Notices by Daniel Lakeland (dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org)

@thomasfuchs
Very true, but if people begin to value privacy or to not be controlled by a big corp, then they may change their cup of tea. Perhaps esp if we help them with the hard bits.

@thomasfuchs
GrapheneOS on Pixel phone, jailbreak a Chromebook and install Linux. Maybe a Nixbook
https://codemonkeymike.medium.com/how-to-convert-an-old-chromebook-into-a-nixbook-4e5d4b55c5ca

But yeah, EBay might be part of the solution.

@cwebber

From now on this is called The Lemmer-Webber thickness paradox

@cwebber @andrewrk
... If you refrain from participating in the software of the commons, the only thing that you're doing is surrendering more of our collective agency to abusive centralized powers." --Andrew Kelley

Fuck yes, can I get this on a billboard? On a flag? On a t-shirt... paint it on a fucking mural please...

@cwebber @andrewrk

"To me this is completely missing the point, which is to pool effort in order to ensure that in general users of software remain in control of that software. To this end it doesn't really matter if your code gets picked up by AI companies. It primarily matters whether high quality free software is available to users providing competition that limits the degree to which proprietary software can get away with being coercive....

Proposal... The US should overhaul the K-12 public school system to make it K-10 and give everyone 4 years of free tuition at local community colleges after 10th. Liberate the 16 year olds to have more control over their educational path, give them time to try out different topics for a bachelors major, and dramatically reduce cost for a bachelors degree. Plus the variety of things you can take is just dramatically higher.

A few years back Morgan Stanley bought out ETrade. In the process they converted my mother's trust account into a personal account with no beneficiaries. If she had died at any time in between there would have been a giant legal shitshow. Its been temporarily mitigated, and we'll get it converted back to a trust account, but if you or your loved ones had a trust account with ETrade before the buyout, go figure out if it's still listed as a trust!

Bladerunner the Final Cut is really gorgeous and makes more sense than the theatrical release. Watching it on high res stream with a projector out back in the summer is absolutely the way summer movie nights should be. My older son found it confusing but the younger one was totally into it. The story goes through just fine if you were to replace the replicants with black southern plantation slaves. the story is really about who matters, who counts as a real human. its soooo relevant today.

When that weed patch on the corner where 40 years ago there used to be a house but it fell down and was dragged off by the city because the person who owned it died intestate, and now it's just weeds and then someone from the neighborhood showed up and started cleaning up the weeds and planted a native garden there, that was anarchism.

When your kids soccer team wanted an end of season party and you all made suggestions and then someone who had the most motivation actually went out and made reservations and then you all wound up doing take-out BBQ to a local park, and everyone pitched in some money, but someone pitched in extra so the poor kid didn't even have to worry about coming, that was anarchism.

Anarchism is so all around us and ubiquitous it's like air... we have to be reminded it exists because it's just always there... When you joined a book club, did someone tell you what to read and beat you when you didn't comply? No? You negotiated and then when a bunch of people decided to read a book you weren't interested in you decided to either go along, or sit that one out and come back the next month? Anarchism

Time to go watch some Max Headroom. If we're gonna live a cyberpunk dystopia then might as well see what playbook we're supposed to follow.

Also, during this morning convo on signal with the parent group, there was a comment thread about math teaching, minutes after that one of the parents reported that when they opened Facebook the whole thing was full of ads for Math tutoring. She reported having FB app on her android phone. I had her delete it. They're legit hard core coming for your data

@inthehands

I think everyone was wrong on this one. The segway was ok, better than the public gave it credit for, but it was never gonna be a world changing technology. I think the public backlash was against the billionaires telling us what the fuck to do. It came out before the media collapse and the rise of social media and the rise of effective Russian propaganda that taught the billionaires how to do their own propaganda.

@tomjennings
At the time, toys for the rich yeah. These days we have lots of segway like devices, theyre inexpensive because of batteries and motors coming way down in price theyre smaller, and you see people riding them around college campuses and to and from public transport and things. so the execution on segways was early and clunky but the basic idea of an electric actively stabilized transport device is fine

@inthehands

Was sent this article about religion as a bond formation mechanism that creates the bond through costly repudiation of what is obviously true. i guess a similar mechanism at play in conspiracy theories like QAnon...

anyway I wondered what a survivor of evangelical US "christian" religions would say so I'm pinging @artemis

here's the link

https://complexsimplicity.substack.com/p/ten-years-of-religious-hypocrisy

@jonny
You may love my uniform midi keyboard

@paninid
went looking for a source found this

“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” – Marshall McLuhan (1970), Culture is Our Business, p. 66.

pretty damn prescient.

@cwebber
Hey everyone have you heard about NTFS ?

@cwebber @Andres4NY

The US is a fascist dictatorship, but under normal situations, using a computer is clear and obvious speech, like using a printing press, and prior restraint on speech by first requiring age verification is bullshit according to lots of "settled" case law. Of course, none of that applies under a system where any old bullshit invented by Nazis goes through the SCOTUS with an express lane sticker.

This morning on my trip to drop kids off at school my son asks me if there is a "real controversy" about how airplanes fly. He's referring to explanations about airplane flight in terms of "Bernoulli's Principal" vs "Newtonian" explanations. I told him that there really isn't a controversy among physicists and mechanicians who have thought about the problem, but that the Bernoulli explanation persists because incorrect science often persists long after its been debunked. 1/n #physics #fluids