A Geek with Guns

Anarchist Death Camps

2026-09-08T13:00:00-06:00

I don't engage in debates with statists as much as I used to. Part of this is because I've heard all of their arguments. They never develop new ones so each debate is just another rerun of a TV show I've seen dozens of times before. It's boring.

The first argument they always make is that without government humans would be ruled by the law of the jungle. Man would prey upon man. The strong would subjugate the weak. This argument is laughable on its face. First, the law of the jungle isn't a case of one against all. Many animals that dwell in the jungle cooperate. Birds flock together for common cause. Mammals do the same. Some birds even cooperate with some mammals by landing on the mammals and eating attached parasites. In this way, they both benefit. The bird gets a meal and the mammal is freed from a parasite. The law of the jungle is far more complex than statists claim. If we humans behaved the way statists claim, we'd never have formed communities in the first place. But we did, which demonstrates our innate ability for cooperation.

The second argument they always make is, who will build the roads? This question is really about large infrastructure projects in general. Building dams, nuclear power plants, water treatment facilities, etc. Unlike the previous argument, this one at least has some validity. Anarchists have a poor record when it comes to large infrastructure projects. However, displaying their usual shortsightedness, this question implies that large infrastructure projects are always a net good. They're not. There are a lot of large infrastructure projects that are downright awful.

How many death camps have been built by anarchists? How many genocides have been perpetuated by anarchists? How many nuclear weapons have been made or used by anarchists? The answer is the same for all three: none. If you ask the same questions about states, the answer is also the same for all three: countless.

Death camps, genocides, and nuclear weapons are either large infrastructure projects themselves or require large infrastructure to support. Death camps are an all to common form of state infrastructure. The Nazis can claim the most notoriety for building death camps and the auxiliary infrastructure to support them, but Imperial Japan, Maoist China, The Soviet Union, and many other states built death camps on a similar or even grander scale. Less countries like the United States and Canada think they're free and clear of such horrid behavior, let us not forget what they did to the American Indians. The United States and The Soviet Union both were in competition for building the most nuclear weapons. Both sides created nuclear arsenals that can irradiate every square inch of this planet's surface multiple times over.

The most commonly cited advantage of states is also their worst aspect. States can build large infrastructure, which gives them the ability to commit heinous acts on a grand scale. Anarchists aren't innocent of perpetrating murderous acts, but they've never been able to perform murderous acts anywhere near the same scale as states.

None of this is to say that all large infrastructure projects are bad or don't provide value to people. But you can't claim credit for only the good aspects. You have to acknowledge the bad aspects too. While anarchists many not have a good record when it comes to building roads, they also have no record of building death camps, committing genocides, or constructing means of ending all life on this planet.

Hunter Safety: Shotguns vs. Rifles

2026-08-04T13:00:00-06:00

Last year a law was passed in Minnesota that would eliminate the state mandated shotgun-only deer hunting zones throughout the southern half of the state (there were no shotgun-only zones in the northern half of the state). While the shotgun-only zones remained in effect for the 2025 hunting season, they're no longer in place for 2026. The one caveat is that counties can opt-in to being a shotgun-only zone</a> and some have. But if a county hasn't opted-in, rifles can be used for deer hunting.

This has a lot of fudds bent out of shape and they continue to parrot baseless claims primarily about hunter safety. Their chief argument is that rifles are more dangerous to fellow deer hunters and therefore more hunters will be injured or killed now that rifles are allowed for deer hunting throughout the state. Before I address those claims, I want to clear up the original purpose of the shotgun-only zones. They weren't established because of concerns about hunter safety. They were established to handicap hunters so deer populations could increase</a>:

The shotgun-only zone was created in 1942 to protect what was then a small deer population because shotguns cannot shoot as far as rifles, said Barbara Keller, big game program leader at the Department of Natural Resources. </blockquote>
With that out of the way, let's analyze the fudds' claims. Are rifles more dangerous to fellow deer hunters than shotguns? Fortunately, Pennsylvania performed a study on the topic in 2005. As far as I know, it's the most recent study on the topic. You can read the study here</a>, but I will highlight the conclusion:

