🔗🇺🇸 Elite Conservatives Have Taken an Awfully Weird Turn

The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—is, according to one critic, indicative of the educated and activist right’s “admiration for the [European] aristocratic past” and a longing for a new elite to which it feels it belongs. This segment of the right has, both programmatically and aesthetically, lost interest in conserving that which is American and moved on to mine its influences from stranger sources.

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🔗🇺🇦 Main blog: “The moral bankrupcy of the IR ‘realists’”

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“Nominative Determinism” is the name of my next band. “Successful Band” is nominative determinism for my next band.

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I can’t be the only one making spreadsheets with my Elden Ring character’s stats, can I?

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🔗 🐦 In c. 1940, a student named Katja Meirowsky cut the swastika out of a stolen Nazi flag, sewed the rest into a dress, and wore it to her Berlin art school. This act nearly led to her death - and shows how important art for protest can be, if only to save the artist’s own soul. 🧵

By chance, I found this link just 10m after reading some nerds making fun of Germany’s laws against antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

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🐦 Every time I open Twitter now the timeline is set to the useless “Top Tweets” instead of latest.

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🔗🇸🇪 Succé med varmare hjärntvätt

Fullständigt briljant rubriksättning.

Sen tycker jag det är konstigt att det krävs forskning för att få reda på att man får bättre resultat genom att tvätta hjärnan efter operation i kroppstempererat vatten istället för rumstempererat. Hallå, brainfreeze?

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🇸🇪 Ett enormt sus gick genom lokalen, som om ett storm i ett vattenglas plötsligt lagt sig. Det blev nog inget #swexit den här gången heller.

EU: Ingen snusändring för Sverige

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🇸🇪 Uppdatering: lappugglorna återförda till Skansen

Tidigare.

• Två ugglor rymde från Skansen – en åter infångad
• Skansens lappuggla Percy hittad – satt på Lidingö stadshus

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Gemsite shutdown notice

My gemsite at gemini://gerikson.com/ will be shutdown permanently no later than 2022-12-31.

Its certificate has been expired for some while now and I’m not interested in either renewing it or continuing to use Gemini as a protocol for publishing.

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🔗 🐘 jwz: Mastodon stampede - “‘Federation’ now apparently means ‘DDoS yourself’.”

Presumably each of those IPs is an instance, none of which share any caching infrastructure with each other, and this problem is going to scale with my number of followers (followers’ instances).

This system is not a good system.

On fedi: https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294

Next person who says “maybe you should use a cache” gets blocked.

– @jwz@mastodon.social

More from @crschmidt@better.boston

lol, and because @jwz boosted this post – which does not include my URL in it! – I got another stampede… because Mastodon fetches the “context” of the post as well, so all the Mastodon servers with someone following jwz got both this post and the parent post indexed, and those servers all crawled mine as well.

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Today in 2020’s problems: planned to work from home, forgot laptop in office.

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🔗 Main blog: “Parsing RFC 3339 timestamps using strptime in Perl”

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“Hiring Google style is out. Firing Musk style is in.” – @varjag@mastodon.social

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There is an envelope marked FASCIST MANIFESTO on my desk. I open it and retrieve a 3x5 file card, with the words “I am neither conventionally right nor left” written on it.

– @electricalWSOP

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Inget På Spåret ikväll pga nån jävla fotbollsmatch? För jävligt.

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It always amuses me to see cryptobros fail to understand legal proceeding basically because they don’t see why something like money laundering should be illegal in the first place. So why should someone be detained for doing it?

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“The Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules”

From The Great Renaming FAQ.

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🔗 “🧵 Today, I’m sharing my long-standing theory behind a US government covert operation designed to partially crack Bitcoin privacy and deanonymize transactions. I believe that popular Bitcoin mixer ChipMixer is actually a United States government honeypot. Here’s why.”

An entertaining conspiracy theory. I hope it’s accurate and coiners get jailtime.

