Notices by Proto Himbo European (guyjantic@infosec.exchange), page 2

@cwebber @pluralistic @jeremiah @jorgecandeias @mlemweb Oops! Sorry. Um... just refer to you by your handle? As Christine Lemmer-Webber?

@jorgecandeias @pluralistic @cwebber I clearly missed @cwebber's writing; I have enjoyed reading her essays/threads, though I don't always understand the details, not being a coder or true tech person.

In honor of the excellent discussion started by @TheBreadmonkey about whether it is okay to swear on #mastodon

#swearing #fediverse #profanity #cursewords #tiktokrefugee #welcome

"Smart leftism pays attention to these differences [in flavors of capitalism], because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition..."

"I'm saying that it's good praxis to understand these divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics."

@pluralistic politely but firmly calling the purity-testing, gatekeeping leftists on the carpet and it's a discussion that is always timely. I am here for it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/

#doctorow #enshittification #leftism #progressive #liberal #corporate #socialmedia

#Mastodon and #Fedierse coders: how hard would it be for a semi-techy person like me (barely know any languages but could put together something in Python) to create a bot that scrapes toots with certain hashtags? Also, I'm concerned about violating TOS or #privacy...

All these awesome song-related events like #ThursdayFiveList, #JukeboxFridayNight, #tunetuesday, etc. generate beautiful, borderline unusable lists of fascinating songs. It would be cool to make a bot that scraped all the titles from, say, #thursdayfivelist, and put them in a playlist. Or just a big document/web page with song.link URLs.

How much pain and frustration would I be bringing on myself?

#programming #bot #scraping #ethics #suggestions #recommendations

@dalias @futurebird @kechpaja @llewelly Conceptually, this is an awesome idea and I can see it clearly in my mind, having spent a while investigating (and failing at) photogrammetry for non-moving objects.

Nobody wants to hear that AI can do things, but AI algorithms might be exactly what's needed to stitch/extrapolate 3D models from thousands of photos of a moving bug. I would be really interested to see the results, in any case. I think the "moving" part creates some big challenges, even with a bunch of high-speed photos being taken (e.g., with high-speed video equipment).

#silentsunday #stillensonntag

@tek I don't know enough about the world to know if you're joking, though I'd give it an 80% chance. Maybe 70% because the world is a big place.

@tek
"Chief Security Alchemist"
I now have the concept for my next D&D character

@queenofnewyork @mekkaokereke That's a fascinating and depressing (because the opposite happened) thought experiment.

It's notable that even the black plague only killed perhaps 1/3 of Europeans. The *low* estimates are that about twice that proportion were killed in the Americas by European diseases.

@mekkaokereke This is wonderful and interesting information!

"It's difficult for many US people to accept that native Americans planted entire forests."

I'm reminded that (IIRC) estimates are that 50% to 90% (!!!) of Native Americans in the Americas were killed, the vast majority by disease, within the first century or two after Europeans arrived. Hernán de Soto documented dozens or hundreds of sophisticated, populous walled cities on his journey across what is now the US south. Archaeology tells us vast civilizations existed in North, Central, and South America hundreds to thousands of years ago.

According to one author (I'm trying to remember who), the social landscape of Native Americans in North America in the 1600s-1700s was not some long-term state; it was the result of the *majority* of people dying over the previous century or so from disease. Entire civilizations had virtually disappeared, leaving whatever existed when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

Native American stories about golden periods in their collective past are probably based on reality. There seems little doubt that a huge proportion (possibly the majority) of the jungle forests of central and south America are the result of aggressive human intervention, now grown wild after a near-extinction event for the humans. The evidence certainly seems consistent with the idea that something similar was happening in big parts of North America, as well.

@molly0xfff ooh, new space opera for me!

Because someone said the words, I'll recommend my favorite space opera: The Hellflower trilogy by Eluki Bes Shahar (or Bes'Shahar or Bes-Shahar; I've seen it spelled all those ways).

