Giga Bites: The Hacker Cookbook is now available to read or download on The Internet Archive! Is it a real and honest quirky cookbook or just a gross 90s joke stretched out to 100 pages? You decide! https://archive.org/details/giga-bites-cookbook/page/n0/mode/2up
Reminder: You can contribute to Anatoly's food/drink fund, and his ability to avoid using any of the recipes from this book here https://ko-fi.com/dosnostalgic
Ja visst är det fint. Kom att tänka på hans "Sagan om busschauffören som tänkte att va fan" nu, många år sen jag läste (eller någon läste högt för mig, så var det nog) men jag minns precis känslan. Bra grejer.
Fint! En annan frejdig favorit ur samma bok är "Sagan om apan som tänkte i flera led", missa inte den! Min pappa brukade återberätta den ur minnet, alltid lika kul.
Seriously though, it's just five questions, and answers are anonymous. If you've read any of my stuff, it would be extremely helpful to get as many responses as possible.
When all you have is market orthodoxy, everything looks like a market failure. Take privacy: giant, rapacious corporations have instrumented the digital and physical worlds to spy on us all the time, so some people think they should pay us for our data.
There's a pretty rich theoretical history explaining why this "data dividend" is a stupid idea. First of all, private information isn't very property-like
. And not just because it shares all the problems of digital works (infinitely, instantaneously copyable at zero cost).
Private information makes for bad "property" because it is "owned" by multiple, overlapping parties who generally disagree about when and who to share it with. When you and I have a conversation, we both own the fact that the conversation took place.
What happens if I won't sell, but you will? Tech companies are *really* good at finding the cheapest seller of an information good, after all. For example, whenever you visit a "quality newspaper's" site, there's a real-time auction to bid on the right to show you ads.
Say there are 13 bidders for that right. One gets to show you an ad, but the other 12 get something too: your unique identifier and the fact that you read, say, the New York Times.
That fact is then sold on to garbage chumbox sites like Tabouleh, whose pitch to advertisers is "I can show your ads to NYT readers at 15% of the price that the Times charges." If the same fact is "owned" by lots of people, it's a commodity.
Buyers will find the lowest, least-discerning seller. What's more, you can't solve this by requiring consensus of all "owners" of a fact before it is disclosed - who owns the fact that your boss sexually harassed you: you or him?
Even if we could get property rights to work in privacy (which, for the record, we cannot), all we'd manage to do is transform privacy into a luxury good wherein poor people are coerced into selling their data for pennies, as Malavika Jayaram reminds us:
Data dividends also require someone to set prices on data, and chances are that price will be set by a privacy-invading tech company or a regulator in thrall to them:
And whatever the price, it won't capture the true cost, as Hayley Tsukayama reminds us: "Low-income Americans and often communities of color should not be incentivized to pour more data into a system that already exploits them and uses data to discriminate against them."
It's not too late to end "pay for privacy," because, as Dipayan Ghosh says, behavioral data is "temporally sensitive" - companies need more of it all the time, meaning we can still push back.
To get this right, we have to stop pretending that data makes good property and that therefore markets will solve data problems. And just because data isn't property, it doesn't follow that it isn't valuable.
Far from it: the most valuable things we know of (human beings) are not property precisely *because* treating them as property would cheapen them. We humans are so valuable that we have a complex set of rules just for us.
My daughter isn't my property, but I have an interest in her. So does my wife, and her grandparents, and her teachers and school district, and Child Protective Services...and so does she.
This "interest"-based system acknowledged the complex web of overlapping claims.
We have a whole discipline - one that doesn't intersect with markets at all - that describes these relations, with specialized concepts like "nurturance rights" and "self-determination rights" (thanks to Rory Pickens for introducing me to these concepts).
All of these points and more are made in "Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy," a 2019 Brookings Institute paper by Cameron F Kerry and John B Morris, who relate them to pending legislation and relevant case-law.
"By licensing the use of their information in exchange for monetary consideration, we may be worse off than under the current notice-and-choice regime...A property-based system also disregards interests besides property that individuals have in personal information."
