Notices by Ghost of Hope (grayface_ghost@tech.lgbt)

@goatsarah Interesting.

I go through phases of not being able to sleep, and if I get to about 4am I know that's it, there's no chance and I'm going to be awake but in zombie-mode until the next night.

If I drink coffee at that point though, I'll crash inside an hour and sleep until 9 or 10.

Stimulants doing unusual things is pretty strong evidence I reckon.

@goatsarah Same, and same, and same.

The problem is societal more than anything.

On the Facebook thing...

They're not trying to join the Fedi. They're trying to bring us into the FB/Insta sphere. You can argue that because it's AP-based that's not the case but I think you'd be wrong. The power imbalance is at least three orders of magnitude.

I'm in the Fediverse because I need social media and community that's essentially free from fascists and their pals, and from corporate manipulation of algorithms to shove them onto my feed whether I want them there or not. Ideally I want this freedom at the wider network level which I effectively have now because of great instances like this that have robust de-fed policies.

If I want to be on Facebook I'll reactivate my sleeping account. If I want to be on Instagram I'll use the account I probably have there but haven't used since the 14th century.

Frankly I think anyone who thinks they're acting in good faith is so gullible they should check their own shoelaces right now because I promise I just tied them together

@goatsarah That one's doing the rounds.

I was tempted to comment on that one along the lines of "unless you're a surfer heading out past the break line and you know what you're doing" and then thought... naah.

@goatsarah The funniest part is Andrew Tate offering to train Musk, presumably from a Romanian prison

Infrastructure projects provide jobs and income for the workers (well-being growth). They enable economic activity providing jobs and income more widely (well-being growth). The cost of creating the money to pay for it is... nothing.

Nothing, as long as people understand that nobody lost out. People will talk about inflation and devaluation at this point, but this happens because confidence is lost. And that's all.

I've yet to find someone who can explain to me why this isn't so. The devaluation thing only happens because those who hoard wealth in a particular currency fear that they'll not be able to exchange it as beneficially in another currency.

But there should be no need to. If money was understood.

Look, I'm a physicist by training, a programmer by trade, and an esoteric priest in my spare time.

I'm not an economist.

As far as I can tell though, our economic system is based on the belief that money is a finite resource.

The value of money though is confidence. It has no physical existence, it's a virtual or magickal substance that's only peripherally related to human well-being (which should be the only measure of wealth although I'll accept forms of wider universal well-being) and even less related to economic activity. Economic collapses don't occur because countries run out of money! They occur because the rich lose confidence that the money they have is real, and that makes the money worth less or even worthless. The lack of confidence blocks the working of the magick.

If more people understood this, there'd be less resistance to the idea of governments creating money in order to fund infrastructure projects.

@RobertWT I worked with FORTRAN IV code when I started but it was compiled on F77 compilers. I think some of it survived in the codebase I maintained, into the 2010s.

Punched cards? No, the old code-shuffle was a thing of the past by a couple of years when I entered official employment deo gratias.

@RobertWT 128k though? I started with 3k effective RAM :)

@jakob The same tech's going to be employed there without a doubt, so if it hasn't happened already then it's going to happen very soon.

The Great Library of Alexandria is burning.

@sheislaurence @0xD I can't see the conversation chain that led to this which suggests dodgy instances are in play. But responding just to your toot...

"AI" (really LLM) is lying repeatedly. It's not hard to see examples. Lying is the wrong word because it's not a sentient system, it's just that its algorithms are returning results that aren't true fairly regularly.

The recent story of a US court case where one team of lawyers used ChatGPT (I think, don't quote me) to hunt case law examples and it... made it all up... and they deployed the entirely fictitious law without checking, is a good example.

This stuff is now appearing all over search engines and so they can no longer be trusted.

@goatsarah Thanks. That's pretty much what it was in 66 then, except tu was less widely used from what it's saying. Close family and addressing a small child.

I'm old enough to remember when a Google search would find what you wanted.

That's not facetious, it's been a few years since I could reliably find what I was looking for on the big G without getting to page 20 or 30. The latest "AI" shenanigans are really the final nail in the coffin, not the start of the problem.

We're basically already back to Web 1.0 where you need to know which sites to look at for decent answers. YouTube videos are better for tech answers than Google for example and that says it all.

"Don't be evil" - mate, you basically killed search, perhaps the single most powerful feature that appeared on the Web forever.

I'm actually old enough to remember when effective searching for technical answers was manually looking through a list of newsgroups for the right one in which to ask the question. If you got really lucky it was moderated and if the cybergods were with you the answer was in the FAQ and you didn't have to get flamed for asking

Been wondering for a bit about how... formal the português grammar guide I'm using is.

Just checked and it was written in 1966, doh. Might need someone to tell me what forms of "you" are actually used in the 2020s in Portugal

@Natasha_Jay I've only posted one single selfie on the fedi, and a "friend" threatened me with a block because I forgot to CW it.

So that's probably my only ever fedi selfie and the friend is blocked.

@goatsarah @EugeneMcParland Musk's interesting in the wtf sense.

Is he a far-right Russian asset because he hates his trans kid and hates that Grimes left him for a trans woman, or was he always a far-right Russian asset who was trying to disguise his far-right Russian asset status by pretending to be just a mediocre batshit multi-billionaire from a racist family?

I don't really care because either way he's a far-right Russian asset but it's interesting to some people. Probably.

I see where you Tories are coming from with Capital Gains Tax. People should be allowed to leave their savings to their children.

I'll compromise with you. Allow people to inherit a million quid without paying a penny in CGT, and in exchange increase the rate to 99% on any amount above that.

Excuse me sir, you seem to have turned purple and steam is coming out of your ears, are you okay?

@goatsarah @thelocalecho * resists urge to jump on a plane *

@goatsarah A worthy pursuit. In related news I seem to have started involuntarily pronouncing S on the end of English words as sh/dzh.

@madelainetaylor They really don't but many of them should. They're just not believing us when we tell them what the effect of this will be.

The person I'm thinking of here's in a position to know but thinks like the rest that I'm catastrophising rather than making realistic escape plans. I'm not throwing personal shade at them, I commented because I think you're right - they're not going to get it until half of us have emigrated and the rest are in jail or the ground