Projects & Politics - April 2024
Buckling down and getting on with some work, making progress with the VR sci-fi project, big changes to my web-hosting, local elections happen while the world continues it’s political chaos.
Me
Politics
Sicknote Britain
First, let’s find out what’s going on with with Normal Island’s Nasty Party, how are they doing?
These young depressed sick malingerers are too woke, the woke doctors are signing them off sick too easily, we’ll set up corporate death panels to make the decisions instead, get these skivers back to work 😡 🤛
Alrighty then, gonna suck even more to be sick on Normal Island in the future.
Join us again next time when the Nasty Party will be taking a wrecking ball to the country while scapegoating some other distressed minority in a desperate attempt to drum up some votes from their reactionary base.
😡: There are too many people off sick. What can we do?
👿: We could give the NHS doctors the pay-restoration they’ve asked for so that they don’t all quit?
😡: But how would that make our corporate sponsors more wealthy?
👿: Ah, good point. Perhaps we can give billions of pounds to Crapita and ask them to assess the sick?
😡: Brilliant! But they have no expertise on the issue and no prior knowledge of any of the patients.
👿: No problem, we’ll just tell them to find half those assessed are lying malingerers, you don’t need expertise to do that.
😡: Brilliant, call the press, I’ll do an announcement.
Meanwhile at the doctor’s office.
👩: This patient is too sick to work, working may worsen their condition, they should be off sick.
😡: No.
👩: What?
😡: No. You’re lying. The patient is just a bit sad. They’re perfectly fine to work.
👩: But, all my medical expertise and training…
😡: No. You’re a woke liar. Hey, Craptia.
🕴️: Yes?
😡: Is this person well enough to work?
🕴️: Ahem.
😡: Oh, sorry, of course. Here’s thousands of pounds given to you so that you will deny claims. Are they fit for work.
🕴️: [Counting money, barely looks up], Oh, sure, they’ll be fine. Couple of Apsrin. Call me in the morning if their head doesn’t reattach.
👩: I don’t think this is….
😡: Shut up you, fuck off to Australia. We don’t need no woke medical staff here. Have a pay cut. After Brexit there’s no drugs left to prescribe anyway.
👩: [Packs bags, goes to a country that appreciates medical expertise]
Immigration / Rwanda
Saw some Tories on the telly blaming immigrants for low productivity instead of the fifteen years of underinvestment and austerity that his party caused.
The thing is the TV doesn’t just laugh and call him out of course, it nods along sagely and asks how we can get rid of these pesky migrants causing such low productivity.
That’s how we end up with this insane bill sending refuges to Rwanda. Not even people who the government claim aren’t refugees.
Just actual refugees.
They sold it as “for processing there” initially, but in fact it’s just send them there never to return.
At a cost of over a million pounds per refugee.
Since the courts found that Rwanda might not be safe, the law they declares that it is in fact safe. Even if a civil war breaks out tomorrow, even if a volcano turns the whole country into a lava-floor, it’ll still be legally safe according to our MPs.
They seem to think that the Parliament is some kind of supreme body able to define and enforce the nature of truth, rather than being just one of many institutions of state which are set up to compete with checks and balances in order to prevent tyranny.
I can’t think of a more obvious demonstration that the house has lost it’s wits entirely and has become crazed with power.
They think they can legislate truth, and should have no legal restraints upon them.
You’d hope an election soon will remove them, but the opposition, Labour, only voted against it because their amendment was refused to make sure it doesn’t include our military collaborators.
They are not promising to undo it quickly.
What a broken country.
We need to disband Westminster, really, it’s become corrupt beyond redemption.
Campus Protests
This month in the Land Of The Free:
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Cops shooting at student protestors
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Social Media apps banned for being foreign
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People arrested and their company closed down for running software services
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Government is using AI to mass-surveil every bank account in the country
Can’t wait to see what other freedoms they’ll be given in that wonderful free country!
As far as I can tell these kinds of things will continue and accelerate whoever wins the upcoming US elections.
