µblog - archive for 2023-02

🔗 Glory or Gravity?

John Hutchinson and Isaac Newton were both devout scholars who believed that the natural world and God were inextricably linked. The similarities ended there.

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🇸🇪🐦🧵Dan Tilert: På förekommen anledning har jag kollat på Svenska Freds hemsida vad de skriver om vapenstöd till Ukraina […]

Att väldigt väldigt mycket ogilla krig är en legitim inställning. Men det är, som nämnts, inte en ersättare för policy, lika lite som hopp är en strategi. Det säger oss ingenting om hur vi bör agera nu.

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🇸🇪🎶 är det verkligen fred vi vill ha - till varje tänkbart pris?

Med freden kommer segraren
Och han som slogs och stred
får på böjda knän och med huv’et lågt
ta emot den starkes fred
Och när sen tungan slitits ur hans mun
och hans ögon skrapats ut
och när ben och armar bundits ’hop
med övermaktens knut
när han har fått en trasa i sin mun
så att ingen hör ett ljud
då har allting blivit normalt igen
och ett krig har tagit slut

Och med freden kommer tystnaden
Allt ordnas underhand
Och folk och länder styckas upp
i samförståndets namn
“Så tag du halva jorden, bror
och halva månen med
så tar jag andra halvan
så är vi bägge två tillfreds”
Om man då kämpar mot förtryck och hot
för den frihet som man valt
då blir varje krig en segerstrid
och varje fred ett nederlag

– Michael Wiehe, Fred (Till Melanie) (1971)

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Yesterday over dinner we were speculating what the actress playing main character in Felicity (Keri Russell) was doing now. TIL she’s the main protagonist in Cocaine Bear.

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American right-wing idiots: “I don’t see any footage from Ukraine in the mainstream news, the war is fake!” Same idiots: “mainstream news always lies”. So the war is real, right?

Update, Mon 27 February 2023: of course it’s not in good faith:

twitter thread

1/ Why are far-right ‘influencers’ suddenly claiming, against all evidence, that the Ukraine war is a fake? They can’t really be that stupid, can they? Indeed, they’re not – it’s cynical manipulation, not stupidity. Here’s what’s going on.

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🇸🇪 fattar inte att jag bröt min Twitter-embargo med att svara på en fråga om artillerikalibrar

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I stumbled across a random software project that still advertised its IRC channel to be on #Freenode. I wanted to check that out, and discovered that Hexchat no longer has Freenode configured as a network. Now morbidly curious, I visited freenode.net to find the connection strings, and there was nothing there about that in the official documentation! I guess we can say Freenode is officially dead now (and yes I figured out how to connect, and the channel for the project is dead on Freenode. There are some people in the #Libera channel though).

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🔗🇺🇦 Robert Farley: Russia and Empire

But of course the Soviet Union was and Russia is an empire, in all of the most literal ways that a political entity can be characterized as “imperial.” It controlled vast territories populated by a huge number of ethnic groups organized with a clear racial and ideological hierarchy, and managed these territories through a wide array of political arrangements. It was (and is) not fashionable to describe Poland or Hungary as Soviet colonies, but they certainly were constituent elements of the Soviet empire, differentiated from Estonia and Ukraine only by some mild differences in governance structure.

[…] Folks who have no problem understanding why the citizens of Vietnam hate France struggle to understand why Poles or Ukrainians have negative feelings towards Russia. And unfortunately in the context of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, folks are reluctant to frame Russia’s behavior towards Ukraine as part of its long-term colonial project towards Eastern Europe.

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The statements “giant company makes record profits” and “giant company treats customers like shit” are in no way in opposition. Yet many commentators expect that the more money a company makes, the nicer it can afford to be to its customers. The cause and effect is the other way around, the more awful it is, the more money it makes.

Likewise, people are surprised that a company spends profits buying back its own shares, thereby enriching shareholders, instead of for example investing in maintenance or infrastructure or lower prices. The shareholders are the owners! The company exists to make them richer! Customers pay the company so the company can pay shareholders. This is not rocket science, yet the current cult of “the free market solves all problems” lead to this fallacy, that companies exist to make society better, instead of making shareholders richer.

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🔗🛸 “Balkan Cosmology” by Bruce Sterling

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Either you want to blog, or you don’t. If you don’t, no manner of technical solutions will help you. (And yes I’m subtweeting HN).

