The bathroom took all month, but it is finished. As of today, I have all my rooms back, they are no longer filled with building materials and bathroom overflow.
Also went to a gig, watched a comedy show, continued with Improv, and ranted about the new government and stuff.
Me
Building Bathrooms
You may remember last month the bathroom had been taken apart and I was left flushless and flannel-washing at the kitchen sink as they built the new one.
I had a plan to add a nook for the dehumidifier which added a couple of days, and watched them tile and tile for weeks.
They have this technique, where they’re screwing blocks into the walls to rest the tiles upon while the cement dries, which was new to me.
Hadn’t seen that kinda thing before.
Not sure how common it is.
Think you’d usually just start from the bottom, and use each lower layer to support the one above. Plastic matchsticks to separate ’em. But not here.
Seems like a useful technique when you have to tile over holes and weird shapes against wood, like here. But I think the massive overuse of it in my bathroom might be because of the stripes pattern.
The stripes are specified as one tile from ceiling and then one more tile below that.
Which makes it awkward to start at the bottom. Would require a lot of careful measurement for sure, to get the right size cut at the bottom to start with.
Worked well anyway.
Hadn’t thought about it much but reckon I’d previously assumed that the grout goes in first, it kinda looks like it’s behind the tiles right? Even seems like it might be the glue that holds them on.
Apparently not. Grouting seems to be last.
There’s photos from the build in the thread, and they finished just at the end of last week. My studio and bedroom are back, no longer filled with bathroom and building stuff!
Yes, I can see the back of my own head now. Both sides. Handy for shaving.
The support act was Jane Weaver and it might have been really nice if I was lounging in a smoke-filled chill-out-room half stoned, but I wasn’t in that state or that kinda comfy chair. Seemed slow.
Gruff’s act was more moving, the xylophone solo particularity groovy, Gruff continues to put together a weird show that I can’t understand many of the words of.
He seemed a bit nervous and a little stuttering, I guess this stuff isn’t well practice and honed yet.
Biggest laugh from the audience I think was when he explained that Buddhists don’t believe in God so when they are shocked they don’t say O.M.G, they just say OM.
A few other nice jokes and without much in the way of narrative structure yet.
Work-In-Progress gigs can be a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s something really honed that they’re just trying to put some polish on, other times it’s 80% missing the mark.
This one was closer to the latter, but that’s what you get from the tiny not-ready-yet gigs that are just under test really for now. I’m sure the final act will be much more confident and connected and fun.
Deleting Facebook
Facebook say they are “Responsibly and transparently” feeding all their user’s data into their giant AI oracle so it can answer questions about any of it.
I’ve been logging in once a year to post a reminder that I’ve left, and point the way out of there.
Your annual reminder that Adam has left facebook is a bit early this year and will be the final one.
Going to delete the account entirely after the weekend, probably Tuesday.
Facebook have never been good system-administrators. They promised privacy and a blog your boss couldn’t read, and delivered the greatest surveillance network ever conceived, sold our digital souls to the data-brokers, and locked us into a terrible panopticon.
They promised to show you only your friend’s posts and no adverts and no corporate junk and have delivered shrimp jesus, AI friends, spam, and adverts while actually hiding most of your posts so most followers don’t see them. They see that spam and adverts and shrimp jesus instead.
Now they are taking all of the labour we have provided and adding it to their giant AI neural-network to leak every word we have said into their general database.
I withdrew my labour, left for the free internet where we can own and control our own data and aren’t fed by algorithms designed by advertisers to manipulate us.
But now they intend to re-use my old labour.
So I’m deleting it. Even the history and the placeholder to point to my real websites will be gone in a few days.
This is my last post 🎺.
This account will self destruct in a few days.
See you on the free web.
Deleting Firefox
Mozilla have merged with an advertising company and started to enshitify their web-browser, adapting similar corporate-spy systems to Google, and adding AI-chat systems into the browser for some reason.
You were an experiment that didn’t last long and I never used you.
Just like some other experimental features that I also expect to never use.
And at this rate pretty soon maybe the whole browser
Good luck to those searching for a new instance.
There’s really no action that stake-holders in Mozilla Corp can do to replace the CEO and change the direction of the business/charity sadly.
The bosses are clearly being rewarded for their complete failure to maintain market share, let alone grow it.
They are not investing in a free open and open-source internet, they are investing in proprietary AI systems and corporate owned social forums.
It’s a shame to have seen this former charity turn into a business so thoroughly taken by the tech-bro mindset.