Images of the riot cops invading a peaceful protest makes you wonder why they don’t ask “Are we the baddies?”
I don’t really understand why the colleges don’t just divest their investments in the arms manufacturing companies and whatnot as the students ask.
Surely other investments are equally profitable?
Instead they send in jackbooted thugs in riot gear to oppress their own students for suggesting that divestment.
I guess they don’t have to pay for the oppression and violence against their students themselves, the state will pay for it.
But surely the images are causing more damage to the universities than selling their shares in Raytheon or whatever would?
~
The cops withdraw just long enough to let the fascist mob attack the peace protestors instead.
We’ve been hearing for months how if Biden loses the election or Trump tries to contest it then there’ll be fascist mobs on the streets doing violence.
And here we are. Guess they jumped the gun.
Then Biden throws the election by lying about about the violence of peace protesters, doing a deranged rant against protest while he passes bad anti-protest laws.
Well.
A second Trump term eh?
I’d have bet against that in October but it looks more likely every time I see Biden on screen these days
This month really was the time I realized that Trump is going to win the US presidency.
It was as I was watching Joe Biden slander peace protesters and accuse them of the violence which was committed by the fash mob raiding the protester’s camps.
That whole scene has fucked Biden, and his response has fucked him more.
His base aren’t turning up, and Trump’s supporters are rabidly angry.
They are turning up.
UK Local Elections
Before the election I noticed people mocking the Green Party London Mayor candidate for having a target of zero murders in a city of eight million people.
But I ask you, if her opponents were undershooting their targets, what would they do?
Would they really murder people just to get up to the target number?
The best number of murders is zero murders and it’s weird anyone thinks otherwise.
I spoiled most of my ballots in the actual election.
It was a different place for the polling station then usual, and I didn’t make it out at lunchtime so a different time than usual. It seemed about as empty as usual though.
Spoiled my ballots by writing “FPTP is a two party fit up, a fraud in which I will not participate” on them.
One of my friends went the more subtle route of just drawing a big penis with “starmer” written on it, but I wanted something where it’s clear my problem isn’t with the candidates, it’s with the whole broken fraudulent system.
The last Mayor election was done under a proportional system, and the national government deliberately switched to a less fair system in order to rig it more in their favor.
So there’s a line right, where an election becomes so obviously rigged and fraudulent that taking part is just a humiliation with no hope of change.
Where is that line for you? How bad does the gerrymandering and fraud and rigging it to be a two party fit up, then rigging it so the candidates all suck, have to get before you’re just validating their fraud by taking part?
For me?
I resolved years ago to never vote for any party that *supported* this voting system. While there exist parties that promise to reform it, I would vote for them, even if they are just a dude wearing a bin for a hat while an actual monster is likely to win.
I’ve changed my mind as the wankers in power have pushed even harder, deliberately making the elections even more fraudulent and biased.
I have indeed moved my line.
I won’t vote for any party at all in a first part the post election.
I will except only if one of the two monsters adopts electoral reform.
I reserve the right to tactically change my mind should I ever happen to live in one of the few swing constituencies, and so have one of the few votes that actually matter a single fuck.
They reported that BoJo forgot his ID and couldn’t vote 😆
I nearly deliberately didn’t take any ID, in protest at the new rules designed to further bias and fix the election results. Thought my own “vote” in the list of those turned away might be more valuable than in the list of voters for wankers.
Decided to not make a fuss other than a frustrated sigh and a spoiled ballot in the end.
In the end for London Mayor, nearly half of everyone voted for Labour.
So certainly nothing my vote for neither of the top two could have changed. Let alone voting for a party that doesn’t support the two-party fit up.
Spoiling it cost nothing as expected.
Congrats to Binface for beating Brtain First, shame Reform did better than either.
Pretty embarrassing for the Lib Dems. Barely better than the Greens. Two two main parties fighting hard for who can be the most awful and yet still nobody really thinks the Libs are any alternative.
