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Happy new year everybody!

During the last month of last year wehad CEOs murdered, we had a string ofappointments by Trump, my oven broke thenmy fridge broke, we had the passingof the Online Safety Bill, everyone wassick and we had Christmas and new year!

Me

Broken Appliances

This month becomes even more expensive: Oven’s broke.

I ordered a new one to be delivered, and crucially, they’ll take the old one away.

Current account getting worryingly low now though.

Then Oh my god the fridge is broken too.

Ugh.

Did you now now your fridge can have AI! And an app!

[Nope, nope nope nope]

Needless to say I didn’t have either.

But I do have new appliances now. Luckily gotpaid between the two breaking.

Yule

Work Xmas Social was a cookery class where we made mince pies and gingerbread and Biscotti before a meal in a pub.

Pretty nice.

The company is growing, more than 20 of us there this year.

Then after visiting friends in the pub, I ended up coughing up green phlegm on Xmas eve.. Bollox. Christmas is cancelled.

Can’t go visit immunocompromised family if I’m gonna be sick.

Home alone without any food or a working fridge it is!

I booked a woosh from Tesco. They bought me a couple of bags of ice and a couple of day’s worth of food. Use the broken fridge like an ice-box. So I had enough to eat.

Did the Xmas thing up in Brum the next week on mum’s birthday. And it’s a white Christmas. Fortunately not so white that the train home is cancelled. So I was still good to travel home to start the year’s work.

New Year

What a year huh?

I

  • Built new software for a watch I’ve worn most of the year.

  • Had new windows fitted in the flat.

  • New Custom-print blind for that window!

  • New format for the Tarot-show, all CGI stage now with large animated cards, recorded 12 of them.

  • Built a 360 Stereovision Panoramic renderer for Godot.

  • Built a fairly crappy IK system for Godot

  • Just one new “Observers” cartoon, but the first using the new Godot engine.

  • Switched to using GotoSocial for Starship and Tarot social and websites.

  • Only made it to one festival this summer: Small World Festival

  • Restarted Improv, performed first two live improv shows.

  • Designed and had built a new bathroom after the bathroom flood

Also:

  • Elected a new government, they are nearly as crappy as the old one.

  • Cancelled Amazon Prime (when they added adverts & blocked unions)

  • Deleted Facebook (after 3 years of none-use)

  • Deleted Linked In (after realizing I had an account?)

Here’s hoping 2025 ends the streak of each year being worse than the last, but probably a forlorn hope I suspect.

UKPol - Royal Mail

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With the sale of Royal Mail to foreign billionaire Daniel Křetínský a new stamp has been announced.

Featuring the corporation’s new top Majesty Křetínský in a regal purple shade wearing his majestic glasses that symbolize hissovereign power over mail delivery in this normal island.

These stamps are expected to be more expensive than the oldones with a King’s face on them, but delivery will be much better to everyone! (except those who live in unprofitable areas such a outside towns and cities or anywhere in the countryside)

UKPol - Online Safety Bill

The UK Parliament passed the “Online Safety Bill”,which is the worst bit of internet legislation inyears.

People acting like it accidentally causes the shutdown of small independent forums, rather than that being the entire point of it: To ensure the only hosts allowed are corporations with legal departments who will censor and spy as required by government (and are likely already doing both for their own reasons anyway).

Okay, sure. They were told over and over again, but it’s an accident, they didn’t mean to.

Sure.

Wanna buy a bridge?

I intend to be ungovernable and ignore the bill myself.I will not shut down and obey in advance.

US Pardons

As he exited, Biden pardoned some people but I don’t care how many people he pardons, fact is he’s more likely to pardon Trump than Assange or Snowden and that tells you all you need to know about the two cheeks of the American Political arse.

US Immigration

Having been elected to do “mass deportations”, Trump and Musk back down talking about H-1B visas and H-2B and that. Surprisingly heated! Personally I always preferred the 2B over the HB because it draws a thicker darker line but it’s not as soft as a 4B or higher.

#pencils

Celebratory Podcast

Watched some of Andreessen on Rogan’s show for my sins, and the lack of self awareness is deafening.

They’re all like “woohoo, Trump won, we are saved from Woke and regulation and now everything will be great”

And then moments later “God, imagine all those people in Germany when Hitler was elected, do you think they knew what was to come, do you think they celebrated? They musthave been so dumb”

🤦

I wonder at what point they will realize, or if they’ll still be celebrating even as the camps get filled with unpeople and the body counts starts to ratchet up.

Twitter

Musk has been continuing his kematine fuelledpublic breakdown and midlife crisis.

