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Projects
Here’s the stuff I’ve made that I’m most proud of.
Interactive VR Sci-Fi Story
30 minute cartoon
Diary
Here’s my latest posts to the free fediverse, some rambling, some ranting, mostly just commenting on stuff I’ve read lately. Some of it gets syndicated to Twitter but mostly not. The best of it reaches my monthly digest email.
Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:45:14 +0000
Content warning:re: USPol election
Wonder how much of Trump's plan can actually happen?
Can he mass-deport millions of people? Can he close a border? Can he replace income taxes with import tariffs? Will he stop the Ukraine fighting without just giving away half of Ukraine to Russia?
Will there be more elections in four years?
Guess we'll find out.
Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:38:36 +0000
Content warning:USPol election
So does Elon get to do to America what he did to Twitter now?
Oh my.
Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:18:08 +0000
This month's digest/newsletter is on it's way to all the hip young excited voters who voted to get it in their email.
The rest of you indolent apathetic abstainers can read it here:
https://dalliance.net/vPre2/oct24
Featuring rhyming headlines, boring descriptions of life in a computer game, and a particuarly well evidenced pro-fediverse section in the links.
Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:27:41 +0000
Content warning:re: USPol election consequentialism/Deontology
I guess sometimes you really do gotta vote for the lizards.
---
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
...
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:25:21 +0000
Content warning:USPol election consequentialism/Deontology
We don't often have such a concrete example of the difference between philosophical Deontology vs Consequentialism as we do in today's election.
Rules for life like "Don't vote for genocide supporters" are good rules on the face of it. In general, that would indeed be a great rule to add to your Deontological set.
Until you're in the impossible position of picking between two genocide supporters.
Sure, you can just stay home. More Americans will refuse to vote than will vote for either candidate most likely. It's not a bad deontological choice. A hope to do no harm.
And yet, a consequential analysis shows you may indeed to harm by attempting not to. You don't support the genocide-abater, and so the even bigger genocider gets in.
I usually lean Deontological because the world is chaotic and consequences are so unpredictable. Even the smartest among us can't actually tell which action will have the best consequences.
But in the end you can only pick a set of Deontological rules by guessing at the average consequences of those rules. Rules can't in themselves be judged good or bad without reference to their consequences.
The best outcome probably comes from the Deontological folks considering the consequences instead, on occasions like this. But then that's what consequentialists always say.
Good luck America. Hope a lot of Deontoligical folks get consequenitalist when push comes to shove in the booth.
Sun, 03 Nov 2024 17:12:52 +0000
Oh, man, trying to repair things with springs is a tricky thing.
Just one moment of inattention and *ping*, off it flies into the corner of a room, never to be seen again.
Can't even measure it to see what size replacement spring I need now.
🤦♂️
Sat, 02 Nov 2024 14:34:23 +0000
Content warning:UKPol new Conservative leader
Congratulations to Kemi Badenoch who is now the leader of the Conservative party.
Apparently she thinks the party has veered towards the political centre by “governing from the left” and must return to its traditional ideas.
Which I would describe as an absolutely batty opinion counter to observable facts about Brexit and Culture-war battles and the corruption and scandal that actually drove the party from power.
So sounds like she'll be working hard to make the party more irrelevant and drive away any voters who aren't rabid hate-filled crazy people.
Good times for the other parties I guess.
Expect they'll change leader again before the next election though.
Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:35:30 +0000
Would like to repaint my ship black and yellow but probably that's not a thing so maybe I'll have to change the suit to grey and red instead.
Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:33:12 +0000
Surprised to find I can still warp to the bases I constructed during the expedition.
And now also do normal star-jumps between them and the nearest stars.
Surprising number of them are explored already. I'm used to being out in the sticks where every planet I find it just me the first to find it.
The expedition has made this part of the galaxy quite crowded by comparison and it's hard to find a planet nobody has landed on before even four or so jumps away in random directions.
Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:29:11 +0000
I did it! I got the fancy ship. It's not all that fancy really. Quite surprisingly constrained in cargo-space, even having spent 20 million credits extending it. Pulse-lasers are overheating too quick.
Gonna have to spend some time improving it's systems I suspect, but this is no longer urgent as it doesn't have to be done during the two-week expedition.