Starship Dev
Pretty slow month socially, must put in the effort to get out more, but at least therefore progress was made with the VR sci-fi project.
Discovered problems with the 360 panorama renderer I’d written, made big changes to the observerpod in particular its lighting and console, had days worth of trouble with UV animation failing to work because of presumably Godot 4.2 importer bugs.
More tech details in the links for those who like that. I’m trying to keep a better log of progress on that project now I feel more comfortable with it’s Fediverse integrations.
Which brings us to:
Fedi Projects
Goto Social
My starship and tarot projects were running their fediverse/social accounts from a shared domain using software called Calckey, which got abandoned and forked and renamed. I became dissatisfied with the whole setup.
Spent a few days exploring different software and integrated Goto-Social into each project’s own website. No longer are they living on some shared domain, they each get their own identity on their own server.
@starship@starshipsd.com
@wordcloudtarot@wordcloudtarot.com
And as well as fediverse integration, they each look great on their own sites:
https://starshipsd.com/@starship
https://wordcloudtarot.com/@wordcloudtarot
Phanpy
Goto-social is pretty great server software, but doesn’t really have a front-end worth much. For that I’ve been using Phanpy.
Catch-up mode is really great. So many ways to sort and view the things you missed while asleep or working.
Works just fine with both Mastodon and GotoSocial accounts.
Others too.
But I do wanna run catch-up on a list instead of just the home-feed though 🙏
It’s so great I ended up using it for my main mastodon account too.
I’m not looking at default Masto web pages at all really any more.
Nothing about using Phanpy to control it is worse, and many things are better.
It’s probably better than even the plans I had for my own client one day if I ever got the time. Skimming lists with it is so smooth, you can adjust easily how much attention you pay to boosts as you scroll by depending how much time you’ve got.
The catch-up view letting you sort and filter things while you’ve been sleeping or at a meeting or whatever is very nice.
It has the thing I want: It is a web-app, so is the same on firefox whether phone or desktop.
A great client for using a wide range of different types of fediverse accounts.
Bluesky
Also in big Fediverse news, the Bluesky/Fediverse bridge is open now.
I found a couple of friends over there and followed ’em.
They don’t seem to post much.
Though they post more than the couple of abandoned friend’s accounts there.
Here’s the Flipboard podcast talking to the guy who runs the bridge.
So if you’re posting on Bluesky I can follow you now, let me know your handle.
Doesn’t look like many friends are doing so though.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
The new format Wordcloud Tarot show continues to be pretty and pleasing. A few released this month, the best of which was the one on the resignation of the Scottish first minister:
Reading
Thought I’d try reading a Star Trek novel so I went for The Antares Maelstrom by Greg Cox.
It had good characterizations of the familiar star-ship crew but felt slow and poorly paced. I guess coz it’s so much longer than a 50 minute TV show.
The way the Federation has supposedly done away with money and need makes a gold-rush story difficult to fathom. How can you have a gold-rush (“pangeum” rather than actual gold) of people heading to a mining-planet if nobody uses money or has any personal wealth?
By making the planet only a potential Federation member, it turns out. Then everyone can act like a Ferengi.
Anyway, it was okay, but didn’t really feel much like watching the old TV shows did.
Links
Cool stuff on the web:
• XKCD - The Machine A fascinating physics game “the machine”, where you build a little contraption to bounce balls around a room, which is your part in the larger machine.
Brilliant.
• 3Blue1Brown - Attention In Transformers Continuing his series on how Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (like Chat-GPT) work, chapter six is about “attention” layers.
Brilliantly illustrated, 3B1B is great.
• Normal Island News - Iran plotting unprovoked attack on country that bombed its embassy
Fake Laura K does a great satire job:
There is outrage in the west that Iran might be planning an unprovoked attack against Israel after the IDF bombed its consulate building in Damascus on April 1, killing two generals and five soldiers. Tensions have been high since Iran refused to apologise for overreacting to Israel’s April Fools’ prank.
