Tootfinder

Had to time-shift my watching of the match, but I knew the result long beforehand. Far less stressful that way, but I HATE not being able to see it live.
Everton played well, their energy hard to match. Beto going out with a probable concussion torpedoed any real hope of claiming all three points. The commentators kept suggesting Ibou should be pulled for hazy decision making, but I didn't see it that way at all. I was critical of his effort on one play late, but otherwise he was g…

Progress! CI jobs for two consecutive commits dispatched by GitHub commit hook.
First one had some minor issues, I fixed the CI script, then pushed a new commit before the first build had finished running.
If everything works, we should get a full build of both commits soon.
I've started work on the infrastructure for artifact uploading but need another day or two to get that all wrapped up.

Inside Outside III 🔲
中间 III 🔲
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Fujifilm Neopan F, expired 1993
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from
PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
Wise

I have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.

It's frustrating that NY Governor #KathyHochul hasn't bothered to raise the #CongestionPricing toll cost (which was much lower than initially intended) since its inception, despite being wildly successful by all measures.
At least Trump's doing his part though…

How is it that the Middle East continue being one of the world’s most war-affected regions to this day?
How is it that the people there developed this culture of encouraging conquest and holding grudges?
Then I remembered that it is the birthplace of the god of Storm and Warfare which became the most Worshiped god of all time worldwide. He created humans and declared it was all Good but, then because he didn't liked how things were going, he drown 99.9% of all humans and anima…

I read Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger", mostly by the pool or the beach while on holiday last week.
It isn't really about her being confused with Naomi Wolf, except on a surface level. Or even really about Wolf moving from left feminism towards right wing conspiracy theory.
Really it's about how political culture has changed as the world has moved more online and suffered the consequences of a pandemic and the often wrongheaded political responses to that.
Conspiracy thinking and a whole culture concentrating on reticence and reactionary thinking instead of evidence and logic.
While reading it I was hanging out with some folks who are much more right wing than I generally do. Here's some things they said:
I don't believe in Sunscreen. Isn't it funny how skin cancer rates have gone up as sunscreen becomes more popular.
I don't believe in COVID.
Carbon Warming models don't even take into account the sun.
I thought Chemtrails were a conspiracy theory, but came to believe it.
Claiming to believe in freedom while also wanting a crack-down on asylum-seekers, thinking they are destroying society.
So it's easy to believe Klein's basic thesis here, the worry that reactionary conspiracy thinking is breaking the entire body politic.
I don't think it's that people have lost all rationality. It's that people are wearing their conspiracy theories as badges, identifying them as a member of a group. Like religious beliefs that bind a group, the more stupid and outrageous they are the more those badges work to identify the ingroup from the outgroup.
The worry is always when they decide the outgroup need punishing for not taking on those conspiracy beliefs and turn to suppression and violence.
#reading #books #worldPol

spouse insists that some of my brainfarts are poetry, and i should publish them. circumventing the 500 char limit with imgs/alt-text.
context: spouse has a bunch of chainsaws.
#poetry #netherlands #biking

I tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.

Once a bunch of companies are firing people (perhaps for reasons they don't even understand), other companies will do the same because mass firings will be taken as an economic indicator. Partially, this is companies seeing other companies "tighten their belt," which smaller companies may read as an indication that larger companies are predicting an economic downturn, and because mass firings may *cause* an economic downturn.
It's easy for folks to jump from descriptions of how economic power works into conspiracy theories about economic control, but the simple fact is that it's often very easy to explain the way that small intentional manipulation by class conscious people can cascade into large emergent behaviors. This all happens without any centralized control.
That is *specifically* one of it's greatest strengths. It is not a coincidence that conspiracy theories would lead you to ignore this specific strength.