Notices by phiofx (phiofx@hachyderm.io), page 3

@nadiaalbelushi i feel sad about the whole #crypto charade. Enormous amount of energy wasted (in all senses of the word).

Αlso, at a deeper level, it revealed indeed the gross financial and economic illiteracy that plagues our societies. Being angry when you have no clue what makes you angry is so limiting

Also it revealed the army of snake oil merchants that will jump at ANY opportunity

If there is any silver lining its the statement that #digitalfinance / #fintech is a brave new world.

@jonny its wasn't me who did it. It was the invisible hand of the markets

@SebastienK https://fedidb.org/

@lynnesbian we can think backwards. Its 2050 and there is dominant gui framework that paints every screen between here and A Centauri. What brought it there? What was the killer feature?

a) a monopoly bigtech (economic reasons)

b) extreme ease in application development (developer reasons)

c) extreme pleasantness in user experience (user reasons)

d) Elon

@mnl can you like code this recursively so that its cameras all the way down?

@seanpatrickphd

the Earth won't die and neither will we (at least as a species).

But our innocence (or at least the pretense thereof) is already dead.

From now on anything happens to the biosphere we know who's fingerprints were on the trigger.

And that will be a heavy psychological burden that did not exist ever before in our history.

@FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades Roger Pensore has in some of his books (I forget which one, maybe the road to reality) a classification of theories: superb, useful, tentative. Superb are those that are phenomenally and profoundly accurate (very few) etc.

The related joke is that some theories "are not even wrong". Much of economics falls in that category. NB: not dissing economists for failing (its an incredibly complex field) but for not humbly disclosing when that is the case.

@FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades

one of my favorite quotes is: "there are no paths, paths are made by walking". Another one: "you never change things by fighting the existing reality. Build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete"

That "walking/building" step is the acid test that separates theoretical visions of varying quality and coherence from the stuff that actually changes the world.

It took one (1) person to build #mastodon. Imagine if we could get better at this.

Two actively developed #foss #linux desktop #RSS GUI readers today: #akregrator and #rssguard (*)

Both are C++/Qt based. Akregator is part of the #KDE collection. It can handle a large number of feeds (>100). It has search but no filtering / tagging capability which is essential if you want to get on top of the information firehose. I have not yet tried rssguard.

(*) A third C++/Qt project was #quiterss. It is currently abandonware with dubious privacy/security status

@jackofalltrades @FantasticalEconomics @RD4Anarchy

Ayres, Keen etc are cited in the the current IPCC reports and that is what matters, not settling academic or political scores. Bullard Herendeen developed energy input-output models as far back as 1974 and Leontief himself had such ideas. These ideas are now heavily in practical use.

There is never going to be some declaration of "mainstream defeat" or a Nobel prize recall. And power structures wont collapse due to improved models

"Finnish airline invites passengers to weigh in for flights"

Oh, that sucks. I will take my private jet then.

#climatechange
#sustainabilitytransition

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/07/finnair-to-ask-passengers-to-step-on-scales-with-luggage-before-departure

@petergleick earlier I could not make up my mind between "digital coalmine" and "digital minefield".

Now I have settled on "Stranded digital asset".

@50sFarmGirl societal regression is entirely possible, happened many times historically (up to complete collapse)

The myth "you never had it so good" is just that, a narrative that can be, and is, abused

Democracy, equality, fairness, sustainability, all the good things - including very humanism itself - are neither built-in nor the only attractors. The evil path is always one turn away and its dark endpoints cunningly concealed.

We need to be constantl alert, fight, invent, build, rebuild.

@jaklacroix 'pecunia non olet' said the Romans, money doesnt smell.

Two millennia later we are full-on monetisation and make no connection between what is happening in the world and the moral values agnostic, one-dimensional blueprint (+€ / -€) on which everything has been built.

Its cunning (= hey, you have a legal system, right?, if its legal its moral, lets just get on with business). In a world that doesnt agree on basic common moral stances less friction beats more friction.

@danhon we wouldn't be here and nobody would give a damn about activitypub if it wasn't for the "mastodon monoculture".

The historical coincidences that made this happen are not important (being at the right place and time to benefit a little from the demise of twitter). What is important, as per Woody Allen, is to show up. And mastodon did.

People now complain about all sorts of rough edges with the protocol, with mastodon etc.

Thats because they care. Good things happen when people care.

@molly0xfff what is fascinating (in a morbid way) is that it seems we have entered an era where the nature of technology ideas is no longer particularly relevant.

What is critical is to have tech talking points, some seed of a technology to spin a narrative. But it cant be anything humble: it must be stretchable into an "X will eat the world five times over" kind of level. #AI will run everything, #blockchain will account everything, we will all be 24/7 in an infinite #metaverse etc.

@timbray @molly0xfff it must be quite a torture for the VC world and their #blockchain obsession to be watching the humble "protocol networks" to be achieving - here and now - what their tons of funny money could not.

@rberger @pluralistic

"Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector."

I like this sentence a lot. The sustainability transition (which is actually quite a bit more complex than just climate) is on a par with the agricultural and industrial revolutions as how profound it will be. I can only see it happening in a globally more balanced collective. A broad-based silicon agriculture of sorts.

@danhulton hmm, I don't really know. There is strong tech backlash in various quarters (imho broadly speaking justified) but whether thats what you are seeing in this specific case is another matter.

@danhulton there will be some people who will like VR goggles. But it doesnt feel that its going to be a mainstream UI - in the short term at least. The backlash is probably due to Apple fanboys overstating the case as they usually do.