Blind Leap - February 2024
Special bonus newsletter with 3% more February than most years!
I got a window blind custom-printed for the kitchen, while Fedi reacted fearfully to a potential bridge with BlueSky and a spam attack.
Meanwhile, politics sucks.
Me
Life
Had Pancakes on Pancake Day and sausage egg and chips for breakfast on my birthday and dinner with the old bandmates at the Piano Works
These talented session musicians half-heartedly performed lots of covers of songs that they didn’t always appear to particularly like.
We do enjoy finding ways to criticize musicians who are clearly all way better than we ever were 😆
Window Blind
Did you know you can get any image you want printed onto a window-blind?
Given my kitchen one is broke I made plans.
The link has lots of in-progress images as I built the design to print into the blind, including a animated one!
Here’s the final version hanging in the kitchen:
Phone Book
They delivered a new phone book and I finally got to live the strong man dream of ripping a phone book in half.
Apparently this is the last one they’re gonna print.
Nobody wants to be in it any more.
It’s not very thick.
AI
If copyright is real then the AI machines owe the artists of humankind (which is to say all of us) more money than exists in the banking systems of the planet.
If copyright is not real then the companies that trained those models have no right to exclusive ownership of the weights.
I bet somehow the law conspires to make it the worst of either option.
Our Farcical Government
Ceasefire Shenanigans
There was a lot of fuss over parliamentary procedures and shenanigans determining the exact wording of a futile gesture asking Israel to stop doing a genocide which they will completely ignore anyway.
It’s not even about if the UK continues to give them the bullets and bombs to do it with.
Just over whether to symbolically ask them to please stop.
All if it pointless. Even if successful it would do nothing other than let UK parties score points on each other.
All they are doing is playing symbolic hen-pecking status games.
Fucking appalling, all of it.
Lying Media
Meanwhile the Telegraph is worried kids don’t believe their lies.
If you want young people to trust you more maybe try not being blatant untrustworthy propaganda filled with lies?
For instance, if you report on a report, you could try saying who did the report or link to it’s actual contents? Or would that reveal that it’s all just fake study propaganda made by corporate sponsors?
The mainstream newspapers are unbelievably credulous and clearly extremely happy to print any old tosh that comes from any shady organization that matches their politics, like this Charlesbye which is a bunch of ex-Johnson government Tory creeps.
Lying PM
says unelected prime-minster feeling threatened by an outlier election result.
Plotting Banks
And Congratulations to the Bank of England in their successful engineering of a recession in the UK economy.
Well done guys!
You wanted it, you got it!
You ignored all the pain and suffering it would cause and just went ahead and caused the recession you wanted anyway.🍾
Online “Safety” Bill
The BBC loves to both-sides arguments you see.
They are neutral.
Except when it’s banning kids from the internet.
Then they only represent one side of the argument, deny that any other side could possibly exist, and insist impossible things which can’t work will protect kids while offering no evidence that internet access is even really more harmful than helpful.
Bluesky Bridge
I rank the social networks like this, in order of being the actual owner of the things you are publishing:
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Fedi (self/community-hosted)
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Nostr
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Fedi (Someone else’s server)
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Bluesky
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Telegram
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All the horrible-corproate-fuckbollocks
I rank the private message apps like this, in order of how actually private they are:
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Matrix
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Signal
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Whatsapp (though, yes, the content of the messages you send with your surveillance app are encrypted, but it is still a surveillance app, FFS)
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Telegram - This is not even a private message app, this is a public not-encrypted message app. Why is it even on this list? It might as well say “email”.
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Email.
Which ones do you think my actual friends prefer?
Run a bluesky server?
BlueSky did turn on the ability to post to their network from your own servers. I wondered about installing a server, checked it out.
Hahhahha. It’s not even optional.
Come help us build a decentralized social media!
Step one: Join this surveillance capitalist’s centralized forum system.
I dissected their blog post a little in the thread there.
Bluesky Bridge to Fediverse
But with the Bluesky data-API turned on, the Bridge between it and the wider Fedi can exist, so many on Fedi were worried about consent, as posts move between the services in a way the poster may not have anticipated.
I poll: If I push a post to Mastodon, which other services should we require collect explicit permission
On our server we block Threads/Facebook.
