I've noticed that when a new (often not-actually-new) technology that is mostly harmful emerges, the capital systems driving it take pains to partition in the public mind an area of "clearly useful" cases where You Gotta Give Em That At Least, no matter how many harmful cases stack up against it, and that this tactic is pretty successful on certain classes of people who value being Reasonable more highly than accepting the testimony of those harmed,
and that challenging that makes you the asshole with the problem. And y'know, I think many of us have become fine assuming that role. But it tilts the rhetorical terrain, seemingly permanently, in a way that really wears you down over time.
Been thinking about getting some sort of Android tablet to read comics on, but worried my preferred feature set ("rectangular screen" "rectangular means the edges of the displayable area are ninety degree angles. that's not a rectangle" "cheap, like tablets were five years ago back when you could still get tablets with rectangular screens" "preferably not Samsung") might reduce the pool of available devices to zero
@mcc you have more criteria than me but just in case it's useful in any way: early last year i wanted something to read manga on, so i got a Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 10.5". my line in the sand was, if samsung forces me to give them my email address while i'm setting it up to do 100% of what i need from it, i will return it. thankfully this did not come to pass; it's been great. i didn't root it but it feels like a device i own, can hack and control what's running on it.
A kinda half-prediction of what we'll see at Apple's WWDC this year:
The defining characteristic of the Vision, to me, is that Apple added new, largely unnecessary, and potentially dangerous technology (eye tracking). And the way they addressed the danger of this choice was by further restricting what users are able to do on their own devices (i.e., further restricting what software they're allowed to run), even more than iPhones.
So the rumor is WWDC 2024 will be Apple's vision of "AI". (1/2)
@mcc i do think they are image-conscious in specific ways that the other big tech cos aren't, and this will probably lead to marketing language and rationales that we haven't heard before, that a certain kind of tech person will be completely persuaded by and reorient all their arguments around. ie it will be exhausting to hear about and discuss
For the last two years I've been semi-daily posting "What I'm Listening to Today" links here. Mastodon has some problems with threads containing hundreds of posts, so I re-create the thread once a year.
Or, alternately, every song from year two in the least practical format possible: A 301-song, 38-hour YouTube playlist (note: video #1 contains flashing):
@mcc in my (clearly failing) memory this was on the radio around the same time as Bel Biv DeVoe's "Poison", but apparently they came out just over two years apart.
@parismarx Musk understands the grift more clearly, though: 2 years is a "pay attention to me now and do as i say, this is imminent" timeframe, and he knows the mainstream press won't point out that he's been full of shit the last 10+ times he's promised something within 2 years. 2 years is the sweet spot because it's harder to disprove but still urgent. these shitheads have manipulating public perception down to a science.
@pervognsen@gfxstrand good piece, i think i remember coming across it last year after nvidia released a linux driver update that made games unplayable in wayland for me (and many others, from the sound of it) with the rationale "well, to really do this right we need explicit sync, so we'll just pull the ripcord on getting that through the whole standards process". this week they finally released a beta driver that supports it and fixes wayland on their cards.
We must protect privacy, even in the face of cryptocurrency crime. As governments crack down on one of the most notorious tools for criminal money laundering in the cryptocurrency world, I’m worried about the ramifications.
@molly0xfff one of the biggest reasons i would be fine seeing cryptocurrency mining + exchanges outlawed entirely is that they paint a target on the backs of so many legitimate and socially just uses of cryptography, basically creating a huge criminal enterprise adjacent to something that is critical for democracy and human rights. governments and corporations' cases against the latter are weak, but cryptocurrency makes them stronger.
@molly0xfff what is the overlap between writing and/or using encrypted messaging software and running a cryptocurrency mining operation?
like, certainly i can imagine a lawmaker who is like "i don't think anyone should be able to do anything in private, ever" and pushes huge sweeping laws that target both and much more, but it's hard for me to imagine an actually-reasonable law that outlaws mining (again, running a for-profit business) that poses any threat to encrypted messaging.
@molly0xfff (removing the CW since we're not at all on that topic)
right, i know not all forms of what could be considered "mining" would be easy to draw a red line around legally. but the crypto market is (in reality, despite its claims) centralized enough (bc of how economies of scale work for anything) that if you outlawed those big mining operations it would have massive downstream effects that would devalue the space for criminals and speculators.
@molly0xfff encrypted messaging is a bottom up social need that the most vulnerable people in society need most, whereas crypto trading is a top down - vulnerable at the top - attempt to create an unregulated parallel economy. it is hard to trust most politicians but i can clearly imagine people who understand these dynamics being able to legislate effectively against cryptocurrency while safeguarding democracy-essential technologies. i don't think we are stuck going to the fence for bitcoin.
@molly0xfff agreed that overly broad legislation is a constant threat. but also what's really happening here is a clash of values: free market capitalists want to reengineer the global economy to be a totally unregulated snakepit, and are happy to use the rhetoric of civil liberties as a shield. there is a very clearly defined position that is neither that nor classic authoritarian statism (also a threat, certainly) that centers ordinary people... which tbc your advocacy has been great for.
Who remembers this awesome jankfest? The IK was bleeding edge for 1998 and when that indie game Hellish Quart came out I remember getting flashbacks to Die By The Sword.
@pervognsen I remember it being on the reference pile during Rune's development, but yeah the mouse-based sword swinging was a highly (developer-)execution dependent idea. I miss PC games being weird laboratories.
@pervognsen absolutely yeah, i think in a lot of ways that era was a last gasp for feeling out genre boundaries and trying out mechanics before the full ossification of the 00s console market takeover set in.