• Where’s Your Ed - Looting The Internet
Nice rant about the state of the internet now and how the tech companies plan to pilpher the entire thing for their AI bots.
We justifiably loathe Elon Musk for destroying Twitter, but we should have a hundred times the bile for Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai. All three have unquestionably damaged our ability to access knowledge through their actively harmful approach to maintaining a portal that billions use to find answers to everything.
And after decades of profiting off of platforms that make billions of people create things for free, they’ve found their next big sting — stealing the content itself, and selling it back to us using artificial intelligence.
• Real Life Lore - NATO & Russia prepare for total war.
A scary look at what might be in store for the world if Russia continues it’s aggression beyond Ukraine and how much of it NATO might actually react to.
Terrifying video.
• Anna Andersen - How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland?
Really fun story with User-Interface lessons about how at least 11 people accidentally ran for president of Iceland because of a bad page layout.
Presidential hopefuls were sending people a link to a page where they could be endorsed, but instead of endorsing the candidate, some people accidentally registered to be a candidate.
• Good Law Project - Tories links with election dark ops
A legal judgement forces the Conservative party to reveal to the Good Law project just how they were trying to smear, misinform and muckrake on them.
We’ve already seen the Tories launch data grabs including an online tax tool, an MP’s bizarre petition for a chip shop and their London Mayor candidate Susan Hall’s dodgy parking ticket campaign. While the Observer has uncovered that Conservative staff and activists are “secretly operating a network of Facebook groups that have become a hotbed of racism, misinformation and support for criminal damage”.
• Richard Murphy - Thames Water Is Bust
Explaining how vulture capital drains our privatized national infrastructure:
quite literally every penny that [the English privatised water industry] has borrowed this century has been used to make payment of dividends to shareholders. Even more money was used to pay interest to those from whom funds had been borrowed to finance these dividends.
more
The bookmark-bot has been offline much of this month and will likely stay offline a month or two longer, coz of this gotosocial switch.
But they’re still going to the RSS feed.
And link-bot will be back.
Around the Fediverse
The corporate internet is enshitifying at an incredible pace. Adverts litter the streets, the data-brokers follow everyone tracking their every move, there’s paywalls and cookie-warnings and half your messages are down-ranked because they conflict with corporate policy.
But there’s a world beyond those walled gardens.
A world where we are free.
New Projects
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org is starting a new server mixing two technologies:
ANNOUNCEMENT: The world’s first general purpose #Akkomane server is here!
With great excitement, akkomane.social is open for registrations!
Akkomane is an alternative to #Mastodon and #Threads that provides incredible stability with a beautiful and futuristic Twitter-like front-end for the #Fediverse.
Learn more and register at the link.
@johnonolan@mastodon.xyz tells us Ghost is joining the network:
Excited to share that Ghost is going to federate over ActivityPub and become part of the largest open publishing network in the world 🎉 https://activitypub.ghost.org
@snarfed.org@snarfed.org admitted the Bluesky Bridge is open:
Hi all! Well, I didn’t plan it, but word got out anyway: Bridgy Fed‘s Bluesky <-> fediverse support went online a couple weeks ago, quietly and without announcement, but people still found it. Over 1200 accounts have turned it on so far and bridged themselves one direction or the other. It’s great to see so much early interest!…
@Langile@ibe.social launches this year’s Fedi-Vision Song Contest:
Dear everyone;Submission form to participate in #Fedivision2024 is open!
The Shitty Corporate Web
@aral@mastodon.ar.al reminds us why Facebook sucks, with links:
Meta (Facebook, Instagram, #Threads, etc.): 1. Doesn’t moderate anti-transgender hate on its platforms. 2. Secretly pays teenagers to use their VPN service so they can access all their web activity, gets busted, then uses same app to man-in-the-middle attack Snapchat users to get their encrypted data. 3. Lets Netflix see user DMs. gGmbH to Meta:🤗 Let’s be besties!
@aral@mastodon.ar.al also points out:
The Kansas Reflector published an article about Meta censoring environmental articles about climate change — deeming them ‘too controversial’.