Not because they are a bridge to other software but because they are Zuckerberg who has proven himself not an honest actor.
If the others get blocked it’ll be because they are moderating poorly.
In general I’m in favour of interoperability, though of course that does include the interoperability of blocks for any reason at all.
Many more thoughts in the thread.
Spam Attack
An argument between some Japanese kids accusing each other of hacking each other spilled out from their Discord servers as some of them launched a false-flag spam-attack in the other’s name to try and get them shut down with spam reports.
Fedi wasn’t well tooled to handle it really.
The spam was mostly coming from tiny barely-moderated servers. Not like free-speech zones, just family servers who don’t need moderating because everyone using it is moderate already.
Our tiny server in the corner of Fedi sent over 100 spam reports to other tiny open servers before they’d mostly closed down and the attack ended.
Check out the Fediverse section below for more.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
This month Lee Anderson was finally kicked out of uk government for saying that Britain is controlled by Islamists.
I did a 5 minute reading to find out the truth: That hidden forces of the establishment prudently used brash stupid Anderson to satisfy their racist voters, but this failed, and the country will eventually see through their manipulations. We will end this government, and the country can have a new dawn.
Reading
The Changing World Order
I’ve been reading Ray Dailo’s “Principles for dealing with the changing world order” , in which he charts the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms and dynasties. The main cycle, he reckons is:
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Winner of a war consolidates power, unites the population (often through oppression)
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A smart cooperative equitable educated society with meritocracy means good societal progress and wide sharing of the wealth.
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Long period of peace, building good tech and military and financial systems.
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Leadership corrupts: Excessive debt, money-printing, inequality, financial ruin, no sense of solidarity, then a natural disaster pushes it over the edge
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The fall: Escalating rebellions, very bad inequality, internal conflicts
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Civil war, revolution, eventually a strong leader proves the winner and back to 1.
We in the western civilization are very clearly in the late states of this kind of cycle, and it’s frankly terrifying with the weapons we have these days when it comes to a war.
The leadership is too corrupt to try and fix the inequality or invest in that well educated, equitable, cooperative society.
He explicitly agrees with Marx and implicitly with me a lot more than I’d have expected from the rabid capitalist that Ray Dailo is.
It’s interesting to hear his emphasis on inequality and how a prosperous society depends upon sharing the gains of prosperity widely.
You tend to hear hyper-capitalists mostly emphasizing that capital’s gains should go to capital, and Ray is certainly suggesting the opposite here. That if that happens, it corrupts the leadership and ends with cronyism and debt and revolution.We seem to basically agree what creates good prosperous peaceful civil society, and that capitalism in the Anglican world isn’t doing it, and that fucked up corrupt government is why we aren’t doing it.
We’d offer fairly different prescriptions though I think.
Watching
Rick And Morty 7
season seven of Rick And Morty
The first one with new actors doing the lead voices. Doubt I’d have even noticed if I wasn’t paying attention. Sounds sort of cleaner. I’d have assumed just a better mic if I didn’t know.
Episode four was well vicious on meat-eaters!
Still pretty great but continuing to go downhill slowly.
Loudermilk
Also watched all 3 seasons of Loudermilk , which is the name of a TV show named after the surname of the main character in it.
It is not dairy or noise related.
He runs a alcoholic support group and gets a young room-mate to look after and help with recovery.
Nice bunch of weird characters, a laugh in most shows. Almost makes me wish I was an alcoholic to join a support group.
Seems like maybe they’re trying to make new ones but nobody will fund it. Fools. That’s what TV is now. Just networks cancelling shows.
Links
Internet Enshitification
• The real problem with anonymity - Cory Doctorow
Cory points out it’s not internet user’s anonymity that causes social issues, it’s the corporate manager’s anonymity:
These are the greater corporate fuckwads, who commit their sins from behind a veil of anonymity. That brand of bloodless viciousness, depravity and fraud absolutely depends on anonymity.
• McLuhan Lecture - Cory Doctorow
If you like Cory Doctorow describing why the internet is all enshitified these days but prefer it as a 90 minute talk instead of an essay then this is for you!
• Generative A.I - We Aren’t Ready. - Kyle Hill
The Dark Forest theory of the internet, in which everyone retreats into underground whatsapp lists and telegram channels because on the internet proper, nobody knows you’re a chatbot and everywhere is full of dark spam.
