Lit new year - December 2023
Spent the first half of the month sick and rewiring all the lights in my flat then there was Xmas and new year and now it’s 2024 already.
Happy New Year.
Me
Illness
I was coughing and sick for more than a week and tried to get some medical attention. There are no doctors though any more. Ended up writing to my MP.
Lighting
I have installed some new lights, and they each come with an identical-looking but apparently differently encoded remote controls.
Investigated how to try and get them computer-controlled for a while.
Love the new lights but gave up on that.
The remote controls will remain on holsters on the walls by the switches.
Happy Holidays
Wishing everyone Merry Christmas! New phones in my family house, so I was mostly doing tech support and trying to understand how they made such a mess of their old ones.
Train back had Quite a few people sniffing and occasionally coughing and not masking.
My mask seem to do the trick at least. Perhaps coz I’d already had the sick this season.
I crashed my new drone to death. within five days. The glue helps until the next time it bounces off the floor.
Sometimes people ask me how come I’m so lucky, but they almost never believe me when I explain that I bought the luck from a man with a pipe and sharp suit on the internet and they too could be lucky like me for less than 50 dollars.
Hope you all get all the luck you need next year everyone.
Have a slacky new year.
Substack platforms nazis
Substack has always platformed racists but this month they did a press release justifying that.
Thing is, all of the protests that Free Speech is their value, all of the insistence that they just want people to be able to express themselves whatever their ideas, all of the lies that a publication may tell itself.
They are all exposed when they ban tittes but not nazis.
No company that bans a wide-open gash-shot can claim they can’t ban nazi incitement. So fuck Substack.
Banning nazis is more important than banning porn FFS.
Rwanda Bill
The government read a bill which will define a place as safe even if it’s not safe.
The idea that you can just define a place as safe without going and looking at it at all is mad. Utterly insane.
And they think that is going to increase confidence in parliament?
We have to get rid of this government, they have completely lost the plot.
They keep talking about stopping “illegal immigrants” when clearly if you have to change the law to make them illegal, they were not illegal in the first place.
Our government has gone utterly bonkers, please send help.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
A Christmas show, too late now, asking what you should buy for Xmas.
https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2023-12-12-whattogiftforxmas/
Reading
Read “The Singularity Trap” by Dennis E Taylor. A sci-fi novel in which an asteroid-belt miner is turned into metal by an encounter with an alien artifact.
Pretty engaging story with the stakes increasing smoothly until whole planets are at threat and galactic war.
Good central character who seems human even while technically not really being one most of the book.
Touches on game theory and fermi-paradox and at least two routes to a technological singularity, both suitably fearsome.
I liked it.
Links
Gaza
The horror in Gaza continues.
A good map of the destruction in Gaza, with source-media and evidence trails,
" We live in a terribly cruel and cynical time where our supposed leaders ignore clear public support for a ceasefire, just as they ignore the vital need for immediate action on climate change, just as they sacrifice Ukraine to US realpolitik, just as they mercilessly keep Julian Assange entombed for 1701 days in a high-security prison without charge.
Did the Dark Ages ever really end? "
" Almost the entire political Establishment of the West have outed themselves as enthusiastic proponents of a racial supremacism, prepared to give active assistance to a genocide of indigenous people.
There really is no way to face up to the Genocide in Gaza without facing up to the active support of Biden, von der Leyen, Sunak and most western political leaderships – including both Labour and Conservatives in the UK. "
AI
Bruce Schneier is talking about how AI enables surveillance to turn to true spying:
" It has long been possible to tap someone’s phone or put a bug in their home and/or car, but those things still require someone to listen to and make sense of the conversations. Yes, spyware companies like NSO Group help the government hack into people’s phones, but someone still has to sort through all the conversations. And governments like China could censor social media posts based on particular words or phrases, but that was coarse and easy to bypass. Spying is limited by the need for human labor. –AI is about to change that. "
Scott Alexander on some recent AI research. Seems that normally trained neural networks can represent more concepts than they have nodes. They do this by building a simulation of that more-neurons network:
" They go on to prove that the real AI can then run computations in the simulated AI; in some sense, there really is an abstract five neuron AI doing all the cognition. The only reason all of our AIs aren’t simulating infinitely powerful AIs and letting them do all the work is that as real neurons start representing more and more simulated neurons, it produces more and more noise and conceptual interference. "
Fediverse
A few articles on the Free Fediverse and the move from the choking corporate web:
The Verge: " When Meta’s Adam Mosseri posts on Threads and you see it on Mastodon, that’s the fediverse at work. If you post on Mastodon and I see it in my Pixelfed feed, that’s fediverse too. When I comment on your Flipboard post and it shows up as a reply in the Mastodon feed you check through the Mammoth app? Pure fediverse, baby. "
@anildash@me.dm has a piece in Rolling Stone! They believe we’re seeing the renaissance of the weird, human internet.
