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halm OP ,
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Huh. There is a worrying lack of license information, yes. I didn't even notice.

halm ,
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Yeah, but we're not looking at the root cause here. Their purpose is to train energy glutton, error prone "AI" even if experience teaches us that those ML models fuck up more often than confirmation bias allows.

"AI" is a bourgeoise and Capitalist tool and, same as with cryptocurrency, we cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Fuck AI down the drain. Make things with your own minds, your own hands.

halm ,
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This reads like a whole lot of research was boiled down to fit the "barely an article" constraints of a casual news outlet. The outline is all over the place but seems well-intended; it's just not clear what information we're supposed to take away from this.

Kudos for mentioning GNU Social, Zot and Diaspora, but I'm not really sure any of them are relevant anymore?

Avoid Virpus VPS

Figured I would hopefully save others from the annoyances I've had with their service. I experienced daily high packet loss to both my VPS and their website, including the control panel (greater than 50%, typically). The control panel was broken and couldn't tell me the status of my VPS. When I asked for a root cause and fix...

halm ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

First I've heard of Virpus but thanks for the heads up. More than 50% packet loss does not sound like a working infrastructure, much less one that should be marketed to consumers.

Am I the only one preferring low quality media over high quality one?

I have a very slow Internet connection (5 Mbps down, and even less for upload). Given that, I always download movies at 720p, since they have low file size, which means I can download them more quickly. Also, I don't notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p. As for 4K, because I don't have a screen that can display 4K,...

halm ,
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I'm with you. 720p unless I can't find lower than 1080 — for my setup there isn't much point. The TRaSH guide parameters make my head ache thinking how much I'd be shelling out on bandwidth and storage for no discernible difference on my home theatre.

halm ,
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Yeah it is. Church on Ruby Road is part of the season but numbered 0. Looks like it got counted as 1 here?

halm ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

That was a really fun buildup and coda. The resolutions to the conflict with Sutekh and the mystery of Ruby' mum were underwhelming, though. If you're going to have the big bad simply be put on a leash and dragged through the time vortex, you better have a gut punch up your other sleeve. But they didn't.

The central conceit is fun but half-baked. Turns out after ages and ages riding the TARDIS, Sutekh had become a scoreboard fanboy like any mortal Whovian who's been watching since 1975. Everything that happens to the Doctor has to make sense to him (maybe Ruby's mum is the Rani?!) and he simply can't kill off the Doctor or Ruby without learning who left her at the church, so he can continue building headcanon from there while the universe spins into entropy. This finale has really been about playing against viewer expectations but I didn't expect it to be the basis of Sutekh's defeat...

So now we know Ruby's mum was a nurse in Coventry all along. That is a nice reversal, of course, and plays into the Doctor's conviction that everyone is special (see "Space babies," among others). Good thing Sutekh is gone though, because he would be furious at this development... There's no complex cosmic puzzle to be solved, Ruby's birth and abandonment dovetails perfectly with real life statistics as Kate told us last episode.

After a season of teasing Susan Foreman, I found the Doctor's and Ruby's talk outside the coffeeshop to be revealing. Trying to talk her out of reconnecting with her mum, he's really talking about himself abandoning his granddaughter, and rationalising why he never went back for her. That is pretty damning if not for his admission to Kate in the last episode that he might bring disaster on Susan if he were to find her.

I liked those thematic strands and the way they set up for next season, and the general storyline if this double feature finale —but the boss fight might have needed a bit more workshopping before making it to production...

halm OP ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

Oh no, I'm not Wayland ready yet. I still use Openbox for crying out loud 🤣 Tried and true still works for me but I'll give Rofi a shot!

halm OP ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

Nice, I'll see if it can replace ye olde taskbar standard for me 👍

halm ,
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As a Doctor Who viewer, I thoroughly approve the "timey-wimey stuff" line. And as I'm currently rewatching Voyager I'm so glad to see the recurring crew in Prodigy ❤🖖

halm ,
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I've had good experience stitching parts together with handbrake. Honestly, it's much easier than importing to an editing suite (and getting the export settings right 😬).

halm , (edited )
@halm@leminal.space avatar

they explicitly use the term socialist to describe the Federation economy in SNW.

