Small World and elections and microsoft's spyware and improv - May 2024
Spent a couple of days at Small World Festival this month, dancing and enjoying sun with friends. Started a stint with an improv group, and got real work done on the next Observers cartoon.
Meanwhile the UK government finally fell apart so an emergency election was called, and Microsoft decided to have all their computers spy on you even more.
Me
Duck all photos taken this week even though I went to:
Small World
Small World Festival in Kent. They go on through Thursday and the bank holiday till Tuesday but I just turned up for a couple of nights. It’s far less exhausting that way.
Not sure I’d really be in a state for driving home after four nights in a tent.
Lovely little festival though. Enjoyed a few hours reading a book in a lounge with musicians jamming around me, watching some folks on stages playing more rehearsed sets, and talking with good old friends.
Some guy had a bunch of duckings imprinted on him wandering up and down the site, much to the delight of the kids. Looked like a Pied Piper thing the way the ducks followed the man and the kids followed the ducks.
Good times. Expect I’ll go back.
Improv
In an attempt to try and get out more I started a short improv course. Eight rehearsals to put on a show.
A couple of the folks there could use to learn to project and speak up a bit, overcome some shyness, but they seem a good bunch overall and improv is indeed exactly good for doing that.
The group is twice the size I like really, and Hoopla love all these short-form games instead of the longer projected narratives I prefer doing.
Hoopla are like the big-brand famous factory-line cult of improv courses. They do a lot of corporate training too. My previous experience of these things is quite deliberately avoiding the big-brand stuff and just hanging out with a tiny indy group. Which is more my scene really, but harder to chance into.
Gotta do the factory brand stuff to find the crew to make a new group I suppose.
We’ll be presenting a n00b show on 20th July if anyone’s in London.
Starship Dev
Wrote the next episode of Observers. Man, writing is hard. So easy to spend hours and hours getting nowhere and not even writing anything but notes.
Or even not that.
This is not a “animate it in a weekend” attempt on this episode, it will definitely take longer to animate coz so much will need to be done from scratch in the new rewritten software.
So can’t be too topical either.
Spent hours and hours with a topic in mind not really even knowing how to approach it.
Still. Managed a bit of flow before midnight, got a first draft.
It’s too preachy and not funny and too long and too boring but then first drafts always are and at least there’s something to try and fix instead of just a blank page.
Once that’s done, I get to spend a few days actually using the tools I’ve been spending months building. The Observer and Companion are very excited to be back and are looking happy and shiny.
Gathering a large list of bugs as we go, but it’s going pretty well.
To build the final thing I’m going to have to render nearly ten thousand 360-degree 16 megapixel images.
Which might be fine if it was mono-vision, but if you want stereo-vision you have to do tricky things with translation of the cameras for each pixel-column in the output image or you’d be cross-eyed when you turned around.
So what you have to do is: build a rig of at least 8 one-pixel-wide cameras pointing at right-angles to each other, and scan that rig over the time-frozen scene as they rotate to fill 4096 columns in the output image
And the trouble with that, is it takes like two or three minutes per frame.
So doing ten thousand of them takes two weeks or so.
Two weeks of render!? Not ideal. Some of the future cartoons are supposed to be topical and done in a weekend.
But what if you could just rent a hundred computers overnight from Amazon?
Get them to do a hundred frames each.
Well you can indeed rent the machines, but can I install my software on it and run it on a computer that doesn’t have a monitor plugged in and I can’t see the windows?
Proof of concept is done: Yes I can!
Being able to do the render on many machines at once is not going to be a blocker. The show will go on!
Media
I found an interesting case-study on the way the media/press distort reality:
Children must show ID to use social media
Why is the word “children” in there? These ID checks don’t only apply to children, it’s an ID check that *everyone* will need to abide by since there’s no way to know if you’re a child or not otherwise.
The headline should say
All UK internet users must show ID to use social media
In fact, for Children there’s no point in showing their ID since doing so would mean their account would be denied.
It’s *ONLY ADULTS* who will be showing ID at all.
Politics / Election
Poor Porn Policy
What, what? I’m hearing the new suggested government recommendations on sex-education are to not talk to kids about how porn isn’t real life until they’re /thirteen/?
Here’s hoping the parents step in and tell their kids that porn isn’t real way before the schools get around to it then.