Elevator pitch: Han Solo as a world-weary, nonwhite middle-aged woman eking out a living after escaping oppression. She ends up entwined (not like that) with a young, naive, confused (because events) super-assasin-type guy from a super-assassin-type genetically engineered lineage. She tries to keep his culture of honor and temper from getting him (and her) killed. Also she is carrying around a piece of "pain-of-death-illegal" tech from the Before Times.

Bes-Shahar created an entire slang/dialect for her main character, and everything is in first person, so there's a little learning curve. It's worth it!

The slang/dialect feels a lot like 1930s gangster-speak sometimes, but you gotta believe me it works.

Another take on AI that (at least for now) kinda nails it.

Someone in my FB feed has bird flu, along with her daughter. They have no idea where they contracted it. They had the vaccine but they still got it.

We are so fucked. We refuse to do any kind of contact tracing and one-third of our nation (U!S!A! U!S!A!) shrieks like a toddler with full-body rash and automatic weapons if you mention masking, quarantine, or even social distancing. State and local governments have given up on even collecting data to track the pandemic and many of them seem scared (see toddlers, above) of even acknowledging any risk to the population.

This will not be good.

#h5n1 #birdflu #pandemic #scary

@futurebird I love reading and thinking about this, though I'm not technically educated enough to make a determination. I just want to believe.

I think you and others have mentioned that one big problem ignored in most sci fi is the fact that humans can't survive (or perhaps just can't thrive) without some very specific conditions: gravity in a specific range, our atmosphere, the stuff we need to eat (including a bunch of little detail food things that turn out to be pretty important), sunlight, a diurnal cycle, and then all the social and psychological needs, concerns about managing a little (or big) society including prevention of violence, resource allocation, education/skills, etc... and then we will need to do more than just survive. "Is not life more than the body?" etc.

I still think it can be done, but I also think that, ultimately, we will need to hack ourselves (significantly more than we already have) as well as building special habitats.

@HauntedOwlbear Relief :)
I didn't want to come off as some outsider judging an entire meta-genre. I know the genres I enjoy more often also develop their patterns and ruts (and I really enjoy some of those ruts*). It's just how genres work, I think.

*Not in the Australian sense. I mean, yes, in the Australian sense, but that's not what I meant right here.

@HauntedOwlbear I've been listening to some of their stuff, and I have classified them in my mind as "interesting metal." That's a really judgmental term, but I'm not really a metal listener, in general, so a lot of it sounds similar to me, and isn't super interesting. Hawkwind seems a lot more interesting (to me) than most. They're going to keep being an interest :)

@HauntedOwlbear Thank you for new music (to me)!

@HauntedOwlbear @MASTERBOOTRECORD For the ignorant among us, who don't even know who Hawkwind are, which song? I'm interested, now.

Insurance lobbyists have terrified us with visions of "welfare queens" wasting taxpayer money.

Thompson made $24M in 2022. I guarantee that came from the pockets of taxpayers.

That's $48K each to 500 welfare queens. Please give 500 welfare queens that money instead of a CEO. I don't care if those 500 people really are goldbricking leeches on the system. Those $24M would make 500 people's lives better and nobody's life any worse than the simple fact of paying a few bucks toward something that didn't benefit them personally. The CEO of a company like United makes tens of thousands of people's lives worse, and who knows how many people's lives infinitely worse by existing--his entire job is to funnel money to shareholders no matter who that hurts.

Waste money on 500 people committing small-scale fraud or one mega-rich person committing fraud and (arguably) bodily harm and murder on a much larger scale? No contest. Burning those $24M would be better for the world than giving it to the CEO of a health insurance company.

The "waste" in the system will always exist. If I get to choose where healthcare money is wasted, I want it wasted on 500 poor people a year who--at worst--simply make the money disappear into their lives, not on one rich sociopath who uses that money to hurt thousands of other people.

#brianthompson #healthcare #waste #fraud #incomeinequality