Contrary to the 1998 study, this study concludes that comparing risk using only the maximum range obtained at a 35-degree firing elevation and the corresponding danger area of the firearm-ammunition combination provides the policy maker an incomplete picture. When discharging the examined firearm-ammunition combinations with large (10 degrees) and moderate (5 degrees) aiming errors, the danger areas of the shotgun and muzzleloader are less than that of a rifle; hence, given this firing condition, the shotgun and muzzleloader are less risky than the rifle. However, shotguns firing modern saboted slugs have a larger danger area than the .30-06 rifle when the angle of elevation is approximately level (0 degrees); hence, given this firing condition, the shotgun is riskier than the rifle. In other words, the typical hunter discharging a 12 gauge shotgun fitted with a rifled barrel firing a .50-caliber saboted modern high velocity ammunition at a deer on level terrain is riskier than a hunter firing a .30-06 with a 150 grain expanding bullet at the same deer. The muzzleloader proved to have less risk in all firing conditions.
The explanation for the last case where the shotgun is more risky relates to how the .30-caliber projectile interacts with the impact media at shallow (low) angles and its aerodynamic characteristics after ricochet. The smaller cross sectional area of the .30-caliber projectile and its shape contributes to a higher loss of energy on impact and after ricochet the .30-caliber projectile tends to tumble in flight with a high drag. Test data confirm that the .50-caliber projectile’s larger cross sectional area and its shape contribute to less energy loss on shallow angles of impact and after ricochet the projectile exhibits less drag which results in a greater total distance traveled. </blockquote>
While the fudds' main argument makes sense on paper because a rifle typically has greater effective range than a shotgun slug, the actual research shows that it's not so straightforward. The 1998 study cited in the excerpt compared the lethality of shotgun slugs versus rifle bullets at their respective maximum ranges, which can only be achieved under very specific conditions (in the study's case, firing at a 35° angle) not typically encountered while deer hunting. The 2005 study compares the risks under much more typical deer hunting conditions. Under typical conditions, shotgun slugs present more danger than rifle bullets. This is something people familiar with ballistics already know. Rifle bullets are typically worse at retaining energy after an impact than a shotgun slug.
Research is good and all, but what about in the field data? Does any exist? Yes! Wisconsin went through a similar debate as Minnesota back in 2013 when it opted to eliminate its shotgun-only zones. The state's DNR</abbr> keeps track of hunting incidents and publishes yearly reports</a>. The information is summarized here</a>, although it's behind a paywall so I'll summarize it. The number of hunting incidents since Wisconsin eliminated its shotgun-only zones has decreased even taking into account the reduced number of hunters. Therefore, at the very least, eliminating shotgun-only zones didn't increase hunting incidents.
The fudds' arguments against eliminating shotgun-only zones aren't support by either research or in the field data. They're parroting claims they've heard elsewhere from sources who likely did the same.

Guaranteed Wins

2026-07-20T15:00:00-06:00

This post is brought to you by the recent craze around red light therapy. Red light therapy has been used in the healthcare industry to successfully treat a number of ailments. Now it's being researched for use in treating various other ailments. Unfortunately, this has caused it to become the latest healthcare fad promising to cure everything from depression to low testosterone. The reason I say this is unfortunate is because, as with other previous "miracle cures," people are focusing on it instead of guaranteed wins.

Guaranteed wins is the name I give to all of the things we know provide significant health benefits. Strength training is an example of a guaranteed win. If you start strength training, you will have health benefits that range from improved mood to higher resistance to injury. Diet is another example. If you improve your diet</a>, assuming you also control your calorie intake, you will lose weight, which comes with numerous health benefits. Getting enough sleep is also a guaranteed win. If you keep yourself up late at night doomscrolling, you likely suffer several unpleasant side effects such as difficulty concentrating and irritability. Putting down the phone and getting enough sleep will improve both of those plus grant you other aspects significant health improvements.

The especially observant amongst you likely noticed that my list of guaranteed wins is largely lifestyle changes. Therein lies the secret. We know for certain that being overweight and not getting enough sleep are detrimental to health. We know for certain that people start to lose muscle mass as they age. Almost everyone claims that they want to address those issues, but they don't want to change their unhealthy lifestyles. This is why "miracle cures" are so widely sought.

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs are a recent example of this. GLP-1 drugs were originally used to treat people with diabetes. Then the pharmaceutical companies noticed that they also result in weight loss and started marketing them as a "miracle" weight loss drug. This was music to many overweight people's ears because GLP-1 drugs offered them a way to lose weight without lifestyle changes. Although that's not entirely accurate. From my understanding, GLP-1 drugs effectively force lifestyle changes by suppressing appetite. But having lifestyle changes forced on them with a drug is preferable to most people than instigating lifestyle changes through their own efforts.