Exclusive to all newspapers: Nazi troll man posts nazi troll message to his nazi troll site.

🥱

Headlines from shitposts. Get a life media, honestly.

Don’t feed the trolls.

Starmer says he absolutely will not tolerate these kinds of things.

He won’t delete his account from the nazi troll site, or do any campaign finance reform, but he has no tolerance all the same.

Seems like an empty threat to me. He’s clearly convinced staying on the nazi troll site is very important.

Bluesky

Some people flee to Blueksy, including famous transphobe harasser Jessie Singal,and there’s much talk there on trying toget Bluesky to ban him.

But it’s interesting that the new pick for fcc says he wants to “smash the censorship cartel”, which could mean legal action against Bluesky if they ban transphobe harasser Jessie Singal?

“Free speech” surely doesn’t mean forcing media to publish things they don’t want to publish? The government saying “You may not ban this bad-actor”!

Forcing all centralized services like Bluesky to publish harassers and bullies doesn’t sound very free to me!

Is properly decentralzied fediverse at an advantage here?

Would government force my server to not block Singal?

Could that even be done?

Not by a foreign government presumably.

They have however banned Brian Lunduke for trolling. Since all his trolling was on the same post it’s hard to be sure if he was banned for transphobia or spreading election-fraud lies or attempted-insurrection lies.

Maybe the system will be better moderated than I thought.

Though Singal seems to still be there.

Probably depends on how famous you are.

Lunduke just ain’t famous enough to escape the moderation.

Reading

Alastair Reynolds - House Of Suns

Read Alastair Reynolds’ “House of Suns”, a sci-fi novel with a galaxy populated by humans and robots who can’t travel faster than light so live millions of years often spent in abeyance or stasis of some kind.

A few humans clone themselves thousands of times and do loops of the galaxy, meeting up to merge memories every 200 kiloyears or so. The shatterlings.

I thought it was really good and engaging. Mysterious questions of the Absence affecting the next-door galaxy and the attempted destruction of the Gention Line of shatterlings leaving just a handful of them to figure out who tried to wipe them out and why. A story spanning a galaxy and a hundred thousand years.

👍

Links

Gaza / Israel

The BBC and corporate media’s reporting on the issue has been so blatantly and obviously biased, valuing some lives much more than others, just straight up copy/pasting Israel’s propaganda,that it should be eye-opening to anyone who didn’t already know our media was like this.

But besides the glaring passive-voice and slantedfocus of the news stories, Owen’s report talks to whistle blowing reporters at the BBC worried about these things, and names the editors he claims responsible.

Craig on the ceasefire:

Israel has spent 72 hours blatantly violating the ceasefire without a word of protest from the Western powers. The moment anybody fires back a single shot, the USA and its satellites will voice outrage, heavy bombing of Beirut
will recommence and Israel will start trying to advance again from its new upgraded Southern bases within Lebanon.

I see this happening sooner rather than later. Peace deals which entirely favour one side never last, barring effective extermination of the injured party, and that has not happened.

Media lens pointing out how the BBC assists a genocide by sidelining it. Their “balance” between Perpetrator Israel And Palestinian Victims and the damning mning Amnesty Report. The BBC are very bad at reportingthese things.

CEO Murder

They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: that’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history

Michael Moore on the CEO’s murder:

Hmmm. Do I condemn murder? That’s an odd question. In Fahrenheit 9/11, I condemned the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people and the senseless murder of our own American soldiers at the hands of our American government.

Not individual revenge, but only workers’ power can settle accounts with capitalism.

Comedian Josh Johnson spending an hour describing the Luigi Mangione case from beginning to end. The audience is laughing but mostly he’s just saying what happened. Which does have something funny about it.

Bluesky

AI

He’s also very clear and explains the ways in which tokens are correlated and their influence upon each other flows through the layers of a transformer model to encode meaning and structure. Great.

Anthropic, who have trained their model to be good, do an experiment where they let it see a “leaked” document about plans to train it to be evil. The good model reacts by hiding it’s intentions and faking being evil to try and avoid changes to it’s values.

Maybe.

Who knows what goes on in these machines.

All possible butler robots are corporate spies, like every other device these days.

A company making butler bots says:

expects the first release of Alfie to handle only about 20% of tasks on his own. The rest will be assisted by a Prosper team of “remote assistants,” at least some of them based in the Philippines, who will have the ability to remotely control Alfie’s movements.

Fascism

Carol Cadwallar thinks it’s the end of surveillance capitalism, it’s surveillance fascism now:

My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen…

In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. T urn on disappearing messages.

Time and Mass

Time has been going for just under fourteen billion years, which sounds like a while, but that’s less than two years for every human being on Earth. Collectively, we’ve lived the entire history of the universe since the beginning of 2023.

