Tootfinder

I keep seeing the "cars replaced horses" thing related to "AI."
People keep comparing "AI" to cars (positively) without thinking about the fact that cars were forced on people (AAA bought up and destroyed tram lines, there were massive protests, etc), and are the primary driver of climate change that is currently on track to make complex human society impossible. Meanwhile, cities that weren't destroyed for cars, or that have reversed most of the damage, are some of the most desirable places to live.
Maybe we could take the car analogy as a warning. Maybe it could be a reminder to think about how forcing technology on people against their will can reshape society in a profoundly negative way.
The answer for cities has been to right-size transit. Eliminate cars wherever possible, maintain emergency vehicles and mobility aids, and find more efficient alternatives (bikes, trams, metros, and trains) where possible. I feel as though we can extrapolate from the metaphor.
We do not have to repeat the mistake of reshaping society around a single, oversimplified, solution in order to benefit a tiny minority. Perhaps we can actually choose the right technologies based on use cases, rather than hype or dogma.
Cars didn't replace horses. Cars replaced walkable cities, tram lines and mass transit, and children playing in the streets.
"Cars replaced horses" to the benefit of a small group of elite men, at tremendous cost to literally everyone else. When people say, "AI is the new 'cars replacing horses'" they are saying something very specific about their privilege and intentions.

I think now we know why this Altra Server won't POST.
Gonna see if a shop down the road will try to straighten the pin for us.
Now for the gripe. The reseller slapped a 128core altra max cpu in this thing as an upgrade. When I log into IPMI it can't talk to the motherboard nor initiate power on... And it says the last known configuration was a 80 core Ampere Altra. So that really makes me think this thing was not tested before shipped. And of course the reseller i…

Facebook should be held partially liable for the death of people like Mr Friesen who were radicalized by the algorithms on that platform during the pandemic.
This leader of the anti-mandate/vax movement in Saskatchewan had to be sent to Ontario for treatment at one point, had pneumonia multiple times since, and died of dementia and pneumonia.
COVID is a life altering and potentially ending disease.
please get vaccinated (for everything!)
https://www.ctvnews.ca/saskatoon/article/grizzly-patriot-mark-friesen-saskatchewans-most-well-known-covid-19-dissident-has-died/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Some of these are pretty reasonable! If you allow them for anyone, you probably make it so to compete at all requires everyone to follow suit. That's bad when those things have life-altering health implications.
But all of these things ultimately shape who is allowed to compete at the peak levels.
it's not always good! Honestly baseball is way less interesting to watch in the majors because everyone's great, all the plays are maximal capability, and it's kinda predictable. You don't end up with many of those "holy shit what just happened? that was awesome!" plays that are so much fun to watch. So as a spectator, these rules aren't always great. Sometimes you want to nerf the peak performance until the game is interesting. Sometimes you don't.
In F1, a huge part of the game is the nerding out about the rules and how to evade them cleverly to get peak performance. And the inside baseball on that is way more fun to watch than the race. The race is just cars going zoom and occasionally crashing, interrupted by amazing choreography in the pits.
There's a reason women's soccer is so much more fun for me to watch than men's. It's not been optimized so hard that the game isn't predictable in kind if not outcome. Plus the camaraderie shown is great.
But looking at all this, we gotta ask, what's sport's function in our societies? Why do we do this?

Oh dear, this is all a bit naive, even if the thesis of power (slowly )ebbing away from the USA and the resurgence of China is incontestable.
E.g.
"With major oil and gas producers now led by ever more erratic and menacing authoritarian leaders, other countries are looking for alternative ways to generate power. Electric cars, for example, have never been more in demand."
Electric powers generate power, eh.

"… I gradually switched from OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks to PC-BSD. Then TrueOS, then FreeBSD-CURRENT. In the midst of all that, something with FreeBSD in September 2012 … probably toying with 9.0 on a PowerPC iMac with failing graphics hardware. Not because I was a glutton for punishment (like, the horror of a command-line loader, and the certainty that hardware was failing) – because there was nothing good to be done with the Mac, and I was curious about non-Apple alternatives to Microsoft…

Sonnet 115 - CXV
Those lines that I before have writ do lie,
Even those that said I could not love you dearer:
Yet then my judgment knew no reason why
My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer.
But reckoning Time, whose million'd accidents
Creep in 'twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,
Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents,
Divert strong minds to the course of altering things;
Alas! why, fearing of Time'…

My next door neighbour is a published author. I was very pleased to hear that he had got his book published and I hope that I can do a little to promote it.
https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-storytellers-war-geoffrey-chaucer-reluct…

The Storyteller's War: Geoffrey Chaucer, Reluctant Spy - Historical Novel Society
Geoffrey Chaucer, page at the court of King Edward III and member of his family’s wine merchant business, embarks on a journey to Castile in 1366, as war is about to resume. Chaucer uses his wine importing tasks to cover his duties to king and country as a spy seeking to alter the course of […]

lately been playing "liked music" on shuffle and thinking, yeah I've heard that enough, time to remove it. just dropped a string of 90s hits
of course I need to add new liked music to keep the warp drive from imploding, so I alternate with yt music's "discover mix", which ~20% of the time finds a cowpath that works for me, and ~40% of the time makes me go, ugh this sucks, back to shuffling likes.
sometimes I try a mix from a liked song, but that doesn&…

Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.