For less private information the problem may be even worse. Only a few people in my street have to disclose the value of their house to get a very accurate estimate of mine.
Data brokers will pay hardly anything to the few people with the lowest asking price for the information.
Similarly, only a few people you know have to reveal they are gay or Republican and statistics will do the rest of the job.
We've got to remember that the Internet isn't like a big truck. It's a series of tubes.
Joking aside, we need to stop thinking that we require centralization to survive. It's shocking once you start to decentralize and distribute and federate, how quickly you realize you don't need to give that power to anyone. Not advertisers, not big tech, not alt tech. Federation in particular has shown me that we can control our own destiny online, and we can use the Internet the way it was meant to be as a distributed system that is resistant to attack.
No need to worry. The delivery queue exploded while I was looking at it. After 15-20 minutes it was back to normal. ...no idea about gup.pe - description sounds pretty similar to how Friendica forums work.
The upstairs Roomba is throwing a bumper sensor error code. It thinks it's bumped into something all the time, so it just spins around in a circle and backs up, like when a cat gets its head stuck in something. This is often called the "Circle Dance."
The bumper switches are infrared optos, and I'm going to fix them now by replacing the emitter/receiver pairs. All the pics in this thread will be of a Roomba in various states of disassembly.
Spent 45 minutes outside in the sunshine with my six year old playing French cricket. I sat on a chair and threw balls at him. First time outside (other than emptying bins) since last month due to covid. Felt like a shadow. Shattered.
"You are the chosen one." "Me?" "You. The evil god wakes. Without you, he cannot be defeated." "What must I do?" "Ask your grandmother to come out of retirement." "What?" "She's the ultimate warrior." "But... Why don't you ask her?" "She is scary!" "She's not!" "We chose wisely." #MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories
This is the last Pluralistic installment until March 15; I'm taking a couple weeks' stay-at-home vacation/email sabbatical. I won't be reading messages of any kind from close of business on Friday, Feb 26 until 9AM Pacific on March 15. Any emails/DMs, etc that come in between now and then will be deleted unread. Talk to you in a couple weeks!
My latest novel is Attack Surface, a sequel to my bestselling Little Brother books. @washingtonpost called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."
My 2020 book "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" is a critique of Big Tech connecting conspiratorial thinking to the rise of tech monopolies and proposing a way to deal with both:
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
My first picture book is out! It's called Poesy the Monster Slayer and it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller. It's the monster book I dreamt of reading to my own daughter.
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🦺". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
I recall his summit with NK and "aid" to Ukraine. His hamfisted attempts to renegotiate NAFTA and alienating all his closest allies. I really hope all that was just chaotic meandering because if there was some kind of coherent plan coordinating it all, that's terrifying and beyond my comprehension.
In a very unpopular tweet after the election, I asked how long it would be after Biden was inaugurated before we started bombing brown people again. The answer is 36 days.
When you and your friends put your fingers on the ouija board planchette and it starts moving around, there's a chance your friends are just yanking your chain - but just as possible is that your friends are experiencing the ideomotor response.
That's when your unconscious mind directs your muscles without your conscious knowledge.
The movement of the planchette doesn't tell you what's going on in the spirit world, but it does tell you something about the internal weather of your friend's psyche, fears and hopes.
Our narratives are social-scale planchettes, directed by mass ideomotor response. When a fake news story takes hold, it reveals a true fact: namely, the shared, internal models of how the world really works.
There's no spirit-realm directing planchettes. Supernatural phenomena are nonsense, in all their guises. Mediums are fraudsters or deluded - and so are soothsayers who claim to be able to predict the future. That goes for fortune-tellers and futurists alike.
A shocking number of self-described "rational" science fiction writers share the delusional view that they can predict the future.
These pulp Nostradamii point to "predictions" of sf that have "come true" and claim to have an inside line on the world of tomorrow.
