SA wants to be involved in innovation, not just be consumers of it: It’s easy! Start with open source software like Brazil, China, and Russia
South Africa no longer wants to be just a consumer of hi-tech and innovative products. It wants to play an active role in technological research & development to produce such products locally.
This was said by communications and digital technologies minist ...continues
@danie10@michaelgraaf it’s not only open source. It’s also about who you see as a role model. As long as powerful people (like Gugu Motlanthe) from https://motlanthe.org/ hold people like Elon Musk up as role models to young scientist. We are going to constantly be screwed.
Petition from George Takei to the Biden administration for inhuman treatment and drowning deaths of migrants in the Rio Grande. There is razor wire hidden in the river. Please sign.
Hey @michaelgraaf, I'm glad you liked that video. Sasha and Dima were also part of the new TROM II documentary released last month, it is a more in depth presentation of our world, the problems we face today, what causes these problems and how we can try to solve these issues. https://www.tromsite.com/documentaries/trom2/
If you liked the prison earth video then you'll probably enjoy this documentary as well.
If you go back to the very origins of mechanical and electrical computing, @emilymbender , the objectives were to automate the production of astronomical ephemera tables and tide tables (Babbage), to investigate the limits of mathematics (Turing), to break military ciphers (Rejewski, and, later, Turing, Flowers et al). Breaking cyphers is unquestionably pattern matching.
@michaelgraaf@emilymbender true. And a lot of Von Neumann's work was connected to the Manhattan project, although what exactly they were using compute for I'm not exactly clear.
But what @emilymbender was reacting to in the podcast was a claim by #Meta's 'chief scientist' that early computers were mainly used for data storage and retrieval, which, as she said, is manifestly not true.
@michaelgraaf@emilymbender
Good grief - I know just enough about computers to get myself into tricky situations I can barely get out of, but even I know that data storage on any scale is a relatively recent thing.
Mechanical computers were generally faster than humans at complex calculations, but the results were stored on paper, vacuum tube computers were faster still, but still required paper storage, you would think someone with such a job description would know this...
I was reminded of a thing I did sometime in 2015, which is still, possibly even more so, accurate...
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Terrorist (noun, \ˈter-ər-ˌi-zt) @b9AcE, originally in 2015]
1 a: a person of oppressed ethnic group that is not actively participating in oppressing the same or other ethnic groups on behalf of the ruling group
b: a muslim or anyone that could be mistaken for a muslim regardless of personal actions or beliefs
c: an anarchist, communist, environmental activist or anti-fascist regardless of variants or personal actions
d: any person that alerts the general public of illegal acts performed by public authorities
e: librarians
f: an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
g: any non-combatant killed by what would otherwise be legally defined as a war crime
2 (archaic): person employing systematic use of terror especially as means of coercion
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@michaelgraaf A good response.
Recent decade many have been sentenced to years of improvement solely for committing acts of proper and free journalism, which alone was considered as sufficient to convict for being a "member of a terrorist organisation" according to the highly tegime-controlled courts of Turkey. Probably similar elsewhere too...
Technologies to tackle water-related risks have been chronically underfunded for decades. Could the ‘tide’ be turning?
So much time and funding has been spent on solar and renewable energy generation, and that has actually paid off pretty well. But it is true that the ever-growing world population, combined with some extreme weather conditions, has also been resulting in some ...continues
@michaelgraaf@Radical_EgoCom Self-sufficiency is a red herring. Show me a person and I will show you three ways they are interdependent with humanity.
What capitalism does is to narrow the scope of social relations to money/commodity exchanges and then to pretend that having money means independence.
Logically, all kinds of (inter)depence are then considered inferior to that mythical state of "independence".
In reality we are all interdependent in space and time. Some people deny it, some use money as a way to obtain help, some cultivate communities of various kind.
What's really revolutionary about the fediverse is not "decentralized!" and "federated!" but the interaction model that users are being exposed to now with Lemmy, kbin, and other new participant systems.
The idea that you can interact with a post or article from somewhere else that's been shared, not only with your own existing identity on a platform you're comfortable with, but without having to interact directly with the original site, its ads, trackers, cookie nags, notification nags, etc.
@michaelgraaf What I'm saying is that it's not the way it works mechanically that makes a huge change to users, but the interaction model that results.
Consider two scenarios to add the next 10m monthly active users to today's #fediverse:
we all block #meta and today's fediverse grows organically by the next 10m users.
we interact with as many #meta users as possible from Mastodon etc. via their ActivityPub integration, make our points why this is better, and convince 10m of them to leave meta and come over to apps not run by a surveillance capitalist.
Which of those two is more likely and quickly to lead to success? Food for thought.
Today it is precisely ten years ago that the first of the blockbuster revelations on decades of massive illegal infosec operations by the US government were published - made possible by whistleblower and conscientious objector Edward Snowden. The unprecedented privacy violations against internet users revealed then were a call to action for many. Why not come and help out too, and submit your idea to work for a more open, resilient and robust internet via https://nlnet.nl/propose
@michaelgraaf It is indeed interesting how it has that strong connotation. Let's hope having a conscience, and acting according to ones moral beliefs and personal ethics becomes a trend. We salute anyone that has shown the courage to stand up, speak out & act against surveillance, exploitation and other unethical behaviour - which comes with significant risks, as one is typically dealing with high stakes and unethical people almost by definition.
Ok. Question for South African followers... if there is a total grid collapse, how is government going to communicate? This there a certain AM frequency that I should know about and tune into ?
@michaelgraaf yes but fewer phones are getting those headphones so the feature is dying out ;-)
Big problem is the Disaster Management Centres are not pre-communicating what to expect. I wrote a long motivation to Cape Town's one explaining why it needs to be communicated ahead of time... But still nothing seen yet sadly.
RT @AfricArxiv
AfricArxiv is a free, open source and community-led digital archive for African research. We provide a non-profit platform for African scientists to upload their works.
Can we talk about 12volts? Especially in #SouthAfrica right now with the power crisis... but why dont more devices standardise on 12v, my LG screen is 19v, my laptop is 19v... 12v feels like a greater standard and so can we not all start producing 12v devices, or if we must 24v?
@michaelgraaf@danie10 I hear you! ...and although i have the the xkcd comic constantly on my mind, i just find the cig lighter to be a chonky design ^_^ i want something with multistrip options where each plug has its own switches (or not) but not something that is so bulky. Admittedly i do like the look of this thing (attached)