I've made my unfinished blog posts public domain. Enjoy: https://write.grin.hu/gmate8-unfinished-works-public-domain/

I've thought I should do this after all. But this is really my last post.

Hello to all of you, who are still on this frequency listening to my stuff. I have decided to leave the Fediverse and to abandon my social media accounts as I feel I've lost my path and I am trying to redirect myself to the right currently lost way. Also, I don't want my ego to ruin my life. I currently have a hard time at understanding it given the complexity of it. I hope you all have a good time and will have a bright future, wherever you are! Big love, and peace! GMate8 logging out.

I am leaving all social media for a while and will see how it runs; don't worry, I am fine, I just feel I have to better manage my time and focus on my work I want to do. Currently, I feel here useless.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.

I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.

One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.

But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?

Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.

Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death *because* of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.

Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things *well*; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.

The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.

They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.

#ML #TESCREAL

Thinking about time travel, you can't have a machine like H.G. Wells described that just changes its coordinate in time, while leaving its x, y, and z coordinates in space unchanged. If you tried that, you'd most likely appear in empty space, because the Earth would have been somewhere else at your chosen time. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuaPyQFrYk

Cup and ring rock art at Drumtroddan, near Monreith, Galloway.

#StandingStoneSunday #Scotland #History

“Scotland is a place full of magic and mystery with legends around every corner. While there are unique creatures of folklore to find here like Brownies or Kelpies, we also have one you’ll be much more familiar with. There are so many stories of Scottish Fairies to explore, with lots featuring in the Scotland’s Stories book, that narrowing down the list is no easy task!
So just exactly what are Scottish Fairies and where can you find them?” #scotland #stories #folklore
https://scotlands-stories.com/stories-of-scottish-fairies/

@TodayInTwitter one thing he got right is the thing we should leave the planet as we can't do anything anymore to save it
We're wrecked

A belated addition to the https://bit.ly/eXit (→ GDoc) spreadsheet:

The original X, @XOrgFoundation, left Twitter/X back in May due to the direction of the platform.

The nonprofit provides infrastructure for many essential components of an open source desktop, e.g., a Linux system.

If you're interested the "under the hood" developments of #opensource desktop tech, give them a follow.

We're starting a new blog series where we cover what we're working on and news from around the privacy space every week, check it out: https://blog.privacyguides.org/2023/12/09/this-week-in-privacy-2023-12-09/ #ThisWeekInPrivacy

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/07/erdogan-hails-new-era-of-friendship-with-greece-during-historic-visit-to-athens

After 100 years of hostility since the end of the war between them, Greece and Turkey have made a friendship agreement in an effort to end the hostility.

@acontios can we just stop for a second and project a penguin up there?

"Israel turns to a new AI system in war on Gaza | The Listening Post"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1lCQV1MHtI

Introducing the new #godotengine Forum 🎉

For the last couple of months, our Q&A platform has been in read-only mode. Now it has been superseded by our new and more powerful forum!

@WinstonYallow wrote about it in our blog:
https://godotengine.org/article/introducing-new-forum/

‘GTA VI’ Has Already Sparked a Bizarre Moral Panic Fit For Our Age

The GTA franchise is the perfect fodder for a moral panic. It’s massively popular, violent, and garishly stupid. The series has long courted controversy, and the panic accompanying each entry says something about the era in which it occurs. It’s early days, but I see two overlapping strains of panic hitting the GTA VI discourse. The first is that the game will lead players astray into a life of pornography, crime, and sloth.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3we8x/gta-vi-has-already-sparked-a-bizarre-moral-panic-fit-for-our-age

#grandTheftAuto #videoGames

I want Grand Theft Auto VI to feature the luckchain with Bitchcoin, Lifecoin and Dogmoney included #GTA6 #Crypto #Bitcoin #Satire

Go ahead and create a consensus mechanism for RCAs. Make them join to the Fediverse and do not let a malicious party break encryption.

It's easy

https://youtu.be/idS5Xg8236s

Meow?

Nonfree JavaScript may be taking away your freedom without your realizing it! Many web sites require proprietary JavaScript. Nonfree JavaScript subjugates users in the same way as any piece of proprietary software. Learn more: https://u.fsf.org/freejs

I need a new mastodon feature:
Schedule to show me this post again in 12 hours.

Yes, there are bookmarks. I never remember to check bookmarks until 3 months later, when I have no longer any idea why I saved them.

@apps