Notices by Matt Wilcox (mattwilcox@mstdn.social)

How do we know the world's going through a cost-of-energy crisis? Oh, well this small-time woodworker from the UK with 14k subscribers has one video with almost half a million views. About turning coffee and sawdust waste into fuel for heating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrUE1Hs82iQ

If you want a gauge of how fucked western society has become by handing power to less-and-less qualified people with less and less oversight and less and less compassion...

This was all avoidable. Technically.

And this is why I have my heirarchy of educational needs. The things I believe should be taught *at school*.

1. Compassion.
Miss this, you'll fuck up everything because your aim and your contexts will be bad.

2. Critical thinking.
So you can establish cause, consequence, and probabilities.

3. Trust and Bias.
So you apply 2 to people. Because as someone good at 1 you don't want to be manipulated by people good at 2 who can't grok 1. Sociopaths exist.

All the other stuff? Less important.

Louder, for people not getting it:

Fascism is the inevitable result of a society with large imbalances of personal security. Which in a capitalist society means large imbalances of wealth.

If your society allows some people to be mega secure and untouchable, while also allowing large portions of it to feel very insecure... you will become a fascist society, eventually.

Do not allow this. Do not allow excessive wealth stratification. It. will. Destroy. Your. Civilisation.

Fascism is inevitable if the wider people feel poorer and less secure than they want to be. People like that seek to blame others, and that leads to fascism.

To defeat fascism, you tax the rich and spend it on the poor. You eliminate billionaires.

That's the only mechanism that will reliably work over periods of time.

EU; change tactics. Stop walking the USA/UK path. Raise taxes on the rich, spend on your public services. Watch the fascists power vanish.

@bastianallgeier As someone in the UK who’s on the other side of that absolute ruination. Hold what you have tight.

How times change.

Used to be if you wanted to search for how to do a thing in just JS you couldn't find anything because all results were jQuery.

Then it was because all results are React.

Now it's made-up code generated by an AI, powered by tossing a childs-weight of CO2 into the atmosphere - that also doesn't work.

Truly, the progress we make is astounding.

You may not be aware of the economics of Mastodon if you're used to Twitter, or Insta, or Facebook.

Please - go look at the /about page for whatever server you're on, and see who's running it and now to contribute, financially.

You are not the product on Mastdon. Your information is not being sold to other companies or advertisers. So your activity here *costs the person running your service money*. It's often a person, not company.

If you value Mastodon, and you can, please cover your cost.

Hey, those of you on mstdn.social - @stux runs this server and it's literally just him. You may not see his Announcements.

He's short a few hundred euro's on the server bills this month.

Please - contribute to help cover your costs.

This is not a big company service. It's not a Twitter or Facebook. It's costing a person money for you to use.

Please - pay some money to cover your costs. It's the fair thing to do.

Thank you.

Info on how to donate: https://mstdn.social/about

“Well what about XyZ?”

Did I stutter? *all* citizens. You all pay taxes, you all live together, choices made by gov effect all of you. So you all get a say. Automatically. Nothing should make any persons voice not count. Yes that includes criminals. ALL get a vote.

For a self proclaimed world leading democracy, so many of the systems in play seem very far removed from that bold claim and much more “keep the current rich white guys in power” encoded in the system as a whole.

Do Americans realise how absolutely insane the very concept of “purging a voter registration list” is? You have to *register to vote*? What are you even talking about?

Are you a citizen? Then you should automatically get a vote. There isn’t anything to administer. You live there. The government serves you; not you it. Voting isn’t supposed to be a privilege, or reward.

The obvious abuse vector that any system other than “all citizens vote” becomes is astounding.

Imagine if all the collective money spent of “self driving cars” had been spent on public transport.

As in, not cars - which are ultimately bad solutions for most of the world - but punctual and pervasive clean-energy public trams, trains, and buses.

It’d have cost less and been far more useful for far more people. Including non-drivers. And actually be here. Today. Working.

Back when I was a kid at school we had IT lessons. One of the first things we were taught was “GIGO: Garbage in; Garbage out.”

A computer supplied with rubbish can only output rubbish.

Anyway; if you train LLMs on “everything out there”, you’re going to get “general shit” out. It can’t know what’s good or bad or right. Just what’s most likely. Think of the most average person imaginable with the most average hot take.

Let me know when you can train LLM’s locally on curated content.

I’m hoping that some Open Source project will start collecting and distributing _trusted data collections_ as raw material to train LLM’s on. Thats where the value is; not the models themselves. Which are mostly trying to un-shittify the shit they got fed.

To me, the biggest issue with the whole thing is _I do not want something trained on the entirety of crap out there_. We _all_ know that most “content” available is biased, incorrect, racist, ignorant, hot garbage.

Let me train my models locally on archived Wikipedia. Let me toss in my own trusted sources like MDN.

I think the real value source in all of this is _well curated datasets_. All the hype of the models themselves is largely going to die out. The initial strategy of feeding enormous amounts of any-quality-data has such a narrow viable use case IMO; which is “understanding what is being asked”; but not “answering the question being asked”.

As always; self host fonts.

Just self host fonts.

No, there really isn’t a benefit to using hosted font services. It’s always another dns lookup. It’s always slower than your own site because your own site already resolved. No it isn’t cached from another site already. It is introducing a new point of failure though.

Self host your fonts. https://friend.camp/@darius/111881129164067505

https://theconversation.com/online-anonymity-study-found-stable-pseudonyms-created-a-more-civil-environment-than-real-user-names-171374

As always; anonymity online isn't just "arseholes being enabled". Nothing is ever one thing. And when people get purse-clutchy about things, they often completely miss the massive benefits the very same anonymity enables for a much larger group of people.

I *really wish* people in general, but especially the morality crusaders, learned to distinguish between *the problem being the people abusing something* and *the thing being abused is the problem*.

It's not the same.

TL:DR; Anonymity helps a ton of people do things that they otherwise could not; for many many reasons.

Most people use that to grow themselves beyond what would otherwise be possible.

A minorty use it to be arseholes.

Letting the minority of arseholes absolutely ruin the benefits for everyone else is stupid.

Find a way to target the arseholes, and not the mechanism they're abusing.

This applies in all settings. People *abusing things other's rely on* is the problem, not the thing itself.

@scottjenson I always find the reaction by non-eu people baffling. They seem to blame the EU.

When you see these, it’s because the sites are by default mining you for money. Selling you. The fact it’s so often and so annoying should be a mirror to how often it’s done and how utterly ignorant of it non-EU people are.

Chrome just opted you into a load of ad tracking bullshit. Don't forget to go in and turn it all off, if you're a #Chrome user.