Notices by Liam :fnord: (liamvhogan@aus.social)

Victorians no longer will be able to buy machetes. The privilege to wear swords to hack foliage is now the domain of the ruling classes in other States. But Victorian peasants will remember the years of turmoil when anyone might have risen on their merits and arms to become Daimyo or even Shōgun

This is going to go on a bunch of slideshows under ‘why you don’t drive through floodwater’

One of the things about AI boosterism and by extension the whole Silicon Valley mindset is that it elevates ‘building things’ as the only worthy human act. It isn’t. You and I and the whole of humanity spend most of our time using and _maintaining_ things. Whether it’s doing the laundry or cooking dinner or sewing a button back on. Or using a template to revise a report. Or being the workers who make the accountable decisions to keep things going. This is what human working life is.

It’s ridiculous that a lower house electorate should have north of 150,000 people (except in Tasmania which in this as in so much else, Special). There’s no way one person or even one office can be available to represent that many people.

Do it by MMP or just by doubling-tripling the number of divisions, who cares

In the Federation era Australia made a conscious choice to model the Commonwealth on the USA: a House of Reps, a Senate, a High Court. It’s clear considering that country’s uhhh issues, that that has been a historical mistake and we should instead take some cues from the UK: a lower house with like five hundred people in it, and an upper house that doesn’t have any veto powers, that the government can tell to piss off

It is Monday morning which means it’s time to remember: dentistry should be on Medicare and bulk billed

In a quiet moment, in which I have the opportunity to relax and contemplate anything I please,

My brain: DRUPAL DRUPAL DRUPAL DRUPAL DRUPAL DRUPAL DRUPAL

The thing about disasters is that we are all primed with frameworks to interpret them, that we develop in our everyday lives, before they happen. Me, I’m off this morning to a planning meeting and I’m certain that’s how I’ll meet the end of the world; a bit too early in the morning, in a meeting room, with an agenda

As I was saying before, the American way of disaster as it is of war is to throw very large logistical resources at a problem, which is their strength, in this case to be admired, because no other society in world history has anything like it.

It’s also a source of their conspiracy—from weird ones like Chinese warfare, to the ‘Elon is helping!’—the idea that problems can *only* be met through application of high technology is very set in culture.

Okay the answer of course is that developers recognise they’re building for households of non-romantically-cohabiting adults sharing for economy. That much makes sense and it’s even good that the market is responding to conditions. But that doesn’t explain why you need a Versailles Hall of Toilet Bowls

My partner found an ad for a flat that was three bedrooms, four toilets. Who shits that much? Who is the market for this?

Current status

The thing about commercial AI is that they’re the evil mirror version of the personal computing vision of the 1980s: that ordinary people would be able to personally, reliably, securely, automate their own data, and have control over their own productive processes, and LLMs fail on every count. The promise is now that my own work is in competition with these things

AI, make me a William Morris wallpaper

[the ghost of the crafts movement reaches out from the past to punch me straight in the testicles]

The promise of LLMs that hope to replace working processes is instead to destroy any link between creative endeavour and worth. Since they’re fundamentally about stealing, who can know what was made with great effort and what was just a prompt and a process? It makes everything low-effort, high-throughput, low-margin work.

The labour theory of value has been threadbare as a theory for a long time but it’s destroyed now.

It’s perverse. We have computers powerful enough to do literally unimaginable tasks with data, tools that can and do create extraordinary things. Tools that the arts and crafts people of the late 19thC would have boggled at, the potential to push creative activity right down to anyone’s personal computer

And yet the prevailing culture of using them is so bad that even *programmers*, who by rights ought to relish the privilege of making whatever they want, resent computing. This is a culture not a tech issue.

Anyway IMO the area of greatest and least justified paternalism which has reduced the scope of young people in society, inhibited their freedom, impoverished them in experience *and* materially, and forced them out of public life, is my own profession, urban planning

Why don’t you just use libre office. Why don’t you just choose your own working conditions. Why don’t you simply walk out of your office and never go back to your job

Put your hand in the hbox, Paul. The box contains badness 10,000. I hold at your neck the Gom Jabbar

Citizens, it is time to march toward the sound of the #tgif :tgif: