@TomSwirly@toot.community
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TomSwirly

@TomSwirly@toot.community

.uk ➡️ .at ➡️.ca ➡️ .nyc ➡️ .nl

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faab64, to Israel

Some 52 years ago, when I was in 4th grade of primary school, I found a book "who put glasses on the kid's eyes" in a small book shop in open bazaar of my hometown Ahvaz in khuzestan province of Iran.

A few days later, we had to bring a book to school and read it in front of the class. Happy as I was to have found a great book, I took it to school and read it in front of the class.

I couldn't understand why my teacher was acting so scared and stopped me before I had finished the book and sent me to the principals office.
I was nervous, didn't know what I had done wrong and our principal, who was a really nice man, and went to the same university as my oldest sister took the book and asked me where I had bought it. I knew something was wrong, so I said I bought it at the book store of our local mosque, to protect the guy who was my source of cheap and lovely books and would buy back my old ones to help me afford buying new ones.

In the evening my father came home, agitated and clearly upset. Asked me what I have done and I explained the situation, including the fact that I lied about wher I had bought the book. Told him the highlight of the book about a happy child who was living in a town with happy people who were all wearing glasses.

He was seeing flowers, colorful houses. Nice people and happy children all around him, birds flying in the sky and everyone were so friendly to him.

Until one day he fell of and his glasses broke. He couldn't believe his eyes, the flowers, colorful houses and happy people were all gone. All he could see was a run down city, with piles of garbage everywhere, people wearing worn out clothes, looking hungry and sick.

He was nece happy after that, he couldn't believe that everyone were walking around with glasses and we're happy all the time. But he was sad and miserable, because he had seen his town without those glasses.

Anyway. My father took me to a building close to the main police station on the other side of the Karun river, he spent almost entire day in a room where I could people screaming at him and a few times someone his the table very hard. But couldn't hear what they were saying.
My dad came out. Pulled my hand without saying a word, we walked for an hour to get home, didn't take taxi as we used to do.

He didn't say a word during the whole day and told me to go over my books and bring all the books I had bought from that shop, he through them in a metal bucket and poured some fuel over it, set them on fire and waited until they were completely burned, mixed the ashes to turn them into dust, filled the bucket with water and through it in the toilet.

He told me to never go back to that shop and be careful to take any books to school from now on.

That' was my first interaction with the notorious Savak police of Shah of Iran. In the next days, all the 4 book stores in our town were raided. Books confiscated and doors locked. Never heard about any of them again.

Reading the comments of pro Israeli accounts on mastodon reminded me of that book and that experience that changed my life when I was only 8 years old.

This post specially triggered those memories. Unlike the kid in my book and the people living in the town, these people know very well tat what they are posting is not true, they have seen the horror of the past 76 years of occupation, they have seen the 66 times they were subject to UNSC charges, and 45 that were vetoed by the US..

But they don't care, they see themselves as victims. They don't see the millions of starving palestinians, or the millions living in refuge camps around the world as worthy of their empathy or cause of why Palestinians and some of the world is fed up with their out of control criminal behavior

They don't have glasses on their eyes, they have chosen to be selective and above the laws of the world.

@palestine @israel

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@faab64 @palestine @israel

My father visited Persia at around that time. Later, when the "hostage crisis" happened, he was singularly silent about it, even though he was politically conservative.

When I asked him, he said that no matter how bad the Ayatollah's secret police were, he could never possibly be as bad as Savak.

He didn't tell me any more, and now he's gone and I can't ask him.

hart, to random German
@hart@norden.social avatar

Nein danke

Bruno Burger, ...mit erneuerbaren Energien geht alles gerade in die richtige Richtung

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@hart Mindless propaganda against atomic power is one of the many reasons why fossil fuel use has continued to grow exponentially for the last century. And now it's too late.

Note that France has managed to mostly decarbonize - by using nuclear power.

Germany got rid of its nukes: and now has the most CO2 emitting power in. Europe.

Congratulations! You help destroy our ecosystem.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@samuelmumm @hart I eagerly await your reasoned refutation, then.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@Blahster @unnameduser @samuelmumm @hart

The devastation from fossil fuels will last for the rest of time.

To be honest, I no longer think nuclear power can save us: it is too late. We would have had to have gone nuclear in a big way two generations ago, giving us enough breathing space to retool our society for degrowth.

The environment movement concentrated on nuclear power and sidelined the much bigger threat of fossil fuels until it was too late.

