@SmartmanApps@dotnet.social2026-05-21 01:24:42
RE: https://mastodon.social/@augieray/116608172974389574
"The ultra-wealthy do whatever they can to hold on to their investments. Instead, they take out massive loans using their stock as collateral, live off of those loans, and avoid paying taxes on…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-05-17 14:13:25
There is growing concern Donald Trump’s massive $10bn lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service may soon be settled by his own administration
– an unprecedented, self-dealing maneuver for a US president,
in which billions of taxpayer dollars could be transferred to the president or his allies.
Trump may agree to drop his lawsuit in exchange for the launch of a $1.7bn fund to compensate people he says were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration,
according t…
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2026-05-18 01:07:32
The Substance V 🧪
某种物质 V 🧪
📷 Nikon F4E
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@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-05-18 18:50:45
Uber increases its stake in Delivery Hero to 19.5%, up from 7% in April, and says it "has no intent to acquire 30% or more" of Delivery Hero's voting rights (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
@mxp@mastodon.acm.org2026-07-18 19:02:36
I agree that it’s important that publications “remain visible, discoverable, attributable, and connected to the version of record,” but no details are given on how a deal with Google or whatever corporation would actually ensure this—and given how LLMs work, there’s actually no guarantee whatsoever—so this remains very vague.
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@mxp@mastodon.acm.org2026-07-18 19:02:36
I agree that it’s important that publications “remain visible, discoverable, attributable, and connected to the version of record,” but no details are given on how a deal with Google or whatever corporation would actually ensure this—and given how LLMs work, there’s actually no guarantee whatsoever—so this remains very vague.
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@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-05-24 15:42:26
Just finished "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers. Overall it's good but I also have some Thoughts.
First, it was very pleasant to finally read some non-trite utopian solarpunk after having read stuff like Octavia Butler recently. Both hope and despair can be poisonous on their own IMO, so getting some balance in is nice. It's definitely a very valuable thing to be able to lay out an actually desirable and in many ways imaginable future given our grim present. Chambers is no LeGuin though. I'll probably be reading more of her work and maybe she fleshes out these ideas elsewhere, but at least in this book there is no focus on either how the transition to a better society could happen nor on how the better society holds up in the face of adverse events and inclinations. Compare LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" or N. K. Jemisin's short story "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" and it feels like there's something important missing from Chambers' portrait of a future society. Of course, maybe the point is to make a cozy book, in which case fine, there's certainly a place for such things, and I can look for deeper inspiration elsewhere.
The second big thought I had was that Chambers' worldview seems not well-informed by certain indigenous perspectives, and this creates some contradictions. For example, (minor spoilers) when Dex enters the wilderness there's a whole bit about understanding humankind's place in nature and how human settlements are what we're used to but they're only a brief interruption of the vast untouched wilderness. Along the same lines, much of the world is intentionally left untouched by humans as a way to keep it pristine and natural. Later however, a character makes the point that humans *are* animals. The indigenous perspective that I appreciate would agree with that, and would further question the value in distinguishing between human influence on ecosystems and influences that others have. More sharply, one might observe that there's a bigger difference between how different kinds of humans relate to and influence their environments than between how less-disruptive humans and various animals do the same: the strip-mine-operator vs. migrant tribesperson impact difference is probably much greater than the migrant tribesperson vs. beaver gap, for example. Rather than talking about limiting human disruption, then, as if all human-environment interactions are disruptive and must be minimized, we could/should be talking about how to create human societies that have beneficial relationships with their environments and acknowledging that we actually have many positive examples of that, both historical and contemporary. Chambers' utopia is a "humans dominate nature but restrain themselves so that their disruptions are minimal and thus nature can thrive" vision, but what I'd even more like to see would be a "humans study old ways and make new ones so that they can interact positively with ecosystems again" vision, including some of "here are the places that sometimes breaks down but also the patterns and institutions that ensure repair of those breakdowns and thus long-term sustainability."
Final big thought: Chambers' utopia is too homogenous for my tastes. Of course it's hard enough and valuable work dreaming up and sharing any utopia and Chambers' transcends triteness in a number of ways, so this criticism is a bit rude. But the single shared religion, lack of mention of conflicts around shared decisions, especially historical society-defining ones, and nagging questions like "what about the people indigenous to the now-uninhabited lands?" and "what about the indigenous peoples who weren't part of the factory-building societies?" leave me wishing for more nuance in this direction.
All in all: a good book, and I'm criticizing out of a place of appreciation, not scorn. I've got there sequel out from the library as well and will probably detour to a few other books but get to it pretty soon.
Sadly I don't remember who, but I got this one because of a recommendation on here, so thanks if you're someone who recommended it!
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-06-22 04:44:36
The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.
@thomastraynor@social.linux.pizza2026-06-12 14:00:01
Finally! I am starting the process of upgrading my old laptop from windows 10 to #mxlinux. I will try to take Amy pictures of the process and then do a short blog on the mini-project.
The only quirk so far is that it didn't recognize my hard drive. A quick dive into UEFI to disable secure boot. Also had to disable fast boot. SATA mode also required changes to AHCI. That seemed t…
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2026-05-14 00:30:05
The Substance 🧪
某种物质 🧪
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Harman Switch Azure (FF)
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
