@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng2026-05-21 16:00:23
Recently, at the library...
"Have you got their new book 'Silk switch system problem'?"
"No. Is that the sequel to 'Equiconnected nanosky oasis'?"
"What's that?"
"Oh, you've never read the 'Magnetic haze cycle' series? That's just too bad. It's full of cool ideas like the ultra-iridescent opcode sentinel, infraconnected division boundary, or even beige frontier mirror..."
"Dude!"
"Yeah, it's real porcelain ultra-peak! Absolutely life changing epoch omnicurve vision!"
…
@zudn@theres.life2026-06-20 22:36:52
No 7Points this time, just one sustained idea/observation and a question for you.
#blogging
@brichapman@mastodon.social2026-05-19 03:53:00
Italian researchers found a brilliant way to give old solar panels new life. They're extracting silicon from discarded panels and turning it into a high-performance catalyst using palladium nanoparticles.
The recycled material matched commercial catalysts across six cycles with 97% yield—tackling mounting solar waste while creating valuable chemistry tools.
@shacker@zirk.us2026-05-19 15:02:49
Meanwhile, on the Python/Django side of life… Over the past few evenings I’ve made numerous updates and bug fixes to my reusable, pluggable, multi-user/multi-group task assignment system for Django. Live on the demo site and installable now. Hope it’s useful!
https://django-todo.org/
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-07-13 07:12:44
Working in computer security, I've learned to be *real fucking careful* about this law and have heard of it being interpreted *very broadly.* If a client of mine described a system to circumvent access restrictions like this I would fire them. But assuming I didn't fire them, I would
1) tell them to shut it down immediately
2) tell them to talk to a lawyer.
LLMs, as a class of user, are clearly not authorized to access the information. By circumventing access controls, they have "knowingly accessed a computer without authorization." Those access restrictions exist to protect against various damages, including bandwidth use and "intellectual property theft" (another concept I'm not a fan of, but anyway). By violating those restrictions they could open themselves up to legal liability.
Now, IANAL. My job is to describe risk. That's a sufficient risk. It actually doesn't even matter if you'd win the case in the end, a lot of people just can't afford to fight.
But, in this case, it tends to be powerful people, for whom the law does not apply, abusing people who neither have the protection of the law nor the money to just ruin someone's life with a flood of lawyers.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-05-29 22:15:58
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.
@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
@brian_gettler@mas.to2026-06-11 15:45:27
Just filled out a form on an AI Assistant pilot one of the online systems I have to use for work has rolled out. My response was basically "this thing is entirely pointless and requires more time to use than not; leave me alone." Can't wait until they proclaim they've heard us and force the damn thing into every aspect of the platform.
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng2026-05-12 11:08:00
What Lies Beneath (2025)
As much as it hurts to witness glaciers disappearing more every year, the colors, textures and exposed geological features are some of the things I absolutely cherish each time I find myself in their vicinity...
These are truly unique landscapes to meditate on the age, scale & forces which have been shaping this planet, the environments they've created, directly and indirectly, the fragility of life trying to thrive in them, even if only temporarily, …
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-05-06 18:49:20
There was a time when creating massive amounts of code would have been valuable. There was a time when lowering the bar for creating software would have been beneficial. But today we are inundated with garbage apps, written too quickly and never maintained, half-working libraries, projects someone took up once and abandoned (I have several), and grift startups just waiting to be acquired and "fixed."
#LLM code generation is a pestilence. We don't need more code owned by people who know less, we need less code managed by people who know more. It's literally the opposite of everything we want. Oh, but it will be easier for infosec to find bugs so it's fine, right? I've found critical bugs that never get fixed (I think one of mine is like 7 years old now).
There are a lot of bugs that just can't be fixed because there are no systems to fix them. Go on Shodan and look for ATGs. There are thousands of them. I'm betting that most of those are not honeypots. It may be possible to blow up a bunch of gas stations with a for loop, but, yeah, we need #AI to find some more bugs.
https://www.darkreading.com/ics-ot-security/fuel-tank-monitoring-systems-vulnerable-disruption