A new VR headset to play with, and apparently impossible programming problems solved, against a terrible political background of war and atrocity.
Me
New VR Headset
1) Install our app!
You must install our app on your phone!
[RELUCTANTLY INSTALLS APP ON BACKUP PHONE, logs in.]
2) Redirects to the website to log in with oauth.
3) Do you want website tracking cookies (NO)
4) We’ve emailed you a pass-code, log into your email!
(CHECKS EMAIL WITH MUTT, WHICH WON’T DISPLAY TRACKING PIXELS)
5) App asks for location (DENY)
6) Popup asking for more spying permissions (DENY)
7) Bluetooth and location services are required. You must grant permission!
8) Really really please can we have extra spying data? (NO)
9) Your have now paired your headset to this phone. [DELETES APP]
The point of all that is the spying data of course.
Could have just asked for my login details in head headset like they did the wifi password.
God I wish any other company in the entire world had bought Oculus.
Sadly, yes, it’s another one from Facebook.
The headset is heavier than the Quest1, but more slimline and feels more comfortable on my face. Your face may vary.
Controllers feel more wieldy without the big hoops.
Was mostly interested to see how the pass-through has improved since the Quest1.
Had big hopes.
But while being in Colour is definitely better, it’s still grainy and fairly low-res and warps around where the camera-views join.
AR-game “Zombie Noir” wasn’t great.
The graphics are cartoony and not well drawn and the pass-through was really pale and washed out.
The little “First Encounters” demo wasn’t pale or washed out so I dunno why that is.
First Encounters was pretty fun, having the little critters all invading my room.
Only a two minute demo game really.
The whole Augmented Reality thing has the issue that I figured it would have: occlusion is awful because it’s impossibly hard.
Hold your hand up on front of your face, it disappears behind even the most distant Virtual objects, blowing the illusion and confusing the eyes.
It can barely understand the shape of the walls and couch, it can certainly not track the positions and movements of me and others in the room in order to occlude things that should appear behind them.
I wrote more geeky detail if you want it over on the thread.
Godot Panorama
I’m moving my project to the free-software game-engine “Godot”, and I thought for a while there it would turn out impossible!
The long detailed thread ended with a Blog post describing my problems and a bit of help from the forums.
“Okay, we can think of extending the method though. Instead of six cameras pointed each along one axis, we can have one camera for every vertical column of pixels on the output image. Four thousand and ninety six cameras!”
Which of course was too much memory.
I solved it in the end. Just hundreds of virtual cameras, but rotating in 3d space like you spinning your phone for a panorama shot.
The final Code is on github for anyone now, so nobody else has to go to the trouble.
The Internet
Google is so shady these days.
I was Looking to book a hotel. The maps page has a dozen middle-men companies all bidding for place on the page to offer me 80 quid a night.
Book through Trip Advisor! Book through PriceLine!
The map has no direct link to hotel website at all.
The hotel website offers the room for 70 quid a night.
Nice work cutting out the middle men there internet!
Nostr
Nostr is Notes and Other stuff Transmitted through Relays.
It’s another ground-up grass-roots decentralized social network, coming from more of a bitcoin/crypto group of people.
I had a look at Satellite Earth which is a open-source Nostr client.
It’s lovely, it’s got the micro-blogging stuff on one column and reddit style communities on the other column and some kind of pay-by-lightning-for-media-hosting to fund itself.
And the Nostr thing where it’s all just the same account as if I logged in with Snort or Iris is still really cool.
There are a lot of good coders building things over on Nostr.
And it’s all proper grass-roots stuff, not capital-funded and indebted.
It is not itself a crypto-scam, even if there are lots of crypto-scammers using it.
Hardest challenge they’ll have there is figuring out how you can be both censorship resistant and also well moderated.
It’s a pretty nice profile page they got going on over there too.
And that profile page exists for every Nostr user, even if they’ve never looked at satellite.earth or even heard of it.
They have reddit-style groups that the users create which can be ranked by either likes or bitcoin-tips (“zaps”).
