So far in this first week of our annual fundraiser, 67 different Sustainers have contributed more than US$22,000 toward the generous match challenge by some of our long-time contributors. Help answer their call and become a Sustainer this weekend: https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer/
Interview with @inkscape@twitter.com Intern James this week's video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQN8Z43xr1o sorry to all, I've been a bit sick so wasn't able to make this more robust.
More to come later, there are more people I want to talk to!
Capitalism causes some problems and makes many problems worse, but that doesn't mean "just remove capitalism and things'll sort themselves out" is an automatic solution.
Kind of subpost but not really, it's not the first time, just the latest example.
What will be put it its place? Not even "communism" or "anarchism" answers the question, because that's just the meta structure.
Which policies those structures enact or encourage depends on the culture and people you apply them to. Any system will have to deal with tradeoffs in resource management and the needs and wants of people and society.
So even more important than the system are the priorities and directions that need to happen within that system. I fully understand that some of them are incompatible with an environment of dominance by multinational corporations and captive regulators etc, and that's a good reason to find something else, but it doesn't mean that as soon as you remove global capitalism, every policy incompatible or in friction with it will organically emerge.
I'm not dunking on people who want to destroy capitalism. You're probably doing good work!
I'm dunking on people who are dunking on people who are working on what humanity's principles and priorities should be because it (1) is pointless under capitalism and (2) will all solve itself after capitalism is solved.
(1) No it isn't, capitalism is different in different places, and even under capitalism democracy and policy do make a certain amount of difference and (2) No it won't, especially if nobody has thought about what we should be doing instead of maximizing profit.
This stuff is important and needs work too. It's complementary work and to not see that is some form of whataboutism.
So, I have been reading a lot of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. He demonstrates how Earth biological evolution favours those organisms with societies, and of those societies favours the more cooperative instead of competitive ones.
That is enough for me to conclude that things will automatically sort themselves out after a revolution.
But, look at the nature of capitalism! It is intensely cooperative. In much the same way as you could conduct a ‘Saudi breakfast’ (adding up all the petrol required to make one), you could look at all the hands a commodity has to pass in order to arrive at your own.
Isn’t that what anarchists and communists are getting at? That the workers are the ones who make society fo around? There are indeed blueprints for revolutions as well—guerrilla war, insurrection, how to organise workers… it is an age-old tradition.
I think the difference between knowing where you want to go and having the structures in place, compared to hoping for the best, is the difference between a smooth transition and a long interregnum where everything initially gets worse.
Without an existing momentum in the right direction, maybe people will figure things out eventually, or maybe they'll just build the old system again.
I don’t see it as an either-or option, though. You can push for concessions within the current system while also finally abolishing it, as you keep pushing and get stronger and stronger.
There are indeed blueprints for revolutions as well—guerrilla war, insurrection, how to organise workers…
These blueprints should not get in the way of including the removal of colonialism, racism, sexism, antisemitism, climate change, pollution, deforestation, agricultural monoculture, overfertilization, food health, pandemic management, surveillance, digital literacy, scientific literacy, centralization and all the other concerns that some people claim just automatically won't happen or are bourgeois concerns.
Addressing these issues now and after the revolution is valid. The Soviet Union had all of these issues, some less than the US, some more than the US, to the extent that they applied in the time period. The difference was that the state perpetrated them instead of outsourcing them.
I've found people mean different things when they oppose capitalism, and that adds to the problems here.
Personally, I think that trying to ban personal possessions is always going to meet with resistance, so communism is ultimately doomed. Gathering supplies is hardwired into people, IMHO.
Also, money isn't a bad thing. Exchanging surplus items for something that stores indefinitely and can be exchanged back for items is just sensible for long term stability.
I have similar worries for anarchism as for communism. The anarchistic ideal is that anything necessary for the common good will be created because people realise they have to do it, without need for governments to step in.
Well, COVID should have taught us otherwise. Plenty of people seem incapable of putting aside their personal short-term needs for common long-term good.
Neither of these criticisms mean I'm a staunch defender of the status quo or can't get used to the...
... ideals of these philosophies. I just am not seeing mechanisms that would address these concerns (and they're TL;DR and just examples, it's more complex).
This is why I'm generally very much in favour of a socialistic framework. It should prevent people from acting against everyone's best interests, and it should curb unfettered capitalism, and redistribute excess to the general population.
Longer term, we may see more advanced things take over. But that's where we are.
And I can get liberals to the extent that once the socialist duties are done, it's best for government to get out of the way.
The dividing line here will require constant renegotiation. That's kind of the deal.
Constant renegotiation is in turn the fundamental mechanism of democracy. I can't really see any of that happen outside a democratic framework, either.