Sf *has* an important relationship to the future, though! It can be a planchette: all the futures imagined by all the sf writers are a kind of mutation-space, and the fitness factor that determines whether a story thrives or sinks is whether it captures public imagination.
Sf writers and readers are a means for society to reflect back, amplify and examine our unarticulated hopes and fears about our *present* technology. Sf doesn't predict the future, but sf readers and writers do an excellent job of predicting the present.
And since the present is the standing wave where the past is being transformed into the future, knowing about the present can be a source of insights into what's coming - and not just because sf reveals what's going on in the present, but also because it influences it.
People who are captured by imaginative, futuristic parables about problems and possibilities of technology acquire a set of intuition-pumps for coping with the future when it arrives, reflexive views and actions about what the future demands of us.
Gene Rodenberry didn't predict the Motorola flip-phone. Rather, when a generation of Motorola designers and engineers were asked to make a mobile communications device their minds immediately flew to the Star Trek communicators they grew up with.
Thinking of fantastic fiction as measurement device and influence machine is a productive way to pick apart the meaning of literary trends.
As I wrote in my intro to the bicentennial re-release of FRANKENSTEIN, the rise and fall of Shelley's book tracks to the rise and fall of fears related to the book's various themes:
Zombies have a lot of different themes, of course, and some are easy to map to the current situation: the fear of contagion and the need to distance yourself from loved ones who have become infected. The parallels to covid hardly need explaining.
But the K-zombie phenomenon predates the pandemic, and zombie stories aren't merely contagion stories - they're often stories about the lurking bestiality of nearly everyone around us.
That's behind stories like The Walking Dead, about the propensity of all our "normal" friends and neighbors to transform into an insensate, rampaging mob. These zombie stories are a throwback to the "cozy catastrophes" of John Wyndham and co:
These are stories of racial and class anxiety, of xenophobia and the literal othering of someone who *seems* to be just like you but is actually a secret monster. Again, on a divided peninsula, it's not hard to see how stories of lurking otherness would catch hold.
Zombie stories are also stories about the fragility of social cohesion: stories about how we're never "all in this together" and how, when the chips are down, it'll be "the war of all against all."
That, too, feels very zeitgeisty given recent South Korean politics.
South Korea has an ugly, authoritarian past that is at odds with its founding myth as the "good Korea," the "democratic Korea." But the post-war reconstruction of the country by the US elevated an elite to a position of near-total authority and impunity.
They abused this power in ghastly ways, running forced-labor camps for poor people and people with disabilities, with rampant physical and sexual abuse.
These forced-labor camps (which continue in a slightly modified form to this day) supplied slaves to chaebols, the conglomerates that represent the country on a world stage. Unsurprisingly, the leadership of these companies is also grossly corrupt:
Korea is also riven by messianic cults, and the leaders of these cults have close ties to the Korean political class, an incredibly politically destabilizing fact that caused recent Korean governments to collapse:
South Korea, in other words, isn't just haunted by the spectre of aggression from the north - but also by the possibility of internal rupture. It has a huge, authoritarian secret police force that has been caught secretly meddling in electoral politics.
Far from reining in this spookocracy, the South Korean political class has tried to hand them even MORE powers, with LESS oversight. Today is the fifth anniversary of the Korean opposition's filibuster to stop the worst of these.
(Seo Ki-Ho, a politician with the affectionate nickname "Milhouse" for his resemblance to the Simpsons character read the Korean edition of my novel LITTLE BROTHER into the record during the filibuster!)
This othering is also sharply illustrated in the country's culture of misogynistic voyeurism, which goes beyond "upskirt" videos and includes a roaring trade in videos captured with hidden cameras in toilets, changing rooms and hotel rooms.
It's hard to overstate the reach of this practice, and its political salience: it has provoked a vast mass-movement of women and allies demanding an end to the practice and a reckoning with institutional sexism:
Zombies aren't ever just about contagion - they're also always an expression of a deep anxiety that your neighbors aren't what they seem, that in a pinch, they'll turn on you, and not just because they've been infected, but also to protect themselves and their comfort.