Pay to top-post! Is that a great plan? I dunno. Maybe it is?
I’m not against paying artists for their work, but I never really liked karma-whoring and that was just for a high-score not even money.
The account-portability thing over on Nostr is just incredible really.
I took the same ID through three different clients as they all started to fail on me this month before trying this one. And I didn’t have to set up account forwarding or anything.
The World Is Flat
Did a poll and 6% of people think the world is flat, the rest all agree it’s fizzy.
Gaza
Well none of this is good it is?
I wonder how many terrorist origin-stories you create when you displace half a million children.
I guess probably not /all/ of them will become brutalized, so it’ll be less than half a million, at least directly.
It’ll take ten to fifteen years for it to mature before we find out I guess.🙁
~
Traumatized people traumatize people.
Brutalized people brutalize people.
♻️
You can only make it stop by stopping.
~
It’s quite eye-opening really how easily vast swathes of the public and political system can be whipped into supporting a genocide.
Not surprising exactly, the last century showed to anyone watching how easily you can drive people mad with revenge and blood-lust.
Seeing it live as you watch among your own countrymen, media and politicians is quite a thing though.
The oppression of any dissenting voice is enlightening. If you look where the demands for silencing any support at all for the terrorized people comes from, you can learn a lot about the control of your media and political systems.
All of them from across the entire political spectrum singing in harmony from the same hymn-sheet: This is okay, it’s fine, it’s legally justifiable, they are human shields, it’s the fault of Hamas, any protest at all is antisemitic.
The whole political class, won’t even urge a note of caution.
Sickening. The whole system is corrupt.
Democracy is a sham, our party system is entirely broken.
Our state is encouraging a genocide and selling the weapons to do it, with barely any dissent.
And there is no way to vote against it.
Which side is doing the most war-crimes?
I wonder which of the countries is the most genocidal of all?
There’s a few good contenders.
Of course it’s normal for states to be genocidal. A non-genocidal state would be quite an achievement! An actual civilization. Wouldn’t that be a good idea.
But still, there’s always a ranking.
There’s always one that’s currently the best!
Or worst. I mean worst. It’s bad to to good at genocide.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
Just one tarot show this month, the news was the same all month and I did a reading in week one.
I found that force and violent oppression can lead to temporary victory, but bigoted tribal nationalist and racist religious wars are based upon falsehoods.
They can only lead to cycles of revenge-violence, cruelty, horror and oppression for all the people everywhere.
Sadly there is no sign of the world raising it’s levels of consciousness just yet, so the cruelty and revenge will continue until science and understanding can bring about change.
The video and audio and transcript are here
Reading
Assignment In Eternity by Robert Heinlein.
A few nineteen fifties sci-fi stories about being human and superhuman and time and space and technology.
The 50s were a different time and the world back then was still full of credulity for things like telepathy and telekinesis and causal sexism.
Those are the things that date it as from a lifetime ago.
Some call Star Trek too “woke”, but that’s what makes it still feel like it’s in the future. Whereas it’s the two-tier sexist society that dates this less progressive material as from the past.
Nice stories though.
Sometimes the supermen are less human than the trained talking animals.
Links
AI
* Generative AI exists because of the transformer
The FT has a really nice and very well illustrated description of how AI systems use Transformers and training to produce large language models like chatgpt
Economics – Scottish Pound
* Viewpoint: It’s Scotland’s pound, and we’re keeping it
A great essay from Richard Murphy exploring the history of finance and money in Scotland and the inevitability of an independent Scotland having it’s own currency.
War
Most interesting reads on war and global politics:
* Death Wish 2023 – Craig Murray
“An independent Ukraine, shorn of the Eastern provinces that have never wished to look westward, is in the long term much more feasible and viable than some kind of military Valhalla created by an epic war of conquest.
“A negotiated and equitable end to this conflict is perfectly viable. It always has been so. The people of Europe have to reject the military industrial complex, the war profiteers and the blazing-eyed ideologues – and look for a fair peace.”
