Article is from October of 2020, I’d be interested in learning how/if things have changed since.

Right?

“Protecting vulnerable individuals” - they must mean Putin and Bibbi, not actual victims of political intimidation, sabotage, etc.

Art might not be about thinking while you are experiencing it, but it most definitely is about thinking about the experience afterwards, as much as experiencing it in the first place.

Not to mention that books are often art.

It’s such a destructive mindset, and it seems to me like indie games are hopefully on the cusp of re-demonstrating to the rest of the industry why it is so.

Art/luxury products depend on catering to subjective tastes to turn a profit. You need to speak to someone’s perspective or interests, and are competing for their disposable income against all other forms of entertainment. Thus the wider the targeted audience, the harder it is to outcompete the rest of the market on “consumer interest” (no idea if that’s the proper use of the term but it sounds correct for the context), the harder it is to even turn a profit.

Simultaneously, these corporations want an ever-greater magnitude of profit (aka growth). So they decide to target the widest audience possible, while investing as much capital as they can.

That’s already an unstable balance of priorities. As soon as you start conceiving yourself as competing with almost every single other market on the basis of shareholder speculation, in terms of ROI, it’s doomed.

You’re not just shooting yourself in the foot, you’re trying to do a Paul Muad’hib Atreides except because this is reality, not sci-fi, instead of drinking the Water of Life you mixed 10 grams of ketamine, 5 tabs of acid, and a fistful of meth into a blue Gatorade and chugged it in one go. All you end up doing is vibrating in place so hard you begin to slough off flesh and erratically disintegrate, like some sort of sad eldritch horror.

God do I hate corpos sick with capitalism.

To continue the Dune analogy, they really could use some ecology-derived thinking: specialize and find your niche (or help it emerge), and give back to the rest of the ecosystem so that it continues to flourish with you. Monoculture has a negative correlation between scale and sustainability, let alone ROI.

The sci-fi/space opera Pandora’s Star (and it’s follow-up, Judas Unchained) by Peter F Hamilton has humanity developing fast growing coral that they then use to essentially grow houses, over around 5 years, to the specific shape and layout that the inhabitants desire.

The books aren’t solarpunk in the truest sense, yet they have a surprising amount of solarpunk compatible ideas involved (including a hefty critique of both capitalism and unchecked industrialization).

In light of the recent forays by AI projects/products into the reason of coding assistants, from copilot to Devin, this reads to me as a sign that they’ve finally accepted that you can’t make an ai assistant that provides actual value from an LLM purely trained on text.

This is Microsoft copying Google’s captcha homework. We trained their OCR for gBooks, we trained their image recognition on traffic lights and buses and so signs.

Now we get to train their ai assistant on how to click around a windows OS.

I think the point is to scold Google for the harm they cause or fail to prevent. When the law is written so as to genuinely prevent harm (data protection, for ex) then I will scold those who don’t follow it. When the law is written so as to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst, I will scold those who do follow it.

The point isn’t to be consistent with regards to the law, as the law itself is not always either consistent nor “good”.

… unless it is me that isn’t understanding your own comment?

Especially the argument for timezones is “I can just Google what time it is in <timezone>”…

You can always Google “what time is it at <location>”

There was a good (albeit short) conference at FOSDEM2020 that gave an overview of a bunch of different “prior work” with regards to government using open source: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/municipal_government/

With regards to other comments about Munich, the speaker touches on that case starting at 7 minutes into the conf, and highlights how it differs/differed from other, more successful, cases.

For what it’s worth: I self-host gitea, and it gives me the possibility to import not only repos but also issues, projects, etc from GitHub, gitlab, bit bucket, and a handful of others.

I don’t know if Utterances can work with gitea’s API. If it does, then in theory you should be able to migrate to gitea from GitHub for this use case.

100% agree that the USA is a special case. The country’s geography (occupies a significant, contiguous portion of the continent) and legacy as the “last remaining superpower” basically requires a non-trivial amount of effort for most Americans to be exposed to non-American anything, let alone people. On top of that, the two-party duopoly is so entrenched in (and fabricated by) the ossified voting & election system that it becomes very hard to separate “fighting for what you believe in” from “fighting against the ‘other half’ of the country”.

[phatic to attempt to convey that I appreciate and think I understand what the article is trying to say] Thanks for taking the time and effort to lay it all out in writing!

I particularly appreciated reading part/chapter 4; many of your statements resonate with my own lived/subjective experience.

[with the phatic niceties covered, here is the meat of my comment:]

There is a phrase that I am uncertain how exactly to interpret:

Even more so because English speakers appear to have a second brain to scrutinize language for microscopic signs of alignment.

Is this more of a throwaway joke, or a serious expression of something you notice? I wonder, notably, about how particular this is to English speakers (and I realize as I write this that I may just be re-enacting the behavior you deplore in your ice cream example). I am French/English bilingual and have lived in both the USA and France; in my experience, the determining factor in whether someone exhibits this “second brain” behavior/characteristic is their degree of preoccupation with politics (and to an extent, their familiarity with the history of politics and propaganda).

Something about seeing what arguments have been used to prepare, enact, and justify atrocities in the past makes those arguments very hard to take at face value the next times they are encountered. Consider the “states’ rights” rhetoric used to justify and rehabilitate the Confederacy’s succession after they lost the Civil War; that specific wording triggers immediate wariness in me today, and I’m willing to wager it also triggers it for most people that:

1. have learned a certain amount about that period and/or the “Lost Cause” movement, and
2. are ostensibly against slavery and racism (in principle, if not in practice).

Yet the term “states’ rights” did not have that effect on me the first time I encountered it - I developed that reaction as I learned more about who was using that term, where and when it came from, and what was effectively being said when that term got employed.

Similarly: McCarthyism, the red scare(s), and the apparent failure of self-proclaimed communist revolutions over the past century to effectively bring about “free and egalitarian societies”, have together trained many English speakers to deeply mistrust anything that could be the start of a “slippery slope” to communism - even when they readily agree that “something must be done” to reign in the damages of severe inequality. This seems to me to be a product of specific events in world history rather than anything intrinsic about the English language and/or the cultures that speak it.

On the other hand, English is (to my understanding) somewhat uniquely a mishmash of other languages’ grammars and vocabulary, with notably so many synonyms that can imply slight and subtle nuances. Perhaps it lends itself to a higher level of scrutinizing seemingly innocuous phrasings (to the point that a human brain develops mechanisms and habits for it) because there are more choices available for articulating an idea.