You definitely gotta tell ’em that before you give ’em internet.
deliberate failure
One interesting thing about the Conservatives is that they can’t actually ever solve the “problems” that they present to the press. If they managed to stop small boats arriving, they couldn’t campaign on small boats any more.
If they managed to resolve confusion about gender, they couldn’t campaign on gender any more.
If they managed to stop migration, they couldn’t campaign on migration.
Its also interesting that none of these things really are actually problems.
The only reason there are “small boats” is that the conservatives deliberately closed down all safe passage.
The only reason there is any confusion about gender is that it’s deliberately provoked by conservative policy.
The only reason migration is a problem is that the conservatives won’t simply process applications efficiently and put the migrants to work improving the country infrastructure and wealth.
They deliberately create issues, then promise that they will solve these issues, knowing that they can’t solve them because if they did they’d have no appeal left to present to voters.
Labour Is Lost
Natalie Elphicke has actually been a tory, voted tory, taken the tory whip, and is allowed to join Starmer’s Labour party.
Dianne Abbot and Jeremy Corbin remain banned from Labour.
That’s what Labour is now, a party where Tories are welcome.
We seem to have gone from “Defend Migrant Rights” to “More Migration Cops”.
We have gone from “Economic Justice” and tax-raises to “Economic Stability” (which presumably means “no change”)
We have gone from “Radical devolution of power” and “Social Justice” to “Crack down on anti-social behaviour"Common Ownership, Union Rights, and Promotion of Peace dropped entirely.
Election
On the announcement day,
the Conservatives were terrible at keeping secrets
Listen everyone, when Sunak comes out and announces an election at least try to pretend to look surprised.
The poor party has been planning this lovely surprise for us all day and it’ll be such a disappointment for them if everyone looks like they already knew.
It’s quite the image to start an election with really isn’t it. Hard to imagine anything more perfect.
Failing in the rain, wet and over.
Meanwhile Starmer says a vote for Labour is a vote for stability.
It’s weird really, with the incumbent promising to fix things and be the change candidate while the challenger is promising that everything will be just the same and it’s safe and nothing scary will happen.
My voting advice is most of you should probably just stay at home and not bother voting at all. You don’t understand the issues and you haven’t really been paying attention and anyway you live in a safe seat where your vote makes no difference at all.
If you feel like none of the candidates are really speaking for you, it’s because they take you for granted and are happy that they live in a corrupt fraudulent voting system that excludes you from power.
They honestly don’t care if you participate.
The country demonstrating complete apathy at the whole situation and giving as little mandate as possible might well be the best message to send.
For the one quarter or so of you who do live in an actual marginal constituency, vote anyone who could possibly win that isn’t the Big Two. A hung parliament is the best hope and you get that by voting for the underdogs where they can make a difference.
Everyone outside England should vote for anyone offering to leave Westminster entirely of course.
The house is corrupt beyond repair.
In Richmond, vote Binface to take out the trash.
Conscription
Dear candidates, I have become concerned that many members of a modern generation are becoming radicalized.
There are forces trying to divide our society in this increasingly uncertain world. Many of them have not had the opportunity to experience things outside their own blinded culturally impoverished tiny small minded horizons. They need an opportunity that many of them have never had the chance at before.
Would you consider a policy to send this generation into national service?
It could just be one weekend a month, they could both give the nation a valuable service in return for their continued citizenship, and have experiences that would broaden their horizons and offer life changing opportunities to learn real world skills, and contribute to their community and our country.
Think of the renewed sense of national pride these people would feel knowing they belong to a country that can forcibly take time from their limited lives, and that they owe that country for it allowing them to live.
Naysayers may neigh that enforced service is a time-share enslavement of a whole generation but I say that these people are in danger of being radicalized and only putting them into enforced servitude for their country can possibly stop them hating it so much they destroy it’s institutions in their incoherent rage.
So candidates, what do you say: Will you support a compulsory national service for all Baby Boomers, doing a few hours a week working at a gay-bar, or helping out at a gender dysphoria clinic, just something to broaden their narrow cynical view and prevent them being radicalized by extremists like the Conservative party spreading hate propaganda.
I’m not saying anyone would go to jail for refusing of course, they could just be transported to a safe third country.
Or one that we define as safe at least.
Who will support an inquiry into the possibility of such a plan, at least just to get some headlines before the inquiry finds it’s infeasible, unethical, appalling and legally indefensible.
No to two-sided TV Debate.