* Gaza’s shock attack has terrified Israelis. – 972 mag
“The dread Israelis are feeling right now, myself included, is a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily basis under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, and under the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza. The responses we are hearing from many Israelis today — of people calling to “flatten Gaza,” that “these are savages, not people you can negotiate with,” “they are murdering whole families,” “there’s no room to talk with these people” — are exactly what I have heard occupied Palestinians say about Israelis countless times.
* War and Peace in the Middle East – and why Israel has already lost – Paul Arbair
“..this moment is characterized by an accumulation of crises that keep blowing up, which often seem to be unrelated at first yet pile onto each other and feed each other, to the point of overwhelming the capacity of human societies to cope and respond, throwing them into vortex of dysfunction. This process is generating and feeding the increasingly widespread and pervasive sense of unravelling and failure that is being felt in many places around the world, and the resulting anger and tensions that are increasingly destabilizing societies and institutions. Maybe you are also having this impression that things are unravelling, that the society you are living in is in the process of failing. Maybe you are also feeling angry about it, maybe you even think you know who or what is to blame for all this…This situation is now often referred to as the ‘polycrisis’ or sometimes the ‘metacrisis’…”
* The “Absolute Right” To Commit War Crimes? Gaza, Israel And Labour “Opposition” – Media Lens
“The BBC reported in its usual ‘impartial’ way that people were ‘killed’ in Israel while in Gaza, Palestinians merely ‘died’. BBC News described intense Israeli bombing as ‘retaliatory air strikes’, conforming to the approved ideology that Israel only ever responds to violence, and never instigates it. The BBC did not describe the Hamas attacks as ‘retaliation’ for years of brutal Israeli occupation, oppression and killing and torture of Palestinians, including children. According to the UN, between 2008 and 2023, Israeli airstrikes killed 6,407 Palestinians in the occupied territories, 5,360 of whom were in Gaza. Israel had 308 fatalities in that time period. In other words, 95 per cent of the total casualties during this period were Palestinian.”
* Genocide Unfolding – Craig Murray
“That appears to be the end game: expulsion of population and territorial expansion into Gaza. That would require a ground invasion, but probably not until after even more intense aerial bombardment to eliminate all resistance. This territorial ambition of course accords with the violent expansion of illegal settlement in the West Bank which is currently under way, with the world paying almost no attention. It is very hard indeed to comprehend the passivity of Fatah and Mohammad Abbas at the moment.”
* ‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That
“Let us be clear: This is a fraught moment, and one that has polarized not only Americans but people all over the world. It demands incredible sensitivity and strict adherence to journalistic standards of objectivity, and simply put, that is something we aren’t willing to do. Rather, we’re just going to say The Onion expresses its steadfast solidarity with Israel and leave it at that. Why? First, because this editorial board doesn’t like getting yelled at.”
Video
* honest government ad Israel and gaza – Honest Media
“officially fucked, and against international law”
Strange goosey animations and music fro Cyriak.
* Are ALIEN SUNSETS The Key To Finding Life? – PBS Spacetime
The amount of information encoded in light is really actually incredible.
Here we can find that there’s slightly better than a coin-flip chance that a planet light years away smells of cabbage.
* The secrets of Einstein’s unknown equation – Sean Carroll
Sean Carroll has been my short term personal savior for so long it’s like we’re going steady.
Quaternions do my head in, but I guess tensors is like that only again and again?
* Can YOU win a 1-in-a-Million Game of 🪨 📄 ✂️ – CPG Grey
Someone will be the lucky 1 in a million player to beat CPG Grey at Rock paper scissors but it wasn’t me. I didn’t even get to round 3.
* The Youtube Effect – @alexwinter@mastodon.social
“So excited to announce that as of today, The Youtube Effect is available EVERYWHERE (with subtitles in 13 languages)!”
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
Imagine you’re at a party and everyone is chatting to each other, and someone pulls out a megaphone, and starts picking people in the party out and giving them the microphone.
So instead of everyone talking to each other, everyone’s listening to whoever has the megaphone, or queuing up for the megaphone, or doing tricks and silly dances and things to try and attract the attention of the megaphone handler.
