Notices by Alistair Davidson (moh_kohn@mastodon.scot)

This is the kind of demographic catastrophe you usually see after a major military defeat. For Britain, it's entirely self-inflicted.

First graph: migration set to turn negative in 2026, with more people leaving the country than enter.

Second graph: British young people are leaving in droves.

I've been trying to express exactly this discomfort with modern interface design and especially LLM design and this lady nailed it back in *1993*

("A Small Matter of Programming", Bonnie A. Nardi)

@LinuxAndYarn Only just heard of it! In a discussion on bsky about how programmers used to read and engage in philosophy

Neurodivergent pals, I am suffering a new symptom. Yesterday I was forced to talk while nonverbal and stressed, and today I cannot speak. I am rarely nonverbal for more than an hour maybe, but this has lasted overnight and through the day. I am otherwise ok. Have you experienced this?

An interesting commonality between the UK and US descents to authoritarianism is the repurposing of liberal institutions. Civil rights law and procedures are used to enhance segregation in the US, in the UK the Equality and Human Rights Commission has become the body rolling back human rights.

Scotland made buses free for under 23s and it's driven record attendance at soccer games and a decade+ reduction in average age of attendees.

Free public transport has huge ramifications for society and the economy.

I'm in danger of becoming The Glasgow City Council Defender. They've been doing some excellent urbanism. And now it turns out Glasgow city centre has had one of the best footfall recoveries after the pandemic in the UK.

https://archive.ph/lxLsF

Reading programmer forums, I am convinced that people are overestimating how much LLMs are speeding them up. They talk about it getting the right thing 1/3 or 1/4 of the time on simple tasks, as long as you monitor it closely. Are you SURE this is speeding you up? I use it selectively but sparingly.

You have to beware slot machine psychology. When something provides you with a result at random, that can feel more rewarding and addictive than it providing a consistent result.

We should continue to defend the radical potential of the internet. CEOs appropriated the rhetoric of connecting the world as peers, then recoiled from the reality of it as women, african americans, and trans people connected and learned that they weren't alone, triggering mass movements.

My wife has a complaint about the Time Bandits TV series. In the last episode they travel to Bingley in 1996 and visit a goth party. She says there were only 5 goths in Bingley in 1996, she was one of them, and they didn't have parties.

@liztai Not sure what you mean exactly - there has been some rioting by the far right this week. Some of it was pretty scary and violent. There is a broader level of anger abroad and looking for an outlet after 14 years of continuous austerity, the far-right are trying to harness that.

I am currently fascinated by internet capitalism. Specifically, data as a commodity and as capital. It is all over the business press but massively undertheorised in economics as far as I can see. Usually that means something is ideologically inconvenient.

Google makes like £140bn a year from advertising which is clearly a really big deal but it's odd because what is actually being produced?

🧵

Varoufakis says position in Google and Amazon searches is like commercial real estate; they are charging a rent for a shop front. Consumer data certainly enhances the "land value" ("search position value"?)

Does that mean that when we search and like and so on we are performing labour? Creating this search position value?

One consequence of all this data collection is piles of data that companies don't really know what to do with. Hence "AI".

@anildash imagine writing "Decentralized technologies from the blockchain/crypto/web3 ecosystem will create a fairer, more inclusive economy" in December 2023

@ntnsndr Adding surveillance absolutely balloons costs. See also Mastodon Vs twitter.

@emilygorcenski $10 a month! For *facebook*!

BBC: "Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried's big gamble"

No, lots of us called crypto out from the very start. I was reading accurate critiques of bitcoin in 2012.

Journalists and financiers and politicians got duped or didn't care about the truth when there was money to be made.

Now you're trying to pretend nobody warned you? Get fucked.

@anildash hits right in the feels with this one - the death and return of the open web

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9wbRUW57sc

Speaking to mate who is a meterologist on the railways and what is happening in the north east of Scotland right now is absolutely off the scale. Way beyond what climate scientists were projecting. By that I don't mean that global warming is happening faster than expected, just that the impacts are proving way more dramatic than expected. The weather is spikier, if you like.

Saw grognards in youtube comments explaining to the younger generation that in very old school D&D you would bring a stack of character sheets and attempt a dungeon again and again.

"Oh like a roguelike? Roguelike D&D would be cool."

Human culture and language is so amazing - they know what a roguelike is, but not that Rogue was essentially a computer game version of old school D&D!