Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ @dredmorbius@toot.cat
Space Alien Cat / Technological Archaeologist
Supervintage
Progress, models, institutions, technology, limits, values. Interactions thereof.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius
https://joindiaspora.com/u/dredmorbius
Administrivia:
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371572777073267
Joined Dec 2017
Pinned toot
This One Trick Will Revolutionize Your Use of Social Media: Block fuckwits.
On social media, the advantage is that a large userbase and participation. The disadvantage: it's 99.9999% crap.
What's working for me is to filter ruthlessly. If someone is disruptive, ideological, insane, or crazy-making, I'll block them without thought (I used to agonize over that, I don't any more).
High signal is rare, but odds of missing out by blocking idiots are low.
Pinned toot
Pinned toot
"Pseudonyms and anonymity are also an established part of many cultures -- for good reason."
- Alma Whitten, former Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering, Google
Pinned toot
My present Recaptcha policy:
Request audio.
Respond "Fuck you Google"
Repeat until access granted, or the joy fades.
Bonus: All audio AI parsing tends to "Fuck you Google".
The chief worry has been met - how to shake down a foreign company ($5B “new company” tax) and help out a Trump donor (Larry Ellison of Oracle) Of and all that data now in the hands of the NSA.
-- Cass M
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/5b960570dd800138f65f005056264835
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
#Samizdat overview now has flowcharts:
https://0xacab.org/rysiek/samizdat/-/blob/wip-documentation/docs/OVERVIEW.md#use-cases
I have no idea if they're useful. Only one way to find out!
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
It's been 45 or so years since the free software movement started and hardly 1% of professional programmers make a living by developing free software.
And of those being able to make a living, most are developing "enterprise open-source software" (like Kubernetes, Prometheus etc.) which the general public is never going to use.
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
Work on the #Samizdat overview document is proceeding nicely and I am starting to be pretty happy with it:
https://0xacab.org/rysiek/samizdat/-/blob/wip-documentation/docs/OVERVIEW.md
On friend's advice I shortened the Philosophy section substantially, and expanded on it in a separate document:
https://0xacab.org/rysiek/samizdat/-/blob/wip-documentation/docs/PHILOSOPHY.md
As always, comments, suggestions, and patches welcome!
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
The performers, meanwhile, insisted that they were performing the music they'd paid for, and if the composers didn't want their music performed, they shouldn't be selling it to performers.
The issue was resolved by a compulsory mechanical license law, which compelled composers to allow any performer to record their songs (once they'd been released on record), provided they paid a set fee for every copy.
That's how Sid Vicious got to record "My Way."
4/
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
Before recordings, the only music "industry" (that is, a business involving large firms with industrial equipment) was sheet-music publishing, and the musicians who performed the compositions they sold were considered mere tradespeople, following the composers' instructions.
The advent of sound recording changed all that. Performers began to record compositions, to the outrage of the composers.
2/
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
Some bad news for folks who are fans of #uMatrix. It's being archived and no longer being developed :
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uMatrix-issues/issues/291#issuecomment-694988696
Can't say I didn't see this coming since maintaining a plugin, particularly as an open source project, is often a thankless job with many personal down sides
I hope it can still continue, if not as uMatrix, then as something else. I really don't like to fiddle with uBlock Origin to get the same functionality
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
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Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
@temporal @dredmorbius IMHO it's better to just take your notes and worry about organising them later. A pattern will emerge from the combination of your needs, your ways of learning, your topics of interest, what you can and cannot remember, and what's convenient for you. And it'll work better for you than anything zettelkasten can ever do, because that's what Zettelkasten is to it's original creator.
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
uspol memetics
Can someone watching bot patterns please put a flag on the phrases: "harm reduction" in quotation marks, and "The trolley problem only works so many times." without quotation marks?
I'm seeing convergence from multiple sources using these phrases outside their ordinary linguistic patterns, in association with sudden nihilistic plunges toward non-voting. It doesn't feel organic.
uMatrix has been archived
The extraordinarily useful, popular, and necessary browser privacy and security extension has been archived and set read-only.
HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973
GitHub repo: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
A retro forum? What a splendid idea!