That’s the algorithm that is.
It’s been a year since Elon Musk took over twitter, and many people have told stories of their first year away.
* @rolle@mementomori.social rolle, for instance
“…First I looked at mastodon.social, but quickly noticed the username rolle is taken. “That’s it, then”, I angrily tweeted that I do not want to join with another nickname, I’m rolle eveywhere AND THE NICK IS TAKEN. Someone immediately pointed out that I should join another instance. An instance, what’s that, huh? I then joined to a Finnish instance mastodontti.fi and quickly learned no English is allowed. A moderator pointed out that I should remove my post. Again, I angrily tweeted THAT’S IT THEN, MASTODON SUCKS, STUPID RULES. Another user politely explained that each instance has their own rules, why don’t you create another account. An instance, huh? I quickly learned about the nature of the service…”
Or
* @jwz@mastodon.social JWZ is more suscinct:
“I created my Mastodon account around 4 years ago but it lay fallow and I only started using it in earnest approximately one year ago today, and I have never looked back. It is now the only social media site that I read regularly…
Twitter: owned by Musk, a fascist
Blue Sky: funded by Dorsey, a fascist
Facebook: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
Instagram: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
Threads: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
Post News: funded by Andreessen, a fascist
TikTok: owned by the Chinese Government I guess?
Mastodon: owned by nobody and/or everybody! Seize the memes of production! “
Echoing what I’d said:
Thing is, if you’re quitting twitter where you gonna go?
Numbers Ten To Four: OwnedPost.News, Spoutible, Hive, CounterSocial, Cohost, Tribel, Threads
Capital owned. Same problem.
You know explicitly that the problem is that the ownership of your community can be bought and sold. Like with Bandcamp. Like with Unity. Like with MySpace.
Like with all of them.
Even if they are okay today, they will be sold to Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Google tomorrow. Tick tock. Tick tock.
Number three: AI Panopticon – Bluesky
Actual twitter-offspring, but done to avoid resposiblity for censorship even more.
Mostly a capital-owned company, still literally owned in part by Twitter Jack.
They want to build a decentralized network of mega-corporations who each hold a copy of the global index.
Those companies can compete to ram an AI driven funnel down your mouth like a Foie-Gras goose, and feed you exactly the influencers and celebrities that will most convince you to click on their adverts.
But you get to pick which mega-corporation you want, and the funnels come in personalized colours.
And also there aren’t any other companies yet.
And they are invite-only for now.
They will have moderation problems when it’s not invite-only.
Number two: Crypto Relays – Nostr
Not really very mature, but the developers are in a co-operative race and they are moving very very fast. Very geeky for now but not actually owned by anybody. Proper anarchy.
They will have moderation problems if they concentrate on censorship resistance.
Number one: Fediverse – Mastodon, Misskey, Firefish, Frendica, etc.
You can run your community server, and no mega-corp has to know anything about it. No adverts, no spying.
You join a group protected by a moderation-team who will block malicious actors. We cooperate on moderation by blocking malicious servers.
Not always all that well, but see also all of the above on that.
So what’s going on, on Mastodon?
notible newbies.
Bruce Pernes who founded “Open Source” joined us:
* @BrucePerens_K6BP@mastodon.radio:
“I am Bruce Perens K6BP. I am one of the founders of the Open Source movement in software, and also founder of No-Code International, which successfully lobbied to end Morse code testing for Radio Amateurs in most countries. I make my living as an Intellectual Property Consultant, specializing in Open Source, and am building a startup company.”
And everyone with a WordPress blog can join us too now:
* wordpress enables activitypub for all users
“wordpress joins the fediverse, all wordpress blogs may now syndicate through activitypub and fedi replies to into the wordpress blog.”
Twitter Migration
* Twitter Migration Report – Dewey Square Group
A report on the move away from twitter:
“As we saw in past reports there continues to be a steady decline in the number of Twitter users as more and more users “quiet quit” Twitter for other platforms.”