Hey TV producers, if there’s only two “leaders” at your “debate” it’s bullshit and I ain’t watching it.
Include the SNP, include the Greens, include the Libs, include Cymru, heck even include Workers Party and Reform if you want.
If you’re excluding parties that have MPs, your debate is bullshit and nobody should bother tuning in.
Though while I was gonna ignore the TV debate, Novara had a troll-box live commentary going on so I watched and made some notes.
Watching TV Debate anyway
It’s impossible to do a TV politics debate without it looking like a TV game-show now.
The first round is the monologue round, when you can score points by sounding genuine and pointing your thumb at the camera.
Sunak brags about doing the furlough scheme a lot, but that policy was the single biggest driver of inequality in the whole of this cursed government’s terms.
I dunno what else could have been done, but failure to tax that windfall back from where it ended up is why most people can’t afford a house and the stock market boomed back.
He gets very whiny about the industrial action.
Waa, it wasn’t my fault the waiting lists went up, it was the doctor’s fault, waa waa.
Take some responsibility, whiner.
There was a brilliant demonstration of exactly how voting is entirely pointless: Will either of you raise your hand if you disagree… Then statement after statement about taxes and neither even flinches.
You could do the same with foreign policy, or social policy, or asking about the military or the composition of the UK.
Not a riza between them. Neither even flinch.
Like here we go now on migration.
Sunak insists levels of migration are too high. (Too high for what purpose? Workers are workers, they add to the wealth of the country.)
Starmer agrees it’s too high, just blames Sunak for it.
The questioner asked why he should swallow anything either of them say because they lie, and they both lie back to him.
Migration is necessary to replace the retiring population with a below-replacement birthrate, it enriches the country.
We need it and should value them.
Migrants are well cool man. Talk about a get up and go attitude. They got up and went. No need to school them for 20 years before they can work, many of them head home before they have to be looked after in old age.
They contribute and contribute and do it for our society even at cost to their original homes.
Thanks migrants
Or on Gaza: we both want Hamas to quit so the war can end.
Sunak: I’m mad enough to blow up the whole world! That’s how much I love Britain. You wouldn’t even destroy everything for Britain.
Starmer: I would too blow up the whole world, I believe totally in the utter destruction of everything as a threat.
Or on climate: argue about whether we can afford the cost of averting catastrophe.
Sunak: we think we can afford to avoid catastrophe more slowly! There’s no need to buy a new heater sooner than necessary.
Neither of them even promise what is needed, neither of them will actually stop emissions, even the pie-in-the-sky plans rely on “net-zero” which relies on carbon capture which can not work.
Or on home-ownership for the young:
Sunak: I’ll avoid taxing you so you can afford it
Starmer: I’ll build more houses
Truth: Housing has become monetized due to excessive currency inflation and massive inequality, the rich are buying all the country’s resources, bidding up prices in a flight from weak currency.
Taxing wealth might fix it, refusal to increase taxes will make it worse.
And most notable in their complete agreement of course is the complete agreement between candidates and the host that nobody should mention the biggest political event the country has suffered this century: Brexit.
The topic that shall not be spoken.
Fuck these guys.
Windows Recall
Microsoft have a new product, built into their latest OS updates. Surprise: It’s a spy machine!
One weird thing about calling a product “Recall” is what happens when it’s faulty or turns out to be ill thought out and needs to be recalled?
Will there be a Recall recall?
Sadly I still have to use Windows for a few things but I continue to turn off all widgets, all AI, all Edge, configure it to show file extensions, configure it to change browser to Firefox, install Git Bash, and now I guess also disable Recall. Uninstall all the vendor spyware etc.
The trouble with Windows is all the configuration you have to do instead of just running your computer. It’s like you have to be an expert who enjoys running Windows as a hobby instead of just getting on with work.
It’s a really badly thought out product. Check the links below.
Releases
Two great tarot shows this month:
How Tarot Works
How The Tarot Works is a five minute tarot reading asking the tarot to explain itself!
Tell us, Tarot, how does the Tarot work?
General Election
The Election Tarot reading has trouble in that with a seven-card spread is that there’s only really room for six cards on the stage, so card number seven has to hover strangely over my head which blocks the titles for the usual final-frame-is-the-thumbnail system.
But I did like this week’s election battle-spread. It all seemed true and real until the final card and then… Man. Hope the cards are right, but, seems optimistic to me.