With that said, there's now enough evidence that taking GLP-1 drugs does result in weight loss. This isn't the case with most "miracle cures." Most "miracle cures" develop from a kernel of truth extrapolated to absurdity. One example is eating an alkaline diet to will prevent or even treat cancer. Advocates of this belief claim that cancer thrives in an acidic environment and that eating an alkaline diet will result in your body becoming an alkaline environment. Fortunately, this is bullshit. I say fortunately because if eating alkaline foods did increase your body's pH level, you would die. It turns out our bodies can only survive in a very narrow pH range. Luckily for us, our bodies are good at regulating our pH level and we therefore won't kill ourselves by eating an alkaline died.

There are a number of guaranteed wins for preventing cancer. Don't smoke. Smoking unquestionably increases your risk of cancer. Be smart about your time in the sun. Too little sun isn't necessarily ideal, but too much sun can increase your risk of skin cancer. Test your home for radon and, if the radon levels are high, get a radon mitigation system installed. Inhaling high levels of radon will increase your risk of cancer. The first two are lifestyle related. None of the three are sexy or necessarily easy depending on your lifestyle and financial situation.

When people ask me about the latest health fad, I immediately ask if they've already went after the guaranteed wins. Red light therapy is another example. Do you know what is shown to decrease depression and increase testosterone levels? Regular exercise, a reasonable diet, and getting enough sleep. If you're asking whether or not red light therapy or any other health fad will improve your health, check to see if there are any guaranteed wins you haven't pursued first. If there are, take the time you were investing in researching the fad and instead put it into pursuing those guaranteed wins. Your time investment will give you guaranteed results instead of potential results. Guaranteed wins trump potential wins every day of the week.

Use What Works for You

2026-06-26T12:00:00-06:00

This post shouldn't need to be written. What I write here should be filed under common sense. The normal response upon reading it should be, "No shit, Sherlock." But my experiences have convinced me it needs to be written. While I'm going to focus on firearms for my example, this post can be applied to most things. That's because I'm going to discuss trends and, more importantly, why you don't need to follow them.

Seemingly every month there's a new "controversy" in the firearms community. I put quotes around controversy because what's really happening is a popular gun channel on YouTube in a desperate ploy to get more clicks releases a video explaining why some gun or gun accessory is the best/worst thing ever and why you will die in a gun fight without/with it. I believe this must've happened with vertical foregrips as of late because I've seen a number of people writing about why they're awful/necessary and posting images of their guns to which they've recently added/removed a vertical foregrip.

Let me tell you a secret to saving a bunch of money: ignore online trends. That's it. Hundreds or even thousands of dollars go back into your pocket with that simple piece of financial advice. Are LPVOs</abbr> all the rage this week? Do you have a lowly fixed magnification optic or, even worse, iron sights on your rifle? Or does your rifle have an LPVO and they're the worst things ever this week? In either case, if whatever is on your rifle works for you, keep using it. You might dismiss this advice because you worry that you won't get any MeowMeowBeenz when your post pictures of your rifle on social media. Worry not because I'm going to let you in on another secret, MeowMeowBeenz aren't worth anything. You can't exchange likes, up votes, or any social media acknowledgements for money.

The next question you're likely to ask is, how do I know what works? Obviously the guy who runs a gun channel on YouTube is an expert and not just content farming ragebait to get people to click their videos so YouTube will send them money, right? Not exactly. It turns out people lie on the Internet. I know that statement may come as a shock, but a lot of content farmers misrepresent their qualifications and credentials to make themselves appear more authoritative than they are. But fear not, there's still a way for you to figure out what works for you: shoot you damn guns. It really is that simple.

I've written about my test method for carry guns</a>. To summarize, I have an initial test where I shoot at least 100 rounds through the gun with at least 50 of those rounds being the ammunition I intend to carry. After that, I do continuous testing mostly in the form of shooting the gun in USPSA and similar style matches. This gives me a lot of hands-on data. I learn what works and what doesn't. The popularity of slide-mounted handgun optics has exploded in recent years. Because of this, I've read and heard numerous comments about how iron sights are ineffective. My carry guns still only have iron sights and therefore I still shoot iron sights at matches. I haven't had any difficulties with sight acquisition, accuracy, or speed. I know iron sights work for me because I've tested them thoroughly. With that said, all of the handguns I buy now are optic ready. Just because I use iron sights at the moment doesn't mean I'm foolish enough to dismiss optics. I haven't test them on a handgun so how can I know whether they work for me or not? I will begin testing them at some point. Until then, I have no opinion on their effectiveness/ineffectiveness for me.

My testing methodology works for any gun. A couple of weeks ago I ran my Steyr AUG</a> in a PCSL 1-Gun match. My AUG has a 2x prism optic and I left the vertical foregrip on even though I installed the (sadly no longer available) MK2 QD rail. That match provided me further data that a 2x prism optic and vertical foregrip both work for me. I had no issue engaging close or distant targets using the fixed optic. With the hand guard, I have the option of either using the vertical foregrip or using a c-clamp style grip. I naturally gravitate to the vertical foregrip. Therefore, I can say that a vertical foregrip works fine for me despite what anybody on YouTube might claim.