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🇸🇪 SVT frågar: “Vad krävs för att kriget ska ta slut i Ukraina?” Enkelt svar: Ryssland drar tillbaka sina styrkor från ockuperad territorium och upphör med angrepp på civila. Svårare än så är det faktiskt inte.

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🐦🐘 Not an endorsement per se, this service made finding Twitter followers who have fedi accounts a breeze: https://movetodon.org/

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🔗🆆 Erskine Childers

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🇸🇪❄️Den jämställda snöröjningen lyser med sin frånvaro🤬

Fyra dygn efter den stora ”snökanonen” är trottoarerna i Årsta fortfarande varken plöjda eller sandade. Inte ens i närheten av lokaltrafiken har staden gjort det lättare för barnfamiljer, pensionärer eller rörelsehindrade att ta sig fram. Men bilvägarna är plogade. Det är bedrövligt!

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⏰🖥 Bye-bye, leap seconds

So apparently Big Computer has bullied Smol Astronomy (and Russia[1]) to stop adding/subtracting leap seconds to UTC to keep it within one second of UT1. I’m sentimentally attached to the idea that local noon should be as close to the actual time when the sun is highest, but the reality is that most people probably don’t live in a civil timezone where that happens (hi, France and Spain!) and DST changes mess that up even more.

[1] the GLONASS satnav system apparently handles leap seconds? Who knew!

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Something big is brewing in crapto and I can’t wait for the other shoes to drop.

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⚽ Not a huge fan of KSA but them beating ARG is nice #qatar2022

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🔗 Lappugglor har rymt från Skansen

Två lappugglor har rymt från Skansen i Stockholm, rapporterar Aftonbladet. Djurparkens avelsuggla Percy och hans unge Barr flög iväg när inhägnaden gick sönder på grund av snö som tyngt nätet.

Lappuggla == Great Gray Owl == Strix nebulosa, probably one of the coolest Latin names ever.

Gratis lektion i svenska: “avelsuggla” är rätt nära “avelssugga” men det är både fel art och fel kön.

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🐘🐝 The buzz around Hive

I’m not surprised the app Hive is getting traction among the masses fleeing Elmo’s dumpster fire. It’s slicker than fedi, there’s one service to sign up for, not a plethora of instances with weird rules.[1]

And you know what? I think a commercialized service is what can absorb the flood right now. Especially if it’s aligned with the values of Twitter (such as they are). There’s an impedance mismatch between Twitter culture and Fedi culture that’s going to be hard to overcome. A service that’s prepared to monetize the traffic, pay for moderation, handle DMCA violation etc. is probably a better fit.

Anywhoo I got an account there to squat my nick but I won’t use the service.

[1] I know there are doubts if Hive is really on the up and up, see these threads

• @rahaeli thread
• @NeolithicSheep thread

but I’m not delving into that right now.

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Understanding #Mastodon gets easier once you get the basic idea that federation between servers can be understood as homeomorphisms across hyperplanes between the Riemannian manifolds of toots, whereas the servers represent countable finite sets of discrete entities—

– @allo@chaos.social via @cstross

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Snökanon >> kulturkanon.

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🇸🇪 Björn Söder: det är viktigt att parterna i Tidöavtalet “uppträder med värdighet”, och inte “slår varandra med järnrör”.

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I can’t believe Tether is going to survive Twitter.

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Felt really good about my Elden Ring progress yesterday (got Tiche, defeated Morgott) but today realized it’s probably just because I’m overleveled.

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Status 13:06 CET - Twitter fine, Mastodon.social not loading…

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Felon fans are desperately insisting it’s malice, not incompetence (he wants to crash the dollar along with the Saudis!)

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🔗 Memento Moridomo

Combining the grandeur of having a slave whisper that you, too, will die in your ear at moments of your greatest triumphs with the modern convenience of an alarm clock, our revolutionary innovation reminds you of your impending death at regular 25-minute intervals, after which you can take a quick triumph break.

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I quit Twitter before it was cool.

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I honestly expected a lot more Nazis and a lot less incompetence from Husk. Pleasantly surprised despite the imminent collapse of birdsite.