Matters Of State
• First it was Corbyn. Now the whole British public is being smeared over Gaza | Jonathan Cook
Jonathan Cook:
The smearing of Corbyn over his criticisms of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians largely worked. But gaslighting much of the public as a dangerous “mob” for opposing even more egregious Israeli crimes may yet backfire
• Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle colluded to turn the Gaza ceasefire vote into a farce - AAV
Another Angry Voice on our MPs squabbling and playing status games while states murder thousands:
This entire farce was caused purely because Starmer wanted to strip out reference to Israel’s ‘collective punishment’ of Palestinian citizens and water down the ceasefire call to give Israel the green light to continue their atrocities. … When your party is being led by a cynical, manipulative, game-playing, profoundly dishonest, constantly U-turning liar like Keir Starmer, then perhaps it’s impossible to imagine others doing things on principle, just because they’re the right thing to do?
• Why are government services going down the pan despite high taxation? - Richard Murphy
As a consequence of poor economic thinking by government that fails to understand any of this, what we get is a downward economic spiral. Growth becomes stagnant at best, but taxation demands increase to match increased government expenditure the demand for which arises directly as a result of failed government economic policy.
In other words, over almost fifteen years the government has deliberately failed to deliver growth but has created an environment where demand for government services is inevitably inflated. This is the outcome of neoliberal thinking. … There is a final thought to add. What all this means is that to get out of this mess politicians have to change their behaviour, but what they’re saying is that it’s a pre-condition of change that the private sector delivers growth first, which makes any recovery look to be impossible since that is not going to happen whilst government policy continues to crush GDP.
That summarises the mess we’re in.
• State Secrecy and Public Hearings Part One - Craig Murray
• Assange Final Appeal - Your Man in the Public Gallery - Craig Murray
Craig Murray is the only man reporting anything remotely true about the trial of Julian Assange. His coverage this week is all you need to know.
Video
• Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED - Veritasium
“Almost impossible” is a strange thing to say really. Like “Almost pregnant” or “Almost sane”.
But Vertitasim do tell a good story, and this one about how long it took to develop a way to make a blue LED is a good one to tell.
Contrast that with:
• Terraforming The Moon - Issac Authur
I like the way Issac Authur uses the word “doable”.
You wanna spin up the moon so it goes 30 times faster to give it a 24 hour day?
Sure. That’s doable.
Ship an oil-taker full of water onto the moon every second for thirty thousand years to create oceans?
Yeah, doable, but you’d probably stop early because of property values.
Build a black-hole in the center of the moon to increase it’s gravity to earth-levels?
Doable. Just have to get the mass from Jupiter.
• The Trillion Dollar Equation - Veritasum again
Veritasium’s video on derivative markets and options is really great too.
Feels like I’m nearly there understanding what calls and puts are now.
• The secret economics destroying Britain - Gary Stevenson interview
Guess we’re gonna get a lot of Gary Stevenson on the wires for a bit now he’s finished his book. Here’s 50 minutes at the Joe channel where he explains why families are losing their homes and the state is in debt.
Audio
• James O’Brien’s Chart-Topping Podcast
Gary was also on James O Brien’s podcast this week, and the week before was Bernie Sanders, in which Bernie schools James on how his profession, Journalism, is a traitor in the class war.
Some of OBrien’s best here this month.
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 one corner of the internet that isn’t yet filled with bots and trolls and surveillance capitalists plastering adverts everywhere. And that corner is distributed. It’s everywhere and nowhere.
Remember when the cutting-edge new-exploration of the internet was Usenet? And then the web came and the forums sprang up and the blogs and then the cutting-edge moved to the big corporate sites and then IT STOPPED.
The big corporate sites became so rich that as soon as anything else started up they would just buy it and either shutter it or cripple it or load all their spyware malvertising all over it.
The new leading-edge can’t be a private corporation, if you get any traction they will just buy you. Getting away from exactly that is the problem.
Where’s the cutting edge now? Does anyone think it’s at Facebook’s companies? Really? Or a Twitter that can just be bought? Does anyone really think the corporations will revolutionize and save the internet?
Here’s some of my boosts in the network.
What Is Fedi?
