drwho

thegibson, 10 months ago to random

I had to go shopping for defcon clothes this year... vanity, yes, I know...

It is hard as a middle-aged aged man to decide on what looks cool without trying too hard.

But I think I did it.

feld, 10 months ago to random

deleted_by_author

rgegriff, 10 months ago to random

Let's say you wanted to build alternative structures to supply communities with life necessities that existing state and capital structures fail to provide.

Short of some revolutionary mass insurrection taking power, liberating capital resources, and upending the economic status quo; any attempts to build these alternative infrastructures would necessarily exist within, and interface with, currently existing capitalist systems. Let's start with the "modest" goal of providing food, dignified shelter to anyone who needs it; forever.

One assumption that is critical to this imagined pathway is that enough people with moderately high-incomes are not so far-gone that they would be willing to, if presented with the opportunity, pay more for things knowing they are directly subsidizing their neighbors.

Let's say you are able to somehow pull together 20 million dollars; maybe you have a lot of sympathetic patrons, maybe you really lucked out when the evil startup you worked for in your 20s IPO'd; maybe you inherited a bunch of money from someone who got it by being awful and you can't stand personally benefitting from it, maybe you just have a lot of friends who believe in you and share your vision.

Either way, you have some cash and the dream to try and boot up socialism from inside of a capitalistic operating system.

You use that money to start or buy a farm. Eventually, the goal will be to feed people directly with farming output, but for now you need to keep things self-sustaining, so the output of the farm gets sold. You pay the people working the farm fairly and avoid using the worst environmental practices. The farm turns a profit, but not a "maximal profit". You don't have shareholders, so you are allowed to do this.

These profits are split between donations to grassroots community organizations dedicated to feeding people, and reinvestment into the farming organization every year; continually growing outputs and increasing margins purely through scale while continuing to mind your environmental and labor responsibilities. You never pay yourself more than anyone else who is working for the project.

If this manages to become self-sustaining, you can take some of the excess and begin opening community cafeterias.
The goal of these cafeterias would be to efficiently serve healthy, desirable, meals each day from a daily menu that accounts for various dietary-restrictions in a friendly communal atmosphere.

Meals can be purchased a-la carte or through a subscription plan; The cost of a meal is on an income-based sliding scale; Diners with high-incomes pay more and directly subsidize lower-income diners. You remind the high-income diners of this as much as possible. Rich people love no-effort ways to feel like they are helping.

If someone is hungry, they get fed, no matter what.

Assuming the food supply side of the equation is able to grow sustainably; start buying mostly empty apartment buildings and converting them into housing co-ops. Since you own the building, you can work with some credit unions and extend low-interest mortgages to existing tenants at relatively low risk to yourself. They have the option to continue renting until they move out, but you structure the mortgages such that the monthly payments are lower than what the monthly rent to a landlord would be. There is also a monthly income-based co-op fee that would pay for maintenance and a blanket insurance policy for all units. This co-op fee would also go towards subsidizing several units from each property as housing-first opportunities for unhoused individuals and families. These opportunities would be provided without any pre-conditions such as seeking employment or entering into drug/mental health treatment.

Purchasing a unit comes with some strings, though; you must live in the unit as your primary residence for the majority of the year; if you move out, you are required to sell the unit, either back to the building at the fixed unit price, or to anyone else who wishes to buy it from you on the same terms. You can get a roommate, but you don't get to rent out the whole unit or collect properties as if they were pokemon cards. This is housing, not an investment.

Start replacing landlords with homeowners.

All the while, you are going to need to build ties. You will need to serve others wherever possible, and get people invested in the vision of this project. You will need to gain support and protection from people in power; Once you start to appear like a threat to capital, you will face attacks.

drwho, 10 months ago to random

Just realized something:

I wonder how many of the "Decentralization won't work unless it's blockchain" folks are too young to have used BitTorrent.

drwho, 10 months ago to random

thegibson, 10 months ago to random

Wow... just... wow.

drwho, 10 months ago to random

I visited birbsite for about a minute today.