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
Hackers leak details of 1,000 Belarusian police officers
Most of the leaked details are for high-ranking officers, such as lieutenants, majors, and captains
https://zdnet.com/article/hackers-leak-details-of-1000-high-ranking-belarus-police-officers/
On education, basic vs. advanced skills, certification, and corporate education
It’s useful to keep in mind the (usually) unstated goals of educational systems:
- Produce a technically-skilled, but politically pliable, working class.
- Produce a managerially competent, but not revolutionary, management and professional class.
- Persist existing power structures, whatever their form; political, cultural, corporate, religious, technical, epistemic. ...
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/e40fb950dd6c0138e516002590d8e506
BTW: #Google are proposing to #disrupt #HigherEducation. In the #monopoly's favour, of course.
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
So... Remember how nigh overnight people started using Zoom?
And not Jitsi?
How did Zoom do that? The fast network effect. How do any of the corpocoms? How could #FLOSS projects do that?
Possible realisation regarding #GDP:
The principle use of GDP is as a growth target, constrained by inflation and unemployment, used by central banks, as they manage the money supply. That is, rather than being a "real" measure of economic activity, GDPis and is used as a metric of monetary quantity.
That is, if you know how much money is circulating, and other bits (velocity of money, inflation, unemployment), you can work out if the money supply needs to grow, shrink, or remain constant. Which is CBs' primary job.
The need and realisation grew out of the Great Depression --- the Mother of All Liquidity Traps --- which was exacerbated hugely by poor monetary management, in part due to no real tools for measuring either quantity (money supply) or flows (GDP).
(What was fairly common at the time and earlier were balance of trade measures of gross imports and exports. And some proto-GDP measures possibly.)
Real economic measures as of the 1930s (and for a considerable time afterwards) was mostly in terms of physical stuff produced or consumed: tons of steel and concrete and coal, bushels of wheat, barrels of oil. Houses built. Man-hours of labour. GWh of electric generation. There is still some focus on this, but monetised trade value is now a principle focus.
I'd like to check this against #SimonKuznits's work, but this seems plausible and explains much.
With time, confusion, and laziness, "GDP" came to stand, improperly per Kuznits, for real economic activity and wealth. Which it ... isn't. Increasingly, GDP, a tool developed for an earlier crisis, is a poor measure for our current economic problems, which mostly aren't grounded in liquidity. (Though it remains a concern, one that's mostly managed fairly well.)
(Came to me listening to LSE & CBC Ideas lectures.)
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
But also, this is where I start to worry about #Samizdat being abused.
Technology is perhaps neither good nor bad, but it is definitely not neutral either. And it is very clear to me that I want the tool I am making to have a net-positive effect on the world, which to me means it needs to be aligned with leftist values.
However, a tool that can protect an LGBTQ+ website from being effectively censored in Russia is also a tool that can protect a fascist site from being taken down in the EU.
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
boosted
I should probably write #Samizdat up, especially in the context of the research done lately, and on how it can be used.
tl;dr is that it is potentially useful not just as a censorship circumvention tool, as originally envisioned, but also:
a). a privacy-enhancing tool for readers of sensitive websites;
b). a way to build an CDN on IPFS.
All three use-cases have their different requirements, and all three would benefit the most from different transport plugins. I am starting to map that out.
The insight, for anyone curious, is that:
Communications channels are preferably highly consistent, low-noise, modulable, stable with distance, and transmit over an appreciable distance, either in radiant broadcast or confined direct channel.
Storage media are preferably highly consistent, low-variance, and stable with time, readily supporting both read and write operations.
Come up with a highly uniform energy emitter (sound, radio, microwave, laser) and you have an ideal transmission basis. Come up with a highly uniform but modiffiable material (clay, papyrus, paper, film, magnetic tape, disk, optical disk, DNA, ...) and you have an ideal storage medium.
There's a bit more to it, but those are the basics.
Space Alien Cat / Technological Archaeologist
Supervintage
Progress, models, institutions, technology, limits, values. Interactions thereof.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius
https://joindiaspora.com/u/dredmorbius
Administrivia:
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371572777073267
Joined Dec 2017
