Notices by Bob Mottram :debian: (bob@epicyon.libreserver.org), page 2

Free software is all well and good but I think that I also need an additional policy of moving away from using anything backed by venture capital and towards using only community run projects without profit motive being a factor.

It's very obvious to me that #Microsoft is angling towards EEE via a combination of Github, Visual Studio and Copilot. All that stuff will become increasingly integrated into one lump where you can't use one without the others, because this is always what they did in the past. It will all be very convenient if you don't mind being locked in.

Listening to Sunak going on about #AI, these machine learning technologies are fundamentally conservative in that they assume that the future will be like the past. The predictions they make are remixes of the past, or at least follow the same logic as occured in the past.

The problem with that is that although history may repeat it is not usually a literal replay of the past. The media of now - if it's any good - is not just strictly a remixed regurgitation of media from previous decades. The material conditions, assumptions and technologies of now are not just a clever algorithmic blend of the 1960s with the 1990s.

EU certificate spying thing.

Wait doesn't the government of China do exactly this, shipped in all browsers? And has been for years.

On the fediverse the real cultists self-select out, because they just don't get the big crowd of adoring followers and there isn't much of an algorithm to game. Unless they're an instance admin, perhaps. #ShowerThoughts

Whenever comms blackouts are deliberately imposed by governments it's always an attempt to cover up their crimes. Cover of darkness in the info space.

It's one of the reasons why independent communication systems and media need to exist. Things which are hard to centrally shut down or jam. Things which are not convenient to set up, and not convenient for the ruling class to put down.

@luckytran I think it's not only about real estate. It's about control. Being able to intimidate an employee in an office is far more effective than sending them a shitty email. The email also creates a trail of legally actionable evidence which can backfire.

A note for #ActivityPub spec people: please don't make the protocol massively more complex than it already is, because that leads back to centralisation if only one or two organisations can implement it. Similar to the problem of browsers being so complex that only orgs with massive budgets can maintain them.

@aral Getting blocked by fosstodon doesn't make sense to me, although it is the case that a lot of foss people have one foot in the world of BigTech and so may feel obligated to defend unethical business practices. Get them by the salary, and hearts and minds soon follow.

I confess to using this terminology in the past, but people in general are not “voiceless”. They have ideas and opinions. It's just that officialdom refuses to listen. “Voiceless” is a kind of punching down perspective.

The ecosystem is moving.

Away from centralized silos.

There is no inevitable technological future, and the inevitability framing is an authoritarian tactic to try to persuade people that alternatives don't exist or are not viable.

There is only the technology future that we choose to build. What we decide to accept or not.

Newen Afrobeat feat. Seun Kuti & Cheick Tidiane Seck - Opposite People https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFSRCG4DrmI #NowPlaying

Newen Afrobeat & Seun Kuti - Zombie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCZZWu9WR5s #NowPlaying