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🇸🇪 Låt den rätta inflationen komma in (SVT Text: ”Fel inflation vänder ner”)

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Speaking of Roald Dahl, here’s a good overview in the NYRB. Spoiler, he was a bit of a shit https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/12/22/making-it-big-roald-dahl-teller-of-the-unexpected/

This is also very funny considering the recent right-wing freakout over “editorial meddling” in Dahl’s works:

[Dahl’s biographer] Treglown, by contrast, makes it clear that the published version of Matilda owes a great deal more to the interventions of Dahl’s editor, Stephen Roxburgh, than it does to his romantic awakening. The Matilda of Dahl’s first draft was “born wicked” and most likely based on Hilaire Belloc’s poem “Matilda”: “Matilda told such Dreadful Lies,/It made one Gasp and stretch one’s Eyes.” This Matilda tortured her kind parents, declared war on her cross-dressing, mustachioed headmistress, and used her powers not to read but to fix a horse race so that her favorite teacher, Miss Hayes, a compulsive gambler, could pay off her debts.

Roxburgh gave Dahl everything that makes Matilda appealing: Matilda’s unassuming intelligence, the horrendous Wormwoods, the dovelike Miss Honey. He shaped Dahl’s lazy nonsense into a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Those of us who gained both our early, envious love of literature and a sense of its cultural imperilment from Matilda must offer thanks to Roxburgh. Certainly, Dahl did not. When he realized that Matilda was not officially under contract, he refused to do further edits and demanded a greater share of the royalties than [illustrator Quentin] Blake.

Update, Wed 22 February 2023: Wonkette has a good overview over how the anti-woke sausage was made: Oh No! Roald Dahl’s Publisher Made Some Really Dumb Edits And Now Free Speech Is Over. Note that this entire thing is market-based, the market for children/YA readers is fierce and it’s really easy to get on the wrong side of buyers. Whether this is cancel culture or not is debatable, what’s not debatable is that the market for racist right-wing views is understandably small.

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The French Republican calender was supposed to embody the universality of Man, but the month names are based on the local climate of France (Northern France at that). Via Wikipedia:

The Republican calendar year began the day the autumnal equinox occurred in Paris, and had twelve months of 30 days each, which were given new names based on nature, principally having to do with the prevailing weather in and around Paris and sometimes evoking the Medieval Labors of the Months.

• Autumn:
  • Vendémiaire (from French vendange, derived from Latin vindemia, “vintage”)
  • Brumaire (from French brume, “mist”)
  • Frimaire (from French frimas, “frost”)
• Winter:
  • Nivôse (from Latin nivosus, “snowy”)
  • Pluviôse (from French pluvieux, derived from Latin pluvius, “rainy”)
  • Ventôse (from French venteux, derived from Latin ventosus, “windy”)
• Spring:
  • Germinal (from French germination)
  • Floréal (from French fleur, derived from Latin flos, “flower”)
  • Prairial (from French prairie, “meadow”)
• Summer:
  • Messidor (from Latin messis, “harvest”)
  • Thermidor (or Fervidor) (from Greek thermon, “summer heat”)
  • Fructidor (from Latin fructus, “fruit”)

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Looks like the Roald Dahl estate have managed to piss off both the left and right by editing his children’s books to remove offensive content.

Update, Mon 20 February 2023: it seems a lot of these changes were made even earlier but some hack at The Telegraph decided to make woke-rage hay while the sun shined.

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🔗🇺🇦 Russia’s Eliminationist Rhetoric Against Ukraine: A Collection

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🔗 JK Rowling was always this terrible

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Blogging protip: if you figure out something good to post but it’s too late, write a draft before going to bed. Can’t for the life of me remember the bon mots I was gonna share this morning…

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Technofetishistic egotism

Bret Devereaux:

[…] I will stipulate that much of the boosterism for ChatGPT amounts to what Dan Olsen (commenting on cryptocurrency) describes as, “technofetishistic egotism,” a condition in which tech creators fall into the trap where, “They don’t understand anything about the ecosystems they’re trying to disrupt…and assume that because they understand one very complicated thing, [difficult programming challenges]…that all other complicated things must be lesser in complexity and naturally lower in the hierarchy of reality, nails easily driven by the hammer that they have created.”

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🔗🇺🇦 Robert Farley: On Russian atrocities

A lot of “realists” would like to pretend that the people living in the occupied territories all prefer Russia anyway, but given the above testimony this is obviously not the case. Contra Bob [Wright], it’s not just “war” that introduces the opportunity for atrocities; a peace deal can also set the terms upon which an army can conduct all of the atrocities that it would like to perform.