1/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@unnameduser @Blahster @samuelmumm @hart

But the highest funding for fusion research came during the cold war:

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@samuelmumm @hart @unnameduser Again, the final storage for fossil fuel waste is our atmosphere. Each year the CO2 emitted by our society increases. We would have needed every possible source of non-emitting energy to mitigate this. This is why it's so unfortunate that activists have systematically concentrated on killing nuclear power for the last fifty years.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@samuelmumm @hart @unnameduser @Blahster While this is a fair criticism, you will note from that previous graph that expenditures on fusion research dropped by about 85% in just a few years, whereas predictions were based on continuing funding levels for fusion research.

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

People trying to train AIs are now complaining that all of the AI data on the internet are making it hard for them to get quality training sets of natural language and images.

bitter snickering

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@ayushbhattacharya @futurebird

"How hard can it be?"

So far, very very hard. These models cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train, and get very mediocre results. More, it's really not clear what these "correct methods" are, and clearly they need a lot more than a "pinch" of moderation.

> AI is cool stuff!

The stated goal of AI developers is to destroy most of our jobs. Sounds very uncool to me.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@ayushbhattacharya @futurebird

I disagree with everything you wrote: for example

> Look no one is taking our jobs!

Why? You don't say.

The stated plan is to eliminate 90% of jobs like artist, driver, call center worker, lawyer, factory worker... indeed, it's fairly hard to name a job that wouldn't be decimated, if AI works out.

Capitalists will have invested trillions, and expect a lot more back.

Look at what happened to jobs over the last 50 years.

1/

compost, to climate
@compost@regenerate.social avatar

Starting to read articles about farmers warning that for the first time, since WWII, we could have a year with no harvest in a lot of crops.

I have seen many documentaries warning us that because of the topsoil being washed away we will see events like this happening.

The consequences of the are that it becomes more difficult to provide a crop with safe conditions to grow.

My point is mastering compost at home and learning to grow your food is a very valuable skill.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@compost Classically, one acre (4000 sq m) feeds one person.

You can do better than that but not hugely better.

Most humans live in cities where they are unlikely to even have 1/10 of an acre (400 sq m) to grow things.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@compost I agree with everything you say, and I religiously kept a compost bin for the 14 years that I had a tiny garden, but that area was at best 1% of an acre, and I used it to grow bee and butterfly friendly flowers.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

People on Twitter are debating whether a person using uncommon words like "delve" are trying to sound smarter than they are, or worse, are ChatGPT bots, because "normal" people don't talk like that.

You don't have to get upset, or embroiled in the debate. Not worth the time or attention. But I'll share some important context as your friendly neighborhood Nigerian 🙋🏿‍♂️

Many Nigerians have bigger English language vocabularies and better command of grammar than the typical American or English person

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@taatm @mekkaokereke

As an pedant myself, I got the "did you swallow the dictionary" comment for my sesquipedalian vocabulary when I was young, but "temperate" is not really le mot juste to describe water temperature! 😀

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/temperate

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@purplepadma @mekkaokereke @mentallyalex The nursery rhyme "One, two, buckle my shoe" ends up with "Eleven, twelve, dig and delve", but I don't know if that rhyme is common in the US, or if it gets explained to kids, or what.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@purplepadma @mekkaokereke @mentallyalex My wife, a reformed Yank, when asked said, "Like 'to delve into something'?", so at least one colonial has heard of it.

soheb, to music
@soheb@pkutalk.com avatar

Spotify officially demonetises all tracks with under 1,000 streams

This is just an insanely bone-headed move that is so pointless.

These artists don't even get paid that much money, and yet Spotify wants to cut off their revenue.

I'm done with Spotify. In fact, I think I'm flat-out done with music streaming services. All of them are exploitative. back to buying digital albums for me.

https://djmag.com/news/spotify-officially-demonetises-all-tracks-under-1000-streams

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@soheb If I pay someone $10 on Bandcamp, they get at least $8.50, $10 if it's on Bandcamp Friday.

Lazarou, to Scotland
@Lazarou@mastodon.social avatar

Children's Author and full time Holocaust Denier declares she is above the Law, goads the Police into arresting her.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@Lazarou Denying the truth of this true statement, "The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research", in a single tweet is exceptionally ignorant, but it doesn't make JK Boring a full-time holocaust denier. Calling her a full-time transphobe is closer to the mark.

I would be very happy if she went to jail, though, even for a short stay - I'm a big fan of justice, and so so so sick of that Hairy Bugger guy with his genetically given gifts.

1/

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Intellectually I knew that Dorymyrmex bureni could dig nests 1 to 2 meters deep into the earth. A long slender vertical tunnel. (This would be like you going out in your yard and digging a tunnel just big enough for your body... a mile deep. And doing it so expertly there are no cave ins)

But seeing them really do it? Being able to watch the progress as they go deeper?