To this day, I wish someone could provide me with a better alternative to socialist democracies and money.
Plenty of people seem incapable of putting aside their personal short-term needs for common long-term good.
I believe there's a counterargument "but capitalism taught them to think like that". But you can't deprogram people very easily. Societal and cultural change takes time and hard work.
I think staging the revolution first may be putting the cart before the horse, but I also acknowledge that maybe some cultural and societal change isn't possible under the current system and maybe the revolution would be put off forever. I know I'm out of my depth here.
That's equal parts laudable optimism and fatal naiveity as far as I can tell.
Of course, the point is change. But change for the sake of change without addressing known pitfalls can't really yield satisfying results - other than by a miracle.
It's not really about solving the problem from the inside, it's about laying down the groundwork and checking the map before ... uh ... burning down the house. This metaphor needs help.
It's just not convincing to propose something in a way that seems to suggest that known issues with *people being people* will magically be irrelevant.
I do agree that in any given environment, people might be prone to exaggerate some traits and not others. So a change in environment could well effect a change in people.
But to *assume it must, and in the way desired* seems dangerous. Best to mitigate anyway.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
I didn't attack you. I called your position partially naïve. That's not an ad hominem attack. Calling my doing so fashernista is a lot closer to that, though. Agreed, let's not go there.
True. But communism in practice has been that in terrible ways. I don't want to hear philosophy, I want to see policy proposals. With checks and balances.
A system needs to be evaluated by how badly it can fail when abused. For example, communism tends to reward the first Stalin to come along by making him a tyrant that can't be removed by legitimate means.
I strongly suspect there's a form of communism - with appropriate checks added - that could succeed quite admirably. I would like to see such proposals, though.
This is extremely why I have disagreement with the 'make things worse so people will finally suffer enough to revolt against capitalism' folks. Making things worse doesn't make things better, wtf.
@f.rift Yeah, make things better now and when you bump into obstacles because of the system, support people who want to change the system. Build structures outside the system that can replace it when it's gone.
I'm not doing this and not claiming my own superiority, I'm far too occupied with trying to dig myself out of my own nonsense, but I don't get people who are opposed to it.
I don't really have anything of value to add to this discussion. Just wanted to say thanks for kicking it off and to everyone participating. It's an interesting thread.
If, for example a country decided that it was going to be serious about mitigating some harmful effects of capitalism, it'd have to adopt some form of communal structures to address, for example food sufficiency in a centrally-planned way, i.e., how many crops per how many people need to be produced yearly on average for example...
Nicaragua is a good example of trying to do some of this atm.
@Claes Wallin 🇸🇪🇭🇰 Intriguing thread, this one. I'm probably leaning towards the "consider desired directions and frameworks, support those who change things for the better and make changes yourself, when you can" camp.
I'm not that enthusiastic about revolutions (or civil wars) as the best form of transition from one system to another - they often seem to incite counter-revolutions, to alienate people and to leave scars for generations. Maybe there's something about the idea that one system completely replaces another through a sudden event that doesn't quite sit well with me: - each system addresses some unique aspects, neither system addresses every single one of them - the existing system arrived at its current state through any number of changes - has the new system been tried in a similar context? Has it been adapted to experience? Has it had its inevitable omissions addressed? - proponents of the new system can still abuse the power they have gotten through the revolution - being on the winning side exposes people to the illusion of being right while potentially harming others
At least one European country has moved from dictatorship to democracy through a revolution, and has since stayed a functioning democracy for more than 40 years: Portugal.
I will not pretend I know how that came to be, but my impression is there was a deliberate, honest direction towards a country for every citizen. If so, maybe that left fewer inhibiting scars and tensions, and kept the country from falling straight into chaos. (I'm sure there was enough hardship along the road.)
Oh for fucks sake with these machine translations!
When doing REAL translation work (that is, no AI involved), one way to find special terminology has always been searching for educated guesses and seeing if they've been used in any authoritative sources.
But that method is nowadays so useless, because every fucking site makes automatic translations of everything, so the search results are flooded with nonsense that's guaranteed to be incorrect.
@Kielitaiteilija ja -tieteilijä There was an article recently on how automated translation has taken over the web, leading to a situation where automated translation no longer has a reliable corpus to train on, just like you the human translator.
oh god a question I always had about the implications of science fiction “universal translator” concepts is coming true
In that, if everyone is always immersed in automated translations, why would anyone even have the ability to learn a language in common with anyone else?
@fluffy 💜 ✪▾̫✪ @Kielitaiteilija ja -tieteilijä Not even just why, but if you decided to learn, how would you do it if the universal translator keeps tricking you into hearing your own language? Mostly thinking of those implants here rather than some handheld device.
