Sargon of ACAB

I think they can help in a small way. If you’re only ever meeting people online, you’ll rarely face consequences for poor behavior or see people facing consequences for their behavior.

That being said, finding allies is probably a bigger aspect here. Where I live there’s fairly few of those spaces, especially for non-electoral leftists but that also means the ones we have are always filled with different groups and individuals that might otherwise not have met. This leads to more cooperation and understanding.

This book can’t be recommended enough.

If you’re an experienced activist you’ll probably know a lot of what it says already, but it’ll do so in language that helps you teach it to newer people looking to get involved.

I don’t like that advice. Part of the fun of TTRPGs, to me, is the randomness involved in outcomes.

But if it works for you it works for you.

Best advice I’ve ever gotten was that the DM isn’t responsible for everything. So now I let players handle the scheduling.

You’ve already gotten good answers so I just wanted to reply that I indeed wasn’t joking.

You can have decentralized planning. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

Decentralization doesn’t mean you can’t have organization, communication or coordination.

What do you think makes it hard to combine planning, decentralization and democracy?

Installing something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu is fairly easy. The hardest part is probably creating the install media and that’s not particularly hard ei her.

If you don’t rely on specific software (like Adobe), using Linux is a good idea. I’d still advice not to mess with a computer you rely on and wait until you have sufficient time to troubleshoot something. Even if nothing goes wrong a new OS can still take a little getting used to.

Maybe “automation” wasn’t the correct term to use. I mostly meant predictive text suggestions, or your IDE handling boilerplate code and stuff like getters and setters. Maybe even auto-bracketing.

We’ve had predictive text and automation of boilerplate code for years without needing any generative AI.

Hostility towards what is now colloquially called AI seems very justified to me. The costs to society, especially the environmental ones, can’t be justified by the meagre “benefits” it purports to offer.

The biggest boons of generative AI I’ve see its champions mention (other than making horrifying imagery that makes someone feel like an artist with zero art involved) are cost-reduction and automating the “boring” parts.

The cost-reduction seems unsustainable and mostly exists because these companies are operating at an enormous loss. A lot of the automation already existed and those “boring” tasks where also opportunities for junior coders to learn their trade.

It doesn’t respond to what’s going on around me, but bone-conduction headphones do help me stay focused and can be used when interacting with others if you don’t make the music too loud.

My local anarchist collective has already decided to donate and is currently looking at how we can do additional fundraising.

I hate nationalism very much and would love to have a more global hub to learn about the important political subjects that dont crop up that much in French (my local one) or US media. Sadly, I never see such a thing. National communities are a bad solution but to a very real problem, which is that global themed communities end up being US ones.

This strikes me as they key point. While I seriously doubt any community based on where I live (Belgium) would be very active, it would be really cool to have conversations about things happening near (or near-ish) me or about region-specific subjects.

The example you give about immigration is a really good one, since the challenges with the EU’s border regime are meaningfully different to what the US is facing.

No idea what the best way to approach this.

Country-specific communities chafe ideologically and might just not be active enough to be worthwhile. Language-centric ones make some sense, but run the risk of seeing the same problem as English ones (namely, being mostly centered on discussion about the largest or most culturally dominant nation state using that language). It’d also (potentially) divide countries that aren’t linguistically monolithic.