August 2022 - Long-Termism and War and Struggle
This month I’ve been doing some test screenings for my next big VR film. I now have a very big bug list. Also went camping and mucked about on the river with friends. None of which I posted about but I did mention other stuff…
Me
Some stuff from my microblog on the fediverse:
Deep-fakes are very convincing until you ask them to turn sideways . Interesting how the fail as soon as their context isn’t right. And I see now I forgot to include the article link.
I took note that The USA is provoking China so that when the war starts we can’t pretend it was unprovoked.
Upgraded my next-cloud and more excitingly, moved all my email back into Mutt. No more web-clients for me. Back to the terminal where Email belongs.
Wrote some thoughts about Ethereum’s change to proof of stake and what the cost of money should be.
A little discussion on think tanks with someone who thinks that they think the tanks do some thinking.
Will MacAskill’s book on Longtermism came out and so I challenged The Repugnant Conclusion and watched Stephen Fry’s film about it in which he interviews the Facebook AI, who admits Facebook are evil.
Why do the newspapers all want us back to the office? so the capital can continue to own the means of production I would think.
So solidarity with Mick Lynch and all the other strikers in this summer of discontent.
Because our next prime minster will probably be even worse and there is no plan for what we face this winter, or this century.
Releases
This month I have announced my new upcoming tarot deck in collaboration with the Internet’s Happy Toast
Watch the show that announced it or take a look at the kickstarter preview.
The kickstart proper will come in November. Look out for that.
Reading
Ministry For The Future
I have been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future. He is famous mostly for his novels about the terraforming of mars, but here we’re set in the more immediate future and are essentially terraforming Earth to try and fix carbon-dioxide and methane driven climate issues.
It’s got a good paced story and is it’s pretty terrifying how it’s being tracked by real word events with heatwaves in India and floods in Pakistan and the general collapse of the functioning of the world’s governing systems.
Some good ideas on how the would could start to fix things, but pumping water to save the ice-caps or the so-called “carbon coin” aren’t going to help.
Haven’t finished it yet. If they somehow save the world, I suspect we won’t be tracking that part on the real planet.
Watching
Lucifer
She is an FBI agent and he is literally the devil from hell and together, they solve crimes. How very silly.
FBI agent and Special Consultant. The genre that keeps on giving.
But the drama is engaging and the characters amusing and it’s not quite as silly as the Zombie one.
There’s loads of it. Six seasons of 20 odd epsiodes. That’s the way I like it too. Barely half way through so far and haven’t really watched anything else this month at all.
Links
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CGP Grey’s new video about runway numbering systems. How does he manage to make everything seem so interesting? Love Grey’s style with tangents and asides and his quick talking voice.
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video and slides presentation on Eth’s move to proof of stake “Monumental Blunder” he reckons. I think Eth is already captured really though, due to stable coins. So it hardly matters really.
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Forrest Fire’s done a lego batman fight animation and it’s really rather well done.
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Why is Amnesty apologizing about their report? Should a human rights organisation apologise for publishing important evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses?
If it does apologise, what does that suggest about its commitment to dispassionately uncovering the truth about the actions of both parties to war? And equally, what message does it send to those who claim to be “distressed” by the publication of such evidence?
This is why the fog of war is so dense. No way to know what’s going on out there because everything goes through the propaganda filters.
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Charlie Stross lists the components of the omnicrisis. We are in so much trouble.
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The EFF take on a case defending the Tornado Mixer The Feds demanded it was taken down for money-laundering. But code is speech, and Americans have free speech.
The EFF is representing a computing professor who has re-posted the code “for academic study”.
Glad to see the EFF continuing to fight for electronic freedoms.
- Craig Murray’s “The great clutching at pearls” “The 2008 banking bailout gave hundreds of billions of dollars straight to the ultra-wealthy, to be paid for by ordinary people through over a decade of austerity cuts to social services, real terms cuts in pay, and increased taxation. In the current crisis the plan is to advance money in some form to ordinary people, for them to pay off by a further decade of the same. In neither instance was taking money from those with billions in personal wealth even considered.”
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
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@onan@dobbs.town wonders about the lifespan of an instance on the fediverse.
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@julieofthespirits@kolektiva.social swears at Facebook for giving cops the details of a woman seeking abortion.
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@prplecake@compostintraining.club has a meme about record profits being unpaid wages.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr Cory Doctorow has a new book out. Sounds great. I pre-ordered it at his kickstarter.
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@glynmoody@mastodon.social links to some simulations of car-crashes
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@Datendealerin@fediscience.org reminds us why in-app browsers are malicious spying machines. TikTok can watch every click you make and password you type when you’re following links in their app.