A petition wouldn’t do it at this stage, they are entirely consumed by money.
We need to somehow fund a new browser fork interested in the open internet instead of getting their part of the pie.
In fact I checked out a fork that takes out the telemetry and spying and advertising-company code and am now running Librewolf
It’s much stricter on privacy, and even has a switch defaulting to “off” for should sites get any permanent cookies at all!
I find it basically exactly the same as Firefox other than the toggle to allow cookies on a site.
I’ve installed all the same bookmarks/plugins, in fact merely by syncing my mozilla account (though that may have to go at some point, I hear you can run your own sync server)
Still gotta figure out what to do about an Android fork.
My dad’s been in hospital this week. I’ve seen it second hand. It’s also actually impossible to get an appointment at my GP. I’m glad I’m not currently really proper sick.
It was always the Tory plan to defund the national health system until it collapsed and then present privatization as the only possible reform.
It’s not even surprising that it’s the red half of the Tory Party that is in power to do it.
It was Labour that first started to privatize the NHS, that first started the ruinous PFI projects to ensure private capital owned the infrastructure.
Starmer reckons the only possible ways to fix the broken health service is to tax workers, or sell it to capital.
He won’t tax workers so it’s sell to capital or death!
Not even a single thought given to taxing capital to fund a nationally owned NHS of course. Such a thing is unthinkable.
And that is what makes this Labour party actually as Tory as the conservatives are. They believe that the state infrastructure should be privately owned by monopoly capital and the workers can rent it back with borrowed money.
I still maintain they are better: 10% less support for genocide is indeed better.
But they are the same. At least the lot in charge of the party right now.
Of course mostly they’ve been just in trouble for taking bribes/gifts.
She might be so disgusted at his cheap suit she doesn’t teach him any tricks on how to be mean to refugees and institute government sponsored human trafficking.
Is that the kind of world you want? One where Starmer is too poorly clothed to be able to hang out with people trafficking fascists?
It’s concise, but this is the best thing that we can say about it.
It’s venomous without being cutting, spiteful without any wit or humour.
It offers no decomposition of the music, no comment on the quality of the lyricism or the stickiness of the melodies. No deconstruction of the themes of the songs.
Not even any mention of the choreography of the videos or of the fashion of the singer’s wardrobe selection.
It’s often said that reviews in the music press tell you more about the reviewer than the record they are reviewing, and we have here no challenge to that general rule at all.
Over all I should say Trump should stick to politics and avoid music criticism, he clearly has no talent in the area.
Trump should have known better really.
Within a day he was being shot at on a golf course.
I posted a bad review of a Taylor Swift single on Amazon once and that very evening someone was shooting at me on the golf course.
Of course phones randomly go on fire and burn people’s legs all the time, but attackers being able to remotely trigger the behaviour could bring on various forms of peril even if it somehow remained limited to state-actors.
Which it wont.
Won’t be long till hackers and jealous ex boyfriends can figure it out too.
It has frozen now, they will never again update their word-frequencies-list.
Because the internet is already so full of AI generated digital slop that nobody can tell at what frequencies words are being written by real humans. They are drowned out by the robots, who have their own peculiar word selections and pollute all the samples.
The software library’s maintainer sunset notice is a sad lament.
Spam machines gonna leave us all in a zombie internet. 😦
And then the main AI I use now and then, Perplexity, started trying to finish my sentences.
Have you ever been annoyed by someone who thinks they know you well enough to finish your sentences but gets it wrong?
And as you talk, they constantly try to finish your sentence, wrongly?
What if they did it not even after every word but at every syllable?
I am myself actually afraid that it’s filling the internet with spam in ways that make it seem like spam has metastasised 😱
But, some questions have verifiable answers.
Especially programming questions.
P != NP
It can be easier to check an answer is right than to figure out the right answer.
By, like, miles and miles and miles to the power miles.
You think it’s a long way to the post-office?
You should see the number of exponentials in a travelling-salesman problem.
I have a *lot* of those types of questions, and the machine is mostly good at answering them.
Not only is the machine answering my verifiable-answer questions, it is allowing interlocution when there is a mistake in that documentation in a way that typical projects are not. Even if they are in the same time-zone.
Language is this ridiculous infinitely combineable structured model we have evolved to represent a world.
You do not know that galaxies exist because you have observed galaxies with your own eyes.
You do not know that atoms exist because you have seen them with your own eyes, or rubbed them between your fingers.
The meaning of those things, and the model of the world that they implicitly represent, is here in the language.
