Yeah, my parents didn’t have money for expensive toys either. I had a small transformer that I swapped off a kid at school for all my marbles (including the large steel bearing). It transformed from robot into tape cassette and I thought that was just cool as fuck.

It’s to prevent a small child from falling arse-first into the crapper and causing a blockage.

I’ll admit I was a bit taken in by the image his PR people created, a few years back before he decided he didn’t need them. I think I wanted to believe in the benevolent billionaire bullshit, that maybe a rich person wanted to do some good in the world. Dumb fuckin me, won’t be making that mistake again.

A pretty early chatbot called Eliza simulated a non-directive psychotherapist. It kind of feels like they’ve improved hugely but not really changed much.

Mostly, but not always first person. But I’m not always the same person - my age and sex isn’t at all consistent in my dreams. I’ve been an old woman or a baby boy, and pretty much everything across those spectrums. In my dreams it’s completely unremarkable.

Or fashion bow ties from their testicles. . ?

Yeah, this is why capitalism should be treated like a dangerous dog and kept on a short leash. It can kind of work out for a while when a government restrains it, ensures that legislation exists and is enforced to protect workers, the environment, and consumers. Strong unions are a good sign. This never seems to last though, because the governments get bought eventually.

Yeah I think Google podcasts is getting killed in a few months.

Yeah, same here. I’m not nearly as active here as I was on reddit, but there’s not as much going on here and activity feeds itself. It’s fine, I read more books.

I know it kinda sounds like a broken record when people say this but it’s still true - the problem is capitalism.

Yeah, but when individual awareness isn’t enough, how can we stop it?

Sounds kind of like my experience when I ended up in Spain teaching English to a class of fifteen 7 and 8 year old Spanish girls. My Spanish was terrible, their English wasn’t great, it was carnage. Eventually I more work teaching adults and learned Spanish but it was a messy time.

Yeah, my journey was just the same as yours. I’m reading more books now, though, so that’s cool.

I think maybe it requires legislation or a change in systems. It’s not really feasible to rely on millions of individual customers coming together to punish bad companies, it just doesn’t seem to happen effectively or make a significant impact.

Yeah. I was active on reddit for over ten years but I said I’d quit when they did the API thing, so I did. Gotta stick by what you say you’ll do. I missed it at first but then I read a lot more books and was fine. Now sync lemmy has arrived and I’m gonna see how it goes here.

Shame about reddit but it’s become an example of the enshittification that seems to be the recent trend. So fuck it.

Yeah, that’s about what my mate says, I’m no musician but he loves the C64 for making electronic music. He lives in a big truck which is also his studio, old computers and amps and synths all running off solar-fed batteries. I understand the C64 had its own compiler too? Yeah there was such diversity of machines back in the day. My first machine was a Tandy TRS-80. And an old ZX81, IIRC that little thing had 1k ram so you had to write tight code. My real love was the BBC B, though, you could do so much with it, learned assembly on it.

Haven’t done any coding now in years. Which is a shame, but mostly these days I don’t really need to. I kinda feel like maybe we’ve lost something though since back then when you really needed to learn to program to get a device to do anything cool. Even though the devices today seem like an exponential improvement. Comparing the phone I’m writing this on to that old ZX81, or even a C64 - just wow. I’m excited to see what comes next!

When you say C64 do you mean the old commadore? Me, I was always an Amiga / Sinclair spectrum guy. But I live with someone who has a working c64 and uses it for music so they are still around.

Sync

I think a fair few may be reddit refugees.