I flew around some beautiful planets and my home base taking photos but they've all come out shit because it fails at taking these things in VR mode. So here's a couple in the station from the flatscreen version.
Fri, 01 Nov 2024 03:32:19 +0000
I've not played in areas so crowded before really. Other people's save-markers all over the worlds. If there's a way to turn that off I'd turn it on and off a lot. Mostly off.
I keep losing my ship because I can't tell it apart from the forest of distant-world save-markers of random players, and for some reason the icons seem to not load properly all the time.
Can't believe I was supposed to write down the phone-numbers of all those portals? They're not even numbers. Bird-bird-moon-wigwam? Eh.
I started taking screen-shots once I realized, but, meh. There's a table of 'em all in reddit. Ought to be saved in my log.
I should be taking more screen-shots though. It's beautiful.
Fri, 01 Nov 2024 03:26:22 +0000
Man, this is taking so long. If I'd realized how much commitment this was when i started I wouldn't have started.
Those massive quadruped sentinel things you have to kill took so long. Couldn't even find any for ages then the battle was so hard I basically only managed by reincarnating as many times as I killed one of them. Picking up my old belongings from my old incarnation's grave.
Call it an 8/8 draw.
Ended up doing some more flat-screen stuff. The battles are so much harder when you can't look and point weapons in different directions.
If all you have is the mouse you can't shoot over your shoulder or anything. VR works way better for dodging and fighting and shooting in all different directions.
Still have to find another ruin and then do whatever mystery phase five is.
It's been fun but is also starting to feel like a chore. Hope it ends soon.
Thu, 31 Oct 2024 19:40:24 +0000
🤵 Does this [personal online budget calculator] also show the impact this budget will have in the NHS, Education, Transport, Infrastructure investment?
🕴️ Er, no, why would it do that?
🤵Well, because doesn't simplifying everything down to an individual figure without taking into account the broader aims of the budget risk misinforming more than informing?
🕴️Well I don't...
🤵Because it encourages to see everything through a narrow personal lens rather than understanding the effects on wider society? And also feeds into a kind of culture-war narrative that everyone is pitted against each other?
🕴️A pint will be a penny cheaper!
👏 👏👏
Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:36:33 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol budget
I think people voting for change were hoping for more than about 5% change, with a vague hope to push that to a solid 10% later on maybe next decade.
But it was always clear in the election they meant "Change the people at the top, not the system!"
Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:33:16 +0000
Content warning:UKPol budget
Haven't bothered to look closely, but so far as I can tell: No talk of nationalizing anything, big giveaways to fossil fuel companies, huge increases in money for bombs and guns, no huge public-owned projects, barely any green energy investment, more sin-taxes on smoking drinking and vaping, no understanding of macro-economics, no real plan for the future other than to rely on private-sector growth and no plan to get that other than give shareholders more freedom to loot public funds.
You can see why people say both parties are the same, but those people are wrong! Labour are in fact about 10% better, under their leadership we will see the country continue to decline into private ownership and techno feudalism at a slightly slower rate!
Tue, 29 Oct 2024 01:15:23 +0000
Tonight's mission included just staring at the night sky for a minute.
Seems to be impossible in vr. The character never really looks up, just the vr view.
Had to play on flat screen to do it, and I've only played in vr. No idea what buttons do what. Nearly killed me just to look at the stars.
Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:57:30 +0000
Spent most of the weekend playing #NoMansSky attempting to go through this new "expedition" and get that sweet looking space-ship.
Only got about half-way though. Spent far too long trying to build a mech-suit to go collecting storm-crystals, but it was all a waste and I ended up just flying the ship around looking for 'em and jumping out to weather the storm for the few seconds it takes to collect 'em.
Which means I still ain't done the worm-monster-murdering or the fishing-trip.
Think it has to be done by the end of next weekend if I'm to get that sweet sweet spaceship.
Fri, 25 Oct 2024 01:32:33 +0000
My actual favorite Desktop Computer software program ever written is still Blender.
It's fast and manages incredible levels of complexity with a UI that is better than any window-manager I've ever used and an API that's just "you can type python into the window here" levels of integration.
Amazing.
Blender is to video/audio/3d-polygon-modelling as Vim is to text-editing.
It's the actual top of the list of my free-software-real-money-donations list each month.
