"Why do you think those billionaires keep pouring absurd amounts of money into school reform, despite decade after decade of failure? Because they know the alternative is to take some of their money and give it away." #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work
"I guess the best CAPTCHA is to ask people how to make a pipe bomb." @cadey https://xeiaso.net/blog/birth-death-seo/ ht @Luketoop @davatron5000
// a great piece on the strange solipsism, the world made of bullshit, the intersection of LLMs and SEO might soon drown us in.
@astrojuanlu that depends on price and quality of service. a higher-touch, more trustworthy steward of digital life should easily be worth somewhere in the single digit thousands a year to many people (i becomes a role like notary or lawyer, not just i-run-an-activity-pub-thing).
recasting things this way does bring in some equity concerns (like everything surrounding e.g. laws or European style notaries) that i think we'd want to use public policy to address.
@pmk i think it should be paid work, not in addition to full-time work.
i think we want to get to a point where instead of paying a stealth Google tax in the price of everything we buy, we pay outright a human or small firm we know and trust and save money on the other side as Google et al away.
i agree that you can't become everyone's cloud provider and troubleshooter and also be expected to have a full-time job. that'd really be without a life.
there's a stereotyped argument that's framed like "dogmatic self-hosting foss dude" vs "person with a life and kids and a job who wants to get stuff done". 1/
these people are presented as adversaries: tech-dude moralistically insists person with a life is a sell-out, person with a life says get a life, i have one and i want to keep it thank you, even if that means gmail. 2/
but these people should be complements and allies rather than adversaries! 3/
"self-hosting" can be community hosting, and if the 1% into being foss-tech-dude and the 99% who prefer a life get together, we could all be less at the mercy of distant providers who treat us like plankton. tech dude could earn a decent living and be a resource for everyone rather than some weirdo in the basement. /fin
"If Threads supported outbound RSS 2.0 feeds we could avoid the dominance Twitter had over news for so long. There's nothing hard or magical about it, the technology of RSS is simple, and well understood by thousands of developers." @davew http://scripting.com/2023/12/12.html #rss
@LesterB99 hot confusion?
goodnight, cruel world.
i will see you in the morning.
⬜ ⬜ 🟨 🟨 ⬜
⬜ 🟨 🟨 🟨 ⬜
💩 💩 🟨 🟨 🟨
💩 💩 💩 💩 💩
Turdle!
We like each other in person. We hate each other online.
i like talking to my kid about math and chemistry. it spoils it for me if i think about it as STEM and recall the stupid footballs we make of everything. but why is one third 0.3 forever is still such an elegant and simple and beautiful fact.
don't trust anything that doesn't also make feeds available via #RSS.
[new draft post] Norms mean you can't pull rank https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/12/14/norms-mean-you-cant-pull-rank/index.html
according to growth statistics we may be richer than we have ever been, while at the same time we collectively can't afford to keep the actual, well, food in the foods we are accustomed to eating. (inflation stats mostly don't capture "skimpflation", the hedonic modeling that hypothetically could would be too complicated and controversial. so skimpflation doesn't subtract from "measured" growth.) https://www.businessinsider.com/inflation-high-prices-costs-making-food-snacks-sodas-worse-quality-2023-12 ht #quoderat at the #TechnologyAsNature blog
when i awake and the fading haze of a dream is still with me, i come to sympathize with hamlet.
from another excellent piece by #PhilippeLemoine https://www.philippelemoine.com/p/gaza-heroes-and-terrorists
@ouguoc i mean, but we don’t want our nuclear fuel actually to *combust*, just to get very hot!
i was going to post something like
"are you pro-fire or anti-fire?"
as an analogy to the way people set up what i think are foolishly framed questions about e.g. the state as a social institution.
but i realized it doesn't work very well in this era of climate crisis, non-combustion-based sources of heat and energy, electrifying all the things.
looking forward, one can arguably be pretty consistently anti-fire.
@DetroitDan this seems maybe of interest to you: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/opinion/european-union-far-right.html