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Notices by Alexandre Oliva (lxo)
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trying to scale up single servers has a limit and runs into complexities and diminishing returns. everyone scales services by sharing the workload among multiple servers, even when they present themselves in a way that gives the illusion of a single server. we don't have any pressing need to give the illusion of a single server, we can scale our federated network by adding more independent servers, which is both cheaper and lighter. (maintaining the illusion of unity has a significant cost). multiple separate servers also make for a healthier decentralized network, at least when they aren't under control of the same entity.
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a platform controlled by a third party can give you an audience just as easily as it can take it away. it's not good for your activism to depend on the visibility provided by a profit-motivated third party whose goals aren't aligned with yours. moving to a more decentralized and neutral platform may feel scary, but it will put it on far more solid ground. you and your target audience should be aware of that, and it would be wise to motivate yourselves with it to make the leap together, so as to remain connected regardless of billionaires' whims.
#TwitterMigration
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part of the problem, I think, is that long-timers have evolved very efficient workflows, whereas newcomers who've come of age under surveillance capitalism got used to interfaces designed not for efficiency, but for exploitation of the useds. this creates a fundamental tension in which making interfaces more welcoming and familiar to the useds makes them far less efficient for everyone, for nobody's benefit (unless there is someone gathering the information made available by the inefficiencies, which we'd be better off avoiding)
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the publishers who criticize unauthorized sharing are precisely those who take nearly all of the money from authors
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servers are really no harder to operate, but propaganda has convinced people that they should leave it to the experts, as a means to capture their data and make them dependent. reversing that belief seems hard.
OTOH, keeping data stable (safe against loss) in consumer devices, especially ultraportable ones, is a bit of a challenge. the best answer to that so far has been live backups.
I know a better way to approach this: local apps, encompassing all the logic (no client/server separation), using dumb p2p storage for the data.
https://www.fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/draft/decent-computing
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he's privatized much of power generation and transmission, so now any efforts to enable rooftop generation are going to be taken as threats to those profits. regulation and public funding could confront that, but I'm not hopeful, it's going to be an uphill battle. which sucks, because our hydroelectric generators are operating at low capacity and a lot of thermal plants are making up. a significant overlap between their owners has led to speculation that reservoirs of hydroelectric plants have been emptied so that they could run and sell the more expensive power from the thermal plants. which sucks for us, because they're not only more expensive, they also pollute more, and the fresh water has not been easy to replenish
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meanwhile, in brazil, bolsonaro's government has granted 109 private banks access to citizens' personal records and biometric data collected by government's online services, electoral authorities and by states' identity document issuers
https://gnusocial.net/url/7938242
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when antivaxxers stop believing and spreading lies
after over 9e9 shots total, anyone who thinks it's experimental after health regulators everywhere say otherwise is living in an imaginary parallel reality. and whoever claims the vaccine is riskier than the virus must be able to credibly demonstrate at least 9e7 fatal victims
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what's most incredible about this date representation is that it was introduced after Y2K. it wouldn't have worked up to [19]99
think about it. someone implemented that after all the many years of preparation and patching decades-old systems for Y2K, knowing (or, worse, without realizing) that it had at most a couple of decades of use. how screwy and irresponsible is that?
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.oO cancel debt, not people
happy GNU year!
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https://bird.trom.tf/TeaJunkie1/status/1474829160547864576#m
Guess what increases your risk of having a stroke? Getting ill with Covid.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7834121/
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.oO you can't expect to be taken seriously if you claim the vaccine kills because it contains or makes your body produce parts of the virus, and also that the virus doesn't exist or won't make you really sick. you gotta pick consistent conspiracy theories
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honest question: have such secure enclaves ever been used for anything but granting remote parties power over the user supposed to own the device, so that they can command the device to betray the user in ways that cannot be appealed or worked around?
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the problem with those connectors is that they're not as leaky, information-wise, as bluetooth. exterminate! exterminate! exterminate!
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.oO new blog post: atracids (on funnel web sites)
https://www.fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/2021-08-23-atracids.en.html
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.oO GPLv3 has just turned 14, and GPLv2 has just turned 30. time flies: 2 more years and GPLv3 will be half as old as GPLv2. I'm told the FSF, that publishes, maintains, and defends them, is running a fundraiser. please support it if you can! fsf.org
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> whatever was necessary to stop the attacks
is firing missiles into civilian buildings supposed to be analogous with the above?
is it necessary? does it stop the attacks?
it's too simplistic to swallow the story of retaliation or defense. nina paley's "the land is mine" goes back centuries of "they did it first". it's not like israel has been treating palestinians decently and they have no reason to be unhappy; see e.g. https://alirezahayati.com/2021/05/18/israeli-apartheid/
what I expect of the strongest force in the area is self-moderation and setting a good example, even when defending from attacks. responding to rocks with nukes is not proportional; handmade explosives vs military missiles isn't either, just to a lesser degree
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would you say it's ok for the police to invade densely populated slums shooting everyone who happens to be in the vicinity of a dangerous criminal who lives there? or would it be better if the police were more cautious to avoid killing the innocent in the pursuit of their goal of neutralizing the aggressor?
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is dying of a preventable disease due to lack of medical care because the physician gets paid by taxes worse than being unable to afford it? is collective payment of healthcare through taxation any worse than through insurance businesses? aren't there lots of doctors, good and bad, who don't care who's paying or how in deciding whether or not to offer good care?
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I'm used to plugging my laptop to an external screen at home. when traveling, I've occasionally connected it to hotel TVs. it's not frequent that they're at a good spot for this sort of use, but it has been useful to me. laptop screens usually bring about a literal pain in the neck
Alexandre Oliva
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