Why Musk hates Wiki

Molly explains what Elon and the right hate about the wiki:

This resilience against control helps explain why figures like Musk find Wikipedia so infuriating. They can buy platforms, threaten lawsuits, or pressure advertisers, but they cannot simply purchase or coerce control over Wikipedia.

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

There’s only one network that’s trulynot owned by anybody, that a billionairecan’t buy and a crypto-company can’t influence.

Here, the drama and power struggles are unparalleled.

There’s literally no centralised system which can give such heights of drama and power struggles. Fedi is amazing at it.

Elsewhere the best you can hope for is a shareholder revolt or a billionaire buyout.But on fedi? It’s free drama every day! You don’t even have to pay! It’s like game of thrones, shifting alliances and balance of power plays. Falling out and making up, severed connections and reuniting forces.

And you get to observe it all with the safety of an escape hatch any time it gets too hot.

Brilliant.

No monolith can ever compete.

Here’s some things people were saying this month on the network:

The Indie Beat

The old Fediverse based radio “radio free fedi"is dead but @mizkirsten@mastodon.social has a new plan:

Happy New Year fedifriends!

I’m excited to officially announce the launch of TheIndieBeat.fm, a streaming radio station showcasing indie #music from the Fediverse. The Indie Beat Radio is made possible through a collaboration with Bandwagon.fm / @benpate

Music artists who upload their work to Bandwagon.fm have the option to make tracks available for streaming on TheIndieBeat.fm

Our goal is to use federation to make less work for artists — upload once; distribute infinitely.

CEO Murderer Luigi

In the aftermath of the murder of health insurance CEO:

@VeryBadLlama@mas.to noted:

in today’s fast-paced world we simply don’t have time for CEOs to be visited by three Christmas ghosts

@Edent@mastodon.social mentioned an old Cory Doctorow story:

Thinking about Cory Doctorow’s story “Radicalised”.It is a short story about Americans who decide to wage domestic terrorism on the Health Insurance industry, and the consequences of those actions.

https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/

@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social noted:

I’m out here in the trenches every day trying to convince skeptical normies that the state is merely the coercive and bureaucratic arm of the capital class and then Kathy Hochul goes and sets up a hotline for rich CEOs to report when when they get too nervous about the poors rising up against them.

https://www.latintimes.com/new-york-considering-special-hotline-just-ceos-report-alleged-threats-their-safety-after-brian-569424

Bluesky

Will Bluesky moderate properly now famed Transpobe harasser Jessie Singal joined?

@gwynnion@mastodon.social asks:

So Jesse Singal joined Bluesky, was suspended, and then was unsuspended because apparently he has mutual friends with the Bluesky moderation team who vouched for him as a fake journalist and “free speech” martyr, which is how guys like Singal have always gotten away with being serial harassers, trolls, liars, and propagandists online.

@oliphant@oliphant.social points out how Fedi is different to the other socials:

I think the fundamental best thing about this network, what we can offer others looking for “a better way” is the direct 1:1 connection between “I post a thing” and “my followers see the thing.”

This is the “incredible engagement” people talk about here, over other platforms.

… the point is, there’s no algorithm deciding “oh, that didn’t get enough people clicking Like or Boost, so you’re not going to see it.”

@localden@mastodon.social posted a blog:

Close to 6,000 words to try and convince you to be a property owner and not a renter on the internet 🌎 https://den.dev/blog/be-a-property-owner-not-a-renter-on-the-internet/

Facebook

Facebook lets spambot “AIs” join it’s social networks:

@jhpot@mastodon.social noted:

Meta is actively developing what they claim is world-changing technology and this is their best idea for how to use it: making bot accounts on their own social network in an effort to get you to scroll just a little bit longer. /link https://justinpot.com/the-future-of-mindless-scrolling/ https://justinpot.com/the-future-of-mindless-scrolling/

@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org noted:

Meta is now using AI-generated profiles to drive up “engagement” on Facebook and Instagram. Now why would they do this?

Well, for one thing, organic engagement on both those platforms is dead—and it’s been dead for awhile. And now they’re stuck in a loop where influencers aren’t talking to people—they’re talking to algorithms.

So what about the 98% of users who aren’t influencers?

Well, most of their content gets stuck in a void with no engagement. And this drives down satisfaction. Why post your breakfast to Instagram if no one sees it?

Therefore, Meta needs to build the illusion of engagement to satiate that need for connection. And Zuckerberg assumes most people will be satisfied with bot interaction.

But what I suspect is that this will lead to a diminishment of trust on those platforms.

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