Starmer winning is obvious, him turning out to be a reasonable just and humane leader?
🤔
I suppose we shall see.
Reading
Read Gary Stevenson’s book “The Trading Game”.
Him off of the economics youtube channel who goes on about how inequality will destroy the middle classes and turn society into a new feudalism.
He’s pretty cool on economic analysis, and he tells an engaging story too it turns out, about how a poor kid growing up in the shadows of the banks got into a job there and became a millionaire by being the top-ranked trader from the bank, by betting on just that: Society becoming shitter because the rich will own everything and everyone else will have nothing.
The book’s more the story of the poor kid becoming the rich trader than economic analysis, so the topic of societal inequality is more backgrounded than preached like on the youtube shows.
It’s a good captivating story, and doesn’t make me have any sympathy for bankers at all, but the things wrong with the world aren’t really the fault of the guys on the trading desks, it’s the systems they work for.
They don’t really understand those systems either in most cases.
Watching
Doctor Who
Oh man, Doctor Who is back!
long thread on each episode but they’ve all been great. Space babies, land-mines, spooky welsh ghost stories, social media commentry.
I think Dot and Bubble is the best one so far, but there’s more all next month.
Links
Things I liked on the web. Mostly Audio/Videos this month:
• Jonathan Pie - Election Report #1 The Economy
Johnathan Pie’s election rant #1. There’s no money left.
• Bob Mortimer on Richard Herring’s Podcast
Bob Mortimer on Richard Herring’s podcast, are very funny together. Bob is funny with anyone though really.
Sabine describing the physics of portal. Which is to say made-up physics that isn’t real. I have some water-pistols like her props, but nothing like that skin-suit. 👀
The 30 minute animated and illustrated abridged version of Lyn Alden’s “Broken Money”. I’m reading the book so slowly I’m barely half way through chapter two.
Good summary of what’s up with the money, though the suggested solution remains very unproven.
• Burning Money - Gary’s Economic
Gary talks as though taxing and burning money would be an unusual strategy, as though tax money usually gets spent on things. But But I think that tax money is always burned, the government is in deficit. Tax just goes towards paying off the government’s overdraft. That overdraft *is* the money supply. Government debt is our money, and taxes pay off the debt.
He’s right about everything else though.
Taxing the wealthy has it’s own social benefits even if you don’t also spend on social causes.
Microsoft Recall
• Charlie Stross - Is Microsoft trying to kill itself?
Charlie Stross blog on Microsoft’s Recall, in which your computer watches everything you do and records a log which could be forced to be revealed in legal discovery, or hacked away from you by a family member or russian hacker group.
Why does anyone want this?
They don’t. Only Microsoft wants people to have it.
more
The bookmark-bot has been offline all month and will likely stay offline a month longer.
But they’re still going to the RSS feed.
And link-bot will be back.
Around the Fediverse
We’re talking about a network which isn’t owned by anybody, which doesn’t have Zuck spying on you or Elon encouraging nazis or Disney brainwashing you with adverts.
A network of the people, by the people, for the people.
No masters, no owners, no bosses.
But community moderation!
War and Elections
@theunderfold@mastodon.social has a great cartoon about good guys:
We have destroyed all the hospitals, schools, and all public places the bad guys may have been hiding.
@mcfadden@mastodon.social has a cartoon about the boot on your face:
Protestors should debate the boot on their face in the marketplace of ideas. Until Congress declares debate to be a form of hate speech.
@AnarchoNinaWrites@jorts.horse on what we can’t vote for:
Can’t vote to end capitalism that’s killing us. Can’t vote to crush fascists that’re lining us up for camps. Can’t vote to provide basic healthcare to our dying families. Can’t vote to stop corporate monopolies bleeding us dry. Can’t vote to end the genocides our government is funding and supporting. Can’t vote to protect migrants. Can’t vote even to protect queer people. Can’t vote against white supremacy. Can’t vote to dismantle a fascist SCOTUS or enshrine rights. Then what good is voting?
The Broken Web
Microsoft is building the spying right in at the operating system layers, every tech company is feeding everything into AI, you can only rent software now, search is shit. What is up with the web?
