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Old Things Still Work

My laptop is downstairs. It is an M1 Apple MacBook Air. The first generation, purchased new in 2020. I am too lazy to go downstairs to get it.

It is not the old thing.

The old thing is the Mac I’m using upstairs in my home office: a Mac Mini (Late 2014) with an Intel Core i5 processor and 4 GB of RAM. It is somehow running macOS Monterey. We bought this in the first incarnation of my law practice for my wife to use. It sat in storage for years until I resurrected it last year with an external SSD to use with the 3D printer.

So far today I have been able to write some work emails (Outlook web), log a conversation with a client (Clio), start work on 3D printing my next oversized Lego wreath, and work on my Pennsylvania Custody book (Watch for a preview chapter in the next week or so!). I am also streaming music from my iPhone to the home office speakers via the Mac Mini with the help of Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil Satellite which just works. I am writing this update using MarsEdit, which also just works.

I marvel that I am able to do real, practical, and creative work on a twelve year old computer.

111931 SP710-mac mini.

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Stop Talking to Each Other

Cat Valente:

Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.

It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.

Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.

And I also understand that we are the generation who has to go through this part of it. We’re the ones born in time to be forced to make the rules and defend them. To say hey maybe one guy shouldn’t be able to own the village square. Because it was never remotely possible before. It’s all new and we have to figure it out. To agitate and legislate and be constantly vigilant. Maybe it’ll all seem so obvious and settled in 50 years, but those are our 50 years and no one else is going to have to be the first to have these conversations and try to make policy out of them. That’s us, it’s our lot, and it sucks ass, but this technology is the singularity we geeks have been talking about, and it turns out it’s not just impossible to imagine life on the other side of it before it happens, but it’s really fucking hard to figure out life on the other side of it once you get there, too.