I'm going to need a source and context for this, apparently it flew by me in between all the parallel timeline nonsense required to shoehorn James Kirk into the series. Also, the "Gorn, but Xenomorphs" retcon.

Generally speaking, I was fine with Socialism being a quiet part of Trek economics for 50+ years. I don't do a lot of mental gymnastics aligning the minutiae of a fictional future with contemporary concepts. Science fiction is a reflection of our real world, sure, but I have as little use for connecting the dots between 21st and 23rd economical concepts as I have for schematics for the replicators on Enterprise. A lot can happen in 2-300 years, especially when Trek concepts are metaphors and narrative shortcuts for telling stories about a future that recontextualise our own times.

But I get what you mean, it was always Socialism, wasn't it? Our real world has taken a weird polarised turn that makes Trek's space utopia seem more far fetched than it has for a long time. Even if "the culture wars" sounds like something the franchise might have introduced as a philosophically apt concept back in the '90s...

In that regard I too appreciate that the show's producers put their company scrip where Trek's mouth has been all those years. It seems that some very loud "culture warriors" never grokked that this was a deeply left (or at the very least humanist) leaning show. It's a little late in the day to spell it out for them that, yes — "Trekonomics" are frigging Socialist, but apparently that's the level of media illiteracy we're dealing with here.

So good on SNW for letting its red flag fly. It will probably piss off some people who still can't separate Socialism from whatever garbled idea of "Red scare" indoctrination has been passed down through generations. Whatever, they're pissed off no matter what.

It is ironic to me that this "Socialist" discourse is coming from a franchise(!) so ensconced in capitalist production and economic structures that it is gauged for marketability and profit. That's the big elephant in the room throughout all the "Trek so woke" outrage cycles: We'll never get to a post-scarcity future resembling Star trek by sitting around watching Star trek.

halm ,
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Got it. TBF, most of what comes out of Pella's mouth I interpret as sarcastic quips. She's the SNW version of Jett Reno, after all.

Not that she's wrong, it's just not exactly a franchise-wide decree of mission statement passed down from Alex Kurtzman or the Roddenberry estate...

halm , (edited )
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Yeah, but claiming that money is a thing of the show's past is as old as the show itself. The voyage home:
https://leminal.space/pictrs/image/f119fcb6-0c7e-421c-b3ba-081bf1657850.gif

Almost 30 years ago we got this great bit between Picard and Lily in First contact:

— The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.

— No money? You mean you don't get paid?

— The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.

This, of course, from a man with inherited real estate in La Barre... But there are several anticapitalist barbs in TNG and DS9, too.

[Edited first to add GIF, second because I got my wires crossed re private property and money]

halm , (edited )
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halm ,
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You're right, I wrote one thing but my head was still at the general economy matter! Will edit.

halm ,
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Also countries that probably started out socialist but took a sharp turn into authoritarianism and under-the-hood oligarchy... You know who you are.

halm ,
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I know! Who would've guessed watching him in DS9 S1 (Quark's doofus whipping boy passing down the abuse to Nog) that he would have one of the most low-key amazing character arcs of the series?

halm ,
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I dunno, Odo's morals are very much tied to his need to maintain control and appearances. Yes, that aligns perfectly with his shapeshifting ability 🙂

halm ,
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So, car factories have used custom built robots on assembly lines for decades, I want to say close to a half century? Why on earth would anybody want to replace those with humanoid robots other than, I dunno, having severed ties with reality to live out his days in a deluded fantasy?

This is as great example of Musk's """genius""" as that time he decided to move a Twitter data centre with the help of his own incapable hands, a cousin and some homeless people.

halm ,
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Can we just dwell on the subject line of "MISSING HAIR GOODS"? 🤣

halm ,
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Art theft

I mean, they're not wrong but ... since they're also hacking people their motives seem kind of mixed.

halm ,
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You forget all the images that "AI" models are trained on without consent or payment. Plus as you say, that training could result in the same artists losing work. Double theft, of IP and future income.

halm ,
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Important difference between you and an ML model: you can enjoy that art (YMMV), the ML never will.

