Managed to refuse… In more than half of the cases. That does not look good. By any reasonable standard failing in one of a thousand would be disasterous.

Yeah, I find that the point is rarely well made and it’s often because the whole argument is a bit confused. People want to present it as being easier than it is.

Open registrations on the fediverse is a problem in general. Trolls abuse it to make accounts specifically to harass specific users. Those not being harassed will not notice this - before the “fetch all replies” feature was introduced they wouldn’t even see the replies. And because it seems so much better than other platforms unless you’re actively being targeted, you’ll have minority women or whatever raising the problem and a bunch of white men will respond that they have no idea what they’re talking about and that there is no problem and that they should just block the trolls. Blocking the trolls is just not efficient if they keep popping up all over the place.

One way to avoid this as a server admin is to defederate instances with open registrations that are being used in this way. But Mastodon.social is too big for this strategy to really be viable.

Of course, open registrations is also key to people bothering signing up in the first place. People are not used to resistance, and they don’t want to write a letter of motivation to sign up for social media. So the issue is not easily solved. Mastodon is working on better moderation tools. Hopefully they’ll manage to address it that way.

relies on the supplier being truthful with their documentation for their production

So the supermarket needs documentation and to take precautions, because they are to a certain extent responsible for the legality of the stuff they are selling.

In the real world supermarkets don’t just pick up carrots from some random guy showing up with a trailer full of them. In online markets, this is closer to how it works. Those running and profiting off online platforms should be accountable for what they sell. If Amazon lists electrical products that don’t meet fire safety standards on their website they should be held accountable for selling these products, even if they only act as middle men.

If companies can just take the money without any responsibility we’re fucked.

I think it would be reasonable if this was a problem of small indie titles that do not have a publisher and basically wouldn’t exist without Steam. If Valve allows for content on their platform they have an obligation to ensure this content is legal. If a supermarket cooperates with a local farmer to sell their produce directly without middle men, it’s partly their responsible if the produce is made using illegal pesticides.

However, it seems unreasonable when it’s about stuff like Forza and FIFA. Then sue Microsoft and EA, for fucks sake. These games have publishers.

My most recent ThinkPad also overheated an insane amount at whatever use I could put it through, and the fan was constantly running full speed. It was like that from day one, and there was no dust or anything, it was just a terrible machine.

In six years I have burnt through two Lenovo ThinkPads. In the first the USB C charging port malfunctioned, and it turns out the charging port is soldered directly to the motherboard so they had to replace the whole thing. Ever since I got it back from repairs it enters into kernel panics all the time, no matter which distro I install.

I was in the middle of writing my thesis so I had no time for repairs when it broke, so I ordered mysef a new ThinkPad. I had to choose between pre-assembled models, and I wanted a high resolution display, a good processor, and some other things. I got one with not quite as much RAM as I really needed, and found out when I wanted to upgrade that they had rendered upgrading RAM completely impossible in that model of ThinkPad. It wasn’t even one of the new slim ones, but a pretty traditional bulky one. Complete bullshit.

Both of these laptops are recent enough that had they not sucked I would still be using them years from now. I’m happy Lenovo appear to be changing their ways, but I wouldn’t touch another ThinkPad with a stick after my experiences with them.

Currently I’m using a Framework 13. Hopefully it’ll last me decades.

And every Ubuntu Touch device with support for external monitors for the last ten years or so. Here’s a demonstration running on a Fairphone 4.

I don’t even mind subscribing to 404media, as I feel like their operation makes sense. But there’s no way I’m going to pay to read some sponsored content on a page riddled with trackers.

Yeah. Sites like CNET and TechRadar seems completely uninteresting at this point. Wired and the Verge seem to have done a better job at transitioning into reporting on how tech affects society, which is much more interesting. 404media seems to be doing well in that business.

The leading article of the Verge at the moment is on what is real in the age of deepfakes, relating to war and disinformation. Wired writes about “All the ways big tech fuels ICE and CBP”. 404media runs a story about how “CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements”. Meanwhile, CNET is headlining how “Apple’s new MacBook Air is faster. It also costs $100 more”, and TechRadar tells us about “the seven best gadgets we have seen today”. I cannot even imagine caring. I wouldn’t even have cared back when I did care.

Besides, if a tech site does their job these days their readers will not be using Google any more at all.

Oops, obvisouly, was thinking about the Muslim world and getting terms mixed. Fixed.

I think the advantage is that it reads partly as a FAQ, partly as a place to read whatever commentary on the situation people seem to agree with. It’s a place where people can discuss and ask questions more generally. Other threads tend to be more about specific breaking news and developments, maybe missing the bigger picture.

All fascists need a good enemy, obliviate one and you have to move on to the next. The only end game to this bullshit is total apocalypse. Which of course is what the evangelical Christian supporters of Israel has been cheering for all along.

Iran has been a headache for a long time. Much like in America and Israel, violent religious fundamentalists took control over society and installed a reign of terror.

This has of course been bad for the Iranians, but America of course could not care less about that. However, Iran has been a major concern for Israel, as they are an unreliable an aggressive neighbour. Again, don’t let the irony get lost on you. The threat of Iran maybe managing to develop nukes has been a particularly salient issue, and perhaps one of the driving forces behind Israel getting its own nukes decades ago.