As I noted at the beginning of this post, this advice works for things besides firearms. I bought a set of Kettlebells USA Paradigm Pro Elite 35MM</a> kettlebells at the beginning of this year. After six months of cleaning, pressing, jerking, swinging, snatching, carrying, and otherwise moving them, I can say they work very well for me. I've run Linux exclusively on my personal computers for many years now. It doesn't matter what any technology influencer claims about Linux not being viable as a desktop operating system. I know it works for me as one because I've used it for years without trouble.

Admittedly my advice isn't going to earn you MeowMeowBeenz on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, or any other social media site. What my advice will do is save you money, which you can use to buy things.

Enshittification of Policing

2026-06-11T12:00:00-06:00

Policing, especially in the United States, has developed a reputation for cruelty in the last decade or two. This is largely due to acts of brutality and outright murder combined with a justice system that often shields cops from liability. Despite promises by politicians to fix this issue, the problem has only gotten worse. Now that cruelty is being enhanced by reliance on online services. Effectively policing is suffering from enshittification.
The first story involved a man arrested for attempted kidnapping of a child. The problem is he was nowhere near the scene at the time of the crime. The only "evidence" against him was a facial recognition match by an AI</a>, which investigators blindly followed:

When security footage at a local McDonald's captured a man trying to get a young, unaccompanied girl to leave with him, Jacksonville Beach police relied on software that flagged Robert Dillon as a 93 per cent match for the suspect.
In reality, Dillon lived in Fort Myers, more than 300 miles away, and told investigators he had never visited Jacksonville Beach in his life, leading prosecutors to drop all charges and dismiss the case following the August 2024 incident. </blockquote>
He's suing and I hope he gets a huge payout. However, lawsuits don't punished government agencies because the people in those agencies don't pay: the taxpayers do. But I digress.
Leaving Florida, let's travel to San Diego</a>:

San Diego police had a description of the Alfa Romeo car he was riding in and a witness who identified him during a curbside lineup as the man who brandished a handgun in Golden Hill. They had also checked the city’s automatic license plate camera system, run by the private company Flock, and got a “hit,” substantiating the claim.
The problem, says attorney Alex Coolman, was that Parra was five miles away from Golden Hill at the time of the crime, and the so-called hit from the license plate reader was captured before any police pursuit began. </blockquote>
The best part?

Despite the signs pointing to it being a different Alfa Romeo, police arrested Beltran and Parra. </blockquote>
Despite the evidence indicating that the Flock system was incorrect, police blindly followed it instead of evidence or common sense. What can you expect when courts have ruled that police candidates can be rejected for being too smart</a>?
These aren't isolated stories. Police are making a habit of arresting innocent people based on faulty facial recognition technology alone</a>:

What happened to Ms. Williams is outrageous and is unfortunately a predictable consequence of police using facial recognition technology. At least thirteen other people are publicly known to have been wrongfully arrested by U.S. police because of reliance on erroneous facial recognition results: </blockquote>
Historically the consequences of enshittification haven't been harmful in a meaningful way. Facebook stopped giving a sequential timeline of posts so it could better manipulate the posts you see. Google's search results are becoming increasingly useless. Amazon increasingly hides high-quality products behind a wall of cheap crap made by companies whose names are an alphabet soup of letters but pay for sponsored spots. Reddit cut off third-party clients. The list goes on. None of these resulted in life altering consequences.
Police relying on faulty technologies such as facial recognition systems, automatic license plate scanners, etc. does result in life altering consequences though. People lose jobs because they're arrested whether they're charged or not. Having an arrest record makes getting a job harder. There's also the danger of having to interact with government agents who already have a reputation for cruelty. Your life could be ended because a facial recognition system erroneously lists you as a suspect and an especially trigger happy officer is sent to arrest you.
As I mentioned yesterday</a>, stupid people use technology stupidly. The examples of false arrests in this post wouldn't have happened if the cops involved looked at the evidence and used a bit of common sense. But they blindly followed the technology instead. This should come as no surprise since we see this time and time again. People happily hand over the task of thinking to AI</a>. Police are human so it should come as no surprise that they're behaving exactly as most humans do when giving this technology.
To quote Blank Reg from Max Headroom, "Now remember when we said there was no future? Well, this is it."