I guess you'd really want to have a way to turn the translator off, also for other reasons than wanting to learn the language. Sometimes not having to know everything a person is saying can be bliss.
Just added a page to my website describing my approach to learning Japanese through self-study, along with some of the resources I've found to be particularly helpful.
Ooh Ooh With your feet on the air and your head on the ground Try this trick and spin it, yeah Your head will collapse But there's nothing in it And you'll ask yourself
Where is my mouse? Where is my mouse? Where is my mouse? Way out in the backpack See it hiding
photography people are all wondering loudly, hey camera makers, how come phones have excellent security, tracking built in, find my phone assists up the wazoo, but we get nothing?
it feels like most devices probably could or should have a buzz mode, a ping mode. where are you?! show yourself?! power down into low energy, enough to leave a couple days of periodic wake ups, listening to see if they should alert, & either go back to sleep or buzz.
Finally figured out why one host on my network (the most important one) was unreachable from WireGuard clients, and it's because Docker keeps allocating a /20 for a container's bridge network, which covers the WG client subnet as well.
Every up/down seems to allocate addresses at random, sometimes in 172.x.0.0/16, other times in 192.168.x/20. So every restart is a crapshoot.
The setting to control this is completely undocumented.
Seems like I've made a ceasefire agreement with the workers at the construction site that used to be the nicest place in the neighbourhood before they began tearing it up. They're leaving a hole in the fence so that my dog and I can pass through there, and in return I'm not making any more holes.
It's funny, listening to CBC radio this week, and the economy reporter first talked about some of the USA's strategic oil reserve used to lower prices of oil. And next he mentioned the Canadian strategic maple syrup reserve, saying they would dip into it this year because they had a low production run last year.
Clearly, in Canada, we have our priorities straight.
Now, I want someone to design a kick-ass T-shirt with a logo that reads: "Canada Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve" in big bold letters on the front and "Staff" on the back.
Or, even better: "I *Robbed* the Canada Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve".
One nuance that keeps catching me in #uxntal is the addressing of the different memory locations and devices. There are two stacks you have access to: the main stack and the return stack. Directives refer to the former by default but appending an `r` to any directive makes it operate on the return stack. Additionally, memory before address `0x0100` is dedicated as the "zero page" and can be referenced with a one-byte address.
Because of this distinction you use different commands to R/W to the page. LDA loads from main memory and LDZ loads from the zero page. So if I place my player reference in the zero page (faster loading since addressing is one byte) I need to make sure to always do `;player/x LDZ2` instead of `;player/x LDA2`. Its a simple and meaningful difference but it's easy to mixup.
The zero-page is at 0000-00ff, so a byte is enough to access it with LDZ, but it's still present in memory, so you can use the full absolute address if you like.
sometimes I keep strings in the zero-page like paths or whatever, I have fast routines to modify that text, but I use generic string printing routines that expect a short, so I use a short even if it's in the zero-page.
Now I'm looking up what topped the charts in the 80s. There's a lot of songs in there that I thought were made in the 70s. I guess I do like 80s music, just not the chart toppers though. There is a 90s band that I like as well, The Traveling Wilburys.
It's funny you mentioned that. I have the same thought. I still have a negative opinion on the 80s though (although I didn't live during that period). Yes, the 90s weren't that great either. That transition from disco to beige, oof. So much beige.
I spent my teens in the 80s. Hearing 80s music during my indoors stationary bike sessions (AKA spinning) played by 20 and 30-year old trainers is kind of funny to me. For them it's "vintage", for me it was just yesterday!
I have good memories of 90s music, but I have a big soft spot for the 70s.
The 80s weren't all A Flock of Seagulls. It was also the age of "post-punk", which became "indy", which was labelled "alternative" and "grunge" in the 90s by the industry when it tried to colonise it, and then around the turn of the century it became "post-punk revival".
I'd like to know where all the cool kids hang out now, because in the age of 99c per track, I don't see any cool kids.
well you already have Flatpaks (and likely snaps) packages of Electron apps, that thing that is suppoded to be cross platform. Someday someone will make an Electron app, inside a flatpak that is inside a spap which is inside docker containers. 'cause, why not...
Working on my game in #uxn and I found this kind of neat: you can see the fifth element on the stack tracking the Y coordinate of the missile when in debug mode :)
took like 30 min. It helped that your app does not have many dependencies and it was easy to find them. There are several tools to automomate deb packaging. And to automagically create boilerplate templates that you just need to adjust.
@neauoire you may have mentioned this already, but I was wondering about your games/apps that were previously available on iPhone etc. Did you have any intention of making them available again, if there was someone willing to put up with Apple's shit (me) ?
