µblog - archive for 2023-04

Personally I feel science fiction is off-topic on Lobste.rs so I’m posting my views here.

This is a proposed reply to this comment, which I actually find reasonable.

“How to be a good human” has been an open question since the dawn of civilization. Many systems have been proposed, none have become universal.

The current crop of AI doomsters are a good example of the old joke that for some people it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism. The vision they espouse (Bostrom) is of an endless expansion into the universe, converting all matter into substrates for running simulations of quadrillion upon qaudrillions of humans doing – what? Shopping, I guess. Oh, and fucking.

One can only imagine their horror if the provably benevolent AI overlord decrees that the best way to preserve humanity is to reduce the population to, say, 10 million globally and ensure this population lives in harmony with the biosphere until the sun becomes a red giant. Or if the way to reach the stars is simply Communism. After all, the signals provided by the Market can trivially be simulated by a superintelligent AI, who will decree who works with what and how much their labor is worth. Any opposition to the Grand Project of Mankind Reaching the Stars will be dispassionately eliminated.

In both these cases AI has preserved humanity, but at an intolerable cost to the right-libertarians currently cosplaying as humanity’s saviors.

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Why I believe Russia was behind the Nord Stream pipeline explosions

(from this HN thread)

• disabling Nord Stream I gets Gazprom off the hook for failing to deliver gas to customers in Europe through force majeure
• Leaving one pipeline of Nord Stream II intact left a door open for Germany to get gas in exchange for ending support for Ukraine
• it’s a not so subtle message to Nato that Russia sees the Baltic as their lake, and underwater resources are not safe
• planting disinformation about “who really did the deed” was used to sow discord among the de facto allies of Ukraine.

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Not only Walpurgis Night / Valborgsmässoafton, nor just the birthday of the King of Sweden, but also the anniversary of Hitler’s death. A red-letter day.

Also the anniversary of the Telavåg tragedy, one of many Nazi war crimes.

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Putin-friendly outlet #1 on HN, totally normal, news at 11.

The rag in question: https://covertactionmagazine.com/category/ukraine/

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🇸🇪 på 80-talet gick det för sig att benämna ett samlingsrum på Matematiska Institutionen i Lund ”Gauss-kammaren”. Vet inte om det funkar idag.

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🔗🎥 Bruce Springsteen on his landmark album “Nebraska”

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🔗🎵 Lloyd Cole And The Commotions Reviewed!

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One year of microblogging

This blog was launched a year ago. Since then, I’ve published 673 entries. It’s replaced Twitter for me, and even if I miss the instant engagement Twitter gave it’s worth leaving the sinking muskrat ship.

I really enjoy being able to write everything from a word to an essay, with Markdown support.

What I do miss most is good mobile posting. I’ll look into that going forward.

Update, Tue 02 May 2023: JFC I just basically restated my views after one month, I’m getting senile.

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🔗🔊 The ATP podcast hosts discuss modern “portable” cameras

Ricoh GR IIIx, Fuji X100V, and Fuji X-T5 – all of these are new to me.

Interesting thing is that Arment was into fixed-focals, specifically 40mm-e, which I like as well. Pros for the image quality, cons for portability, and big drawbacks regarding integration with anything other than a computer with an editing program.

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🔗📷 Dante Stella: Dear God, the film base is gray

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Weirdly enough, the news that a Russian submarine support vessel was observed near the Nord Stream blast sites four days before the incidents has failed to set Hackernews ablaze.

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🔗🇩🇰 Forsvaret bekræfter: Rusland havde specialfartøj nær Nord Streams sprængningspunkt

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Tucker out. US Trumpian fever breaking? Somehow doubt it.

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Bag End. He always knew it would come back to that. The same old place, the same old rain that never stopped. The same suspicious glares from passers-by as he made his way to the house where the old master lay dying.

– 🐦🧵@lavietidhar

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I should start re-reading Evelyn Waugh.

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🐦 Next obvious mitigation step from Twitter is to gate the ability to block accounts behind a blue check #blocktheblue

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I was wrong yesterday, blue checks have value. It’s a good signal that an account is ready to blocked.

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So sad, he can make a car that blows up and a rocket that blows up but still can’t write a tweet that blows up.

– 🐦@daniel_barker

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Blue-check shills are complaining people will pay $8 for coffee but not $8 for a blue check. They’re missing the point, coffee is worth something. A blue check isn’t.