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I am once again predicting that Elmo will pay Orange Man money to tweet.

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Grattis till min mamma, 80 år idag!

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☢️ That sudden realization that people who shitpost on Reddit are now gonna inhabit positions of power

@katienotopoulos 🧵:

This is a very fun story and I have many thoughts, but being anti-car seat is, to me, the best part: Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’

The main couple profiled in the story is mentioned as having a viral Reddit proposal, which, I beg you: you NEED to read to understand who these people are: How I Proposed to My Girlfriend on Reddit

Now that I know their Reddit handles, I’m sorry but you have to now also know that the mom made an anime body pillow of herself as a gift for the dad: My Creative Anniversary Gift

Also that the dad posted videos of his kid accidentally eating a raw onion to r/KidsAreFuckingStupid: My kid HATES being told what to do. His granddad told him not to eat an onion.

(That kid would be Octavian, btw. His sister’s name is Titan Invictus.)

This is all very fucking weird.

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The Wikipedia article on Toussaint L’Ouverture is around 11,000 words, and has 144 citations. The article on Arthur de Gobineau, obscure French racist, is 17,000, and has 195 citations.

🤔

Update 2022-11-18: slowly slogging through the Gobineau article. According to it, he was so racist he opposed slavery because it could lead to “miscegenation”.

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Fediverse 2 months ago: please join us to escape social media! Fediverse now: go away, we are full.

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Was it 2 weeks or 3 between headlines warning about the dangers of “Effective Altruism” influencing policy and the ones saying EA is basically all frauds?

FWIW I believe EA is a stalking horse for fascists but the turnaround is stunningly fast.

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🐦 Got an updated Twitter archive! Thanks, people still keeping the lights on over there!

It took about 3 times as long a time as forecast but hey.

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I consider myself well-versed in SF history and I have a passing knowledge of the 1930s, but the “Technocracy Movement” is news to me.

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/amendlocke/status/1592253571105447936

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Simplest way of determining if something has actually happened is if Russia denies it has happened.

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At this point, even Andrew Lee is shaking his head at Felon’s antics.

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Current bonkers alt-right theory that FTX and disgraced boy wonder SBF were “laundering money for the Democrats” presupposes there was any real money in FTX to begin with.

(ofc I found out about this via an Elmo tweet)

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🔗 Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon: Audiophilia and its discontents

The new OMA turntable, the K3, is a three-hundred-pound hulk cast in iron with a tonearm that looks like a miniature boom crane. It was on the October cover of Stereophile magazine, and the review was positive: Michael Fremer called it a “truly great audio product.” The magazine listed the price at $360,000.

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HN is taking the midterms hard, a submission on the front page is titled “The Case for Abolishing Elections”.

(to be scrupulously honest the linked article advocates for sortition, but the comments are full of anti-democratic spleen.)

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HN is just nerd People Magazine now: “Caroline Ellison (Alameda Research CEO) Deleted Her Goodreads Account”

Update 2022-11-14: we regret to inform you that Ms. Ellison seems to be into HBD

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🔗 Of sanctions and silencings: Russia’s war as cultural suicide

[…] it is hard for Russians in mass media to explain Ukrainian resistance. They lack any concept of a self-aware people. They see themselves as the clever winners and the Russian people as manipulable fools. They cannot imagine defending the moral nation with their physical bodies, and so cannot attribute such a motive to the Ukrainians. Hence Russian politicians and propagandists seek the power of Ukrainian resistance somewhere beyond Ukraine, or indeed beyond reality: in conspiracies of Nazis, Jews, gays, and Satanists. In these fantasies, no one ever has to ask what Russia is or might be, what Russian culture might represent, since it is defined as opposition to a phantom.

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🔗🐘 On Running a Mastodon Instance (2021)

With all the enthusiasm around about the Fediverse replacing mainstream social media, I found this piece to be a refreshing reality-check.

Conclusion: I don’t think the current system of “owner-operator” instances will scale, and we’ll see the rise of big centralized instances. A bit like how podcasts shaked out, actually.