I will do as many as I can with it, but considering 2015's day 3 took me probably 10 hours of dinkin' around with it, I may need to switch after that haha
Realizing after reading all the other replies that I want to learn *every* language, but that I also learned so many meta strategies last year like memoization, etc. that I'll prob default to JS and then Python if necessary.
If I was going to curse myself with a new brain worm, any recommended resources to start learning Forth?
the language I'd love to learn is one that everybody (the most people?) can learn to use to express themselves in new ways -- the language of the people, let's say
there's many useful definitions I think. A few possible:
1. the easiest to pick up to people that don't code yet. They unlock code as a medium. Python does well here, I think? And it's my choice in the backend currently (but then again I'm old school.)
I guess it depends on people's education, where they were brought up, that'll affect which language is more compatible with what they know. I don't think there's an international language that is built-in the human mind, python is probably a good candidate for the western world yeah :)
imagine if there were one yet to be discovered though -- one that latched onto the language instinct optimally, following benjamin or chomsky for example.
[[tree notation]] makes me think of something like this, although it might not be it.
[[meta]] do you prefer if I use my social.coop or my merveilles.town identity when interacting with you? Feel free not to respond if you don't have a preference or are uninterested in meta.
Rust and C, most likely. I’ve done both before (usually i get about halfway through) but yeah, Rust on its own isn’t really a challenge, since I’m pretty familiar with the language
oooooh. If gluumy isn't able to codegen in time for AoC then no_std Rust or Factor (from the other thread) are both intriguing options. I've never worked with no_std rust....
I don't know if I will. I usually start super motivated but never finish it, and leave with a sour feeling of not having accomplished the goal I set for myself. Maybe I should simply set a simpler goal?
Last two years I made it most of the way through with only C99, and it was kind of brutal because of all the string parsing stuff last year. Maybe I'll do something terrible this year and use Python with tons of libraries just to see how trivial it becomes :)
ah, nice. I'm not even sure if I'll do it this year. I feel like I already played out the minimalism thing the last two years (and I had some really good solutions last year) but the only other thing I can think of to target, other than performance, would be getting leaderboard scores, which probably means using Python or something with lots of libraries to get the answer as easily as possible. Which sounds more like a race to the bottom. So I'm not really sure.
C with no libraries. And I also did a few with assembly. But lots of the problems aren't fun with assembly because of the high % of the problem involves reading in line-delimited ASCII text UNIX style.
The last few problems are usually the most challenging and rewarding. The first week tends to be a slog. I think maybe what I'll do is use Python for the first week of text parsing challenges, then once the more interesting stuff starts, switch to some more interesting language like Factor.
there's entire Python libraries dedicated to doing 'automatic' kind of parsing for coding challenges. Like my_text.guess_parse() and you get the result you want :P
I enjoyed doing it in Haskell last year, so I’ll do that again (this year, I’m setting a bonus goal of actually documenting my code, last year’s solutions only just make sense to me today)
I wasn't planning to this year because of my RSI last year. But it just occurred to me that I've been programming in a HLL for the first time in years! So I guess I'll try to do it in Lua/Teliva.
I just signed in and last year's leaderboard is still around. Cool!
aah don't know :o on one hand it feels like a good opportunity for me to learn scheme or forth; on the other i'd like to keep practicing with awk or tal :)
i haven't done it before, so in any case it seems it would be fun
perhaps in Eclipse Jr./Snakefield* assembly or Luik** or Brainforth***, but over the past couple of years I've become somewhat uncomfortable the way advent of code is associated with finance capitalism and the idea that programmers should compete to rank themselves for the benefit of potential employers
* this is a fantasy/ARG console with a RISC-V ish ISA ** this is a language that compiles to the above *** this is a Forth-ish language that likewise compiles to the above that I wrote in a day to poke fun at a friend ('brain' comes from 'brainfuck' with the allusion that forth is a little bit of an esolang)
After fooling around for a few days, I realize I have to sharpen my uxntal axe a bit more before attempting an aoc So.. probably clojure (although kotlin is still nagging me). I got enough kotlin during my day job, so might as well go for a breath of fresh air in a lisp.
I tried making a webpage with answers to some questions people could have about Mastodon. What do you think about it? Are there things I should add or improve? https://privacydragon.github.io/Mastodon-Facebook/
One of the cool things I learned researching things for the novella I'm working on is that during Japan's Kamakura period, mothers and fathers not only held property independently of each other, they transmitted it individually down separate lines of descent.
Married couples could choose separate heirs! Some women adopted heirs to continue their line; heirs could be female.
wow. i am a lot thinking about media sustainability and in the film archive where i work i am trying to write digital infrastructure adaptation strategy to climate change, without much interest of others... and all that can be said with one nice image
![[AFK] Mario](photo/10369367295fe7d2de60367651837182-5.png?ts=1638036121)
