Notices by Jake Hamby (jhamby@chaos.social)

Republicans love #nicotine, something I find curious. Tucker Carlson even launched his own competitor to #Zyn called ALP.

https://archive.is/I0HPu

@dalias I hadn't thought through the implications having an LLM would have on blockchain-based contracts. The whole "oracle" thing never seemed to be feasible other than for commonly-agreed-on things like stock prices or currency conversion rates. Until now.

What gets me is none of these guys seem like they would have thought of the idea of pooling cryptocurrency money to assassinate a CEO of a greedy company. It's only and always government employees they hate.

This is the type of "anarchy" that Libertarians are into, the kind where you violently murder all the government agents and then those with the most power rule, or something.

If you read Jim Bell's original "Assassination Politics" essay (posted to USENET, which was the style at the time), it's even more unhinged than Wikipedia makes him out to be:

https://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm

#anarchocapitalism #politics

If you're a fascist, then you're "Dark Enlightenment" by default, right? Conversely, if you say you're Dark Enlightenment, that implies you're at least on your way to fascism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

#uspol #fascism

From what I can tell, NRx (Dark Enlightenment) is more of a club or a secret society than it is a political philosophy.

It's basically a way of being a quasi-fascist in public but you're also "vice signaling" that you're a full-on fascist acting discreetly.

They talk in their own terms (linked essay by Nick Land) about being "enlightened", but the enlightenment they seem to have found isn't any sort of higher spiritual or moral or ethical purpose.

Rather, they seem to be enlightened about the idea that it's possible to be a Nazi in the 21st century. Also, it's fun (for them) to be racist and sexist and bully people of other cultures and ethnicities.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130925165535/http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

#fascism

It's bizarre, this belief that academics and government bureaucrats are living large on "our tax dollars" and spending money wildly inappropriately, because they excuse the most extreme inequality and the hoarding of wealth by individuals accountable to no one. Completely hypocritical.

The most extreme example of that belief that I know is the guy who invented "assassination markets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market) because he was so violently opposed to taxation that he wanted to murder tax agents.

“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
― Henry Kissinger

https://mstdn.social/@knittingknots2/113955038355657045

#Trump #TrumpCoup #DOGE #Treasury

"What does someone who is worth $30 billion lose if you take $29 billion from them?"

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/confiscate-their-money

#economics #billionaires #capitalism

When A Greedy Oligarch Tries To Be Hip...
Kat Blaque

https://youtu.be/rEZa4gnqHrE?si=E6N6O4vvIcnd6Vjk

Excellent analysis.
#Facebook #capitalism #JoeRogan #Zuckerberg

So there's a part halfway through the video where she pastes in a TikTok video of a guy warning against using Facebook Messenger because it's basically a spying device, scanning all your Wi-Fi networks for devices and that sort of thing.

I thought to myself, "he must be talking about the Android version of the app". Indeed, if you're on Android, yikes, I wouldn't install it:

https://crambler.com/truth-about-facebook-messenger-app-privacy/#facebook-messenger-permissions

The iPhone does block companies like Meta and Google from vacuuming up too much of your data.

I worked on the #Android team from 2010 to 2014, and I had a real crisis of hating what I saw Android had become. But #Meta actually pushes the envelope as far as being creepy even more than #Google ever has.

Meta was caught downloading people's SMS and call logs. On Android only.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-facebook-was-able-to-collect-android-phone-and-text-logs/

Android has extremely granular permissions, which is great if you're a nerd, but in this case it allows apps like FB Messenger to do all sorts of creepy stuff like scan Wi-Fi and BT devices.

@benroyce @SnowshadowII no, if you're in Canada or any other country besides USA and Mexico, you're going to get *both names* on your Google Maps, courtesy of Dear Leader.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/google-maps-to-show-gulf-of-america-after-government-updates.html

The 33 state attorneys general who are suing Meta for deceptive and unlawful practices make a lot of interesting points in their 233-page complaint (PDF link in page):

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-unredacted-federal-lawsuit-against-meta-%E2%80%9Cdamning%E2%80%9D

Ed Zitron is really on fire preaching against the general malaise we're all feeling from the Rot Economy and the enshittification of everything, like this recent post:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

#RotEconomy #facebook #instagram #dystopia

I decided not to open a #Bluesky account because I have my hands full here following a chronological feed on a variety of topics. I was able to transfer enough friends I knew from the old Twitter when I made this account to get going, and now I just follow anyone who posts anything I find interesting or insightful, to keep building a network.

#Mastodon is at heart a hobbyist platform, and that's okay. There's no imperative for growth at all costs, or even forcing consistency between instances.

I can only put 500 chars in a toot on this server, but I see others posting really long toots, the bulk of which is hidden for me behind a "Read more" link, thankfully.

I'm old enough to remember the BBS days, and this is not a whole lot different than FidoNet, UUCP, BITNET, or other federated forums of years past. Of course those systems had to be store-and-forward because instant high-speed Internet from anywhere at all times was science fiction and reality was often a 2400 baud modem.

To put that in perspective, "baud" is bits/second, but on an RS-232 serial link you have a start and a stop bit for each byte so you have to divide by 10 to get bytes/sec, not 8.

I'm just old enough to remember Commodore selling a 300 baud and a 1200 baud modem, and I was fortunate enough to have the $70 to buy the faster one. I still have it, although I'm not sure what it's good for. I have a lot of retro stuff I need to sell. I had a friend with the 300 baud one, so I know it was painful.

Quantum Link, or Q-Link, was an early online service that evolved into AOL. Q-Link had a special graphical client for Commodore 64 that you had to use to connect, so it wasn't impossible to use at 300 bps. But you'd be waiting a long time to read even short posts at 30 bytes/s.

Then came 9600 bps, but there were a lot of incompatible standards (MNP-5, U.S. Robotics):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcom_Networking_Protocol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRobotics

BBS's would advertise which brand of modem they had to get >2400 bps speeds.

At the higher speeds of dial-up modem, things did eventually get standardized, and we got 14.4 kbps, 28.8 kbps, 33.6 kbps, and finally 56 kbps, which requires one end of the call to have a digital phone line (ISDN), not analog.

I digress. We ended up going through the same evolution of slower to faster speeds with 2G phones, 2.5G, 3G, 3.5G, 4G LTE, 5G. Things didn't get really interesting until 4G LTE, with high speed and low latency approaching the slower tiers of home broadband.

What I find fascinating about Meta is that they don't really care about the content of the slop they're serving to users, for better and worse. They're not trying to convert their users to any sort of ideology, except for consumerism, because they need to serve ads, and most ads are for products and services.

We don't really know what filters TikTok has in place to amplify or suppress topics for ideological reasons. And we can see now in Twitter/X what blatantly pushing an agenda looks like.