Notices by Jens Finkhäuser (jens@social.finkhaeuser.de)

@reiayanami The phrase was never meant as an excuse, really?

@thomasfuchs Granted, but...

So, two other books to compare. Zittrain's future of the Internet, and Tarnoff's Internet for the people. It's almost as if the latter was written as a reflection of the former a decade later, but apparently not.

Anyway, the key argument of Zittrain is that of appliances vs. generative systems.

Appliances have a single, baked in purpose. Generative systems have no real purpose - many possible applications, but nothing truly so baked into them that it defines them.

A lot of Germans are posting in German about #Giessen today, and since many of our friends overseas may be confused, here's a summary:

The current iteration of the Nazi-Party, the AfD, is holding a summit in the town of Giessen today. They announced the formation of a youth org (Hitler-Jugend?). A ton of people came to protest. The police are busy protecting the Nazis, and politicians in the current government see fit to attack the protesters.

This needs international attention.

#depol

@fionafokus I tend to link this directly to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook, which is the popular science version of a 600-something pages academic work. It very clearly explains the mechanics by which tyrannies and democracies form, and it comes down to resources.

If you have natural resources, you need a small percentage of the population more or less directly involved in extracting them to stay in power. If you don't, then you need to run a service economy.

A service economy depends on a...

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@fionafokus ... large, healthy, well-fed, well-educated population, which tends to demand a say in how things go.

AI is a deliberate attempt to "hack" this, and establish an artificial resource in lieu of natural ones. The goal is the same, that you need fewer people to stay in power.

AI - as it is shilled - is a strategic weapon for establishing tyrannies. And while not every tyranny must be fascist, every fascist is a tyrant.

It's no stretch to state that AI is a fascist project.

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@icedquinn Alternatively, you can store everything in the binary except for indices. That way your metadata doesn't get out of sync with your data, which seems to be a fairly common thing.

@requiem yes

Random reminder that "survival of the fittest" does not refer to physical or mental excellence, but to the best fit to the specific environment you're talking about: in an environment in which stupidity is rewarded, the fittest is the most stupid.

@patrickcmiller Quick, burn your 2FA tokens!

@sophieschmieg That is cute!

@khoji @inthehands Well, the Open Source movement has always had a capitalist streak. Free Software less so.

@elilla @sotolf @slothrop @schratze @elexia Germans sure love their rules, and when it comes to language, the Bible is Der Duden.

If it's not in that Bible, it's sin.

@alex Oh, sure, I know the difference. It's still the unintended side effect of popularity, though.

I have never experienced anything like it here, though. I tried asking fedi to boost a post once to test how it'd work, and it didn't happen 🤷♂️

@elena

@april @puniko badumm-tss

(No idea if intentional, but it was perfection)

@aral I've limited it for a while, didn't hurt.

@aral Mind you, it's difficult to decentralise when your tech stack begs for centralization 🤷♂️

@skinnylatte I always felt I was kind of lucky I was born at just the right time so that my youth was smack in the middle of the grunge era. I didn't need to explain (too much) about growing my hair. Everybody thought it was teenage rebellion, when in reality it was the kind of terror you describe.

25 years later, my wife dragged me to a hair stylist again, just to trim the tips. My hair was badly damaged. The right kind of attitude in the surroundings made it painless, even enjoyable.

@skinnylatte In hindsight, it was a lot of sensory issues combined for me. I hated the feel of the cold wet on my skin. The snip-snip of the scissors drilled right into my brain. Plus, I was terrified if losing an ear (thank you, Struwelpeter!).

I have a mole on my head, and the stylist always tore painfully over it with a comb. He also wore too much of a cologne that assaulted my nostrils. And afterwards with less hair, everything felt colder.

I couldn't begin to explain that.

@skinnylatte Social issues added to it. The guy tried to smalltalk. I didn't understand what a "good" haircut was supposed to be. At best, I could associate it with whatever the cool kids had. (Here I have to say my dad saved me with his insistence on short hair, otherwise I would have worn mullets. Notable exception!)

Nope, it was all terrifying and unenjoyable.

@dalias @ireneista @misty @bob It's more that an API *can* (in plenty of cases) present e.g. something UTF-8 in a POSIX-ish API, etc, but a) perhaps my use case doesn't want that, and b) if it doesn't, the API also may fail to provide it.

I mean, you just have to read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification to understand where Unicode may be a particularly bad choice.