The Luddite / is on Nostr

Previously at https://mastodon.online/@theluddite

Mostly in English, though sometimes in Spanish and occasionally in French.

Last Notes

2024-08-16 17:45:50

I'm doing a huge deploy on a Friday afternoon. Client's call against my advice. Thoughts and prayers please. I don't want to pull a CrowdStrike.

2024-07-21 02:52:16

re:previous boost - I had a job that involved going to garment factories in Bangladesh to test/deploy equipment. I got to see imperial extraction first hand: Beloved western brands with air conditioned offices pocketing profits extracted from labor half a world away. The hotel that I stayed at had a french chef and manicured grounds surrounded by abject poverty. They checked every car for bombs, and while they did mine, I always thought about how totally justified it would be.

2024-07-16 12:27:24

I'm so glad that this is paywalled, otherwise I'd ruin my entire morning by reading it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02319-3
https://sb-assemblagees.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/112/796/139/839/224/787/original/abd14426ed9b1d3d.png

2024-07-12 15:58:07

The destruction of humanity's one and only planet is the single most catastrophic possible failure of an economic system, to say nothing of capitalism's many other shortcomings.
To advance truly democratic alternatives, a group of activists, researchers and academics (myself included!) have launched the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning
https://www.indep.network/
We'll have two launch events tomorrow. Anyone interested is welcome:
https://www.indep.network/events/

2024-07-10 15:59:21

I got interviewed as part of a youtube video titled "why haven't we regulated big tech?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XU06CoNjkI&ab_channel=Dummy

2024-06-22 12:34:03

Do you work at a tech company that has user personas? If so, I'd love to read them! I'm doing a deep dive into them as a corpus, and I'm collecting as many examples as I can.
I understand that sharing these might be against the rules, so DM me to use email, signal, exchange PGP keys, or even hop on a call in which I won't write anything down beyond some general hand-written notes. Happy to do whatever you need to feel comfortable with sharing.

2024-05-24 12:29:17

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Alternate Headline: Capitalist rag admits artificial scarcity necessary for corporate profits.

2024-05-24 12:27:19

The point of solar panels is not to ensure "solar profitability," but to make for a greener, better world. Its profitability is only justified insofar as it moves us towards that goal. If we want to switch to renewables, then sometimes we're going to have surplus, because of how renewables work. This is well known and discussed ad nauseam. If that makes power markets unstable, then the problem is with markets, not with there being too many solar panels.
https://sb-assemblagees.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/112/496/032/305/158/040/original/392052966e1529b1.png

2024-04-20 15:12:35

People in tech spend too little time asking what we should do with our time, and too much asking how to free our time by automating what we currently do.

2024-03-18 23:32:56

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@npub16uk…pv7k
Hello from my T520! I use it every day to write software. It's had a couple minor upgrades and repairs but it's currently running fine with Ubuntu 22. I like it so much that I have a stack of 3-4 other ones, some are spares and some are donors for parts.

2024-03-06 19:25:24

Reddit signed a deal with Google to use its data to train LLMs. To celebrate, we made a firefox extension that lets you replace all your comments with any text of your choosing. All we ask is that you not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material, and we wouldn't want Reddit's uniquely valuable data to become hopelessly intermingled with that of litigious copyright-holders.
https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension

2024-02-21 14:50:44

https://sb-assemblagees.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/111/970/021/842/302/934/original/83fea726f2372e40.png

2023-12-18 20:37:46

I call bullshit on this study:
"AI-screened eye pics diagnose childhood autism with 100% accuracy "
https://newatlas.com/medical/retinal-photograph-ai-deep-learning-algorithm-diagnose-child-autism/
If I have time, I'll read the actual paper and write a blog post about it, but just based on the article, I call bullshit.

2023-11-07 21:41:19

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@npub13vv…0sze oh my god no! that's so cool!

2023-11-07 19:14:24

Each cruise ship burns tens of thousands of gallons of diesel every single day, and due to their international nature, their fuel isn't well regulated, so it's apparently nasty stuff.
For fun, we take mobile environmental disasters with us on little tours of our degrading planet. It's like we're not even comfortable leaving home without
a cloud of environmental degradation.