(via @mikael@merveilles.town)

Update 2022-11-14: another view: Scaling Mastodon is Impossible.

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I can build a decentralized social network!

Why, so can I, or so can any man
But will the users come when you do call for them?

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🐘The R-word, and replacements

People moving accounts from Twitter to the Fediverse (mostly Mastodon) have been semi-jokingly calling themselves “Twitter refugees”. From a certain perspective, it seems to fit - you’ve arrived in a new “country” and aren’t sure you’ll fit in.

Plenty of people have pointed out that relatively privileged social media users describing themselves as refugees is insulting to real refugees, whose problems dwarf those of people losing their followers and likes.

A better term would be “mid-term school transfer” - there’s still a giant support system around you, you just have to adjust to a new social circle.

Anyway, I had “refugee” in my pinned post but removed it in favor of “Twitter quiet quitter”. I think the original concept of “quiet quitting”[1] was overblown and probably not real, but for this case it works. I still visit Twitter to see the car wreck from the front seats, but I don’t interact as much as I did. I’m basically costing Twitter more than I give back and that’s fine by me.

[1] basically, in an American context , not going above and beyond the job description. At first I thought it was something like 🆆work-to-rule, but more reading revealed it was employees not putting in unpaid overtime or working weekends. Capitalist propaganda, basically.

(The Wiki article does mention QQ as W2R but I reject that inclusion.)

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🔗🐘 JZW: Mastodon and Federation

So what I think is going to happen is, the Twitter Diaspora is going to descend on Mastodon, and they’re going to pick their instances essentially at random, for example through the time-tested technique of “the first one on the list that isn’t currently closed for sign-ups”. And then a few months later, the people actually running those instances are going to start flexing their muscle, and the users’ response will be, “Wait, who even are you? This sucks. I just wanted my memes”.

It’s gonna go great!

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🎵 let it go, let it gooooo

A while back when I started this blog I downloaded my Twitter archive. It was too big to fit on my VPS so I plunked it onto the work computer. I did some fairly non-trivial Perl coding to extract my tweets (not replies or retweets) and massage them into the format here.

If you check the archive before Apr 2022 you’ll see them.

I didn’t include images (I didn’t post too many of them anyway).

Anywhoo, that computer had to get its motherboard replaced so now that data and code is gone (thanks, TPM!). I could try to request a new archive but I think I’m too damn late with the current implosion.

I think I’ll just accept that I got the tweets out. Remember Jaiku? Good times.

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🔗 “It is a Mathematical Certainty” - Abigail Nussbaum delivers an elegy for Twitter

I think Fusk is purposfully driving this into bankrupcy so as to get out of the deal.

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Running a social media company is probably not as hard as sending people to live on Mars. What does failing to run one say about succeeding in the other?

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God I love you can edit posts on this fedi instance.

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This is a feature test, sorry.

There should be a [...] at the end of the first sentence indicating more content to be read on the web. This is for posting to fedi.

Update I’ve tested this without having to send to the fedi instance.

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Kherson liberated. Twitter still under siege.

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🔗 CW: birdsite analys, paywall - In the Hothouse

Twitter may not survive Musk, but if and when the website dies, I won’t be sure whether I should mourn it. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, and so sometimes it’s hard to know how to feel when such documents burn.

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🔗 Paywalled - FT: Sam Bankman-Fried is not very good at League of Legends

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It’s been 20+ years but I still hate Coldplay.

About the only good song is Aimee Mann’s version of The Scientist.

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🔗 Home invasion: Mastodon’s Eternal September begins

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The planet is still slowly boiling and there’s still way too many nazis, but I have to say that the Musk meltdown, mini-crapto-crash and GOP getting (relatively) thrashed has lifted my spirits somewhat.

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Dr. Oz? More like Dr. No 🔄.

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🔗 CW: Crypto collapse: J. Pierpont Moneygone — FTX rekt, bought by Binance

What happens next? It’s contagion time!