I like blender more than I like almost all of the actual people who are likely to read this.
It's one of the few projects not yet infected by corporatism or capitalism or enshitification or in-group squabbling.
But, man, that's a lot of videos in your youtube RSS feed during conference week eh?
So much stuff going on.
I actually literally can't keep up.
Fri, 25 Oct 2024 01:02:00 +0000
Erin's xoxo talk was really all of it great but the kernel is just before 14m.
"There is a pretty strong belief in many quarters that because of corporate predation and and human nature, no many-to-many social system can ever be anything but corrosive
The Dark-forest theory of the internet... posits that the public internet is now so hostile to authentic human sociability that all real interaction has to go underground - into group chats, private slacks, and discords.
This is happening both because the platforms themselves are extractive surveillance monsters, and also because they've incentivized so much predatory Player-Vs-Player behavior...
In this light, retreating into private spaces is obviously wise and protective.
But my fundamental discomfort with that conclusion is that when those of us who have found our friends [online] all retreat into private spaces, we're slamming the doors on everyone who hasn't gotten there yet.
Leaving them out there to get eaten....
The answer can't be that we cede everything above ground to the billionaires and demagogues and predatory forces they've arrayed around themselves...
So there's only one option: we fix the fucking networks.
👏 👏
Thu, 24 Oct 2024 23:26:16 +0000
Exciting to see that Blue Sky is taking more money from vulture capitalists, and getting deeper into debt in order to grow their user-base of eyeballs they can sell to manipulative data-brokers and corporate advertisers!
> "we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, and others."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a
This news surely will lead to exciting features and not at all to the inevitable enshitification of the service because I'm sure all these corporate interests are not interested in the least in extracting value from the users of the service!
Did you know you can follow me on bluesky through the bridge to the actual free un-owned distributed federation of anarchic communities on a network not owned by extractive capital?
It's true!
Look here's the bridge!
Bookmarks
A list of the last few things I’ve enjoyed reading/watching or sometimes bookmarked to read later. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here or follow the little robot on the fediverse that toots them out as I bookmark them.
It's time to stop buying into tooth-fairy politics. No one's bringing salvation
Johnathan Cook on why Trump won: "Kamala Harris didn't lose because she's a woman or because she's black. She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge. Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right."
Mantic Monday: Judgment Day - by Scott Alexander
Scott Alexander on #us #election #predictionMarkets: " Tomorrow - if we are so lucky - there will be a result. The great function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life. The winner’s campaign operatives will be praised as world-historic geniuses, the loser’s mocked forever as utter nincompoops. Thousands of lifelong public servants who backed Mr. 49% will be tossed from DC like used toilet paper and replaced with thousands of hacks who backed Mr. 51%. Funding streams will go dry. Whole lands will turn to economic deserts. Fortunes will be destroyed. A few people will make good on their exile and suicide threats. Most won’t. The Union will either survive or not. If it survives, we’ll do it all over again four years later."
voter analysis video from onion news network
ha. Very good. really rooting into the voting patterns
Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Zuckerberg explains the downfall of Facebook in an Investor Call: "“If you look at the big trends in Feeds over the history of the company, it started off as friends, right?,” he said. “So all the updates that were in there were basically from your friends posting things. And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends. It may not even be from people that you’re following directly. It could just be recommended content from creators that we can algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and valuable to you.”" - Strangely he seems excited by it rather than thinking it of some kind of hellscape.
Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow: "I don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted."
Call Jonathan Pie - Call Jonathan Pie: US Election Specials - American Dream: Part 1 - BBC Sounds
Johnathan Pie's US election special episodes are pretty good fun.
Gaza: Britain’s seventh genocide
Mark Curtis is surprised that people are surprised that Britain might support a genocide. He details how that is the normal position of the UK ministers: "High moral principles are largely espoused only for the cameras and complicit journalists, who regularly parrot them as though they are important to Whitehall planners. In reality, the UK is concerned about the law and rights only when it comes to enemy states, as a means to pressure and isolate them for public relations purposes."
Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs."
Owen Jones: My verdict on Keir Starmer's first 100 days
Perhaps the leadership will be helped by a Budget which will be forced to offer some answers to mounting crisis: but the refusal to overturn a failed economic model means that won’t last. Labour is assisted by a shambolic Conservative party, but one poll put it just one point ahead of its only recently crushed opposition without even a change of leadership. You cannot rule out this government disintegrating completely in office.