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🇺🇦 Western simps for Putin seem to be able to hold two ideas simultanously: “Russia is a great power and the last hope for Western civilization” and “Russia is unstoppable because it has endless supplies of obedient soldiers it can order to die in human wave attacks”.

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🔗🐦 A Twitter thread with links to some works by Iain [M.] Banks

• BBC Radio 4 Bookclub - Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory
• The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks
• The Difference Is Entirely One of Setting: Iain Banks’ The Crow Road
• Iain Banks’s The Bridge: the link between his mainstream and SF work

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I am once again reminded that the post preceding this one could not have been written in #gemini with #gemtext. In source, it’s 5 rows of Markdown. With gemtext I’d have to use at least the double, and mess up my prose with long URLs. And of course, the kicker, I could not accurately have reproduced the title of the penultimate link (no italics in gemtext!) Link, source.

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HN very excited about news that a popular initiative in Switzerland is proposing to ban all-digital currency, no-one points out that the organization proposing it is your basic right-wing conspiracy (antivaxx, anti 5G) outfit: fbschweiz.ch.

Update the fact has now been pointed out in comments.

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🔗 Norton’s Dome

Fun physics / maths brainteaser.

• HN discussion (and from where I got the link)
• A rebuttal
• Another rebuttal (DVI format)

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A more relaxed Elden Ring build (INT)

I started my 2nd character as a spellblade, high INT but not a pure caster. I focused on DEX and used Moonveil, but never really got into it. Juggling ranged spells was tricky, and Moonveil didn’t have the damage I was used to from using greatswords with my first character. Just before Maliketh I created a new character and started playing with that instead.

Then I stumbled across this video and Was Intrigued. I decided to try it out. I respecced (basically DEX -> STR) and upgraded the Dark Moon Greatsword[1].

And oh man is it nicer. DMGS is so FP efficient, just buff it then strong attack for days and stamina. Just having a couple ranged spells removes a bunch of clicking around to find what you want. The original build included a shield but I skipped that because I was quite used to playing without a shield in my other characters.

Using this setup I breezed through some stuff I’ve been avoiding, like Lichdragon Fortissax, and had no problems dealing with Maliketh and the penultimate bosses.

[1] it’s a bit weird how the game throws somber smithing stones at you. Sure the top-level ones are gated behind Farum and Consecrated Snowfield but if you know where they are they’re easy to get.

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🇺🇦 I wonder how American right-wing cheerleaders of Putin square their adulation with the fact Russia is using Iranian drones to target Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.

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Did not expect to see Robbie Williams shill cat food in a Youtube ad. He must owe a lot of taxes. Or like cats, I guess.

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🔗 We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

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🐦 so the API shutdown didn’t happen?

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🇸🇪 ”Frost” får ännu en uppföljare, enligt SVT Text. Jag antar den kommer heta ”Tö”.

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Unconfirmed reports of heartless idiots on social media saying we shouldn’t help Türkiye with earthquake relief if they don’t let us into NATO. Do these idiots know what being a NATO member means? It means helping countries like Türkiye if they’re attacked. If we don’t help now with a humanitarian disaster, why should Türkiye trust us to help in a military alliance?

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🇸🇪 Rolig felstavning i TextTV: ”Spindömd bror överklagar domen”[1]. Ska givetvis vara ”spiondömd” men tanken på att en stackare döms till evig spinning är ju kittlande.

[1] https://texttv.nu/109/spindomd-bror-overklagar-domen-34454824

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🔗🇸🇪 Det finns få ursäkter för att vilja snälltolka J. K. Rowlings transfobi

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Internet nerds who make fun of people anthropomorphizing their pets unironically anthropomorphizing large scale learning systems.

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News of a massive earthquake in Türkiye. I hope Sweden sends what help it can to assist in search and rescue.

Update we are prepared to assist if requested.

Update 2 it looks really really bad, with aftershocks registering above 7 on the Richter scale. I have my own beef with the continued use of Richter scale values in media but that’s for another time.

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🔗🇸🇪 Detta bör givetvis prioriteras i försvarsbudgeten: ”Varbergs fästning i dåligt skick”

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🐦 Someone referred to current Twitter as “Vichy Twitter” in a Buzzfeed interview and it’s fucking perfect.

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🔗 ACOUP - Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge

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🐦Twitter finally turning off free API access will kill my preferred client, Oysttyer, and help wean me off the hellsite. I just wish there was as good a terminal client for fedi…

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Visiting Goodreads first time in a long time… get a message saying “Free Cryptocurrency Novel in Exchange for an Honest Review”. No fucking thanks. I really should look into non-sucky booktracking apps/sites.

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