I'm so proud of them!

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@futurebird Very charming! I note also Barry Malzberg's Phase IV as a little easter egg in the first image. 😀

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

There's a few different camps on generative "AI":

  • "It's our lord and savior" (mostly AI companies pushing this)
  • "It will kill us all" doomerism (it won't, it has no intelligence or sentience or agenda)
  • "It has some use cases!" centrism (problematic because it enables the lord and savior types & it's also wrong as work products are highly unreliable, even for basic things like summaries and tabulation)
  • "It's a bullshit tech hype, paired with theft and environmental waste" (correct)
TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@thomasfuchs You seem very very sure.

I'm also a skeptic, but I am not so sure.

I think an awful lot of BS jobs, like call centers, are at risk from BS AI. Yes, the error rate would go up, but the costs would plummet. Making call centers less useful might be part of the plan...

AI's main threat is to jobs. Automated driving isn't generative AI, but will, eventually, kill nearly all the 10 million or so professional driving jobs in the US and some huge number of jobs elsewhere.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@thomasfuchs

Some sort of argument would go a long way to helping me understand why.

Again, take customer support.

This is an area where 90% of the queries are one of perhaps a dozen questions. If generative AI can answer those with 90% accuracy, and then defer to a human, you've saved 80% of your personnel.

Human customer support representatives have << 100% accuracy, too.

It is impossible to be completely sure of non-trivial events in the future. Your very certainty makes me doubt.

denmanrooke, to random
@denmanrooke@social.coop avatar

Boycott Express VPN.

Repost from Lowkey (at)Lowkey0nline
'More people should know that the sole owner of Express VPN's parent company is Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi.

He has a long history of funding the Israeli Occupation Forces and appointed a Duvdevan unit veteran as the CEO.'

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@denmanrooke

Thanks for posting this.

As an alternative Mullvad has a very strong privacy policy - they keep no logs at all, and you pay as you go to an "account number" which has no password and from which you can retrieve no information at all. Their code is all open source.

Also, I've twice had technical issues which I wrote up carefully and each time I got a real human engineer writing back to me incredibly fast with an explanation and a workaround.

Amazing for €5 a month.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Last night our cable internet box randomly died. It’s totally fried and must be replaced. This happened just as my husband got home from work, waking me up to tell me the governor of NY had issued a warning about power outages during the Coronal Mass Ejection (there was a big solar storm last night) — basically I thought the world was ending and put my laptop in the oven. (it’s a faraday cage)

I may have overreacted.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@futurebird @lampsofgold I've been living in cities for decades and I've been craving a real starry sky. (I went to summer camp in Northern Quebec.)

I love the idea but it would likely fail for the same old tired reason. It would have to be voluntary, they can't just cut everyone's power, but Fascist-Americans would take it on themselves to turn all their lights on even brighter than usual.

As always, a few psychopaths spoil everything. If we could fix that, everything else would work.

1/

TomSwirly, to random
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@w7voa I just read this article: https://www.steveherman.press/p/unraveling-threads and it's extremely strong, though a bit depressing (often the case with factually correct articles).

I wish I could disagree with your claim that Mastodon will remain marginal because it's not owned by a large company, but I can't.

But there is one line that's... more formulaic than the rest and it's this one: "but Mastodon can be technically overwhelming for novices."

1/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@w7voa If you visit, say, someone's profile, and you aren't doing it "within your instance", then that site simply won't know about you - it shouldn't know about you, even, because we want all the different instances to be completely independent, and particularly, not to be able to get secrets like login information from other instances.

The standard Mastodon UI helps here because there's a different color to the background for pages in and out of your instance...

6/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@w7voa ...but the user still needs to understand this one concept: that people and posts on Mastodon can be reached in two ways, from inside their instance and from outside, and in the outside world, you can't favorite or follow.

This is already too long, but I'm going to sketch a mitigation, and then suggest a more complete boilerplate for discussing the barrier to entry on

7/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@w7voa The mitigation would have to be in UI, and have to handle the "error case" - you try to favorite or follow a page where you aren't signed in, and the landing page tries to help you better, while not making it easy for unscrupulous sites to steal your passwords. Big can of worms, but progress is possible.

To talk about the difficulty in learning Mastodon, something like "but many users fail to "get" federation, and soon leave" is short and more precise.

8/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@w7voa I do want to emphasize that the same or a similar issue would appear in any such decentralized system with publicly viewable pages.

The problem isn't per se but emerges inexorably from having small, localized instances where I, the user, am only signed into my home instance.

/thread

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