Alameda has likely been borrowing against the FTT it held — the FTT that is now crashing. (Earlier today, FTT was worth $19; as we post this, it’s trading at $4.60.)

Binance might rescue FTX, but it’s sure not going to rescue Alameda.

This means a series of margin calls by everyone who’s lent to Alameda. If Alameda defaults, those lenders will likely end up with worthless FTT.

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I don’t know how much more comedy gold my blockchain can hold…

So first off, the Twitter gray check thing they launched yesterday, to differentiate the real verified accounts from the soon to be scammy blue checks, was cancelled by Chairman Elon in a single reply tweet. Now the only way to see if a blue checkmark is really verified or simply paid for is to hover over it.

Then Binance, the biggest crypto exchange in the world, decided not to buy troubled next-biggest 3rd largest exchange FTX, leaving boy billionaire SBF high and dry and probably opening for further bloodbaths in crapto.

Third, the GOP didn’t manage to swell more than a gentle ripple in the midterms and his sycophantic coverers are saying Former President Cheeto-dust is bigly mad at his awful candidates bombing, and the elders in the party are sharpening the long knives in favor of horrible ball of human lard DeSantis. May the civil war be long and bloody.

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nopost

As usual, Matt Levine says it best:

One other point here is that if this is the story, then it is not a liquidity crisis but a solvency one. That is, the problem is not a timing mismatch, in which FTX’s customers asked for their cash back but FTX did not have enough ready cash because it had long-term but money-good loans out. The problem is that FTX took its customers’ money and traded it for a pile of magic beans, and now the beans are worthless and there’s a huge hole in the balance sheet.

– source

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“Fusk considers putting Twitter behind a paywall” - man, the parallels to Freenode are just getting more and more apparent.

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Got my work computer back after a defective screen fried it via USB-C and of course I now have to reinstall everything.

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Elden Ring journey two complete, finally managed to beat the Beast (using Pest Threads, very effective) to become Lord of the Frenzied Flame. Next up: Ranni ending, then I should be 100%.

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🔗 CW: crapto - Why NFT Artists Shouldn’t Expect ‘Royalties’

Note that Coindesk is a crypto shill sheet so they ofc are fine with creators being shafted. It’s typical though that one of the central promises of NFTs - that creators would get paid recurring revenues - was just so much hot air.

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Aujourd’hui, nous sommes l’octidi 18 brumaire, de l’année CCXXXI du calendrier républicain, jour de la dentelaire.

–@Ererepublicaine

–𝖊𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖓𝖆𝖑

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

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JFC Twitter really is Freenode II: The Fuckening. Every day brings new and hilarious details on how it’s all going to shit.

Today,

A lot of folks have asked about how you’ll be able to distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official, which is why we’re introducing the “Official” label to select accounts when we launch.

Not all previously verified accounts will get the “Official” label and the label is not available for purchase. Accounts that will receive it include government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures.

The new Twitter Blue does not include ID verification – it’s an opt-in, paid subscription that offers a blue checkmark and access to select features. We’ll continue to experiment with ways to differentiate between account types.

– @esthercrawford

Twitter: yo I heard you liked ticks so we put ticks on your ticks while you die of Lyme.

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10% drop in BTC today, I’ve seen better but this will have to do for now.

Ofc the big news is that formerly high-flying wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried has had to sell his sportsball-sponsoring exchange to another because all crapto is shit.

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Some big names following me on Mastodon, I am honored (ok I know it’s because they’re using a service to follow people from Twitter but it’s still cool alright??)

For context I mostly write here and it’s posted to my fedi account. You can get the whole experience directly (and faster!) using one of the feeds.

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Same dude who wanted Ukraine to give Russia everything it wanted is now saying parody isn’t protected speech, and like insecure nerds everywhere, citing Wikipedia.

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So if you pay for your $8/mo blue checkmark on Twitter, you’re not allowed to change your handle at all on pains of suspension? I’ve never done it but changing your handle is a thing a lot of people do on Twitter to respond to current events, make jokes etc. If you’re a paid user you get less functionality.