“Our Q2 2023 report found three additional migration patterns: a user migration and developer migration to other platforms, and a technology migration to open protocols undergirding them.”
Facebook’s Terrible History
* @kissane@mas.to’s excellent report on Facebook’s involvment in genocide:
“Part III of the Meta in Myanmar series is up: I’ve written these saga-length posts for the social technology community—people who make, use, and care about platforms and tools.”
* Part one
* Part Two
* Meta
AJ’s Peertube Project
* @ajroach42@retro.social is doing things:
“We’re still in the planning stages, but I’m launching a #FOSS project to reshape the way media is produced in the modern era. You can read a little bit about our vision here: https://mountaintown.technology I’m working to get the tools we curreently have available in to a presentable and sharable state.
I’m taking advantage of the fact that youtube has recently started rebuking people for using an adblocker to launch this thing I’ve been working on for a while.
I’m offering shared peertube hosting.
$15/year for 10GB of storage. Larger packages available.
Big beefy server, lots of juice. No live streams at this time.
All content held for moderation until I know I can trust you. Free accounts for patrons.
I even made a trailer, and I think it looks pretty damn good.
Art
* @revk@toot.me.uk is building a stargate:
“Time to dial the (desktop) #Stargate, #3D printed with 372 WS2812B RGB LEDs.”
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6259024
* @DiConX@mastodon.social has a wooden gameboy:
“Time to reveal my wooden Game Boy, which I CNCed out of walnut wood. How do you like it?”
“More details, footage and project files (under CC-BY license) can be found at Youtube: https://youtu.be/rECMivhOat4My blog: https://there.oughta.be/a/wooden-game-boy “
War
* @georgetakei@universeodon.com:
“The Israeli government has cut off food, water, and fuel to 2 million people inside Gaza as part of its campaign to stamp out Hamas terrorism. Collective punishment is not only contrary to international law, it is inhumane and illogical. It is what my community once endured in World War II, all because of the actions of others who happened to share our ethnicity. Have we learned nothing? How will this possibly help deescalate the violence rather than radicalize many more? It is madness.”
“One thing I never really came to terms with when thinking about the enormous atrocities of my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents lives that I have been trying to reckon with for the bulk of my adult life:
There is no great interruption.
The routine does not collapse. The expectations of “get up, go to work, eat, go home, eat, go to sleep, repeat” don’t get put on hold, even when people are being exterminated. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the early days of covid. So many died that we had to set up temporary morgue trucks.
Every day, I was asked to work harder. The US police force is operating as an unaccountable death machine, killing people from all walks of life, but disproportionately attacking black and brown people. The political and legal response to the largest public protests in my lifetime was to shrug and keep going. Go to work, pay your bills. Cop city is still being built. Dozens of people’s lives are going to be ruined by their opposition to cop city, for crimes as vast as distributing flyers and printing zines and operating a bail fund, and attending a concert.
But we have to keep going to work.
And now the government of Israel is punctuating decades of genocidal apartheid by bombing civilian evacuees, and revoking *access to water* to millions of people. And, what am I doing?
Going to work. Selling records and VHS tapes.
Enshitification
“If you own an Alexa, you might enjoy its integration with #IFTTT, an easy scripting environment that lets you create your own little voice-controlled apps, like “start my Roomba” or “close the garage door.”
“If so, tough shit, Amazon just nuked IFTTT for Alexa…”
* @openrightsgroup@social.openrightsgroup.org:
“The #OnlineSafetyAct is now UK law 😱
This grab bag of half-baked fantasy solutions to misunderstood (or misrepresented) problems has received Royal Assent, including powers to break encryption in messaging apps and censor content before it’s even posted.
Scrutiny over how Ofcom implements the law and how the government exercises its powers is critical now that the threats to privacy and freedom of expression have become law.”
* @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk:
“New legislative articles, introduced in recent closed-door meetings and not yet public, envision that all web browsers distributed in Europe will be required to trust the certificate authorities and cryptographic keys selected by EU governmentshttps://last-chance-for-eidas.org/ “
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