Notices by Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social), page 4

"And yet with less than two weeks to go before America’s 2024 presidential vote, it’s hard not to feel a creeping sense of déjà vu. Far from shaking up the political dynamic, this summer has instead crescendoed to a moment that is eerily reminiscent of 2016: a coin toss election that pits the most unabashedly right-leaning Democratic campaign in modern history against a menacing Maga effort with an alarmingly real shot at victory."

"Nowhere has the latter been more apparent than on the issue of Gaza. Throughout her campaign, Harris has rejected even rhetorical distance from the White House and repeatedly reiterated her support for Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing. (In addition to being morally reprehensible, polls suggest Harris’s hawkish stance could also significantly hamper turnout among both younger voters and Democrats in key battlegrounds like Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania)."

Hope your passport's current.

US Politics Has Reached a Dead End
https://novaramedia.com/2024/10/23/us-politics-has-reached-a-dead-end/

With no end in sight for the US's wars, China and India have reached an agreement dramatically reducing tensions over their border dispute.

China confirms pact with India to ‘resolve’ conflict over disputed border
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/22/china-confirms-pact-with-india-to-resolve-conflict-over-disputed-border?traffic_source=rss

I just realized Jurassic Park is a Frankenstein remake.

Google and MS are paying a bunch of money today for nuclear power that may not even pan out and if it does will likely cost substantially more than electricity does today. I suspect they're betting that electricity will become both more expensive *and* less reliable over the next decade. Seems like a safe bet.

The other, perhaps more sinister part of this is that they don't want anyone else to have a say in what they use electricity for.

Tech giants set to pay through the nose for nuclear power that's still years away
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/18/big_tech_nuclear_power/

Reading through r/sleepheadphones, it's apparent that this market is extremely underserved. I blame China. By which I mean outsourcing manufacturing to a place with a lower standard of living, which makes it uneconomic to manufacture hardware unless you can sell millions of units or at very high prices that a) are unlikely to be commensurate with the quality (looking at you SleepPhones, which apparently only last a year despite costing an arm and a leg) and b) are way more than people have been conditioned to expect to pay.

It's weird to think about inexpensive manufacture making it so some products don't come to market at all, but that really is how it works. In exchange we get products coming to market that have no business being there. Specifically all the disposable electronic junk that can't be recycled, isn't worth repairing or refurbishing, and is poisoning our planet.

I know I've said this before in different terms, but David Graeber has taught me a better way to think about it. In Pirate Enlightenment he says that the Malagasy always avoided having a class that specialized in violence, because they would tend to seize power. That's where we went wrong with computers: having a class that specializes in programming them. That gives them enormous power, in particular it gives those who control the means of distribution of those "applications" the ability to capture nearly all of the extra value computers enable to be produced.

I've also mentioned before that TRON has had way more influence on me than seems reasonable for such a silly inconsequential film. It's because I saw it at a very impressionable age, 8. In TRON, the programs are played by the same actors as the *users* who created them. Not programmers. That word is never used in the film. Users.

Which in 1982 was how computers worked. There wasn't a huge software market. There certainly weren't any app stores. Personal computers booted directly into a programming environment for a language that was intended for people who had no experience with computers. Mainframes and minicomputers would typically have all the tools to program them available to every user.

And before that, programming was the *only* way to interact with a computer. You fed it a stack of cards with the program and the data, and you got back a printout. To the extent there were specialists, they were the people punching the cards, who were almost entirely women. Programming was generally looked down upon as a menial task.

Imagine this as an alternate world: there are no software companies. The only specialists are the ones building things like compilers, and they work directly for the people who make the computers. There are no app stores, just places where people share and talk about programs and help other people come up with their own programs. All computers come with all the tools their users need to make them do what they want, and any they don't come with can be downloaded for free. All code is open for inspection and modification.

People say there are people who "can't" program, but we live in a world where computers have been built by and for programmer-priests for generations. The entire platform is built for them from the gates up.

While we're celebrating Eric Adams' indictment, let's not forget he got away with it for a FULL FUCKING DECADE and only got caught because he went way over the top. How many politicians and bureaucrats have been getting away with it far longer just because they never got too greedy?

@aud I don't really see how deliberately misgendering someone when they're engaging in racist harassment against is any different from using a racial slur against someone because they're misgendering you or whatever. There's an impact on the audience, and Are0h is certainly in a position to consider that. He's just refusing to.

Can't wait for this election and inauguration to be over so we can get started on the disillusionment.

Who the hell am I kidding? People who weren't disillusioned with Clinton, Obama, or Biden sure as shit aren't gonna be disillusioned with Harris.

And that, my friends, is why the only inevitable thing is our descent into fascism.

It's not that Earth can't support civilization. It's that humans aren't yet civilized.

@aral @blogdiva Hah, I'd missed that you said secret key. I seem to recall that was the original idea behind emoji-based codes, though they also look cool.

I ran a script over https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/16.0/emoji-sequences.txt and only got 1185 that don't require 2 codepoints, so you're right. I did test with one codepoint sequence and confirmed it only uses a single character of my Mastodon character limit, so I may still publish an implementation just for fun.

@aral @blogdiva Damn, only 2321 in total even including those that require multiple code points. I don't even remember why I thought there were more than that.

Base 921 encodes 256 bits in 26 emojis...

@aral @blogdiva Hmm. If we assume bigint math is available, we could use 3184 of the emoji and encode your public key with only 22 emoji :D

@aral @blogdiva Encoding as emoji is funny, because the UTF8 ends up being 4x as many bytes as the original key, so 128 in this case, but because social media limits the number of characters and not the number of UTF8 bytes, it uses only 32 bytes of your character limit, less than hex or base64 would even though both of those would use less space in the database, in RAM, and on the wire.

While we're dissing Linux for rejecting modern safe languages, which of the BSDs has seen the light and rejected C in favor of a safe language?

@dahukanna So much this.

It seems pretty clear to me that the unethical behavior didn't start with LLMs. The papers that are getting through tell me that peer review already wasn't happening in many cases. So how many thousands of papers have been published over the past decades where the data have simply been faked, but the papers themselves were written by humans, making them much harder to catch unless without trying to reproduce the results?

There's too much pressure to publish, and no incentive at all to do real peer review, much less reproduce others' results. If we want ethics we need a thorough housecleaning. Starting with shutting down all the closed-access journals.

We can't recognize Somaliland because "sovereignty" and "territorial integrity" but we have to recognize Taiwan and the Orange Revolution because "self-determination".

We can't allow China to force the Uyghurs into reeducation camps because "human rights" but we must allow the Israelis to genocide the Palestinians because "self-defense".

The western propaganda/brainwashing machine is truly unparalleled in history and in the world. Orwell couldn't even see it, because he was steeped in it. In fact, he became part of it. "Propaganda" is just what those other guys do. When the west does it it's "journalism" and "education".

I guess if I'm not yet able to bring myself to block mastodon.social, it's not really fair to block smaller instances for engaging in similarly bad behavior. But this is REALLY unprofessional behavior from a mod. I strongly recommend folks on tech.lgbt pressure their admin team to... eh, I don't know what. Seems pretty clear they're not capable of recognizing racism. Resign, I guess.

https://tech.lgbt/@david/112950803409015022

Realizing that ecofascism includes imprisoning climate protestors.