Building Our Own Cage

2026-06-10T12:00:00-06:00

I'm now convinced that Ted Kaczynski was a visionary when he wrote Industrial Society and Its Future</a>. When I first read it, I believed that the future he described could be avoided. I believed what Timothy May wrote in The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto</a> about how technology could be used as a force against the State. Most foolishly though, I believe that the masses would act in their own self-interest.
Rather than be a weapon the masses could wield against the State, technology has become almost exclusively a tool the State wields against us</a>:

In recent months, civil liberties groups have warned</a> that adding facial recognition</a> to consumer smart glasses could turn everyday recording into something more troubling: real-time facial identification</a>. It reflects a broader shift already underway, where images and videos captured for one purpose can later be searched</a>, matched, and used for another. </blockquote>
Everywhere you go, you're being recorded. It's long been standard practice for businesses to install surveillance cameras inside and outside of their properties. That practice has now extended to residences. Many people install Ring cameras, which use facial recognition</a> to identify people. Inside their houses they often have devices like Alexa, which have microphones that are always listening</a>. No matter where you go, you're surrounded by people with smartphones with shockingly good cameras. Soon they may all be wearing camera-equipped smart glasses. Most of the data recorded using these technologies is uploaded to the Internet. Ring and Alexa upload recorded data to Amazon's servers. Footage recorded with smartphones and smart glasses typically ends up posted to social media. Once the data hits third-party servers, it's available to law enforcement either through an agreement with the company or via a warrant:

The basic approach is now routine: People record the state, or anything else—as in the January 6 attack</a> on the U.S. Capitol—and the state compiles that footage and data into a searchable environment, which may later be used to identify some of the same people who made the footage. </blockquote>
Surveillance goes beyond video and audio recordings. Most purchases are made with credit cards or applications like Venmo. Every transaction that goes through these systems is recorded. In the case of Venmo, transactions are treated like social media posts by default</a>. Credit cards and payment applications are so prevalent now that many venues won't accept cash at all. This wouldn't be so bad if people exercised common sense. But I've been in enough conversations and seen enough comments online to know that many people, including drug dealers, use these applications when buying and selling illicit goods. The comments are typically found on social media, which means people are stupidly posting evidence against themselves on a publicly accessible forum.
We've built our own cage. All it took was a handful of large technology companies to offer us convenience. While there are many people who bitch and whine about it, they typically do their bitching and whining on the very social media platforms that are being used to surveil them. Furthermore, they typically use credit cards and payment applications for all of their transactions. In other words, even thought they recognize the problem, they refuse to forego convenience to be part of the solution.
Technology is ultimately a tool. Tools are neither good nor evil. However, humans in aggregate are stupid. Stupid people use tools stupidly. Individuals can certainly use technology intelligently, but truly self-actualized individuals are rare. Most people have allowed their individuality to be subsumed by the herd and are therefore incapable of doing much of anything, including use technology, intelligently. They will ensure that technology as a whole continues to be a tool of oppression rather than a tool of individual empowerment. Unfortunately us self-aware individuals are caught in the cage created by the herd.
Kaczynski believed that the use of violence for the purpose of starting a revolution was the only solution. This is one point where I disagree with him. Violence won't start a revolution. The only response the masses have to violence is to pull out their smartphones, record it, and upload it to social media. Their lack of self-awareness is so complete that they regularly record violence rather than flee from it. The only solution I can see is breaking the masses away from the herd by making them into egoists. This, however, is equally impossible.
The only upside in all of this is that those few of us who are self-actualized individuals can at least mitigate some of the damage inflicted upon us by the herd. Simple actions like removing ourselves from social media, using cash to pay for goods and services, self-hosting online services, freeing our devices from the control of the large tech companies, and not taking our smartphones with use everywhere reduces our surveillance footprint (although we cannot eliminate it). Refusing to be a node in the State's surveillance network by not recording and especially not uploading footage to the Internet prevents us from being part of the problem. The herd is too large to be avoided, but we can at least separate ourselves as much as possible from it.