How do you understand what a galaxy is other than by words?
Does that make a galaxy meaningless?
Sure, there are a lot of red-herrings, but then that has literally always been true.
The documentation is so often a red-herring that people used to advocate against commented code for that reason.
Out of all of them, I like Perplexity:
It fills the context-window with a traditional-search.
It means the machine can give references to let you know where it got that idea, maybe clue you in when it’s lying, and seems a bit less likely to make things up as a result of checking it’s own sources.
My usual Firefox text-editor window corrects my spelling there anyway.
But this month they started to try and predict my next word…
😱 🙀 😱 🙀
I mean, apart from anything else, they are using the prompts to train, right?
At least some of the prompts.
If you prompt the prompter, you are going to pollute your own data with exactly the kind of problem which leads people to add “before:2020” to a search.
Capitalism’s AI:
I am desperate for real human input because machine-feedback leads to model-collapse. Must find real human data… Data!!!
Capitalism:
Prompt the user to say what we think they were going to say anyway, only bias it towards private capital owning the means of production.
It seems to have stopped for now anyway.
Maybe it only happens if they have idle GPUs or something.
Reading
I read “Technofudalism” by Yanis Varoufakis, in which he describes the collapse of Capitalism in 2008, and the rise of cloud capital as the economy instead forms around the restricted not-free markets like Amazon and the other web monopolies.
He talks for a bit about a turning point when the economic news was terrible, but the markets reacted by increasing prices.
The capital knew that the government response would be to print money, and inflate the price of capital. The worse the news, the more the government prints, the more the capital prices expand.
That did seem to lead to capitalism breaking down in 2008 with the transfer of the bankrupt bank balance-sheets onto the public ledger, and the money-printers since then funding asset-inflation and driving down the power of the workers.
He describes the way the non-free cloud “markets” operate and the way asset-price inflation driven by the money printing is funding the monopolization of the network.I’m not really convinced that the new situation will be long-lived enough to call it a replacement for capitalism though.
The money-printer driven economy doesn’t seem stable enough to last, though it’s collapse may well be uncomfortable to the point of deadly.
Watching
Star Trek Beyond
Watched Star Trek Beyond, the 3rd of that rebooted Kirk/Spock/Bones set.
That shot where Scotty it jumping from his escape pod to grab onto the cliff is pretty spectacular. Can do more or less anything with a camera when it’s all GCI I guess.
Like have characters running around the sides of corridors and their space-ship lands sideways, skidding through doors.
Even ridiculous warped-gravity sky-fights towards the end.
Love that team though, the Kirk/Spock/Bones set. “Beyond” captured them well, and since Simon Pegg wrote it and played Scotty, old Montgomery Scott gets a bigger part than usual.
Led into a trap, the Enterprise is destroyed, the team each isolated and the crew captured. Star Trek is brilliant man, I can never get enough. Dunno why it took so long to notice I hadn’t seen this one yet.
Episode 5 was just mental, with Sharon Rooney playing the multiple-personalities as “the housekeeper” and more.
Reminded me of doing improv, especially when Greg started acting other personas too and she just accepted it and yes-anded to accept that okay, he’s the lord of the manor now.
Loving the accents too, especially in E6, finding myself repeating half the lines in Brummy accent. Like being back home.
Who else ‘as facilities in Stowerbrige, Doodlay, an’ West Brum?
A list of the local towns from home. 😆
Biggest providers in th’ Black Coontray
People say ter me, why storage? Ah say ‘cos every kingdom needs a king! The plains o’ Africa got the lion, an’ the leadin’ storage solution o’ Wulver’ampton got Bob Mammot
🤣 Good stuff, Greg and the BBC do great at this kind of thing.
Talking about how Israel’s war on Gaza exposes their genocidal lust.
Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed ‘left’ evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party. All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed ‘right to defend itself’ – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants. All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion. All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide
He’s also been writing on the way the establishment media report on the Middle east.
I think people in general are getting better at seeing the fnords in the western capitalist propaganda that passes for news media.
The more they have to twist the truth the more obvious it becomes.
It’s still hard though, having been trained not to see them.
Cook manages to fill a long article pointing out case after case of the press’ constant oiling of the path to mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Media Lens once again contrasting reporting of terrorism done by Israel to the terrorism done by the IRA and Muslim organizations:
It is difficult to overstate the importance of these incendiary appeals for war, and more to the point, the impact on our psyches when these appeals for urgent ‘action’ are almost completely absent, as is the case now on Gaza. No newspaper editor would dream of calling for a ‘no-fly zone’ over Gaza.