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Another day on lobste.rs, another day breaking lances white-knighting for Perl.

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Seriously, hating on Perl is such a nerd shibboleth. Express any positive sentiments about the language and get slaughtered at the ford.

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The irony of free software dudes lamenting the death of the native app when web-based applications were the thing that finally made using Linux as a daily driver viable.

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🔗 The Economist (free link): How intrepid Victorian surveyors mapped the length and breadth of Britain

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The signs were there all along

[Musk] once got pushed down the stairs by a classmate after he made a mocking comment about the suicide of the boy’s father.

– A Grand Unified Theory of Why Elon Musk Is So Unfunny

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🇸🇪 känns helt klart som om den här regeringen är OK med att kriskapitalisera 3 år och sen köra full kulturkrig inför valet för att vinna igen. Det funkade för Tories ju.

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🇸🇪 Regeringen: för att inte urholka dom rikas köpkraft måste vi inskränka köpkraften hos fattiga, arbetslösa och bidragsmottagare.

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🇯🇵 tokyo storm warning

Someone tried to assassinate ANOTHER Japanese Prime Minister at a campaign appearance and it barely made headlines.

– @prchovanec

They’re so tired of shooting protest singers
They barely even mention us

– Elvis Costello

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🇸🇪 känns som om SD borde vurma mer för att få tågen att gå i tid. Det är ju liksom deras förebilders grej.

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1940s: betray one’s country for ideology

1990s: betray one’s country for money

2023: betray one’s country for likes

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The manufactured panic about falling birthrates (in developed countries) pushed by VC billionaires and “effective altruists” are leading some Hackernews into very dark places. Basically women’s rights have to be curtailed to ensure that white children have a future and can reach the stars.

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🔗 Substack Is Not a Neutral Platform: The newsletter platform is the latest tech company to turn a blind eye to anti-trans arguments (2021)

(via @mhalila@mastodontti.fi)

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🔗✝ Andrew Brown: Alpha

(via @Peternimmo@mastodon.scot)

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🇸🇪 jag var idag dagar gammal innan jag iddes ta reda på varför det verkar vara 2 dagar mellan jesu död och hans uppståndelse, och inte 3 som folk har sagt i typ 2000 år

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🇸🇪 (ljud)bokrecension i huvudbloggen: Ingen vanlig pappa som man bara har

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Twitter-Substack catfight is the alt-right Schadenfreude I crave.

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“The Forbidden Newsletter Company” is a better name than substack, ain’t gonna lie. Felon’s onto something.

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“Wi-Fi Dead Zone Killer” is the name of my next band.

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🔗 Techdirt: Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It

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🐦🧵🇸🇪 Det är många som har åsikter om fossilfritt stål, Hybrit och LKAB. Det har även jag. Många är negativt inställda. Det är inte jag. Så ta en kopp kaffe (eller en öl) och häng med på denna MEGATRÅD så ska jag reda ut ett och annat missförstånd.

– @simonwakter

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🔗 Wanda Montlak Szmielew

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Türkiye Foreign Minister just invoked Godwin’s law.

I mean, SD are trying to make Sweden like Nazi Germany, but they haven’t really gotten going yet (warrantless wiretapping is a decent start, though).

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Free Software advocates have been surprisingly quiet about the fact that a company sponsored by Microsoft is hoovering up FLOSS code for its LLM, as well as the clearly enunciated plans to erode the human craft of software creation with machines, using those same models. Right-libertarianism is a hell of a drug.

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Russia’s all like “we’re not mad Finland joined NATO, please don’t put it in the paper that we’re mad.”

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Given the overwhelming hype around “AI”, LLMs etc., taking the contrarian view that they’re actually not going to fundamentally change society is looking increasingly viable.

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Still mad at the philistine at KTH in 1993 who named the university computer lab’s computers after the moons of the solar system - Ganymede, Miranda, etc, and then used Moon instead of Luna.

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Idly interested to see where Doge is in the “market cap”[1] race since Space Karen added it to the birdsite, and it’s hilariously in the top 10, while Bitcoin knockoffs “Bitcoin Cash” and CSW scamcoin “BitCoin SV” are at #27 and #65.

[1] “coin market caps” are fake AF but CoinMarketCap.com the site has an OK API.

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🔗✈ HushKit: Flying Hercules for the US Coast Guard

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