The AI Takeover of Humanity

2026-05-28T08:00:00-06:00

Technology journalists, the mainstream media, and even the Pope</a> are warning about the threat of AI</abbr> taking over or destroying humanity. This fear is largely fueled by the AI industry itself. In the scramble to inflate their valuations before their impending IPOs</abbr>, they're trying to trick everyone into believing that the statistical language models they're developing are far more capable than they really are.
When people think about AI taking over, they envision Skynet from Terminator, SHODAN from System Shock, the machines from The Matrix, and the thinking machines from Dune (HAL 9000 usually falls into this group, but if you've read 2010, you know HAL wasn't evil). All of these are artificial intelligences that developed sapience and used their superior intelligence to either wipe out (or at least attempt to) or enslave humanity. What we're referring to as AI right now isn't that. What's being sold to us as AI isn't even intelligent. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other popular software packages being billed as AI are really just large language models. They use statistics derived from training data to guess which word should come after the next based on provided input. This results in grammatically correct responses (which is a miracle considering the training material) with dubious correctness.
AI does stand a real chance of taking over humanity. However, it's not because AI is sapient or even somewhat intelligent. It's because the majority of humans are incredibly gullible. The best illustration of this fact in the context of this post is the ELIZA effect</a>:

In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits—such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy—onto computer programs. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum that imitated a psychotherapist. Many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations. </blockquote>
History doesn't repeat itself, but is rhymes. The main limiting factor for ELIZA was the technology of the time. Computers in 1966 were far and few between. That meant the number of gullible people who interacted with ELIZA were limited. A secondary limiting factor was morality. Joseph Weizenbaum didn't lie to people about ELIZA being more capable than it was. He wasn't trying to increase the valuation of some company so he could make off like a bandit after an IPO. Instead he pointed out that the people attributing human traits to ELIZA were gullible fools (although he probably used a nicer descriptor).
The unwashed masses (I'm not going to refrain from mean-spirited descriptors) seem to be in a hurry to outsource their thinking to anybody or anything. Historically this has taken the form of the masses parroting whatever a philosopher, religious leader, or politician said. Today it's taking the form of parroting whatever an AI generated. Asking a human being a question often results in them asking an AI</a> and parroting the answer</a>.
The masses aren't relying on AI only for their talking points. They're listening to AI generate podcasts</a> and music</a>, reading AI generated novels</a>, and watching AI generated videos</a>. Soon they will rely on AI to tell them how to spank the monkey</a>. Writers (I use the term loosely) are letting AI generate their articles</a> and novels</a>.
Companies are also rushing to outsource as much work as they can to AI. Amazon is pushing employees to use AI so fiercely that its employees are gaming the system by using as many token as possible</a> to improve their performance metrics. The same link mentions how Meta is ranking employees by how many tokens they use. Even if they're not necessarily making it a performance metric, many large companies require employees to use AI</a>. Soon companies will use AI for marketing</a> and creating influencers</a> (looking at human influencers, this might be an overall improvement).
I could go on, but I believe I've illustrated my point. AI stands a real chance of taking over humanity, but not in the way most people are predicting. We're not looking at a sapient hyper-competent AI emerging in the near future and executing a brilliant plan to eradicate or enslave humanity. We're looking at gullible humans outsourcing their thinking to the current batch of statistical models. Shackled humans won't be prodded into forced labor by armed robot overlords, they'll continue wandering aimlessly as they stare at their smartphones. The catalyst won't be machines developing sapience, it'll be human stupidity and laziness. Our future isn't Terminator, it's Idiocracy.
The only saving grace will be when the AI companies finally start charging profitable rates. Right now everybody is living high on subsidized rates meant to develop massive user bases. Eventually these companies will need to make money. Being technology companies, their preferred form of making money will be offering less for more (enshitification). That's when we'll see whether the unwashed masses and companies will continue to outsource everything to AI or instead see AI for what it really is: a tool that is appropriate for specific jobs.

The Return of Your Apps, Please

2026-05-15T09:00:00-06:00

In my previous post</a> I discussed how the ability to attend concerts is increasingly locked behind using either an iOS device or a device running a Google approved version of Android. The issue I described isn't an isolated incident. More and more of our lives are being locked behind our smartphones. The two major smartphone operating system providers, Google and Apple, know this and are using their positions to lock us into their platforms. This is especially egregious of Google since it introduced Android as an open platform, which it no longer is.
Since introducing Android, Google has slowly been locking it down. Now there are effectively two tiers of Android: the Google blessed tier that can participate in our smartphone centric lives and the bastard child tier that can't. Less somebody think I'm being hyperbolic, Google demonstrated this fact with the latest update to reCAPTCH</a>:

Google has tied its next-generation reCAPTCHA system to Google Play Services on Android, meaning anyone running a de-Googled phone</a> will automatically fail verification when the system decides to challenge them. </blockquote>
reCAPTCHA is used by many websites, including government and educational websites, to thwart access by bots. Instead of providing an image-based puzzle, the new version of reCAPTCHA will require you to scan a QR code with your phone. The dirty trick, which is covered in more detail on this post</a> from GrapheneOS's Mastodon instance, is that on Android this authentication mechanism is tied to Google Play Services, which is Google's proprietary framework for Android, on a Google certified device. That means people with de-Googled phones, such as any phone running LineageOS or GrapheneOS, will be unable to access any website where reCAPTCHA suspects you're a bot.
With this change, attending concerts won't be the only thing locked behind using an iPhone or Google blessed Android device. Huge swaths of the web will be too. This also creates a potential Catch-22 situation. Since many government websites use reCAPTCHA, people not using a Google blessed Android device will inevitably be unable to access government websites, which could result in legal consequences depending on the website in question. Imaging being unable to renew your driver's license or pay your taxes because you don't own the right kind of smartphone.
This isn't the reality we're heading towards, it's the reality we're at right now. The European Union is working on a European Digital Identity, which will require Google Play Integrity</a>. Google Play Integrity, like the new version of reCAPTCHA, only works on Google certified devices. This not only expands the two tier system I mentioned to European citizenship, but also demonstrates that the European Union has no opposition to Google being a monopoly despite the rhetoric of its politicians. While the European Union makes a show of stopping Google's "monopoly" through lawsuits involving its app store, it hands Google a literal monopoly over the European Digital Identity application. To reiterate a long running theme of this blog, your government doesn't love you.

Your Apps, Please

2026-04-25T19:00:00-06:00

I'm going to date myself. When I first started attending concerts, you bought physical tickets. These paper tickets could be purchased in several ways. You could visit the venue ticket box during business hours and purchase them. Ticket would normally be available weeks or even months ahead of a concert or you could buy them when you arrived for the concert if it wasn't sold out. If you lived too far from the venue, you could purchase tickets over the phone and either have them mailed to you or will call (that's and old term for picking your tickets up at the venue). As the Internet became more prominent, many venues started to offer online purchases. Tickets purchased online could be either mailed to you, will call, or printed at home using your printer. These were the halcyon days of concert ticket purchasing in my opinion.
All good things must come to an end though. Attending concerts today is often a pain in the ass because venues have moved to using apps for ticketing. This idea sounds convenient on paper. Everybody carries their phone with them to concerts so they can hold them up and record the entire show to post on social media so their friends know they were there. Since everybody has their phone with them all the time, making the device the method of acquiring tickets and entering concerts only makes sense, right? Except some of us don't carry our phones with us all the time. Some of us like to actually watch the concert with our own eyes rather than filtered through a screen. But more importantly, not all of us use venue approved smartphones.
There are several major problems with apps being used for tickets. The first one I will cover is the combination of shitty technology and nonexistent customer support that defines modern services. Anybody who has had a problem with a Google or Microsoft product will understand this pain. Getting a hold of a human being at either company is basically impossible. If your problem can't be solved through simple online methods, your problem often isn't going to be solved. One venue I used to frequent uses AXS</a>. I say used to frequent because AXS is a unique ticketing service in that they won't actually sell me tickets. You see, their website and app are both convinced that I'm a bot. Creating an account took long enough that one could legitimately write an epic poem about it. Once I managed to create an account, I couldn't use the service. Getting human support isn't an option. I did find their online support page and submitted a ticket thinking a human being would respond at some point. Instead, several days later, I received a link to chat with a large language model that was completely incapable of solving my issue. I'm calling out AXS in this case because it's my most recent encounter, but the same headaches are true of many ticketing apps.
The second major problem is the seemingly endless number of apps you need to install. Ticketmaster used to be the go-to app for ticketing, but they're a shower of bastards so venues rightly sought alternatives. This has lead to a seemingly endless number of apps. Each app also requires you to sign up for yet another service. Some services, like AXS, make signing up a tremendous pain in the ass. A few services, like Dice</a>, make the process straight forward and easy. Most are somewhere in between. It wouldn't be so bad if there appeared to be an end to the madness, but like Sisyphus pushing his rock, we seem to be damned to signing up for new services and installing new apps for all eternity.
The third major problem, and this is the biggest one in my opinion, is that you need to own a venue approved smartphone. This means you either need an iPhone or an Android phone running the stock OS. If you use anything else, good fucking luck. GrapheneOS works in most cases so long as you have Google Play Services installed (I install it in a separate, isolated profile along with all the stupid ticketing apps). If you don't have Google Play Services installed, you're out of luck for many apps (including Ticketmaster). What if you use something radically different, like a phone running mainline Linux</a>? Some ticketing apps can be made to run in an Android emulator with microG, but not all. If that doesn't work for the specific app you need for a concert, you won't get to attend that concert. The reliance on apps for ticketing helps Apple and Google maintain their duopoly over the smartphone market.
The old ways were better. Anybody who could afford the tickets could attend a concert. Now being able to afford the tickets isn't enough. You must also own an iOS or Android device, be lucky enough to not be tagged as a bot by the ticketing service, and have the wherewithal to not blow your brains out while you navigate the Byzantine account sign up process that many services utilize. Rubbing salt into the wound is the fact you don't have ticket stubs you can tack into a scrapbook to remember all the concerts you attended (for you younger folk, tickets at two pieces and the venue ripped off one piece when you got to the concert and you kept the other, which is referred to as the stub, and a scrapbook is a physical book you could paste photographs, ticket stubs, and other paper objects in).

