Notices by Mallory's Musings & Mischief (malcircuit@thingy.social)

You bitches better be ready to sabotage and subvert. Break shit. Run out the clock. Be an expert at malicious compliance. Waste as much of the fascist's time and energy as humanly possible, until they have none left to kill with.

I like the term "adulting" because it implies that you are doing an activity that isn't the default state of a human

Calling it "adulting" makes a lot of sense because "adult" is a culturally constructed role. When you are "adulting" you are often performing tasks to satisfy society, not yourself. You are doing tasks that have been obligated to complete simply by virtue of being an "adult".

I'm afraid to hope for a better future, both generally and personally. All the trends are pointing in the opposite direction, and that hope for things to improve has been crushed before. It feels naïve and dangerous to hope for a future that's better than (or at a minimum roughly the same as) today.

But I don't want to be hopeless. It's not who I am. It's not who I want to be.

This fear of hope is one of my issues. Another is the feeling of moral outrage at being forced to participate in an economic system that relies on exploitation of people and the environment.

I don't know how to live a fulfilling, prosperous life without feeling like there's blood on my hands. It feels like I'm in a zero-sum game; my prosperity is from another's exploitation and suffering. I want to achieve and excel, but that feels like I'm just taking advantage of others.

/1

When you live in a system that is always pushing for growth, your perspective becomes skewed. There are problems that we deal with everyday that probably could be solved — permanently (or at least for a long time) — but to do so would eliminate an entire cascade of profit, which is considered unacceptable.

So we continue to try to reinvent the wheel, or add features, or enshittify to increase profits.

This goes back to something I've ranted about in the past. Capitalism is incapable of comprehending the idea of a solved problem.

There is a class of problems for which optimal (or nearly optimal) solutions exist or could exist. Some of those solutions have existed for decades. But capitalism is never satisfied — growth must continue. So people keep trying to reinvent the wheel, making solutions that are more profitable but also more abstracted and inefficient.

Manufacturing new computing hardware is an enormously energy and resource intensive process. Having to make hardware obsolete because the *software* isn't efficient is an absurd waste.

I get that there are more impactful changes to society that can be made that would reduce our environmental impact more than writing better software. But it's still a thing that matters and should improve.

Putting advertising on everything takes power.
Making everything internet connected takes power.
Pushing notifications takes power.
Autoplaying videos and sound takes power.
Tracking and data collection systems take power.
New "features" take power.

Don't even get me started on all this new "AI" bullshit.

Something no one talks about enough:

CPU cycles aren't free.
Memory reads and writes aren't free.

That shit takes power. A miniscule amount per instance, yes, but it adds up quick if it's from an app that everyone uses constantly. All that power comes from somewhere, and right now that's mostly fossil fuels.

When people complain about software bloat, it's not just a UX problem, it's an environmental one too.

I've been taking a little bit of a break from astro stuff lately due to mental health and getting a bit frustrated by having a few too many failed attempts from technical glitches.

I was hoping I might be able to get the scope out tonight again, but the forecast isn't looking great. But I have a backlog of data I haven't done much with, so I figured I work on that instead.

Here's the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a.k.a., the Eye of God or Eye of Sauron

#astrophotography #astronomy

The novel/movie Contact, but the Message is a scheme by a rogue accelerationist cabal of aliens to use humans as pawns to break the stalemate in a million year galactic cold war.

As much as I love the movie Contact, after watching it again this weekend I couldn't help but think about how naïve everyone in the story was about the whole situation. The last time I had seen it was several years ago, and I've read a lot of sci-fi since then that contain compelling points about how dangerous aliens are likely to be, particularly the Three Body Problem series and Blindsight.

/1

Like, yeah, if the likelihood of alien life is *just so*, then maybe the friendly alien scenario in Contact might make sense.

But if intelligent life is anything close to commonplace, then we might be in a universe filled with implacably hostile aliens who will outwit and outmatch us at every move. We might be in a game where to be discovered is to lose. We might have already lost decades ago. Or maybe the reality of our place in the hierarchy of life is even more bizarre.

/2

This reminds me of a book I heard about way back when reading books was a thing I did regularly. Play Anything by Ian Bogost. I put it on my reading list but never got around to it. It's about the power of play and how boredom can be leveraged. Maybe I should actually read that book. Seems like it would be relevant to this line of thinking.

[Update: seems like that book has mediocre reviews, so that might have been why I skipped over it. There might be other books that cover the topic better.]

I suppose a big part is to accept one's own ignorance and uncertainty. Curiosity evaporates when one assumes they understand a thing. Why explore when it's obvious what the outcome will be?

How does one restore a curiosity that's atrophied?

A common meme is that a CPU is sand that can think, but something I hadn't considered until just now is that a camera sensor is sand that can see.

Here's a pic of the Fireworks Galaxy (NGC 6946) I captured recently.

#astrophotography