@Gargron@mastodon.social points at an explainer:
Excellent video by @Techaltar about the #SocialWeb. You can basically send this to anyone who wants to learn what makes Mastodon unique compared to other social media platforms and what it is that we’re doing here 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3ptZ1W-FRA
Spam Attack
Most of the open servers that were sending spam closed registration and deleted the spammers when they got reports, but not all were so well moderated.
Immediate reaction to the spam-attack was the block-lists:
@ErikUden@mastodon.de Kept one updated:
Hello all Fedi Admins who have problems with spam! The Mute List 2.2.2I have been updating the spam list and found ~104 additional instances that continued spamming!
@renchap@oisaur.com , Mastodon’s developers made some plans:
here are my plans to tackle this, hopefully we will be able to start on it soon: https://renchap.com/blog/post/evolving_mastodon_trust_and_safety/
@sam@urbanists.social built a quick-mass-report tool:
Introducing Citadel! Citadel is a tool for Mastodon admins that makes it quick and easy to find + suspend spammers in one click!
BBC
@BBCRD@social.bbc , The BBC are sticking around:
We’ve just published an update about this Mastodon trial which has been running for the last 6 months – you can read it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2024-02-extending-our-mastodon-social-media-trial We are going to continue our trial here for at least another six months while we share our findings internally and seek more engagement from other BBC teams. We are also planning to start researching ways to publish more BBC content using ActivityPub.
Glad they’re sticking around and finding it encouraging, saying:
…most of the comments and feedback have been positive, welcoming both our interest and the way we have set things up. We’ve had really encouraging levels of engagement (i.e. replies, re-posts and likes) on Mastodon. For some equivalent posts we’ve seen significantly larger engagement numbers for Mastodon compared to X/Twitter, particularly given the relative sizes of different platforms. We think this is partly due to the culture of Mastodon, and partly because of some of the topics we’ve posted about.
That Bridge Thing
@snarfed.org@snarfed.org who is building the bridge describes his approach:
Moderate people, not code.
His blog is activity-pub compliant, and so is on Fedi without using Mastodon himself, using his own software.
@deadsuperhero@mozilla.social is sad about how bad the backlash gets:
If you’re going to be mean to people because they did something they’re passionate about in their spare time, simply because you didn’t like some design decision they made, I’m not going to have much respect for you. Doubly so if you don’t even bother to do any homework on the subject.
@hello@social.wedistribute.org points to even worse backlashes elsewhere:
The #ContentNation situation is a dumpster fire for the #Fediverse. What would you do if you were building something, people misunderstood what it was, and things escalated to a point that someone loaded CSAM onto your server for the sake of reporting it? https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/contentnation-mastodons-toxicity/
@lrhodes@merveilles.town is pleased that Bluesky’s approach shows Activitypub is corporation-proof:
The fact that #Bluesky felt the need to develop a protocol from scratch actually makes me feel a lot better about ActivityPub. People are constantly reminding me that fediverse posts are public and data can be scraped and indexed from here, but the existence of ATproto is a testament to the limitations of ActivityPub as a tool for surveillance capitalism.
@lrhodes@merveilles.town also points out:
Another thing that stands out, if you can look past the hype, is the poverty of what they’re offering in that announcement: You can host your data, and nothing will change.
There are some intimations that this gives you control, but the one example it gives is: Your data won’t disappear if the company goes under. But the network is still fundamentally mediated. If server choice doesn’t affect what content you see, it likewise doesn’t affect who gets to use your data and how.
@J12t@social.coop tells why Facebook and Twitter’s spin-off Bluesky are joining Fedi?
And that, I believe, is the real reason #Meta is implementing #activitypub: So that they can cross-post across all their apps, such as from #Facebook to #Threads, without running afoul of antitrust law specifically in the EU. @Sarahp here has a piece on that cross-posting, although she does not mention ActivityPub. (Which they may or may not use for that purpose between their own apps .. whether they do is not really important) https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/meta-tests-cross-posting-from-facebook-to-its-twitter-x-competitor-threads/
NodeBB joins
@julian@community.nodebb.org is NodeBB, experimentally joining ActivityPub:
Today marks the day that our community forum connects to the fediverse. We’ve updated the code and switched over to the activitypub branch, and enabled federation on two categories, the NodeBB Development category (which is read-only for everybody but NodeBB staff), and the Testing Ground, which is meant for content of no consequence.
