I got very good at keeping my emotions/reactions under control when I was young and I'm still good at it now, but the instincts are still there. I've worked hard at suppressing the bad things about being on the spectrum while leveraging the focus and thought processes that come with it to further myself professionally. Unless I happen to be in a state where I have trouble communicating at the moment, most people are completely unaware that I am on the spectrum until they get to know me well. I'm proud of this fact, not all of us become slaves to our conditions. I'm over 40, when I was in school - a shit-hole in the middle of the desert - any learning disability was tagged as dyslexia. My school recognized I had a learning problem, and despite reading on a grade level well above my grade level at diagnosis and having reading comprehension to match they put me in a dyslexia class to teach me how to read. I only wish mild forms of autism were diagnosed back then, or that I didn't live in a shit-hole, when I was in school it would have saved me a lot of time grounded.
You're pigeon holing a world of people based on an inaccurate anecdote.
I'm on a "local" social network that is just that - meant for your local neighborhood called Next Door.
I got some scrap furniture to build a desk, bought another desk, and gotten rid of old appliances using it. It's about 80% "I found this dog, have you seen my dog? Who's cat is this?" but since it's truly local it's a good way to find out when the water is coming back on, get pictures of the truck that hit the light pole and took out the power in your area and bitch about the the pothole in the street outside. One dude was moving away from my old nieghborhood, decided to go full cloud/streaming and just set a box full of about 300 DVDs, BluRays, and music disk by the curb. I grabbed that one up. There's some annoying advertising on it - in feed type - and I've had posts mysteriously disappear when trying to do a tasteful, one time only plug for my own business, but if I mention my own business in reply to a post they seem to leave it.
As for family/personal circles I use Friendica, it's got what makes Facebook appealing to family, but my family complains it's too complicate. I don't see it, and I've used a lot of different stuff over the years. Meh, more work....
I've already done my part.
If the nerd in each family where to do this, then start cross-linking with the nerds in other families in their circles we would have the share your meme, dog, and rug-rat circuit family and low-tech users need!
Oh yeah, even though I know it's supposed to be in its deaththrows I use Hangouts so I don't have to type on a stupid touchscreen for text messages. It takes an annoying amount of time to load and they eventually started making "Chrome only" modifications so you had to use Chrome to do video.
Yep, Google can be assholes too.
I seem to recall Microsoft telling the world "There's not need to close the table tag" then proceeding to put an open table tag in their pre-CSS server side templates and encouraging others to do the same for no reason other than to break Netscape.
Some of us have memories and don't feel sorry for Microsoft even if we think Google of today is as bad as Microsoft of the late 90s.
In the end it's still open source software running on top of closed source hardware and software.
You obviously didn't look to close.
It's open source software, even the phone is supposed to be SIP, not actual mobile phone. It's pure I.P.
Some of the hardware may be closed source, who cares, the software can be pretty much any Linux distro (or theoretically something else) you can get to run on it, it's an unlocked system. The radio may have some closed-source components, but that's all but mandatory due to FCC rules. Even most other-wise open source WiFi drivers in Linux have closed source components due to this tidbit.
Facebook does not deserve our traffic.
The "Fake News" on Facebook was a real problem - the fix is to educate your ignorant relatives about actually looking at URLs and how to tell what the real URL is, not the deceptive one and how to click around to a site to confirm it's a real one before sharing something that looks too good to be true. Also CHECK THE STUPID DATE of the article. I don't know how many times dead celebrities have died again on my news feed.
That being set aside - yes, Facebook along with the other big media platforms are using the actual fake-news (a.k.a click-bait) articles as an excuse to censor ideas that don't fit the ideas of their sponsors/management. This is a real issue and needs to be addressed not by the government but the users.
