What really creeps me out isn’t that we’re great at imagining non-conscious things as people - that’s just a harmless quirk. It’s that we might be just as mistaken about actual people, and we’re stuck in a cosmic horror plot. https://mastodon.xyz/@pmorinerie/112506480363973206
write a fairly inflammatory toot then see how many of them blocked you. but I've been thinking about this a lot, for literally decades, and I can't avoid this conclusion.
My response to that is that authoritarians and terrorists need each other against the middle.
On anarchists, they're all over the place. While some follow accelerationism to trigger social transformation (which sounds like a very risky plan to me) many others are far more constructive. Anarchist accelerationism isn't new, to most "anarchist" is still synonymous to terrorist because of attacks a century ago.
@zzzeek oh, and the generalization of "anarchists" I think doesn't work, as left libertarian types are really all over the place. As you'd expect for anarchists.
@zzzeek Let's detach that statement from anarchism as lots of people say this who aren't anarchists, and even anarchists have all kinds of reasons to say it.
I'd say most people who say this aren't deliberate acceleratists making a deliberate choice by not voting. A lot of people use statements "all politicians" are the same because they feel powerless, or they are misinformed, or are looking for an excuse.
@zzzeek I realize that this is frustrating in election time with a highly flawed election system and some very worrying outcomes. I'd definitely vote myself.
But I don't know whether blaming people who don't vote (or vote for a third party in the US) is very productive. It's unlikely to convince them I feel, more likely to make them more defensive.
I have a soft spot for Libertarians even though I shouldn't and they don't deserve it. When I was a kid I had a weird neighbor who was always giving me Libertarian books... I wish I still had some of them they were WILD. He was a thorn in the side of the local, school board as well insisting that if they had an event at the school that involved politics Libertarians had to be included.
And in defense of the guy, he was about as likable and earnest as a Libertarian could be.
@futurebird
There's this guy Eric S Raymond who was extremely influential on the early open source movement who demonstrated this trajectory to me.
He devolved from a quirky "freedom!" libertarian into a, well, a LOT worse over the years. Perhaps it was always in him - there were definitely signs. But the angry, ugly screeds came later.
I had 44 books tagged on a list to read in Libby. Now, almost half are no longer available, which is confusing. Meanwhile, I can’t pick from the rest because I really need something good, I can’t take something sad or anxiety-producing right now.
It took about five months but I finally finished The Count of Monte Cristo. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back in time and punch myself for saying “wait, this used paperback is abridged? well that’s stupid, I’ll just get it on Kindle where I can’t see how long it is.”
@rebeccawatson
I read it for a long time last year and I was "this is taking a long time" and it was setting up a whole soap opera plot with lots of characters and people talked out loud in the literal opera in Paris and then I saw there were a vast number of ereader pages left and decided to pause it. I am still on pause.
This was prompted by a visit to Chateau d'If in Marseille, the prison island, which is neat though not all that much to see.
The answer to "how can we make more technology work better and more for everyone" PROBABLY can't hinge on "individual software developers are responsible for knowing internalizing and perfectly executing every single thing in the world and perfectly understanding the needs of billions of people" eh?
I like individualism and individual responsibility but not blind individualism because, it is said, we live in a society.
Making the world work better in general depends on creating, encouraging, preserving and enforcing structures and patterns that make individuals do things that help improve rather than detract. And figuring out what that is together.
I wrote a PDF reader with libcosmic yesterday. While it is very basic and not likely to be ready for the first COSMIC release, it is pure rust, lightweight, GPU accelerated, and highly portable.
@soller
Ah! The libcosmic had me thinking you were writing a reader UI.
That sounds like a challenge. Interesting! Alternatives would be good here. For some large RPG manual PDFs, especially where I want to do a quick search during a game, libpoppler is a bit slow. mupdf in something like zathura is better but the UI is idiosyncratic
I wonder how to best describe how #RustLang influences design, for better or worse. Here is some rambling...
It makes you avoid cyclical data structures, and you are far more aware of ownership. This makes surprising action at a distance harder. It also makes it more difficult to misuse globals or struct fields as globals just to pass data along to where it is needed no matter how.
Enums turn out to replace dynamic dispatch very often. Inheritance is just gone.
Since dynamic dispatch is uncommon, you might think traits are less common, but they are not, especially default ones. Because they are used to define how generics fit together statically. Generics are interesting as they are highly abstract yet what happens in runtime is very concrete - no action at a distance.