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nopost

Now, Twitter is like a Tesla on autopilot going after pedestrians at random.

–Slate interview with Manu Saadia

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David Golumbia: Fascism, Free Speech, and Musk’s Twitter

When fascism talks about “free speech,” that has to be understood in the context of its fundamental commitment to “us” and “them.” Free speech, to the fascist, applies only to us. We must be allowed to say anything we want, without consequence. We get free speech, in the most ordinary sense of free speech.

When it comes to speech, this means that fascists often seem to think that fascists can say anything, and non-fascists have to listen to them.

[…] Musk bought Twitter because he honestly believes that free speech means everyone else has to listen to and accept the torrents of racism and antisemitism his supporters have unleashed in celebration of his purchase of Twitter. We are less real than they are. We need to sit there and take it. That’s “free speech.”

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Imagine if Google just reactivated Google+, sucked the air right out of Fedi… dump your Twitter backup into it and it would recreate your graph automagically. G+ had its good sides, the realnames crap was not it, but they’d be a credible alternative to Twitter now.

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The irony of HN complaining that the fediverse is “hard to use”… every bubble has its blind spots. I don’t think the fediverse will absorb every Twitter refugee but the very fact it exists means that Fusk’s walled garden is full of secret escape routes.

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Prigozhin really has that Evil Villain look down cold.

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Kinda hit a wall in with my second Elden Ring character. Replaying the game reminds you that some bosses and dungeons aren’t that fun, even with a new build. Also I’m stuck in the final bossfight with my first character’s second journey and it’s frustrating.

I just want to get the frenzied flame ending (1st character) and the Ranni ending (current character). Maybe time to take a break.

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The legacies of the Ottoman Empire

Darke’s laudatory comments, however, will be welcomed in some parts of contemporary Turkey, where nostalgia for the Ottomans extends not only to hit TV series but to mainstream political debate that frames the end of empire as a disaster orchestrated by malign forces from afar. There has been talk of appealing to a “neo-Ottomanism” in foreign policy as a means of restoring the prestige of Turkey and the Turks, but also as a counterbalance to the perceived shortcomings of US and western policy across the Middle East.

This strikes a chord with the cocktail of nostalgia and imperialism that is being mixed in other quarters too, especially those that are heirs to crumbled empires. The most obvious parallel, of course, is Russia, where Vladimir Putin is the cheerleader of a chorus clamouring for the restoration of past glories and the re-incorporation of peoples who were once subject to the whims of rulers in faraway capitals. Something similar is afoot in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, where the Ottoman Empire is seen through the rosiest of tinted spectacles, as a benign entity that brought peace and harmony to all its citizens.

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nopost

Testing a way to write here without posting to fedi.

Update seems to work!

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Classic “trading memory for speed” implementation, Perl version:

Perl implements lists with an array and first/last element offsets. The array is allocated larger than needed with the offsets originally pointing in the middle of the array so there is room to grow in both directions (unshifts and pushes/inserts) before a re-allocation of the underlying array is necessary. The consequence of this implementation is that all of perl’s primitive list operators (insertion, fetching, determining array size, push, pop, shift, unshift, etc.) perform in O(1) time.

– Perlmonks post by lhoward

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Reminder: don’t implement functionality then go to bed.

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It’s increasingly clear that the world’s richest man, supposedly so smart he can run 3 companies at the same time, paid $44B to buy a company without knowing how that company made money.

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In terms of annoyance-to-rewards ratio, I think Gelmir Hero’s Grave is the worst dungeon in Elden Ring.

Chariots. And lava! And Pages, I hate those guys.

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CW: graphic imagery - How Russian soldiers ran a ‘cleansing’ operation in Bucha

This is the reality the “realists” who want to appease Putin accept - that people will be apprehended and murdered by Russian soldiers.

They don’t care, because they’re in countries far away from Russia, and if they aren’t they’d be first to sign up to be Quislings.

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WTF is wrong with (some) influencers?!

Dietz, more like ditz amirite.

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Odds on when the Fail Whale returns?

