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Sorry I haven't gotten a damn thing done on my software & video projects in months. I'm enduring a sort of lightning round personal torture hell at the moment. In a couple weeks I will be done moving my family to the new place and can finally get back to my own work. At least, if I hopefully don't injure myself doing this entirely alone, or my truck's deferred maintenance catches up to me on the highway and it just explodes in a fireball of pure exhaustion / spite

@bobbyd0g
also the lesson of the no-fly list &c. isn't that the state is omniscient, it's that it can make a thousand people ruin your life because a computer told them to with very little regard for why your name is in the computer

@bobbyd0g
also the assumption that you have to do stuff to get in trouble

like, cops shot that protestor in january and now they're trying to charge everyone else who was there with his death

These ideas are ludicrously out of date. The idea that "somebody" needs to do any "sifting" for our world's near-inescapable new mass surveillance regime to be effective is total nonsense, especially in the face of new AI technologies that will allow the unskilled (e.g. even individual shitty cops) to make use of huge search & stat engines on multiple dragnet information sources. No mention of private communications here, just blaming activists for what is really a software vacuum. A real shame.

RT @KielstrupMikael
Sticker seen in Copenhagen, Denmark
@GraffitiRadical

Alaska Says It’s Now Legal “in Some Instances” to Discriminate Against LGBTQ Individuals
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On the advice of the state’s attorney general, Alaska’s civil rights agency quietly deleted language promising equal protections for LGBTQ Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints.

#Alaska #LGBTQ #CivilRights #Discrimination #SCOTUS

propublica.org/article/alaska-

Are there ANY car manufacturers NOT selling data about you / your car?

Reading @pluralistic 's Feb 28 piece about VW tracking cars (and not providing the info unless you pay): pluralistic.net/2023/02/28/kin

Cory Doctorow writes:
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> And yet, here we are. Like most (all?) major car makers, Volkswagen has filled its vehicles with surveillance gear, and has a hot side-hustle as a funnel for the data-brokerage industry.
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Is anyone keeping a list of car manufacturers who are NOT doing this?

The best thing I've seen written on Musk and Twitter is this random YouTube comment (that I can't find a way to link to directly)

this is sort of the fate of every conceptual framework: the useful concepts gets lifted into some other, subsequent frameworks, but the language — particularly category labels — can easily survive in this unmoored state, now colloquially popular but signifying nothing

and so 15 years later you're shaking your head because you read a whole paragraph about how "Narrativism" is when fictional positioning doesn't matter

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in a moment of lovely synchronicity i rediscovered this David Byrne quote today.

"It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation."

Years ago elementary was approached by Canonical to become an official Ubuntu flavor. “All” we had to do was offer Snap out of the box. We debated it—being able to offload some additional infrastructure concerns was attractive—but we realized it helped Canonical more than it helped us, and we had chosen Flatpak for all of its benefits as covered here:

blog.elementary.io/elementary-

#elementaryOS #Ubuntu #Flatpak #Snap

I've been working my way through Eric Balchunas's /The Bogle Effect/, on the founding of Vanguard. Hagiographic biz books like this are hard going for me, but it is important stuff, hopeful in some respects, and deeply saddening in others...

🧵

This is something you see over and over when you study co-op history: This stuff works. Really well, if there is real money behind it. But it doesn't facilitate stealing. So the rich people who get to decide what gets done in the world don't decide to do this. That's the problem.

But there's another problem...

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Hellsite

The hell site