It also means that henceforth any bugs discovered are public and I’d be on the hook to fix them post-haste [🖼 😅]
Exciting to see more different types of software figuring out how to federate.
Pol
@fkamiah17@toot.wales on Labour ditching their green pledge:
This whole thing is so fucking pathetic. CCHQ had a whole strategy to attack £28bn, which is partly why there’s been so much backsliding on it from Liebour. And now, even though the whole policy’s dead in the water, the fucking *Tories* are saying it isn’t, just so they don’t have to waste their attack lines.
I think the thing is to realize that nothing any of them say has any actual meaning.
They have no intention to stick to any promises they make anyway.
They are just saying the passwords, chanting the spells, using words to try and manipulate the meta-conversation.
The words they are using do not have literal meaning of any kind at all.
They are not bound by promises, and the phrases they utter are not limited by logic or even physics.
They are saying passwords, trying to do global public consciousness priming, not planning or building policy.
All of them.
This is what politics under capitalist media has optimized for.
It is indeed, fucked.
@RichardJMurphy@mas.to asks:
Why are government services going down the pan despite high taxation? … The answer is pretty straightforward but never spoken of. It is the inevitable consequence of the economic policy of successive Tory governments, now also adopted by Labour. So why are we in a dire position? That’s because profoundly unwise politicians have decided to put us in this position.
Art Craft
@ancientjames@mastodon.social Ancient James is building some really cool spinning 3d displays:
These photos look amazing.
@conniptions@mastodon.social has a web-toy to demonstrate different scales:
Right so, I’ve got a little webtoy now that lets you toggle between what I /think/ are correctly calculated Equal and Pythagorean temperaments: Code, very rough, is here fwiw: https://www.conniptions.org/temperamental/ Can you hear the difference?
I can’t, but this is probably why my band always complained about my singing.
Tumbler sells out to AI
Tumbler and Wordpress.com are selling all their user’s posts to the AI companies for millions of dollars.
@pointlessone@status.pointless.one describes the backlash:
The latest drama is that Automattic is about to sign a deal with OpenAI to train AI on WordPress.com and Tumblr content.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that OpenAI probably already had crawled most if not all of WP and Tumbler.
Automattic also allows users to opt out and that fueled the Opt Out/Consent discussion that started a bit earlier.
Great long post, check it out.
@jalefkowit@octodon.social points out it was a prior backlash that made Wordpress what they are:
The irony is that there is one and only one reason WordPress is where it is, and that is because, back in the Triassic Age of the web, the blogging software that everyone used back then, Movable Type, changed its license. Movable Type was commercial software; there was a free personal version, and a relatively expensive pro version. This didn’t get in their way for a long time, because the terms of who qualified for the free personal version were generous. But when they released version 3.0 in 2004, they tweaked who qualified for which license in such a way as to make it look like lots of high-traffic bloggers were suddenly going to have to pay for a pro license.
As you might imagine, the entire blog world lost its collective shit….
@_jv_@mastodon.social explains why opt-out might not really work:
Ok, you know the Tumblr AI opt-out setting everyone is talking about right? You see, there is something funny about how Tumblr internally works.
Every time someone reblogs one of your posts, an entire copy of the post is created in the blog that has reblogged you.
That’s why, for example, if you edit a post, the edits are not propagated down the reblog chain: those are, in practice, different posts with the same content than your original
Gaza
@AnarchoNinaWrites@jorts.horse writes
“But what about HAMAS?!”
Yeah when MY fucking government starts donating billions to Hamas, sending them weapons, pushing their propaganda as fact, vetoing resolutions designed to hold them accountable for an ongoing genocide, terror-jacketing their critics in America and abroad, openly arguing that genocide isn’t genocide on their behalf, and talking about turning the FBI loose on people protesting the shit they’re doing, I’ll fucking get back to you.
Eat shit you absolute monsters.
@fsinn@mas.to notes:
The number of people who believe - and unabashedly say, publicly, - “the murder of these people is okay because those other people were murdered first” is unbelievably astounding, and scary as hell. PS - If you’re thinking of coming into my replies to justify the collective punishment and mass starvation of an entire population forcibly displaced and corralled into inhumane conditions by a state military offensive, one million humans of which are children, ONE MILLION CHILDREN, don’t.
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