It is fun as a quirky hobby, but really, depending on it for information and entertainment was really bad. Radio and TV are what created mass culture, removed local dialects and accents.
It is a one-to-many channel where people in charge of the station have disproportionate power.
It is nice to have as a simple alternate way of communicating, but boy, how am I never giving up internet access to get back to those.
Everytime he is mentionned this webcomic en tête springs into my mind, and I can’t help giggle out of it.
I wont buy electric until they are analog and disconnected from any sort of internet.
I have this one:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i_MiEV_-_Peugeot_iOn_-_Citroën_C-ZERO
As analog as you will get. Bought second hand for cheap. Only about 100 km range though so not for every use.
As someone who was extremely vocal of “the cloud” when it arrived and enthusiastic about AI (especially the non generative uses) I am sad and a bit angry that people only NOW realize that servers do not exist on an etheral plane but do have physical requirements.
The article is about lithium and copper. AI does not use lithium. It is a very small user of copper.
“Our ancestors were miners,” says Ramos. They were the ones who discovered the copper in the first place. The problem, she says, is the scale.
And I’ll add a complementary take: the problem is not the tech, it is the capitalist economy that decides to centralize megamining projects in the places where they are worst (read: cheapest) to implement due to poor environmental and social regulations. Most mineral resources are pretty well distributed in the world, we choose to mine them only in the poorest countries for a reason, which is unregulated trade.
The question is not “is the damage done worth the final benefit?” but rather “is the environmental and social damage worth a 20% decrease in consumer prices?”
Nowadays with JIT #1 and #2 are very close. There was less than a x2 performance gap when I compared a direct simple task in C and javascript.
About #3 no one does that.
#3 and #4 will be on the same scale, every token generated is roughly the same amount of CPU.
I am part of a citizen’s collective that promotes direct democracy. They did not theorize the narcissism-authoritarian link explicitly, but gave a few tricks that worked here to make some bad actors flee:
And I think that we failed on that account here: recognize that they are going to go from friendly to hostile in the blink of an eye and be ready for it.
One thing I will do differently in the future is that I will not waste too much time with people who can’t clarify their positions and disagreements.
I am really happy that this question led to so much elaboration. It does come from a person I know IRL who talks a lot about the psychology of power structures, having had to deal with too many psychopaths himself. If you are interested in the profile of authoritarian followers, which is different from leaders, there is an abundant literature on RWA profiles (right wing authoritarianism, but a bit ill named as stalinists followed similar patterns)
Power/authority needs to be based on trust, and it needs to be lost at the same instant as the trust that supports it is. The overhead of getting everyone together to hold a vote of no-confidence is way too high.
We should reverse the logic of the ‘signing onto law’ where a final formality gives a president, a chancellor or a queen an actual but rare veto power.
There should be something like a representative assembly that has to give a ‘go’ vote for coercive power to be exerted. Nowadays it can be very lightweight: remote voting can be secure easily if it is not anonymous (representatives, one can argue, should vote publicly).
It should be almost automatic when trust is there, but if it is absent, mere doubts should be enough to block an action.
We would live ina very different world if the representatives of a neighborhood had to give the ‘go’ for a police operation
can Anarchists build and maintain public infrastructure?
Internet
Wikipedia
Many open source projects
One could argue that international research efforts are generally done in a non-coercivie way
Anarchist ways can maintain public infrastructure, but they need to be built differently with that modus operandi in mind.
Over the past years, reading more about the dark triad/quadriad, I am becoming more and more convinced that authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism and that it is 100% of the explanation, that there is nothing more to it. Want to fight authoritarianism? Stop narcissist. It is not a matter of ideology, of left or right, of reformist vs revolutionary, it is just a matter of psychological profile. Stop the narcissist, that’s all.
How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?
I had a eye-opening moment with this videp, whose title (“Can 100 people self-organize without a leader”) is actually misleading, as it (IMHO) failed to demonstrate what it wanted to test, but demonstrated something much more interesting. The task given to 100 people was too simple to require multiple people (a “hack” they forbade has shown that one person was enough to do the full task) yet, a hierarchy “naturally” emerged. Even though the sample population is biased towards people who would not be very hierarchical.
My main takeaway was that an organization that does not want a hierarchy does not only need to make it possible to self-organize, but needs to actively “weed out” hierarchies. That’s hard, I don’t know of any examples of it.
It surely sounds like it. Which is annoying if they are crying out wolf, because China can and probably will (or did) put backdoors in its equipment.
Batteries pack with radio is weird. But really I don’t understand why we don’t have technical details.
Yes, well, from what sources do you gather that?
(I hate it when a technical take makes me side with authoritarian propaganda, but well…)
There is zero technical information in that article, yet plenty of people jumping to politically-loaded conclusions. Reminds me of the time when there was a (totally legitimate imho) scare about Huawei backdoors but zero technical details about what was actually found.
So from what I understand, some inverters “phone home”. A despicable habit of too many hardware in the industry, but the phrasing suggests without even confirming that it may be more nefarious than “mere” telemetry that plagues any connected device out there.
“Rogue device” suggests that it is additional hardware. They imply that the add connectivity channels that were not present in the device. Are we talking offline devices that were stealthily loaded with a 5G simcard or a Lora device waiting for a bricking code? It is implied but not stated, which makes me extremely suspicious.
If Chinese authorities can remotely brick solar inverters, it is a matter of national security to disclose the models and the modus operandi asap. It is irresponsible to not help us mitigate the potential of attack. Also, if there are “rogue devices” designed to sabotage your grid, that’s international sabotage, that’s state terrorism. It is important to state it if it is the case, instead of implying it.
“This is a serious issue that the industry needs to address, and it’s even more reason for Congress to maintain tax credits that are onshoring the production of inverters and the entire solar supply chain in the United States."
I suspect that this is the core reason actually. Don’t get me wrong, manufacturing crucial equipment locally is definitely a good idea, but I suspect strongly that these accusation are just a way of dodging the embrassement that Chinese companies’ market share is annoyingly high in a market that westerners were too slow to recognize as critical.
Yes, I meant as a client. I thought you were looking at options to hook up guests to a openssh-sftp-server
Filezilla is also a popular option
That’s interesting! Thanks
sFTP. If you have a machine with a ssh server, it has sFTP capabilities.
Most of the solarpunk crowd seems to equate anything LLM with Sam Altman and Elon Musk. They think it is a purely capitalistic endeavor that can’t run on anything else than methane-breathing datacenters. There needs to be some education about the real impact of it and the open source of it. To explain how it can fit into a post-capitalist society.
I do think that vibe-coding is one way to reappropriate tech yes, and is extremely solarpunk. It makes manipulating machines and designing system a far more inclusive capability, bringing it from the work of specialist into the political sphere.
But explaining that is an uphill battle. When I made a post about solarpunk AI a year ago, it was well received. I fear it would be downvoted into oblivion if I published the same thing today.
Accountability is the #1 enemy of any narcissist. The responses you’ll get will be absolutely insane.
I think everyone agrees that there is a connection between narcissism and authoritarianism. This conversation makes me wonder though, if there is not more than a mere correlation. Could it be that authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism and that there is literally nothing else there?
It is not only corporations. Single governmental voices are bad too, and many non-profits have their own political biases.
The difference with influencers and podcasters is that you have the choice between thousands of them. Radio would be like having the choice only between the top 5 of youtube, and you would have to tune in at a precise time to get it.