@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

simon_brooke

@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot

Anarcho-syndicalist, autistic, crofter, cyclist, depressive, entrepreneur, geek, searchable, Zapatista. Politics & environment, especially #LandReform. he/him.

Twitter: https://mastodon.scot/@simon_brooke
GitHub: simon-brooke
FetLife: Simon_Brooke

Credo: Life is harsh. What we can do - and what we should do - is strive to make it less harsh for the people around us.

Addendum: you would not deliberately block a wheelchair ramp. Do not post images to social media without alt text.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

petealexharris, to random
@petealexharris@mastodon.scot avatar

I think the #Yes movement in Scotland should coordinate to create satirical, scathing and inconvenient petitions on petition.parliament.uk and add 100k signatures so the Westminster joke parliament has to debate and respond to them.

Should be easy, 100K is actually a tiny fraction of pro-independence adults living in Scotland. All we lack is coordination and focused spite.

It should be easy to make 100 petitions about the UK government's failings since, well that's everything they do.

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@petealexharris Right, you start, I'll promise to sign yours. After that, I'll take a turn.


?

seachanger, to random

mutuals could be called connections, followers could be called readers.

influencer culture sucks and we could/should design away from it

what if your public stats (which could be optional) described community rather than hierarchy

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@seachanger mutuals could be called 'acquaintances', or even 'friends'. 'Comrades', perhaps?

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

New blog post, 'Climate Change as Crime'

"Can it be reasonably claimed that those responsible for creating and sustaining the carbon economy were ignorant of the consequences?

Well, not since the beginning of the twentieth century, no. The global warming effect of CO2 emissions has been known since 1896. The petrochemical industry has known from its own research since at least 1977. And I knew in 1972, because I read the Club of Rome report."

https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2023-05-22-Climate-Change-as-Crime/

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

Here's a petition I'd urge you all to sign!

Code paid by the people should be available to the people!

We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.

https://publiccode.eu/en/

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

Summing up what I've learned in a lifetime as a left political activist in Scotland into one sentence, it is this:

"People who have power rarely voluntarily relinquish power, even when it is manifestly and even overwhelmingly in their interests to do so."

This applies equally to Peter Murrell, the Duke of Buccleuch, the Scottish Government, the Westminster Government, the chief executives of the fossil fuel companies, billionaires generally, and countless others.

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

"We find that agricultural intensification, in particular pesticides and fertiliser use, is the main pressure for most bird population declines, especially for invertebrate feeders"

We have to stop poisoning our own environment: this is not rocket science.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216573120

timnitGebru, to random
@timnitGebru@dair-community.social avatar

"When OpenAI launched as a research nonprofit in 2015 with Altman and Elon Musk among its founders, it sought "to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." But to save us from AI, they first had to build it." 🙄

https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-worldcoin-helion-future-tech-2023-4

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@viriato By that measure, they won't be able to save us from AI for a very long time yet.

MediaActivist, to random

ICYMI: I wrote a piece for Organise Magazine about the radical media network known as Mutu that has gone from strength to strength, growing beyond France -- and how, here in the UK, we could finally leave behind our "silos" to embrace non-hierarchical, non-commercial, local autonomous media: https://organisemagazine.org.uk/loam-local-autonomous-media-theory-and-analysis/

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@MediaActivist I wrote an essay (and partial specification) on something very similar back in 2005; I think it still holds up.

https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2005-12-30-collabpres-local-news-for-an-internet-age/

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@MediaActivist Glad you thing so. I think it's very important to have the ability in a news website to track a moving story with potentially multiple witnesses reporting the aspects that they can see; and to have mechanisms to help understand which accounts are reliable and which perhaps less trustworthy.

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

I am getting less and less tolerant of people who post pictures of text without alt text. It's an extraordinarily thoughtless, unkind, and rude thing to do.

If you can't work out how to add alt text to a picture, don't post the picture, just retype it.

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@maegul I have friends who are completely blind. For them, it's a human rights issue – not using alt text completely excludes them from the conversation, and thus from full engagement in the public sphere.

It takes SO LITTLE effort to treat them with respect.

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@glitzersachen @bodhipaksa To be honest, I sometimes type text smileys and I have no idea how screen-readers handle them. @ChristineMalec?

