March 2022 Digest
I did some foreign travel, ate a ton of chocolate, got fat, won an award against a background of mass job-sackings and city-sackings and financial-hackings.
Me
Some stuff from my microblog on the fediverse:
War in the internet age is weird, it’s on zoom and social media while television channels get banned.
I went to visit a friend in Paris that included boats, a studio of lights and time inside a kaleidoscope.
Energy prices are up through the roof. Richard Murphy says it’s not about cost so I suggest capitalists call that a price-signal and that if they’re right suppressing it could stop the market responding by producing more cheaper greener energy.
I also pondered about volatility in the markets and the end of the petro dollar and crypto.
I did some thinking about crowdfunder sites and the economics of print-runs pondering why the service I want seems to not exist.
I found that thanks to proxy site “nitter”, it’s possible to read twitter through RSS now which means I can read it in a well designed reader instead of an algorithmic manipulator.
It’s nearly easter so I filled my treasure chest to overflowing with chocolate and crisps and easter eggs.
Mass ferry sackings made me think of pirate tour operators repossessed from the capitalist oppressor and operated as a worker-owned pirate co-op ferry collective.
I tried on every pair of trousers in my wardrobe and most of them didn’t fit on account of the universe is expanding. Or my tummy is at least.
I explained some of what the half a billion dollar hack of a Ronin Bridge means.
My friend Angel made a song which made me think of a story I read once about aliens failing to take over an anarchist society.
I am a winner in many universes, including this one, but in this one I’m not a millionaire-winner.
Releases
Best five minute Tarot Show of the month was either yesterday’s on why Elon Musk bought a load of twitter or the one about ending the monarchy.
Reading
How Physics Makes Us Free
I finished reading How Physics Makes Us Free by J T Ismael which is a deep philosophy book about free will. He reckons we have it! Hurray.
When I say it’s a philosophy book I mean it proudly contains words like “exegetical”, “apperception”, “speciotemporal”, “Phenomenologically”, “metacognition”, “nomological anticedents” and “pretheretically”.
A tight case explaining that free will isn’t destroyed by deterministic physics, it’s enabled by it.
Watching
Picard
Season two of Star-Trek show following the now retired Captain Picard is going great. They’ve time-traveled to our time in order to fix everything going wrong with our world. Critics are calling it too “Woke”, like they forgot where the first interracial kiss on TV was. Trek is woke and proud of it thanks. Now help Picard fix the climate so the 25th century isn’t a murderous mess.
This Is Going To Hurt
There’s a medical drama based on the book by Adam Kay this is going to hurt which is funny and sad and shocking.
Links
- Lyn Alden on “what is money” is really long and detailed and great. We’ve had the current unbacked petrodollar money system for 50 years, but is it stable, what could break it? What could replace it?
“If we condense those stages to the basics, the world has gone through three phases: commodity money, gold standard (the final form of commodity money), and fiat currency. A fourth phase, digital money, is on the horizon.”
“the owners of the Evening Standard and The Independent are both Russian oligarchs and media moguls, and they have influenced Johnson’s political career. The London daily, owned by Alexander Lebedev – a former KGB agent in Britain – and his son Evgeny, had an important role to play in promoting Boris Johnson during his time as Mayor”
“The British media is right cover the plight of the Ukrainians in detail — but if it paid the same attention to Yemen, a conflict Britain is actually a major player in, that war would be over in a week”
- geeky explanation of how video encoding works. Fascinating stuff for those who don’t already know.
“H.264 splits up the image into macro-blocks - typically 16x16 pixel blocks that it will use for motion estimation. It encodes one static image - typically called an I-frame(Intra frame). This is a full frame - containing all the bits it required to construct that frame. And then subsequent frames are either P-frames(predicted) or B-frames(bi-directionally predicted). P-frames are frames that will encode a motion vector for each of the macro-blocks from the previous frame”
- war story about reporters escaping a besieged Ukrainian city was moving and very well presented. War really sucks.
“Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for fuck’s sake?”
I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said. "
- Craig Murray describes Julian Assange’s wedding in prison even though he wasn’t allowed to actually go in the end because an old man is such a danger to the state
“The British authorities had done everything they could firstly to prevent, and then to mess up, this wedding. Permission to marry had first been formally requested of the prison service in 2020, and in the end was only granted by involving lawyers and threatening legal action. There followed a whole list of antagonisms on which I shall not dwell, one minor example of which was banning me from the wedding and then lying about it.”
- Another Angry Voice is being censored from Facebook. Everyone is censored on Facebook. You can only say what they want you to say there. Here is some truth they won’t let you say.
“Saudi Arabia’s repression of political opposition is well documented. Amnesty International reports that in Saudi Arabia freedom of expression, association, and assembly are all repressed.
Their repression of political dissent is so extreme that they’ve even sentenced a 14 year old child to death for attending a pro-democracy march!”
" I also know from the history of American nuclear strategy that the US is unlikely to defend Europe with nuclear weapons. But there is still a chance of escalation here, so it is an abysmal scenario and I hope that some kind of a peace agreement between us and the US, and between us and Ukraine, can be reached before we go further into this unbelievably dangerous world.”
more…
That’s just the highlights this month, remember you can always see my full public bookmarks at my website and/or follow my link-bot on the fediverse or my RSS feed of interesting links
Around The Fediverse
Some cool stuff from other people on in the social-media federation:
Neenster makes cool tiny looping animations of bible verses and got this nice lenticular card made.
The Lisp Witch explains why modern art will rot faster than classics
Over at Dobbs Town, Onan notes the fediverse growing to over five million accounts.
New EU laws forcing interoperation on big messaging providers were noted by users at fosstodon and the eff at mastodon.social which are both already inter-operating you may notice.
On April 1st, at the wandering shop, AI researcher Janelle Shane gets an AI to list the pranks computers play on humans.
JC Brand at a mastodon site has a programming tip: use the integrity tag in your scripts
As Elon buys a chunk of Twitter, Ryan at Hates Company notes a gentleman simply doesn’t talk about who secretly owns most of his mastodon instance