Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged

(This is from October 16, 2022.)

“Can't Think” is a subtly red-pilled emotional prose piece on internet addiction. It doesn't scream at you to wake up right now, like the “Wake Up Right Now!” spray from Omega Mart's Halloween Special commercial.

Of course, nothing about this issue is as simple as taking the red-pill and waking up... well, that's not even what happens in the 1999 film The Matrix, but forget about the plot. “Plot doesn't matter”, as Sam Esmail has said.

The page is curiously offered up when you go to CloudTube, which is maintained by Cadence. Cadence was the former lead developer on Bibliogram (a front-end for Instagram, so effectively good for viewing the latest post from public Instagram users, or seeing how bios of private Instagram users change over time), but that shut down about 1-2 months ago, as of the middle of October 2022. Cadence has made positive discussions with Austin Huang, who was the lead developer on Barinsta (a FOSS Android app that logs into Instagram but was shut down in mid-2021, due to a law firm handing over a cease and desist letter on behalf of Facebook).

(Gosh, it's actually easier to make a Facebook account with higher levels of privacy and anonymity from Facebook, out of all Big Tech apps/sites, than Instagram. Either hope a fresh JMP number from the West Cost of the U.S. works for SMS account verification texts, or obtain a prepaid SIM card only to port that number into JMP Chat to make a single Instagram account with relative privacy and anonymity. Lastly, you better use if you even want to try logging into Barinsta once in 2022 — the app likely works, but many things like chronological ordering of everyone you follow no longer works... I think.)

Of course, my commentary doesn't matter — it always hedges towards what Westerners expect philosophical or religious commentary is expected to be (more like the highest peak or “golden age” of Europe's Enlightenment, yet detrimental). There is important commentary out there, but it is more like Theravada Buddhism commentary, but this situation is rare: the literal, verbatim source material is so scarce and small that commentary needs to be supplied by a sufficiently competent and trustworthy teacher to show the way (or, at least part of the way).

Tangent: shark maids and slow internet

Suricrasia Online is a very funny idea to me.

Of course the entire premise of Suricrasia Online is somewhat of an elaborate joke. If you check out the library, some of the entries include something called Bepis: The Lost Guide from the programming sociology-centric publisher O'Reiley (second only to No Starch Press, of course). The Lost Guide series is real (which feature a dog and seemed to peak during the early 2000-nots, when written information for applications such as Microsoft Office XP were harder to come by or had its price significantly increased for being “approved” guides from Microsoft), but just the presence of word “bepis” indicates that some childish and infantile humor is being used here, as one quick look towards the direction of Urban Dictionary will show you.

(Gosh, I sound as dry yet exacting as the fricken AI that explains jokes from novel research released in early 2022...)

It's just curious to see “the slow side of the Internet” (where everything isn't the 5G or higher cellular protocol/connectivity speed on a goddamned iPhone 14 with vehicle collision detection and some stupid virgin millennial implementation for emergency satellite calling) combined with decentralized depictions of furries that aren't attached to the centralized hubs of FurAffinity, Weasyl, or paywalled lewd art supported on Patreon.

In fact, I'm willing to argue that the centralized platforms have indirectly created everything wrong with the paywalled Patreon art... but I don't want to get lost on that line on thinking here.

(I think furries aren't bad, but they become bad more easily when they become super centralized — but that's the same for political groups, adtech social media sites, school systems, or municipal governments. Of course, nobody wants to actually talk about furries without the obligatory “yuck” exclamation because of sensationalism — yet no one's claiming that the man behind “Down the Rabbit Hole” is a furry after making the “History of Furries” video. Also, the majority of Night Mind's viewers on YouTube are blissfully ignorant of the fact that Nick Nocturne is a fursuiter — a fact easily overlooked if you've never lurked on the Night Mind account on Twitter. People are so stupid. As one of my Socratic figures would endorse: the question is, “Why are people so stupid and incapable of objective and unbiased critical thinking?” and the answer is, “Yes.”)

Conclusion thing

Anyways, it has been fun to explore the part of the Internet that isn't centralized and ad-tech entrenched. Even sites like 4chan and Reddit have lost their respective appeal. Sorry to sound the exact opposite of egalitarian, but the Internet has become too easy to use in 2022 for the vectoralists of Mackenzie Wark's work (from A Hacker's Manifesto to take over and ruin everything for everyone else.

That is what I believe some the Linux users actually mean when they agree with the sentiment that Linux shouldn't become mainstream. It already kind of sucks, namely: nobody actually likes AppImages, Flatpaks, or Snap (yes, we love to hate Canonical from South Africa here in this “club”) packaging of applications. The most vocal people from Privacy Guides (minus BlackLight447) promote the Fedora Linux/RHEL adjacent enough Podman (powered by RPM, a Linux distro line that non-corporate Linuxers hardly use — except for dom0 in Qubes OS) over Docker... which reminds me that Tommy Tran probably has a conflict of interest recommending RPM backed technologies as a RHEL certified software engineer.

(Oh my — won't it be interesting for others after me to compile everything I have into a collected writings book, long after I have passed away...?)