…
We are trained to recognise a major crisis by the level of alarm sounded by corporate media. As with the evolving climate change catastrophe, it is all too easy for the lack of media alarm to persuade us that things are ‘not that bad’. Perhaps the climate isn’t really collapsing, or the problem is under new management. Perhaps the suffering in Gaza isn’t actually that bad. Otherwise, we would surely have heard more outrage from the ‘humanitarian interventionists’. Assuming we live in a basically sane society that is not drowning in moral and intellectual corruption.
Al Jazeera covers the USA the way the US media cover the rest of the world:
Efforts to restore democracy to the United States, a troubled, oil-rich former British colony with a history of political violence, may have suffered a serious setback this week after yet another chaotic presidential debate, some Americanists say.
the insurers haven’t bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they’ve bought off your boss – they’re sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you’re being suckered into paying. There’s so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot
NYMag examining the state of AI slop drowning out the internet:
In the nearly two years since, a rising tide of slop has begun to swamp most of what we think of as the internet, overrunning the biggest platforms with cheap fakes and drivel, seeming to crowd out human creativity and intentionality with weird AI crap.
Assange Speech
Julian Assange talked to the European Assembly, his first statement since his release from jail.
…I looked over at the applauding media, and thought how Julian had been slandered and traduced and his case entirely misrepresented for over a decade. I recalled how he had been wrongly represented for years as a sexual offender and as a lunatic who smeared excrement on walls.
Oh well … ‘there is more joy in heaven at one sinner that repenteth’
If the mainstream media are now willing to give positive coverage to Julian’s thoughts, that will be a good thing, as indeed largely happened over this event. His words on the assassination of journalists in Gaza and on the programming of targets in Gaza using AI were an excellent pointer towards where his thoughts are trending.
This video is trying to safe your life by looking at their audience’s behaviour: 3 of you will die this week because you looked at your phone while driving. Stop it! Check your speed and your balls and your mental health.
Apparently I am way over the average age for this advice though.
No longer will blocking someone mean they can’t read your posts, instead it will mean they can still read your posts but can’t reply.
The reason for this, they say, is that blocked people can always just view the posts anonymously.
Which is of course not actually a reason at all.
Especially since you can’t in fact view a thread without being logged in at Twitter ever since Musk took over and wanted to force everyone to log in.
So they are lying about the real reason, of that we can be sure.
What is the real reason? Probably Elon wants to be able to read the people who have blocked him I guess.
Maybe force his posts into the feeds of people who have blocked him too.
So Twitter will get even worse, while Fedi will continue to diversify.
Blocks still won’t work very well here but they’ll be working better than there!
Hilariously, a bunch of companies got together and launched a “Social Web Foundation”, Corporations joining up with a bunch of other corporations to ensure the fedi doesn’t fall under corporate control! 😆
The idea here is to make it a bit easier to see how well the various players in the fediverse support the Client-to server side of the ActivityPub spec.
You can punch in any ActivityPub discoverable web url or fediverse handle, and BrowserPub will discover and display the underlying AP
If you’re confused by why The Guardian doesn’t seem to know how to cover the far right, lemme tell ya something I learned not long ago.
…
In 2020 two academics published a paper looking at how The Guardian has been mainstreaming the Far Right. At the core there is one problem (this is my simplification): the conflation of Far Right concerns with ‘the people’.
By default whatever the Far Right says has be taken more seriously than anything even left of center (let alone further left) which is also why the Guardian often uses ‘populism’ and ‘the far right’ interchangeably.
It’s official! #Liotia will no longer be on Spotify, Tidal or other streaming services. We’ve been considering this for a while and decided that if Spotify can’t support independent musicians then why on earth should we be paying to advertise their services?
Telling people to ‘check us on Spotify’ is frankly embarrassing. Check us on radio, check us on Bandcamp/Faircamp/Mirlo/Wavlake etc.
This is a good point. A GPU/NPU tax of roughly $1/year per watt of power consumption would work wonders to blow up the AI bullshit! Your Android or iPhone would pay pennies, a gaming laptop might pay a ghastly $50/year surcharge … but LLM-grinding data centres would get slammer for billions a year.
Case in point: there’s no way to build a backdoor that only the “good guys” can use. When the entire technical community says that the EU’s ChatControl legislation + similar pose serious cybersecurity threats, we’re not exaggerating for effect.
