[liberationtech] Is this list still active?

[David Majlak]

As a thought, I can't remember how many years ago I got on here - I wasn't
even attending a school or anything, though there were many edu addresses.
I was interested in the technological ramifications of the day, reading
stuff from slashdot, which actually might have been how I stumbled into
this. As of lately, you've of course got low unemployment, and the zoomers
are in college now, if they made it that far. And of those who did, the
political temperature and fallout has likely stifled anything thrilling. If
it hasn't, the few eggheads that made the cut into AI production are
probably living their best lives right now.

There's also the matter of gmail sorting things into new categories that
literally no one asked for, just like how Microsoft keeps forcing peoples
computers to constantly crash from their lack of beta testing and abundant
reliance on vibe coding. So maybe less people have seen these come over
into their inbox, or maybe no one's trying to make the world more free than
it was before, what with all the extra freedom of thought we have now.

As for me, I went from working on lighting retrofits to making commercial
solar proposals to being promoted to customer. We ever so gently used
ChatGPT - the sales guys use that more. Perhaps a few months ago I was
looking into some silly crypto stuff, one of which was an ESP32 homebrew
GPS system which can work down to the centimeter that I thought was super
interesting. They'd give you some coins to tap into an additional base
station, and I kind of wanted to make one to get a fix on whether my clay
based soil would be impacting my house foundation over time, but it seemed
a little complicated and I didn't have the free time to work on it. And now
that I do, I don't have the money to work on it lol. There was another
similar crypto project for a weather station, like a crowd sourced one, as
well as one that tracked flying planes overhead.

I've recently seen a youtube thumbnail for a homebrewed ham radio, and
watched a different one about the distance those things can reach - 30ish
miles or so. Free communication! As for today, I've got a state of the art
PC and have run my own language models impressively well locally, but
haven't found much of a use case with AI beyond thinking about making some
simpleton youtube videos for hahas. I never did like programming. The
academic pursuit of programming in college crushed my spirit. If i > i++;
what is the output x. Just, dry heaving the alphabet from pages of text.

Still not quite sure how i'm going to start with AI, since everyone keeps
forcing us to think it's going to be the future. There's a handful of
methods I want to familiarize myself with and rejuvenate the cycle of
working back in "IT" like the old days. I can run LLMs locally but it's
like, what is this stuff even good for? It can't do anything. The really
neat use case was VR, a holodeck, and blueprint overlays for mechanics
working on huge machines - that was fucking cool. But now it's all robots
and seizing the means of production.

Vibe coding with Cursor was pretty neat, certainly imperfect, but cool that
it could do so much on its own. You could talk to it and it would install
dependencies and things for you, which was nice.

I think the only useful aspect of AI outside academic pursuits (medical
research and the like), for the common man, might have been google's AI
studio - I think that's what it was called. One of their AI's can "see"
your screen and you can talk to it and have it teach you like an educator
on how to accomplish particular tasks in generally common software, such as
photoshop for example. "How do I do X to this image?" And the thing would
guide you.

That's all for today, and about the extent of my thoughts on the latest
technology. Can't wait for the singularity, and don't use any teleporters,
no matter how safe anyone tells you it is.

On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 7:44 AM Jeremy Pesner <jp659 at georgetown.edu> wrote:

> It's been a while since I've heard from anyone on it. I'm curious to know
> where people are at with everything these days. If people still want to
> discuss these issues, I have an idea for how we can do so!
> --
> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable. List rules:
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