That was more than sufficient.

awoodsnet, 10 months ago to UX

One of the biggest problems on the web is search — especially from a privacy perspective. we need to setup our own search engines, so that get more universal results without manipulation. Also could we federate the m? Remember how the original Napster worked?! Perhaps we could setup our search engines to work like Napster.

#Search #UX #SearchEngines
#Privacy

thegibson, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

Time to make the party favors...

#DEFCON #DEFCON31

santiago, 10 months ago to random

I’ve had bad experiences in the past with boards other than @Raspberry_Pi (notably BananaPi). The cheaper price didn’t compensate for all the little things that didn’t work easily on the software side.

I wonder how it is nowadays ? You can get an orange Pi Zero 3 with 4GB of RAM and gigabit Ethernet for 25$ from 🇨🇳 . Pretty powerful for a small server as long as you don’t need USB3 / fast storage. RAM is also useful if you build just a display kiosk with Chromium.

drwho, 10 months ago to random

"221 2.7.0 Error: I can break rules, too. Goodbye."

Cute.

thegibson, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

I love an incredibly bad takes by people considered to be thought leadership.

BlackAzizAnansi, 10 months ago to random

I love Mastodon but too many of y'all don't know how to have fun, somebody throw a fucking pie or something.

simplenomad, 10 months ago to random

Decently productive evening with a few new tech toys. Now I’m playing with other recent purchases.

#MyChemicalWarfareRomance #gasmask #EndTimesAreFun

foone, 10 months ago to random

HOW EXACTLY AM I SUPPOSED TO TYPE THAT, DOS?

drwho, 10 months ago to random

Because I earwormed myself, I've been contemplating the lyrics of Ice, Ice Baby while in daily standup. And I've come to the conclusion that Vanilla Ice might be the wisest rapper of the 90's. Here's why:

Guy's at a club hanging out with his posse. Lots of folks around him are doing coke, but he's not. Right there, smart.

Then something goes sideways and shit gets real. What actually happened? Doesn't matter. What matters is at least two other folks there decided to open fire on each other.

What does Ice do? He doesn't throw down even though he's heavy because he knows nothing good will come of it. He's outnumbered, probably outgunned, and likely to get geeked so he does the only smart thing: He gets his crew together and they get the fuck out of dodge. There's no point in joining in a coke fuelled gun battle over something potentially stupid. They're out to have a good time.

And on their way out of the area, Johnny Law rolls up with the party lights going, and they're going the opposite direction. Not arrested: Bonus when a gunfight breaks out.

deco, 10 months ago to homeassistant

At this point, the easiest solution seems to be to set fire to my current #HomeAssistant raspberry pi and then stand up a new one with the new z-wave stick and just start over from scratch.

cmdr_nova, 10 months ago to random

Feel like I'm living in mediocre cyberpunk

I wear a watch that monitors my vitals for irregularities, I exercise in virtual reality, I have a phone with all the knowledge of the world in it, that also talks to me, and I get nicotine from a device instead of a cigarette. But then I work for a company whose tech is all stuck in 1992

drwho, 10 months ago to random

Farmers Insurance pulls out of Florida, affecting 100,000 policyholders

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/business/farmers-insurance-florida/index.html

enkiv2, 10 months ago to random

the fact that some people find LLMs useful for writing code is not a credit to LLMs but an indictment of the average signal to noise ratio of code: it means that most code is confusing boilerplate -- boilerplate because a statistical model can only reliably reproduce patterns that reoccur many times across its training corpus, and confusing because otherwise-intelligent people capable of convincing a hiring manager that they are competent programmers find it easier to ask a statistical model to produce an incorrect prototype they must debug than write the code themselves. we all know from experience that most code is bad, but for LLMs to be able to write more-or-less working code at all indicates that code is much worse than we imagine, and that even what we consider 'good' code is from a broader perspective totally awful. (in my opinion, it is forced to be this way because of the way we design programming languages and libraries.)

nobody, 10 months ago to random

Space is pretty cool

Anybody who bought a Tesla in the last few years is a goddamn tool.

We’ve known for years that the owner is a lying, creepy, out of touch dipshit and that it’s a very flawed car and the company will cut costs to save money on safety items, every time....