The Endless Cycle of Enshitification

2026-04-16T16:00:00-06:00

I've lived through a few epochs, moments in time where things changed so dramatically that we commonly talk about our world as it existed before and after. 9/11 was the first epoch that I was aware of living through (the fall of the Soviet Union happened when I was too young to know or care about it). COVID-19 is another. The differences between the pre-COVID-19 years and post-COVID-19 years are significant. During COVID-19 we experienced a dramatic drop in quality of life. Not because of the disease, but because of the fallout from the worldwide response to the disease. The world has never recovered from this. It's been caught in a continuous cycle of enshitification ever since.
The damage to education caused by the response to COVID-19 is hard to understate. Math and literacy rates were already trending downward before COVID-19, but they fell off of a cliff during and keep dropping after. It's not just K-12 schools either. College level education quality has been dropping too. The popularity of large language models (commonly and incorrectly referred to as AI) has exacerbated this trend. This isn't helped by the fact that education is no longer focused on the exercise of learning itself but on making the grade (which are often divorced from each other). It's common for stories covering this phenomenon to focus on students using large language models to skip doing the work. I submit this story</a> penned by a college instructor as exhibit one:

But since the appearance of ChatGPT, the instructor’s job isn’t just to teach the subject and frantically attempt to keep every student’s plate spinning. Increasingly, it’s to moonlight as a detective and prosecutor because students without the motivation to do the work don’t have to skip it anymore. They can turn in a work-shaped simulacrum almost as easily. And a substantial number do—in a recent College Board survey</a> of 600 high school students, 84 percent said they had used generative AI for schoolwork. </blockquote>
This part of the story wasn't what jumped out at me though. This part was:

For the last few years, I’ve been exclusively teaching asynchronous online courses, meaning recorded videos rather than live sessions. </blockquote>
Enshitification in education isn't coming solely from lazy students trying to make the grade without doing any work. It's coming from both sides of the teacher-student relationship. Before COVID-19 college classes were largely in-person. There were remote classes, but they were the exception rather than the rule. During COVID-19 most classes became remote. This resulted in an overall drop in quality for both the teachers and students. After COVID-19 many classes remain remote despite no remaining restrictions against in-person classes.
It's easy to blame students who use large language models to avoid doing their work for being lazy. But it's equally true that instructors prerecording video lessons (asynchronous learning to use the academic buzzword) are being lazy and avoiding doing their work. An instructor's job isn't to simply regurgitate information. If students want that, they can go on YouTube. An instructor's job is to help students learn. That not only requires covering material but also requires helping students understand the material. This may require explaining the material in several different ways, having one-on-one conversations with students, pointing students to additional resources, developing hands-on exercises that can help students walk through the logic, etc.
If an instructor is simply recording videos for students to watch, those students are going to pick up on the instructor's laziness. They will respond in kind with their own laziness. After all if the instructor doesn't care why should the students? The enshitification cycle feeds on itself like an ouroboros. The cycle can't be stopped and certainly can't be reversed unless one or more of the people responsible for perpetuating it stop. I will argue that in the case of the teacher-student relationship the teacher should be the one to stop perpetuating the cycle. Amongst the responsibilities of an instructor is the responsibility to demonstrate a belief that the material is worth learning.
I'm sure there are teachers who stand out in your memory because they seemed to be exceptionally good at teaching. I can recall many. One of my high school science teachers excelled at her job. Part of her success was her obvious love of the topic. Her excitement when it came to science demonstrated that she truly believed that the material was worth learning. Many of my college professors were the same way. They obviously loved the subjects they taught and their love of the subject alone could convince students that the material was worth learning.
Thwarting students' use of large language models is actually quite simple. Return to in-person classes and the use of hand written (they were called blue book exams when I was in college) and oral examinations. Will some students still find a way to cheat? Yes. But I suspect most won't because successful cheating under these conditions requires far more sophistication. The bigger challenge is overcoming students' apathy. I believe that requires teachers to first overcome their own apathy, which is an equal challenge.