aral

aral, 11 months ago to random

If there is even a single gram of truth to this…

Any instance that goes along with such a thing will be lost to surveillance capitalism. I don’t care how large they are or who they are, any instance that becomes Meta’s bitch should be defederated immediately by all others. Let the largest few get swallowed up whole by Silicon Valley if they’re dumb enough to do it. The rest of us will rebuild.

I really hope no one is stupid enough to take Meta up on this if it’s true. https://beach.city/@vantablack/110594120842443355

aral, 9 months ago to random

“We rebuilt the Mastodon backend from scratch and made it able to handle Twitter-scale (500M users, 20M writes/second, unbalanced social graph, etc.)”

Congratulations, you reinvented Big Tech.

Did you stop to consider that fediverse (emphasis “diverse”) servers should not be trying to reach “Twitter scale?” That they should be kept small on purpose? That the goal isn’t to recreate Twitter but with some other asshole in charge?

(Of course, it’s a VC-backed startup.)

https://redplanetlabs.com/mastodon-clone

aral, 9 months ago to startups

Do I want it?
↓
Is it by a startup?
↓
No.

(A ‘startup’ is not just any new small business. It’s a temporary venture capital funded company that must either fail fast or exit. An exit is where you’re either bought by Big Tech or become Big Tech through an IPO. To understand this better, if you have a sustainable small company, a startup is what will put you out of business.)

#startups #SiliconValley #ventureCapital #vc #SurveillanceCapitalism #PeopleFarming

aral, 9 months ago to ArtificialIntelligence

Hey, thanks to you and a billion other people whose work we’ve scraped and used for free, we now have a billion dollar company.

Ah, that’s great, so I guess we can scrape your work too and use it for free?

Fuck no! What are you, a communist?

#artificialIntelligence #ai #machineLearning #ml #llm #SiliconValley #extraction #exploitation #SurveillanceCapitalism #PeopleFarming

aral, 1 year ago to random

Privilege is the luxury of remaining neutral on issues that destroy less fortunate people’s lives.

#privilege #socialJustice #neutrality

aral, 10 months ago to random

Late-stage capitalism? That was last week. Welcome to extinction-stage capitalism.

aral, 5 months ago to random

If you missed the prequel to The Handmaid’s Tale on TV, you can watch it on any news programme that covers US news.

aral, 22 days ago to Israel

I am not pro-Palestine or anti-Israel. This isn’t a football game between two equally-matched teams where you support your favourite. I am anti-genocide and Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #apartheid #ethnicCleansing #genocide

aral, 5 months ago to Israel

“Words fail us to describe the absolute horror being inflicted on Palestinian civilians by Israel as it carries out incessant and indiscriminate warfare in Gaza for all the world to see.”

– Dr Christos Christou, International President, Médecins Sans Frontières

https://www.msf.org/letter-gaza-un-security-council

#CeasefireNOW #israel #palestine #gaza #genocide #ethnicCleansing

aral, 1 year ago to random

“According to a recent poll, more than 70 percent of Britons under the age of 50 are indifferent to the coronation. Even so, a staggering 250 million pounds ($315m) of magicked-up taxpayer money will be spent on this single day even as thousands of nurses, doctors, teachers and other key public workers have been told for months there is no money in the coffers to offer them a meaningful pay rise.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/5/with-charles-iii-coronation-colonialism-is-coming-home-to-roost

#monarchy #uk #inequality #letThemEatCake

aral, 1 year ago to ai

Machines aren’t taking over.
Corporations are taking over.

Worry about the right thing.

#corporatocracy #ai

aral, 10 months ago to random

Basically, what we’re saying to people today is:

You’re interested in tech and you want a nice home (or just any home) and stability? Go work at Google, Facebook, or some other surveillance capitalist.

What’s that? You want to work on free and open source? Sure, go work at IBM or Oracle… Oh… you don’t mean enterprise software? Tech to protect human rights/democracy? Not for profit hippie-dippie crap for the common good?

Oh, then suffer.

I mean, is it any surprise things are as they are?

aral, 6 months ago to twitter

Just saw Twitter/X called birdchan.

chef’s kiss

#twitter #x #birdchan

aral, 7 months ago to accessibility

Programmable keyboards with free and open firmware are not just geek toys but accessibility tools.

I was just able to create a new layer in Vial that moves the arrow keys to the left side of the keyboard and maps them to s/z/x/c to make them easier to use in some keyboard shortcuts after breaking my right hand.

#accessibility #a11y #keyboard #qmk #via #vial

aral, 7 months ago to random

Israel-Hamas war: Israeli military orders 1.1 million in Gaza to evacuate south ‘ahead of operation’

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2023/10/13/israel-hamas-war-latest/

This is prelude to genocide. Gaza is an open air prison with 2 million people, nearly half of which are children. The places being told to evacuate include hospitals. There is nowhere to go.

You cannot condemn the barbarism of one group while cheering on that of another.

aral, 8 months ago to random

We call it capitalism because greedy shortsighted self-destructive shitfuckery is too much of a mouthful.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/brain-implant-removed-consent

aral, 8 months ago to twitter

The people who own X are sentencing people to death based on their posts.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/29/saudi-arabia-man-sentenced-death-tweets

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-to-maintain-twitter-stake

#x #twitter #musk #saudiArabia

aral, 3 months ago to random

Folks promoting Bluesky on the fediverse is like the three little pigs doing public relations for the big bad wolf.

But, hey, clearly some folks still haven’t gotten the message that VC and billionaires are bad and that non-corporate spaces have to be protected from corporate ones.

I guess something has to keep the folks who write “what went wrong/if only we’d known” articles in business.

🤷‍♂️

aral, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to internet

Spam alert: thegx.ca/forum

Dear server admins,

If you see an account named thegx.ca/forum (thegx@…) pop up on your servers please suspend it. Some bastard has been setting up spam accounts all over. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve blocked and it’s getting annoying.

#meta #fediverse #mastodon #spam

aral, 5 months ago to random

You mistake politeness for kindness and accuse those who refuse to be polite in the face of injustice with being unkind.

I pray you never experience just how unkind the polite can be.

aral, 4 months ago to random

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

aral, 4 months ago to uk

If you’re a British taxpayer, you can at least rest assured that some of your money was going to compensate the victims of British slavery as recently as 2015.

Sorry, did I say compensate the victims? I meant compensate the slave holders.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fact-check-u-k-paid-off-debts-slave-owning-families-2015/3283908001/

Via @LewisHarrington

#britain #uk #england #slavery

aral, 3 months ago to max

“‘I would absolutely not fly a Max airplane,’ said Ed Pierson, a former Boeing senior manager. ‘I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door. I tried to get them to shut down before the first crash.’

‘I would tell my family to avoid the Max. I would tell everyone, really,’ said Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-30/boeing-max-9-flying-again-after-door-panel-blowout

#boeing #max #boeingMax9

aral, 1 month ago to threads

NASA captures stunning photo of mastodon.social federating with Threads.

#threads #meta #facebook #mastodonSocial #resistenceIsFutile

aral, 1 month ago to Germany

Wow. Germany, are you ok, hon?

https://diem25.org/germany-bans-yanis-varoufakis-from-entering-the-country/

#democracy #germany #Yanis #Varoufakis #YanisVaroufakis #israel #palestine #apartheid #ethnicCleansing #genocide #iDidNaziThatOneComing