queerlilhayseed

You’re welcome! I hope you find your people, we’re going to need a lot of local organization to get through this.

I haven’t bought an oscilloscope in a while but that seems like way too much.

One of these days I gotta write a proper program in a lisp. Everything I read about them makes them seem really cool, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

Don’t look on the internet, you won’t find the community you’re looking for here. Find the coolest candidate running in your local area and volunteer for their campaign. Even if they kinda suck, show up for their events. You aren’t there to meet the candidate, you’re there to meet other people who care about their community. Talk to the other volunteers. You’ll be surprised at who you meet.

I think that’s an interesting distinction. I wonder whether the indigenous lifeforms of Coruscant would classify the Republic as good guys or bad guys.

I think about it in neither way. My point is that the descriptors of “light” and “dark” are our own (or the Jedis’ own) moralizations mapped crudely onto the nature of the universe. The Jedi describing themselves as “light” and others as “dark” is a recursive definition of morality and it leads to moral rot, because people start to believe that the rules handed down by the Jedi are actually morally perfect, and above question. It is definitionally authoritarian.

I replied to Björn’s comment first with more detail, but I fail to see the difference. The “light side” of the force is just branding the Jedi used to claim moral authority for their own rules about who can use the Force and how.

What is the “light side” of the Force if not Jedi propaganda establishing themselves as the only morally correct force users in the galaxy? Who is to say which parts of the force are good and which are evil? The failing of the Jedi isn’t that they assumed they were completely on the right side, but that the force has “sides” at all. The dark side exists in all living things, because the Force exists in all living things. To deny a part of the Force is imbalance.

I think that is precisely the misreading that led to the downfall of the Jedi order. The dark side of the force isn’t inherently evil, just as the light side isn’t inherently good. The Jedi did a lot of shitty stuff under the banner of being the good guys. Balance, I think, is having all aspects of the Force (that is, all living things) in harmony.

Ok, I watched up until he started comparing the development of “AI”, as he calls it, to the development of nuclear fission technology, and that’s where I got fed up. Is generative AI as “impactful” as a nuclear weapon detonation over a city? This guy says no, but I don’t know how you can possibly compare the two. LLMs are great at manipulating information, they aren’t high-energy explosives. There’s no common definition of “impactful” that meaningfully puts the two technologies on the same scale of comparison. They’re just different.

And why does it matter, anyway? Is “nuclear weapons” the bar for when we should start caring about impactful technologies? I think not. Generative AI is an informational monster born of the internet and it is unique to it, and that is a huge problem given that the internet is quickly becoming the defacto medium of communication for groups over a certain size. We should be taking it seriously, full stop. I’m less interested in ranking it alongside other catastrophic technologies.

I think we haven’t seen the full potential of generative AI yet, and I fear it may be quite destructive (more destructive) if we can’t engineer our way around the dead internet that it was created to usher in. I think we should be trying to learn about it, how it works, how it may evolve, and how to have a usable internet alongside it.

I started playing around with RedHat Cockpit as a potential podman-based replacement to my disorganized docker server. Only got a jellyfin instance running on at the moment, sharing the same network disk as my “production” jellyfin server.

So far, I am not impressed. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to preserve settings when I want to update the image, which is one of the main reasons I want to migrate. I’d like to have a weekly cron job that checks for new latest images, and updates them automatically, ideally without me having to intervene, but that doesn’t seem like something cockpit can do. If I want to update a container image through the GUI, it seems like I have to recreate it from scratch.

Stare decisis is, and has always been, for suckers.

There are tons of spam factories that pose as local newspapers. The first one that comes to mind is the Denver Guardian, which gained brief notoriety during Trump’s rise to power. But there are a million of them, probably literally. They are easy to make and they are easy to launder through social media bot networks.

the list for the curious. I don’t mind if rimu wants to maintain a default blocklist, if I maintained my own fediverse app I would probably make something similar, based on my own preferences, to cut down on the mod work. If you want your piefed instance to allow botfarm produce, disable the blocklist or just fork it and live your dream.