@KathyReid@aus.social asks about Microsoft Recall:
Why does #Microsoft want to implement #Recall? It’s not about *images*. It’s about modelling what workers do on Windows, and then replacing them. The most expensive part of a computer is the fallible feelings-filled unpredictable meat sack that operates it. Google has YouTube, Google Photos, Maps, and a bucket load of search data, Google Analytics, advertising, as well as it’s #GCP data (e.g. #STT transcriptions).
[…]
That’s what Recall is about - 360 degree surveillance of the worker, to model their functions, make them fungible, replicable - and replaceable.
@drwho@hackers.town tells a story about that kinda mindset:
[…] the psychiatrist kept asking me questions because she couldn’t figure out why someone she thought was a pretty standard Silicon Valley techbro would refuse to work on surveillance or tracking technologies. Absolutely couldn’t wrap her head around it. Why would someone care about second- and third-order impacts? Why would I care about abusive realtionships?
[…] lead to another couple of consultations with another group of psychiatrists, which I think very nearly got me 5150’d as delusional.
But. The point I’m trying to make is this: When it comes to Silicon Valley, thinking that any of the surveillance stuff going on right now - Palantir, drone tracking, privacy, all the way down to stuff along the lines of Microsoft Recall - is harmful and probably shouldn’t be done is considered deeply weird.
Possibly pathologically weird.I don’t know.
@ajroach42@retro.social has a long thread about computer bullshit:
It’s amazing to me how we’re watching the tech world fall apart at the feet of monetization and AI and whatever other bullshit of the week, and it’s all exactly the consequences that the Free Software folks have been warning about and talking about for decades. But the free software folks are, often, aggressive ideological purists or incredibly gatekeep-y, and free software as a movement has been seriously hampered by both of those things, and also by the same monetization push that is eating everything else. We built our entire world on computers. We embedded them in every facet of our lives. I’ve spent my entire life With The Machine. And yet…
[…]
the shape of the world is changing quickly, and some of these tech companies, Microsoft in particular, are not only Too Big To Fail, they’re also too big to be allowed to continue to exist without significant external governance.
Google, Amazon, Facebook… I mean, these companies shouldn’t exist. Their products, such as they are, should be ripped apart and rebuilt as a million tiny things.
But Windows? I think Windows has it’s place, or at least I think that it has so completely captured the modern technological world that we’re worse off without it.
Which is what makes things like AI PCs that take a screenshot of your workload every 10 seconds so dangerous.
Windows is too big to continue to be owned by any company.
[…]
Really great thread.
@futurebird@sauropods.win talks about the problem with AI spam now filling the web:
Once you could count on some things posted online probably being true because, well, why would anyone bother to put out misinformation about a topic so obscure or uncontroversial? now the simple fact that someone might want to know a bit of information makes it worth faking if it can get their eyeballs on an ad— or improve the search ranking for some company. The harmless act of *being curious* about the world causes misinformation to spring to life. We have made wanting to learn destructive.
Privacy
Privacy too is still under threat,
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io is famous for crypto-scepticism but even she says:
We must protect privacy, even in the face of cryptocurrency crime. As governments crack down on one of the most notorious tools for criminal money laundering in the cryptocurrency world, I’m worried about the ramifications.
Her blog post was great.
Linktax
@fabio@manganiello.social wrote about the Economists’s view of a link-tax:
To be fair, for as much as I like to lash against #BigTech, I’ve always criticized the link tax in the format it’s often implemented.
Taxing another website, no matter how big, for sharing a link to yours (or for letting theirs users share a link to yours) is a violation of everything that the Web is supposed to be.
It’s a desperate attempt from news outlets to get money out of tech giants that focused on the wrong problem and proposed the wrong solution.
[…]
The result? People have got very creative on how to share news (including screenshots and links to cached/reproduced articles), the void left by professional news outlets on the platform has been filled by disinformation/misinformation, many outlets have seen their traffic drop by a third or more, while Facebook hasn’t been affected at all.
Of course we need to have a serious discussion on how sustainable it is for people to consume news articles from 2-3 private platforms with algorithms designed to enforce their biases. But that’s unfortunately the reality we’re in now. Slamming a tax on the links and hoping that it would fix things by redistributing revenue (only to those outlets large enough to get a deal with Big Tech btw) was a solution doomed to fail from its very inception anyway.
Bluesky
@snarfed.org@snarfed.org accidentally released the bluesky bridge!
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. […]
In theory that’s an open bridge now, but I tried to follow the only people I know on Bluesky and presumably they refused permission or something coz nothing ever happened.
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