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@glitzersachen @breadandcircuses @maegul

My strong objection is for images whose content is exclusively or primarily text, which have no alt text. There are people who can read but have great difficulty typing, but they're very rare (and they're unlikely to be using social media).

DrTCombs, to random
@DrTCombs@transportation.social avatar

I really do try to believe that most* drivers aren't careless about the lives of others, but rather clueless. That's why I put together videos from my handlebar camera to show, from a bicyclist's perspective, what their driving looks and feels like.

The video here is a sample of dangerous--egregiously dangerous--overtakes by motorists over the course of a year.

https://urbanists.video/w/rXpdJpCkhPvhsGBHDQ1Kyk

*I said most.

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@DrTCombs Huge surprise that most of them are Jeeps or other SUVs. I wonder why that could possibly be?

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

The project is still producing some amazing and beautiful things!

https://youtu.be/C97kMKwZ2-g

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.

If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!

If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!

And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.

Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.

@music @technology @music

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@ajsadauskas @technology @music @music That essay is such a complete misunderstanding of the issue that the author is either an idiot or a bad actor.

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

"Our studies show that greenhouse gas mitigation is not a reason to abandon pastoralism or to promote vegan diets – rather, decisions about sustainable food sources should consider from which food systems products come from"

https://news.thin-ink.net/p/born-to-rewild

lewiscowles1986, to random
@lewiscowles1986@phpc.social avatar

@simon_brooke this blog is so good.

I moved onto another article, which I was pleasantly surprised by. It had a worrying title "On the protection of minorities"; but went to what I felt was a good place.

Then they have a nice "Manifesto for a good society"

I suspect much reading ahead. thanks @jalcine for boosting!

I'm limiting character width (likely something me-specific) using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-javascript-and-css/nbhcbdghjpllgmfilhnhkllmkecfmpld to set #post { max-width: 45rem; }

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@lewiscowles1986 @jalcine Many thanks for these kind words. I hope you enjoy more of it!

amoroso, to random
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

Medley Interlisp has the most tightly integrated combination of system software, application platform, programming language, development environment, tools, and runtime platform I've ever experienced.

A rare "whole greater than the sum of its parts" level of synergy mostly seen only on Smalltalk workstations and Lisp Machines.

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@amoroso Remember that the initial Interlisp-D and workstations were essentially the same machines with different microcode, and originally built and used, in fact, in the same building. It's not at all surprising that they share common DNA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@amoroso I think Xerox PARC must have been an AMAZING place to work. British Telecom used to have a somewhat similar establishment at Martlesham Heath, which I visited a couple of times, sadly after privatisation when it was clearly in decline, but it still had an amazing buzz.

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

New blog post, as promised.



https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2023-05-14-the-carbon-economics-of-sawing-timber/

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@onepict Indeed. But the carbon cost of modern building materials – concrete, but also plastics – is unsustainable. So we're going to have to build more in timber. And while I've been concentrating on the carbon saved over 'letting it rot', the carbon saved over building the buildings it will be used in in masonry is far larger.

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

"In essence, Dommett accuses the SNP of sabotaging Yes Scotland during the independence campaign. If independence is ever to be won, it needs taken out of the SNP’s hands"

This piece is savage, but it's also true; and the SNP would do well to take note and ponder.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/23520654.ex-yes-scotland-director-snp-trashed-us---lost-2014/

ChrisMayLA6, to random
@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

There's been a lot of chat in the timeline about people's dire experience(s) of US , suggesting we don't want to be on a road that would lead the nearer the US system...

I think, possibly, the fact that some people in our political elite are 'relaxed' about such a route is because they only see the results of private healthcare for their rich & influential friends.... not the general experience across the states.

That & the influence on them of the private providers, of course!

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@ChrisMayLA6 An extraordinary proportion of leading UK politicians (mostly, but not all, ) have financial links to private, mostly US, healthcare firms. It's very apparent that US healthcare is trying to buy its way into the UK.

dmoser, to random
@dmoser@mastodon.social avatar

➡️ BREAKING ➡️

The Danish capital Copenhagen 🇩🇰 is looking to ban ALL cars 🚗 with combustion engines from the city by 2030 ‼️

On Friday, all local governing parties agreed on a resolution to pave the way.

This is how you create a city for people 💪

video/mp4

simon_brooke,
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

@dmoser Come on Scotland, lets do this here!

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