@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-04-29 14:13:00
heise | Wie Sie Ihren alten Kindle nach dem Supportende weiternutzen
Amazon klemmt alte Kindle am 20. Mai von seinem Store ab und verhindert den Download gekaufter Bücher. So können Sie ihn weiter benutzen und neue Bücher lesen.
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@davidaugust@mastodon.online2026-03-30 04:01:21
So glad the US is going through difficult-to-replace missile interceptors (THAAD, Patriot, etc.) on a war of choice instead of having any in case North Korea or China decide to do anything.
So wise, so safe, our child-fondler in chief is exactly who we need as a leader at this time. /s
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@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.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io2026-03-29 18:15:22
My main gripe with “AI coding” is that people present it in highly emotional terms as a fait accompli that will “change everything” instead of it being just another tool (that is one of many) to make software.
Like I saw a SERIOUS post today (not on here) from a tech guy I previously respected that was basically like a 90s infomercial with black and white video of working on a computer (labeled “without AI”) and then over-saturated footage of chilling in the pool or whatever shit (labeled “with AI”).
Not to mention there’s a constant barrage of “enjoy being poor” type bullshit.
This is abusive behavior; it’s emotional manipulation and gaslighting.
It’s cringe, as the kids would say.
I think the underlying LLM technology has use cases that are genuinely useful, for example when making explorative software prototypes, both for backend and frontend stuff.
But it's like a hammer. Useful for nails, useless for anything else.
And you got to ask where the hammer is coming from. Was it made with stolen metal? Forged by exploitative labor? Locked away in a data center so you can only rent the hammer by the hour from some business trying to do a bait and switch?
I'm hoping that the AI landlord industry dies eventually (signs point to this as they won't be able to fulfill the obligations to their investors) and people use locally-run stuff, ethically with open source models (without stolen stuff) and without ridiculous environmental impact in the future.
@david@boles.xyz2026-04-30 13:58:34
Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld
In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word "story" carries a double valence. We say "tell me the real story" to demand truth, and we say "that's only a story" to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what s…
@shriramk@mastodon.social2026-05-30 16:50:14
There's a statistical test called Page's trend test, for testing whether a predicted *ordering* holds — so it would be funny if it were to get renamed to "Page's rank".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page's_trend_test
@metacurity@infosec.exchange2026-05-30 13:28:43
Each Saturday, Metacurity offers its subscribers a run-down of the top infosec-related long reads we couldn't get to during the week's news crush.
This week's selection covers
--TP-Link is fighting for its life,
--Quantum's threat to RSA encryption could be soon,
--How Russia's GPS spoofing could destroy us all,
--How cops and the courts relied on a stalker's digital evidence,
--The safety and security risks of AI distillation
@cdarwin@c.im2026-03-29 14:44:58
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams stood with Trump at the White House,
serving as a prominent face of the president’s health agenda.
Now Adams has taken a far different stand: trying to stop Trump’s hew nominee for Surgeon General , Casey Means, from being confirmed as the nation’s top doctor.
Means’s nomination has stalled in the Senate, where several Republicans have questioned her stance on vaccines,
her pushes against th…
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-04-30 15:56:00
heise | Brennende E-Autos: So löscht die Feuerwehr wirklich
Ein Feuerwehrmann erklärt im Video, warum E-Autos anders, aber nicht gefährlicher brennen als Verbrenner und wie die Profis sie wirklich löschen.
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@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-05-29 06:04:00