Labour’s carbon-capture scheme will be Starmer’s white elephant: a terrible mistake costing billions | George Monbiot | The Guardian
Monbiot on the government's 20 billion quid for carbon capture in the fossil fuels industry: "The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, talks of a fiscal “black hole” of £21.9bn. But this is a real black hole: a long tunnel into the rocks, down which £21.7bn and more will be poured. A more reliable and cost-effective means of sequestering carbon would be to bundle up the money (roughly 1,100 tonnes in £20 notes) and shove it down the pipe."
The Busy Worker’s Handbook to the Apocalypse | by Sam Hall | Medium
"Climate change will cause agricultural failure and subsequent collapse of hyperfragile modern civilization, likely within 10–15 years. By 2050 total human population will likely be under 2 billion. Humans, along with most other animals, will go extinct before the end of this century. These impacts are locked in and cannot be averted. Everything in this article is supporting information for this conclusion." - well argued and detailed reference on the state of the climate and it's depressing.
A Very Peculiar Triumph - Craig Murray
Murray on Assange's first public statement after his release: "...I looked over at the applauding media, and thought how Julian had been slandered and traduced and his case entirely misrepresented for over a decade. I recalled how he had been wrongly represented for years as a sexual offender and as a lunatic who smeared excrement on walls."..."Oh well … “there is more joy in heaven at one sinner that repenteth”. If the mainstream media are now willing to give positive coverage to Julian’s thoughts, that will be a good thing, as indeed largely happened over this event. His words on the assassination of journalists in Gaza and on the programming of targets in Gaza using AI were an excellent pointer towards where his thoughts are trending.
People said this experiment was impossible, so I tried it - YouTube
Some great slow-motion video of the thermite reaction in Veritasium's video here.
IN FULL: Julian Assange makes first public statement since prison release - YouTube
Julian Assange's first public address since his release, giving evidence to a European parliamentary assembly. Journalism is not a crime, it's shocking and chilling what they did to him. #assange #media #law
The Internet’s AI Slop Problem Is Only Going to Get Worse
NYMag examining the state of AI slop drowning out the internet: "In the nearly two years since, a rising tide of slop has begun to swamp most of what we think of as the internet, overrunning the biggest platforms with cheap fakes and drivel, seeming to crowd out human creativity and intentionality with weird AI crap."
‘Everyone In Gaza is Sick, Injured, Or Both’ – Israel’s 2.1 million Victims – Media Lens
Media Lens once again contrasting reporting of terrorism done by Israel to the terrorism done by the IRA and Muslim organizations: "It is difficult to overstate the importance of these incendiary appeals for war, and more to the point, the impact on our psyches when these appeals for urgent ‘action’ are almost completely absent, as is the case now on Gaza. No newspaper editor would dream of calling for a ‘no-fly zone’ over Gaza."..."We are trained to recognise a major crisis by the level of alarm sounded by corporate media. As with the evolving climate change catastrophe, it is all too easy for the lack of media alarm to persuade us that things are ‘not that bad’. Perhaps the climate isn’t really collapsing, or the problem is under new management. Perhaps the suffering in Gaza isn’t actually that bad. Otherwise, we would surely have heard more outrage from the ‘humanitarian interventionists’. Assuming we live in a basically sane society that is not drowning in moral and intelle…
...Will Save Your Life Next Week - YouTube
Kurzgesagt's video is trying to safe your life by looking at their audience's behaviour: 3 of you will die this week because you looked at your phone while driving. Stop it! Check your speed and your balls and your mental health. Apparently I am way over the average age for this advice though.
Pluralistic: What the fuck is a PBM? (23 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
State of the US health system by Cory Doctorow: "the insurers haven't bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they've bought off your boss – they're sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you're being suckered into paying. There's so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot"
Why Scientists Are Puzzled By This Virus - YouTube
The things going on in our bodies are just dizzyingly complicated. Here's Kurzgesagt talking about the friendly viruses in your body.
How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism
Johnathan Cook talk about how Israel's war on Gaza exposes their genocidal lust."Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.", "All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants. ","All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.", "All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather th…
