Interesting, I didn’t think about that nor did I know about the mesh network someone else mentioned in a reply to you. In my case, I’m renting the home. The landlord pays for a very small internet package that is reserved for the cameras. He stopped paying for the subscription at some point but he still pays for the Internet it connects to, which is how we were able to access live footage in the past.

When I said “we no longer have the ring camera.” More accurately I could have said “we stopped charging it.” The landlord would probably have a minor aneurism if we tried explaining why we want to replace the camera he mounted a case for into the stucko by the front door.

Parasites need their host to live. I don’t think the impact to the host is considered by the definition.

I’m half curious if I cut open the box… you think there’d be an easy way to replace the camera with a video stream of my choosing? Because I wouldn’t mind cutting out the camera and leaving the device plugged into my PC for a constant headless stream of video content.

My wife and I recently moved to a home with ring cameras preinstalled, but no subscription of course. We can only access a live feed via the cloud service. I told my wife, I don’t think it matters whether we have a subscription or not… if they want to use the footage from our home cameras for any reason at all, it’s in their power to do so. They can save it, scan it, watch it, … they don’t even need to save the video, they can save results from a scan to get out the important details more efficiently.

My wife didn’t want to hear it. She said we aren’t paying them, so there’s nothing they can do. Then this news story dropped about Google Nest. I showed my wife. We no longer have the ring cameras.

Imagine there was some sort of drug that had the ability to recode culture in any of its users. You take this drug and suddenly you stop seeing all figures of authority as such. Any person might profess jurisdiction over a particular persons, geography, or ideological framework… but you just can’t see how any of that is significant anymore. You start to realize, after having consumed this drug, that you have no idea how to take care of yourself. Worse, you have no idea who within your community you can rely on for necessities. Given this concern, you begin to host gatherings where the goal is to produce a network of community support and knowledge sharing. Where can you find water? Where shouldn’t you find water? How can you clean water? Who has vital resources during a storm? Who knows how to make tools? … this goes on until the group develops an ability to be self sustaining.

Now imagine all your friends and neighbors took this drug, as well as their friends and neighbors. What would happen to the current power structures? I’m curious how much of there power is actually just given to them freely by our own culture, while sustained somewhat by the technology they employ.

Rome, circuses

Those skills are too far taken for granted. It’s the very reason you see increased crime and addiction in high poverty areas. Families who had good access to healthcare, education, work opportunities, … those families were privileged enough to learn the value in self control far more naturally. Families that struggled to put food on the table, parents in and out of jail, constant exposure to drug use, … those families experience a much different reality and the kids are statistically more likely to reproduce that experience in their own adult life.

Sounds like free advertising.

I’m not aware of any such repository. Medical records are managed per doctor office, no?

I guess they can check with the IRS. On tax documents when you get a new job, “autism” is one of the qualifying disabilities for “do you or have you ever had a disability.”

I’m willing to bet a lot of people weren’t customers because they wanted to fuck kids. Many, probably, but I bet that a chunk of them were probably just willing to sell their soul for a secured position in power. Something like: ”If you fuck this kid while we record it, you’ll have the full support of the Russian propaganda machine.”

In other words, I bet you there was a whole market for incriminating evidence. Even if you made the evidence for yourself, as a way to make yourself an asset of larger powers because they’d more easily know they can control you via that evidence. If you fucked a kid, you earned their trust. If you earned their trust, they’d promote you into more powerful positions. Someone sadistic enough might see this as a win-win.

They probably used people with incriminating evidence to lure more people in. Every single party may as well have been a private sting operation to further grow the network of influence.

How do they expect to find autistic people? They aren’t exactly preaching to their autistic god.

Shit. Is that the point? Anyone can be deemed autistic if they’re undesirable?

Anyone want to script through the signup process and feed the damn thing a bunch of AI generated faces?

Typically when a signup page is difficult to automate, you can use a library meant for automated testing within a browser—like Selenium. Also, disposable emails services come in handy—like mailsac. If they block all the disposable email services, you can also use your iCloud+ custom email domain (if you have it) with the Allow All Incoming Messages setting turned on—then you use randomly generated user handles for each signup. A better way would be Gmail accounts so that they blend in more, but I’m not sure how to script through Gmail signup when they often require a phone number verification step.

Not sure about the easiest way to recycle your IP, in case they monitor signups that way too. I’m sure there’s a way to overcome that too via VPN.

If 2% of Discord users did this 50 times, that would make half of Discords user profiles and face recognition data completely fake.

Yeah. I’m a full grown adult and I don’t know shit about taxes, starting a business, marketing myself, being part of a community, … none of that, really. I feel like a lot of my recent adult life can be defined by self-teaching. Recently I’ve been teaching myself about radio technology. I’m planning on putting together some dishes/antennas to do stuff like read the GOES weather data and join the Meshtastic network.

I’ve wanted to help run a business my whole life, but never knew how to get started and still don’t. I don’t even know what I should open a business for… I could see myself doing consultancy for data engineering or analytical services, or perhaps a digital marketing gig. But again, no fucking idea what to do. I probably need to start with something small and less-risky if it fails, but everything seems like it’s high risk when your poor.

What if, it turns out, that the psychology of an entity capable of contorting as much energy in such a way is also a psychology that would not do so? Say, because to learn as much about the universe, as to be able to treat it by blowing up its stars, you must understand the universe in a way that would reliably demotivate any such action?

Stars blow themselves up without our intervention all the time. All we need to do is wait, which we seem okay at already…

We do a lot of dick swinging these days, via the convenience of being able to redefine so easily what counts as progress. Is capital growth progress? Is extending the average life expectancy progress? Is exhaustive levels of individualism progress? Is being able to fuck kids on a private island, while none of the poor people know about it, progress? Is being able to kill a large animal progress?

I don’t think any one of those should necessarily count as progress. Especially not the one involving kids, though that seems to be in opposition to what our billionaire class believes.

Progress comes relative to a shared value system. The world’s leading economic and military superpower does not really have a shared value system anymore. That makes none of them capable of any meaningful progress, unless they find a way to come together as one. That’s going to be hard when your billionaire class controls your media platforms. Would you call that control they wield “progress?”

Isn’t it weird that the story given to you by your successors would have you believe that your successors are in some way more worthy than you?

Pretty sure I saw this one before… something something, wunderwaffen technology.

Capitalism relies on:

• Competition
• Self-interest
• Status-seeking
• Wealth Accumulation
• Abstract trust in money, contracts, and institutions

…it amplifies specific human traits:

• Ambition
• Risk-taking
• Hierarchy formation
• Exploitation under weak regulation

This is great for innovation, growth, and resource extraction. But it is dynamically unstable without adequate regulation, because:

• Wealth concentrates
• Power decouples from democratic control
• Externalities accumulate (pollution, burnout, inequality)

Socialism, on the other hand, can more easily prioritize things like survival over growth, equality over abundance, stability over economic freedom.

They may not have the capacity for building out a super cool surveillance network off the back of spectacle-driven consumers and their electric/network, so that they can continue farming behavioral data to feature embed on models and sell to the biggest bidder, like your life insurance companies (too bad, I know…). But they sure as shit can be robust to all kinds of embargo, sanction, tariff, … you name it.

You have an adversary in your ranks. Her goal is not shared with yours.