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Skin in the game / insane in the brain.

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Ghost in the Shell thoughts

GitS was mentioned on lobste.rs. I’m maybe not a superfan of the franchise but I believe it stands head and shoulders over most other manga/anime fare. But that’s because I really like material like Patlabor and Planetes.

I was late to GitS, I checked out the manga in English translation around 10 years ago from the awesome local library. I’ve watched both the “rebooted” movie and the original (better!) and the SAC series (great!). I’ve even tried to read the 1.5 manga, which sucks.

If I’d discovered it during the 80s when cyberpunk was new and fresh… I dunno. I kinda like the technofetishist sidebars in the manga but if you’ve read you Gibson it’s not really that new. It’s weird to me how cyberpunk has become an aesthetic now.

Anyway, GitS is fun in that Japanese way in that the main arc of SAC season 1 is basically just political corruption. There’s no “take over the world” as in so much media now. Section 9 is a police unit (albeit vigilantic) and the show is a detective show.

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Is the “S-A-B-C” tier list ranking more general than in soulsbourne games?

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Data point amid the Twitter hand-wringing - no participants in Sweden’s “Idol” have Twitter accounts. They have IG and TikTok handles. Twitter is for old people.

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Fediverse integration

I whipped up a small tool that will poll this blog’s feed and post new entries to a fediverse instance.

Because this blog doesn’t have comments, feel free to rant in replies to those posts.

https://mastodon.social/@gerikson

Code: https://github.com/gustafe/post-to-fedi

Edit it turns out that this is the 10,000th entry to this blog! Go me.

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A smart person simply would not have leveraged assets as collateral whose value was meaningfully affected by their own behaviour, and then very publicly nailed their own ballsack to a website nearly everyone hates, especially the people who use it

– @vexwerewolf

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Surprising (not surprising) to see the same people who were Very Wrong about Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine being Very Wrong about what to do about Twitter.

Update 2022-11-13: OK so I was subtweeted David Sacks here, there’s a profile of him, he seems terrible.

Sacks is quietly becoming the leading practitioner of a new right-wing sensibility that has emerged in the political realignments provoked by Trumpism and the pandemic. On foreign policy, it offers a blend of isolationism, Trumpist nationalism, suspicion of the deep state, and the anti-empire realism of John Mearsheimer. Domestically, the vision is more muddled, a series of angry poses, a politics of pique, much of it playing out on Twitter, Callin, YouTube, Rumble, Substack, and other online media, especially among people who may have once counted themselves on the left but now can’t countenance the sight of homeless encampments.

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Expect Twitter terminating accounts for having fedi addresses in the bio, Andrew Lee style.

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SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency-related projects to be removed

Excellent decision by Drew here, his stance against this waste of resources is to be applauded.

For those interested in a quick summary of the current pro-crapto talking points, the HN discussion offers most of them.

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Bullshit Reporting: The Intercept’s Story About Government Policing Disinfo Is Absolute Garbage

Masnick pushing back against this obvious trash that of course got lots of play on HN and among tankies.

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Automatically posting stuff from here to Fedi is coming along nicely.

(and yes this post might be seen as a test of that functionality)

It’s not ready yet though, it’s getting late and I don’t code good when tired.

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In the immortal words of Gen. Jack D Ripper:

I do not avoid Twitter, Mandrake. But I do deny it my essence.

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Not surprised seeing cryptobros misunderstanding what a Veblen good is when they’re advising Felon on how to price Twitter Verified checkmarks. These are the people who tried to sell butt-ugly monkey JPGs as Veblen goods, after all.

LGM: The Inverse Veblen

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Meta note on timestamps

I have discovered once again that the timestamp scheme I came up with when I created feed support was not optimal (The design principle was “LOL YOLO”). So I’ve changed it and thus (probably) updated all entries in all feed readers. Sorry about that. I hope it won’t happen again.

(It will happen again.)

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I thought watching Twitter descend into the nether depths of hell would be depressing but I have to admit it’s also quite entertaining.

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