Notices by FoolishOwl (foolishowl@social.coop), page 2

@jonny People complain about how we talk online and don't organize in person.

Every left group I know struggles to find a physical meeting place. If you want a meeting of more than three or four people, there are very few places available.

The US Supreme Court has declared the POTUS is immune to prosecution for "official acts".

The Magna Carta was in 1215. The US is now politically reactionary by the standards of medieval England.

@silverwizard @foone Part of the force of the joke is that we've had decades of mass media that split the superficial imagery of science fiction from the social criticism at the core of it.

I'll believe ChatGPT has PhD levels of intelligence when I say something about "feudalism" and it looks frustrated and takes a deep breath before asking me what region and period I'm talking about.

@socketwench @yuki2501 @lori Part of what's frustrating is that I see these discussions of what complicated platform to use for running a personal website, and I wonder how many people know that you can pretty much dump plain text between the "body" tags in a simple HTML template and boom, you've got a basic Web page.

@lori I've never seen a computer game use as much RAM as a web browser. I've never seen anything use as much RAM as a web browser.

I see people insisting now that they need 32 GB of RAM on a personal computer, and I look at my fifteen year old desktop that almost never uses more than 2 GB of RAM and a fraction of a percent of CPU time. The performance constraints are disk access time and, with some games, GPU.

The Cass Report: Anti-science and Anti-trans – Skepchick
https://skepchick.org/2024/06/the-cass-report-anti-science-and-anti-trans/

@ZachWeinersmith Datacenters also need a lot of water.

@silverwizard @saddestrobots I've taken courses and read books on programming and I feel like none of has much of anything to do with what developers actually do.

I don't know if it's still the case, but my impression is that public schools teach kids about computers either by teaching about programming, or about office software, but not really about system administration. I arguably have a bias, but I think system administration is a more relevant skill for most people than programming.

I would like to see more public statements of committed opposition to "generative AI". I want to know if there's anyone left who can be trusted.

This is after I found out that OSI and the Linux Foundation are working on "open source AI" projects, a few days after Red Hat announced it's working on "AI". Mozilla has been sending mixed messages about "AI" for months.

Both Intel and AMD are integrating NPUs into their processors, so hardware manufactured after 2023 is no longer reliable. I'm getting ads for laptops with those processors.

It's looking like the end of general purpose computing.

Trump Says He Will Reverse Protections for LGBTQ Kids on “Day One” If Reelected | Truthout
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-says-he-will-reverse-protections-for-lgbtq-kids-on-day-one-if-reelected/

@silverwizard @hipsterelectron I feel like there's some sort of epistemic closure involved, as well as some sort of unexamined emotional attachment, something like nostalgia. Like all that advertising and marketing has a more profound effect than we realized.

(Well, maybe Guy Debord realized.)

@hipsterelectron In other words, the creation of social alternatives gets framed as a rejection of solidarity, rather than as an expression of it, as many of the people who create them intend and as you describe.

@hipsterelectron I feel like several things are going on, and I don't understand all of them.

Beyond software, I've tried to think how to articulate a basic question of strategy, whether to try to organize people to reclaim a social institution and reshape it, or to try to create a new independent institution that we control directly.

The latter is often criticized as abandoning people who are coerced to use the existing institution, or as cruelly forcing people to use something inferior.

@goatsarah I did pretty much read Silo as, "Fallout but edgier (and without the social satire)".

Like, the visual elements of the apartments obviously echoed Fallout.

@scottsantens “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, scientist who actually knew what he was talking about

@BeAware Also, I'd always found post-apocalyptic stories hopeful, since they're about surviving the worst circumstances imaginable and rebuilding.

@BeAware It's not beyond a shadow of doubt, but it does look to me like they made a point of letting us know that the Prydwen is still flying and Mr. House is running what's left of New Vegas.