US zombie booms always have an element of this: 1950s (reds under the bed); 1980s (red menace redux); 2000s (immigration "crisis"), etc. It'd be amazing if the only thing driving K-zombies' popularity was the pandemic, or even less plausibly, a mere aesthetic coincidence.
A lot of people have written in to the show and asked...
It was only 09:55 on a Friday morning but Wetherspoons was carefully selected as my first hostelry. Bizarrely, it appeared to be shut despite me waiting until 10:05.
Bishop - closed
Thames Boatman - closed
Black Horse - closed
This is getting annoying. Only one thing for it - my cast iron guarantee for an after-hours locking after a night of multi-screen European football.
'The Willoughby Arms'
Sure enough, I wasn't disappointed. As I approached and my pace gradually increased, I saw a large banner adorning the fence
'WELCOME BACK !'
Salivating and reaching for my debit card, I pushed the large double doors open, expecting to see the usual motley collection of lonely, alcoholic local men staring into a glass of Fosters, balancing on their bar stools.
But no - closed.
I dropped to my knees, slamming my fists into the doors, screaming
'OH COME ON. FOR FUCK'S SAKE. PLEASE. LET ME IN ! I AM EVEN WEARING MY COVID-19 BADGE. JUST ONE PINT OF GROLSCH. JUST ONE TINY RUDDY SIP. HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME ?'
@neauoire does the web-ring require the icon to be shown or can a link be used instead? i'm avoiding images in my website as to reduce the bandwidth it consumes, and i'm interested in applying to the webring
[bookmark=https://twitter.com/da_667/status/1365130137835102209]personally I think android is a fucking abomination, and it annoys me to no end that it is perceived as "wrong" that as the owner of my hardware, would want root access to my device.[/bookmark]
The thing is, Android users don't really own the hardware. The true owner is Google, and Google will only allow the hardware to be used in a way that benefits Google.
So I guess I can thank the @EU_Commission@twitter.com, BioNTech/Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and the german politicians for the coming 3rd wave and no vaccination for me in sight anytime soon. Two summers in voluntary #Lockdown for me. I am very disappointed.
Crikey. Frank Breech. That takes me back. Professional lovable rogue. Had a semi-regular role in Minder, and was a memorably well-hard Cockney invader from another galaxy in the Tomorrow People. Top ten novelty duet with Barbara Windsor: "Wot's Yours Luv?"
Got greedy. Flew too close to the sun, didn't he?
Last of the Summer Wine, first day on location, wallop! Hit by an out of control bathtub. Nothing to do with the shoot, ironically. Doctors said he'd never wink again.
Still he pulled himself back from the brink, then he went back to the brink, then he pulled himself back from it again. Was always milking it, old Breechy.
I read somewhere that he'd retired and bought a pub by the Chiswick Flyover, for the passing traffic. I don't think he'd have minded that most of it was passing directly overhead.
He was a dreamer. None of the dreams were realistic, and in most of them he'd forgotten to wear pants, so I say damn the press reaction, and the fines, he was being his authentic self, right to the end.
The vinca alkaloids are from the periwinkle plant (catharanthus rosea). The taxanes are from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree (taxus). The podophyllotoxins are from the May apple plant. The camptothecan analogs are from the Asian "Happy Tree" (Camptotheca acuminata). (Podophyllotoxins and camptothecan analogs are also known as topoisomerase inhibitors)
Vinca alkaloids: Vincristine, Vinblastine and Vinorelbine Taxanes: Paclitaxel and Docetaxel Podophyllotoxins: Etoposide and Tenisopide Camptothecan analogs: Irinotecan and Topotecan
Bendamustine is made of chlorinated sulphur synthed with ethylene. the first effective #chemo it was previously known as, Agent X and before that... Mustard Gas.
I got some really cool glitches from Atari. Might try to make more and release them somewhere. I got the opportunity to use some in commercial work last year. #theWorkshop
![[[in the arcades]]](photo/111108540060282180d0b51967447098-5.png?ts=1614385098)