In short, Israel just cannot feel safe with the current rule in Iran. Or so the Israeli far right has insisted for decades, anyways. Keeping this fear high on the agenda has been key to winning elections and to get in place the far right genocidal lunatics currently in the Israeli government. Along with the fear of Palestinians of course.

The US is of course loyal allies of Israel as their one true friend in a region full of oil. The Saudis are of course also good friends whenever they are not actively attacking America and killing civilians or journalists, but they are not quite as good at lobbying. So American interests and Israeli interests are pretty much the same, and the Iranian regime has been the face of evil for decades. Conveniently they are also super evil, so it’s easy to make propaganda.

Recently the Iranian regime has murdered a bunch of civilians who protest the regime. The US and Israel wouldn’t usually care about dead civilians in the middle east - they certainly wouldn’t oppose it at least - but right now it provides a convenient excuse to bomb the fuck out of Iran. Trump needs this because he needs support before the upcoming election- a successful impeachment might allow the opposition to grow teeth, and if they do he could end up locked away for life.

Netanyahu is in even deeper ship than Trump, with corruption charges at home and crimes against humanity abroad. Now that his genocide in Palestine is getting old he needs something new to keep him in power.

Iran responds to attack by sending missiles towards American military bases in the area. American military bases are located in the surrounding countries, which is why you see newspaper headlines making out as if Iran is launching a war on every country in the regioun. They’re not, they’re just trying to strike back against America and Israel. Just like the Americans and Israelis they suck at hitting military targets and often end up hitting civilian ones instead.

Gaël Duval, the lead developer behind /e/OS, has been recommending an app called Zettle on his blog. It at least work on degoogled /e/OS, probably GrapheneOS as well. I have no personal experience as I prefer sticking to cards.

I just remembered this amazing book:
Why Not Socialism by Gerald A. Cohen.

Super nice and easy read, fantastic introduction. It has been years and years since I read it but I highly recommend it as an introduction.

This is probably a much more efficient “mention of the fediverse” than if the journalist had started trying to explain that there is this federated network of independent social media sites bla bla bla.

The people reading this are looking for something they can understand. I expect naming Mastodon and leaving it to them to check it out will convert more people than if they started trying to explain what it is.

I’m a bit weirded out by all the attention given to w-social.eu by mainstream media, though. First of all it doesn’t exist yet, second we have no reason to believe it will actually be decent, third we have good reason to believe it won’t be.

The neat thing about algorithmic social media is that content relating to suicide and self-harm inspires a lot of interaction among teenagers, causing it to be shoved in their faces whether they search for it or not.

Suicidal teenagers are not searching for suicide material on Instagram; Instagram is feeding suicide material to regular teenagers for ad views.

I’m a bit sceptical of people who are too into “socialism as a government type” - they tend to develop fundamentalist ideas about what the perfect society should look like, and which means are justified in order to get there. Usually all means will be. To me socialism is at its best as a critique, allowing us to understand what’s going on in the world and how to fight it piece by piece instead of trying to construct some ideal society based on a feeble understanding of reality.

I guess what is considered easy is very subjective. I seriously think Marx’ Manifesto of the Communist Party is not a bad place to start. It’s everything Capital is not: short, easy to read, somewhat superficial.

I’d say the historical analysis is at the core of marxism as much as the economic one, and it’s summarized perfectly right from the start:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Make sure to take a second to reflect on this and the Soviet Union and the failure of Marxist-Leninism. It was not the end of history, but another common ruin. Which brings me to the biggest problem of studying socialist theory: The line between theory and propaganda is often blurred. The Manifesto of the Communist Party itself, thought-provoking as it is, is a pamphlet made for wide circulation, and more propaganda than academic work. Marx’ understanding of history revolves around how proletarian revolts such as the Soviet Union go wrong and end up reproducing existing power structures. Yet many of today’s self-proclaimed Marxists are somehow blind to this and end up tricking themselves with all sorts of mind games.

That’s why I think it’s important to start with Marx himself. Understand his view of history and his criticism of the economy, and reflect on what it means for what you see in history since it was written. It still holds, though the theory itself has become weaponized in the very historical and economical dynamics he is describing. If you understand this independently you’re less likely to become a sucker who falls for propaganda.

And of course, Marx wasn’t a god, and he didn’t get it all right. I personally think the main problem is his understanding of history as having an “end” (a teleological account) - Marx believed every class revolt would lead us slightly closer to a classless society, and that eventually we would get there. This builds on Hegel, who had a similar understanding of history rooted in religion rather than communism. I think this is plain wrong - things very well might just get worse, and there is no end of history. But that’s me.

Of course one shouldn’t focus only on Marx, but I feel like he’s important enough that it’s worth taking him seriously. And with all the stupid takes people have on his work, I think it’s a good idea to go straight to the source.

I would of course love to see ladybird succeed, but it has seemed problematic from the start in my opinion. Servo seems much more serious.

I also like that Servo is developing an engine, not a browser as such. Seems like a good idea to keep the two separated.