aredridel

aredridel, 2 months ago to random

Do not make me tap the sign: if your democratic process has any hint of disenfranchising people who should be included, be it in process, inconvenience or structural dilution of their votes, you're not doing democracy, you're just doing sparkling electoralism.

aredridel, 2 months ago to random

I am rewatching Person of Interest and it strikes me just how much current "AI" discourse is just ... this show. It's grounded in a story. A clever, well-written story, but just a story.

It's not grounded in the systems of our world. It's not grounded in understandings of power.

aredridel, 2 months ago to random

I've been reading "On Green” (https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/03/21/on-green) and its following article, “On Attunement” with some interest today. I am uninterested in the ways he is focused on “AGI”, but that might actually be part of what he's saying and missing.

They talk about the philosophy of green in the "magic the gathering" sense, which has five core modes of things, and being a game, designed to balance. It's an attractive system and not without merit as a philosophical labeling system. In short: white, moral; blue, knowledge and rationality; red, passion and desire; black, power and achievement. And green. Green is the subject they can't identify clearly.

I don't think they really understand green. (They come from a very rationalist place, and that's not a good mode to understand Green)

Green is the domain of systems thinking and of ecology. It's one of flexible boundaries and hierarchies that vanish when you look at them for long. They talk about philosophical agents and try to fit a green philosophical stance into that framework, but it misses: the very idea of a self is nebulous in a green philosophy. Yes, it obviously exists, we are all separate from each other. But also we are inseparable from each other. Green is a philosophy of relationality and multiple perspectives and ever shifting viewpoints. It's not just yin, passive, permissive, but holistic. It's not that it lets the Other in, it's that it actively is in relation with the Other. The other is the self, the self is the other.

The essays also label green as conservative, and this is not quite true. It is not about being slow or regressive or traditional, but about being whole. They can't quite see that green's willingness to accept death and pain as things that happen and also its strong preservationist stance are not opposed to each other. It seems incoherent, but it's not: death and pain are things that happen to living parts of an ecosystem. They matter, but so too does the whole matter. Where so many blue rationalists see statistical and demographic counts of deaths and "sentient beings harmed”, green sees a whole ecosystem where some of that is deeply natural. It's unnatural, ecosystem-harming deaths that are disasters in the green philosophy. Wholesale extinctions. Protracted, painful deaths, as much for the wound they cause outside the individual as the individual suffering as well. But we all come to an end, and to change that wholesale would end so many kinds of relationship, so many things.

Green revels in the illegible, the incomplete, and the connected. It's easy to be green-blind, to ignore the subtle systemic effects. So many of us want simple cause and effect, rather than action and plurality of reactions.

Green's ability to embrace the illegible lets it deal with Red chaos; its resilience tempers red passion. It can ally with White philosophies into a pastoral, conservative, moralistic framework. It ends up at odds with the rationalist Blue and the power-hungry Black, because they drive disequilibrium, but more than just transition to new stable ecologies, they drive systems permanently out of stability, destroying relationships in their path. When confronted with this, they will deny it because the objects are still there. Preserved. Catalogued. Legible and accounted for. Perhaps used instrumentally. Perhaps wrecked for some "greater purpose” but only acknowledged as objects. The relationships between things remain illegible.

aredridel, 2 months ago to random

I went to the art opening for a trans photographer today. The usual thing: portraits of trans folks from all over the country.

Something unusual though: I didn't know any of the subjects nor the photographer. It's the first time. (I’ve probably been to a dozen such events in my life)

There's so many of us now. So many of us who are OUT. So many of us who are out, and just living our lives, not this dense clique of folks willing to be out on the Internet. If you asked me "who's the guy you talk to about being trans? Like who's been around, who's well known that they're The Guy?”, I couldn't tell you anymore.

And that's lovely. That's the way it should be.

aredridel, 2 months ago to random

I should start a mastodon feed just for decaying internet infrastructure I find. :/

Today's discovery is pegjs.org

aredridel, 2 months ago to random

Me: "we're all made of stardust, love"
Him: "you're made of stardust and cheese."

aredridel, 3 months ago to random

So about unintended consequences.

My husband just flew home from SFO, and he arrived with an absolutely terrible water bottle.

first, our security theater means we can't bring our own water bottles with water, and the unreliability of services after security means we can't necessarily refill it.

Second, SFO bans plastic water bottles. Good, right?

Except this means that the water bottle he got cost a lot, was made of ALUMINUM, and by most people, flying out of SFO where recycling is everywhere, and to other places where it is not, means that aluminum is extremely likely to end up in the trash.