There is a similar distinction between artists and galleries putting artwork to the public, and corporations auto-scraping billions of artwork for a statistical engine to mass produce qualitatively lesser versions.

halm ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

Wow. All artists throughout history just facedesked at that comment.

halm ,
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Oh, the single, shared built-in search function in mastodon, pixelfed, misskey, lemmy, friendica, peertube, diaspora, castopod, writefreely, &c?

Please, the fediverse is more than [platform you're currently using].

halm ,
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It's only a duopoly?! I'm genuinely curious who you see as the top two and what other bloated browsers don't make your list.

halm ,
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Right, so engines not browsers/brands. That makes sense 🙂 I guess Edge, Trident or WebKit don't really figure into that scale?

halm ,
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LOL, fair point!

Chrome but crypto and homophobic CEO

😬 I'm just going to guess Brave?

halm ,
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Duh, you're right. I refuse to use it so I'm not exactly up to date...

halm ,
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BECOME BITCOIN
BECOME LIGHTNING

LOL, not in a million years. Dumping this like the cryptocurrency infected garbage it is.

halm ,
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I mean, that quote is truer for any regular currency than it is for shitcoin. The only unique thing about cryptocurrency (and especially POW ones) is that it's flushing the environment down the drain even quicker than bog standard hypercapitalism. And still you can't use your fucking monopoly money to buy a bottled water.

halm ,
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"Sovereignty", that big white whale of the dysfunctional far right?

halm ,
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True. Tipi, Umbrel and CasaOS are savvy enough to do this. But do you really want to teach more cryptobros to slip their message under the threshold? I'm fine that they show their true goals front and centre, it's like a note saying "hit me" taped to their backs.

halm ,
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It's been a buzzword among the ultra-libertarian, anti-government, tinfoil hat wearing set for decades.

halm ,
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The title literally says "Sovereign computing". Are you okay? I do recommend reading from the top down, for more information please re-read.

halm ,
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Okay, sorry for the sarcasm. I think there is a certain overlap in the language used around general privacy principles and the more... out there, political anti-society movements.

Sometimes it's innocent and random but when I see somebody putting cryptocurrency up front in their project and using "sovereign computing" as a tagline, my internal crackpot detector goes nuts. I'm fairly sure that deep down these people would want to see the world burn to stay warm toward the end.

halm ,
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You say that with such certainty, as if proof of stake schemes won't simply be a greenwashing alibi for accelerating validation of currencies using them, to the point of the same carbon footprint as POW.

You're simply wrong to say that POS is without environmental impact, even Ethereum's carbon reductions were only that (and not nearly as high as they claimed).

halm ,
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There's another reason I don't share "It's FOSS" links anywhere: this should have been a github issue but it's turned into a clickbaity headline. Every othe article coming out of "It's FOSS" is either low effort, sensationalist, or both.

halm ,
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Funny how Bountysource deteriorated at the exact time cryptocurrency got involved.

halm ,
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I use the LibRedirect browser add-on to use Invidious on desktop and NewPipe on Android. Never use youtube.com, problem solved.

Poast owner was bragging about poisoning the results Cloutier of Bird.Makeup gets from their server, if you use that service we need an alternative lol. Currently I use my friend's small Nitter.

From looking at their posts they were able to get enough performance to start caching popular tweets, that doesn't sound that expensive to me. Might get into hosting that soon but putting this out there in the hopes someone else does, I'm happy with my secluded option....

halm ,
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Does Nitter still work for you? Because several instances officially closed when "Twitter blocked the last known way to access their network without a user account" (quoted from nitter.cz).

halm ,
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Yeah well, there are surveillance reasons you don't want to rely on services based in the USA.

JustinH , to Fediverse
@JustinH@twit.social avatar

"We Need To Rewild The Internet"
An absolutely excellent read (and great analogy) by @mariafarrell and @robin Probably the best piece I've read all year.

I often struggle to think of a term for "appearing messy from a distance is often, on a human scale, healthy actually." Comparing the social web to an ecosystem is exactly it.

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

@fediverse

halm ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

You're doing what again?! Insert obligatory 15 standards XKCD (edited because you can't link images directly?)

Jokes aside, tell us more!

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