I personally have addressed this issue by looking at why I go to Facebook. The fact is for social media having to do with my interest I've mostly moved over to decentralized IPFS/Crypto platforms. The reason I go to Facebook is those dumb assed relatives who share click-bait but I love them anyways who would have their minds blown and eyes glazed by trying to explain decentralized IPFS/Crypto concepts to them.
My solution? I made my own social media site. The tools are out there and they're simple. I experiment with quite a few, I gave Wordpress a good solid try, but the plugins I needed to make it work right were flaky and needed exact versions of one thing or another to work. Libertree looked promising, but required a tool-kit that I just didn't approve of - I'm not going to use anything that requires me to establish an account and connect to a third-party API just to keep it working. I settled on Friendica. I like it, it's got post-previewing (something that's very important to me) and decent support for just about any kind of media you want to link to/embed. It's still a bit shy of what my family/users want.
My plan if I can get anyone else on-board, I'll host my friends and family, and I'm hoping another nerd is a circle that crosses with mine will start their own server. It works fine on it's own, but Friendica is designed to network with a bunch of other nodes. Mine is removed from the public nodes, I just want it to connect to other friends and family, and I'm not posting pictures of my kids, including my seven week old that has never had his picture put on Facebook by me as a bit of a prod to get friends and relatives on-board with deligitimzing Facebook. You're a bunch of nerds here - the rest of you should pick up on this trend. Instead of a decentralized cluster-fuck of each person for themselves of truly decentralized social media like Minds (which is available and source and was considered instead of Friendica - but was ruled too difficult due to the crypto-not social media stuff) or Akasha, we can make social media look like a relational cluster grid. Not decentralized, not centralized, something with a lot of different centers working together with nerds acting as shepherds of their own nerds.
(After I setup Friendica Hubzilla was recommended to me and will be my next attempt should everyone completely give up on my Friendica site.
Also, I can add to my spacious 128 GBs on board with an SD card.
I can use NFC in any capacity NFC works, not just Apple blessed register transactions (phone to phone for example).
I can install games from the Humble Bundles I buy.
I can plug in a pair of $3 ear buds from a discount store. (That doesn't mean I can't use a $400 Bluetooth pair).
I can charge it with an common standards off-the-shelf unlicensed cable and charger for one.
I know they're not out yet, and yes, I have an Android phone that does a lot more than an equivalently priced iPhone, but I'm sort of looking forward to getting away from Android too.
Apple users want new well branded, logo showing bling the same way zombies want brains.
It did seem to prefer Russian over English, even site versions, which I understand completely, they are offering a patch so I as an English speaker can use it, they are Russian at the core. I still use it some. I've often wondered how much it must suck to speak any language other than English and try to use the web. I know there's stuff out there for speakers of other languages, but English seems to be where it's at online.
I understand DDG used to be more of what you're describing, but it's got it's own spider now. I'm not 100% sure of the particulars, but I'm liking it.
Sailfish has caught my interest before, and the pure-Linux phone on the horizon definitely has my attention. Google is following Apple into the void and I don't want much to do with it. Apple just got an award thanking them for their censorship, and Google is working with the Chinese bother there and here.
I want to be as far away from that crap as I can be.
I've of course been ridiculed for choosing Russia above. Honestly, Russia for all their spying and what have you isn't out to get us like China is. I'm not going to get too close to Russia, but overall I think their current media image is being intentionally and unfairly skewed toward evil.
I started using Yandex when it became obvious Google was biasing its results politically.
As far as U.S. politics is concerned it looks like Yandex was probably neutral. Unfortunately as a Russian search engine, even though I was using the English interface it gave way too many Russian language results so I've mostly abandoned it for DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
Yandex, I have to say was solid and well made. I do believe there's more here than another "Fire Phone".
Semi true.
However our courts also work on precedent - what has been done in court before becomes the guidelines of what courts should do thereafter.
There's also an argument to be made that if any part of the federal government used something like Mail Chimp for broadcast communications, combined with Hillary getting away with it, that the law is now a Symbolic Law and no longer has any real standing.