It's not a GOOD water bottle. It's not the sort of thing you'd re-use unless you're poor or weird. It's light, barely thicker than soda can grade aluminum. It does its job, but at what cost?

This is a lesson in systems. You have to look at the whole, and keep your actual goals in mind. The proxy measure of "plastics reduced" is a bad one in this case: Technically we've succeeded, but the actual goal of reducing environmental impact has not been met. What does it take to actually reduce plastics? There's a bunch of ways: one is ban water bottles entirely, except for BYO. Make sure filling stations are available. This will penalize people who didn't bring their own, so now you need to provide cups and a cleaning service. Possibly workable!

Or you need to attack the root problem, which is the TSA rules that are more for theater than actual security.

The 'cleaning service' could be a mandate that airport restaurants provide cups and washing; it could be a separate service. But with a real analysis and power to fix problems, the TSA rule would go away or be modified so that they can tell water is water. (And the other thing here is that I suspect this rule is also about keeping alcohol out; a flask of vodka would be rather popular with a certain sort of passenger, who themselves may be unruly, and be, in some eyes "a security problem")

flexghost, 3 months ago to random

The teens of america are uniting!

To end war? No

To solve world hunger? Nope

To stop congress from banning TikTok? Yep

After the spyware… (ahem) after the app supplied users with numbers to call, one teen threatened “I promise you do not ban TikTok. If you want a January 6th riot, that's what's going to happen. Don't do it”

…this, after giving their full name and address at the start of the call
(Via Politico)

And the calls keep coming

We’re about to see the wackiest uprising ever 🇺🇸

aredridel, 3 months ago to random

When Malaysia wants this you know it's bad.
https://mastodon.green/@pvonhellermannn/112067341877241544

blogdiva, 3 months ago to TikTok

if Congress is banning #TikTok for their #surveillanceCapitalism for China, are they doing the same to

Amazon
AmEx
Apple
AT&T
BlueSky
Comcast
Discord
Discover
Disney
EA
Facebook
Ford
Google
HP
Mastercard
Microsoft
Netflix
Paypal
Spectrum
Stellantis
Tesla
TMobile
Verizon
Visa
Xitter
Yahoo

just to name a few?

MrBehemo, 3 months ago to random

Now Ahm just a simple country lawyah, but this "copyright" seems incredibly spurious. (1) You can't copyright a game mechanic; that would have to be a patent. Software patents are ridiculous, game patents especially so. But in any sane world, you'd get laughed out of the patent office for submitting such a basic, extant mechanic.

And...

https://www.404media.co/nytimes-files-copyright-takedowns-against-hundreds-of-wordle-clones/

aredridel, 3 months ago to random

I have a blog post or maybe a thread brewing about how existential questions in economics warp everything.

So you a big piece of your entire food supply is tainted. Do you raise the alarm?

If it's a tolerable loss, sure.

But what if it's an amount where there won't be food to go around if you do? Or where it'll disrupt the food system enough to cause it to break?

Then what?

I think this warps a LOT of what we see in the modern world. It's a way things can go to shit without anyone saying anything. It leads to open secrets where "everyone knows" that things are terrible.

chrisamaphone, 3 months ago to random

ok so does anyone actually like the thing where restaurants have been switching to QR code menus/ordering systems? is it primarily because of staffing challenges or am i just aging out of enjoying when technology changes stuff?

aredridel, 3 months ago to random

I hate LLMs they should not be products as they exist now.

https://github.com/aredridel/node-bin-gen/pull/241#issuecomment-1963442116

aredridel, 3 months ago to random

Something else we're not talking about with LLM training: a huge number of sites are going to go paywalled or private because of it. It's already happening in genre publishing. Sites will no longer publish stories for free, adjusting business models to do this. The blatant copyright violation, the unethical sourcing, the tendency to produce works so similar to what exist are all aspects of this. It’s a well-flanked attack on open publication.

So yeah thanks for that OpenAI and company.

aredridel, 3 months ago to random

Y'know what makes it easier to see through propaganda?

People without a reason to lie.

aredridel, 3 months ago to random

Holy shit the propaganda

Edent, 3 months ago to fediverse

OK. Here's another "developing in the open" post.

I've written an #ActivityPub server which can be deployed as a single #PHP file.

No databases, no libraries, no dependencies, no frameworks. Also, no advanced features!

It is currently powering the user example@example.viii.fi

I am looking for alpha testers. All you need is a domain, PHP 8, and the ability to add a custom .htaccess rule to your server.

If you'd like to try it out & give me feedback, please drop me a message.