Facebook then censored the article about Facebook censorship, and then after an independent site published a copy of the climate change article, Facebook censored it too.
@eloquence@social.coop notes the closing of failed private corporate twitter replacement post.news noted:
… and post.news is done for: I don’t think the story of Post’s a16z-fueled trip to oblivion is particularly interesting, except for the hype it received from corners of the news/media industry who saw its weird micropayment scheme as a Hail Mary. Outside the media bubble, few people will even notice.
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io has a manifesto to rebuild the web:
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was….
@javi@goblin.band remembers arguing against corporate enshitification in their job: noted:
…I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it
The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %, so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn’t care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.
Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns….
Story Time
@ajroach42@retro.social has a great story reminiscing about Pokemon Go noted:
… honestly and truly, none of that mattered! For a solid two years, I could reliably walk down the street in any city (or drive down the street in most suburbs) and meet new people, united by a common goal. That part was incredible…
…Suddenly everyone had their phones out.
People scattered from the break room to fetch other people. There was a flurry of people throwing back the last of their tea or swapping it to a travel mug or furiously typing out “we’ll have to reschedule this 1:1, something has come up” messages on their laptops.
Within 5 minutes, 4 elevator loads of people had descended on the lobby to the building and were walking in a big mob across the parking lot…
@djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology noted:
And frankly, nothing is a better indication of the truth of this than this - the fediverse. Our favorite voidspace, constantly changing and nebulous yet solid as real life because it is, in fact, real life. It’s real life because we bring ourselves here and declare it to be a place.
David does a wonderful job in another part of the book talking about our relationship with space, and the inherent nature of a place having space in the physical world, and how the Web brought us to a new conceptual realm, that of a place without space, where space can be created wholesale out of a smidge of desire and a dab of action.
Politics
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social has a great rant about so-called corporate efficiency:
A common complaint I hear about anarchist proposals for collaborative decision making—direct democracy, consensus building through dialogue, federations of councils, etc—is that they would be grossly inefficient.
God, can you imagine sitting through so many interminable, insufferable *meetings*?
But inefficient compared to what?…
…The anarchist alternatives seem inefficient only in comparison to a system that has streamlined decision making by confining the vast majority of choices and decisions to a tiny elite…
@VPS_Reports@kolektiva.social on selective outrage:
There was a Nazi Patriot Front rally in Southern California at the start of April. No public outrage over antisemitism followed.
Then there was a Nazi rally last week in Southern California too. Nazi salutes and antisemitic k-slurs. Again: no public outrage over antisemitism.
Today there was a pro-Palestine protest at USC condemning genocide and suddenly everyone calls antisemtiism?
Anti-Palestine reactionaries claim they care about antisemitism but they’re silent when it comes to real Nazis.
@Hex@kolektiva.social on voting:
… Single payer healthcare is supported by the majority of Americans. Which party do I vote for to get that?
A sizable minority wants UBI. Which party can I vote for to get that?
The vast majority of Americans want to see banks be held accountable rather than bailed out, who can I vote for to see that? Can I vote for a party that won’t send troops to break up protests against banks straight up robbing Americans twice?
The majority of Americans have wanted to see the drug war end for like… Decades. Which party would one vote for to see that happen?
Which party, exactly, would one vote for that would not force people back to work during a pandemic? Which one is that again? Speaking of forcing people back to work, is there a party that would make return to office mandates unenforceable? I bet that has a fuck load of popular support, but where are those politicians looking to leverage that support? Which party do I vote for again? …
Art
@mxtthxw@mxtthxw.art has recorded a song:
Even though this sounds ragedy as fuck, I’m happy how it’s turned up, I don’t really want to mess with it for risk of making it suck and miss the point completely. Too much delay, too much distortion. Cool. I’d describe as dark, brooding, psychedelia melting down over militant drum machines. If that’s your bag, feel free to load up. https://video.mxtthxw.art/w/2yL3w37g2PDjxkQWK8WYAD
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