" There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird. "
Depression
Thought this was very interesting from Scott wondering why depressed people like sad songs and avoid doing things that cheer people up:
" Just to hammer in the analogy to fevers: In a fever, you are dangerously warm, but instead of trying to cool down, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even warmer.
In anorexia, you are dangerously thin, but instead of trying to gain weight, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even thinner.
Now let’s take it all the way: In depression, you are dangerously sad, but instead of trying to cheer up, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even sadder. "
more
That’s just the highlights this month, there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed
Around the Fediverse
Flipbook and Instagram Threads increase their federation tests, and many more organisations leaving Corporate Internet for Free Fedi.
Migration
" W3C has posted that we are no longer active on X/Twitter and have directed all our followers here to Mastodon. We are encouraging all W3C-related accounts to do the same. Encourage your friends to follow us here! "
" The State of the Federation, with Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko https://flipboard.video/videos/watch/60495342-c321-4949-9cc9-0fa1a1f2d788 "
" What constitutes a dream job in the #Fediverse? Ian Forrester is living the dream as Senior Firestarter at the BBC where he is helping to chart the way forward in the Fediverse for a highly influential global media brand.
Check out my interview with Ian where we dive deep into the experiments the BBC is running, what they’ve learned so far and what a day in the life as a BBC researcher is like. "
" We lost the Internet. It’s now run by large corporations that don’t give a shit about you. You live or die by the algorithm and they occasionally elevate one of us to superstar status just to make us believe we matter. "
" The world of social media is changing, and we are embracing this new social web, the Fediverse. Today, we started to federate our platform with a test of 25 partners. "
Threads
Note that nobody cares if Flipboard federate, or when Wordpress or Tumbler join us. It’s only Facebook/Instagram/Threads which people won’t tolerate:
Lrhodes has a thread on how Threads federation bridge will be working:
" Yes, I’m over-parsing, but I’m really interested in the phrasing Zuckerberg used in the #Threads post everyone is reporting on.“Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol.”
That could mean full federation, sure, but it doesn’t say “testing federation,” does it? It could also mean that they’re testing automatic cross-positing, which would be something significantly less than full ActivityPub integration. "
A couple of posts from Kissane:
" I needed to understand the angles on Threads federation in a more rigorous way, so I took a few days to think through and write up my sense of the benefits, risks, and available risk mitigations, along with loopholes that need closing and questions to discuss with fediverse administrators.
This is a blisteringly hot subject for me, so it’s hard to keep my head cool enough to understand other people’s trade-offs, but I’m trying. "
" They build all kinds of safety capacity but the human-value-extraction machine at Meta’s core will *always* outrun it because the company is led by people with nothing at all where their ethics should be.
I was very careful in the series to try to keep my feelings largely to one side, but these people have so much very real blood on their hands and I think the whole grotesque organization is deeply, meaningfully unholy and I think no one should fuck with it ever at all. "
" No one should federate with threads for a very simple reason: they are a known entity with a horrible track record for moderation. If Facebook had always been part of fedi, they would already be widely blocked for failure to moderate bigotry and harassment, and failure to live up to the mastodon covenant or any similar fedi standards.
Federating with threads doesn’t just mean more content for everyone, it means having moderation work offloaded onto fedi. "
" In honor of Threads linking to the Fediverse, here’s a video reminder about why we should all block it. "
Rwanda Bill
" The Tories have now published their Rwanda Bill that suspends the rule of law, human rights and the right of our courts to consider facts when considering whether a person is being victimised or not. This is what fascist governments did. We now have one in the UK. "
Gaza
" 16 years growing up in Gaza - Graphic from Visualizing Palestine: Six wars old. "