hometown 4.6.8+hometown-1.3.0Practice-based research in arts and design. Interested in sociotechnical systems, DIY, self-organization and alternative technological trajectories. Sometimes I boost things multiple times because of time zones and chronological feeds.
banner, detail from "Toda Mongke and His Mongol Horde", Folio from a Chingiznama (History of Genghis Khan), 1596, wikimedia
If you are interested to know more about Autistici Inventati, I can highly recommend their book
+KAOS: Ten Years of Hacking and Media Activism
It was translated to English by Institute for Network Cultures and is available for free as epub:
https://archive.org/details/KaosTenYearsOfHackingAndMediaActivismAutisticiInventati
Interesting study on usability of low-tech designs
The Experiential Trade-Offs of Low-tech Systems: Evidence from a Large-Scale Citizen Experiment
"Taken together, these results point to a design paradox. Low-tech clearly aims to resist the narrative of convenience and comfort [...], yet it does not simply invert its logic. In our regression analysis, effort does not impact future use intent, but pragmatic quality does impact it. This phenomenon may be explained [...] by the idea that effort associated with changing practices is not inherently rejected, but it is evaluated in light of sustainability concerns. Users tend to endorse efforts that are perceived as meaningful or useful. In contrast, those considered unnecessary or stemming from poor system design are more likely to be dismissed, an observation consistent with usability theories. Therefore, the design anchored in a low-tech aesthetic of interaction should identify and encourage meaningful effort while improving dependability through a focus on usability design."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958826003283
New LTM article out, this one is for the #CarryShitOlympics crowd!
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2026/04/rediscovering-the-handcart/
It turns out the #Fediverse can bring in more web traffic than Instagram, if you aggregate those decentralised sources.
A thought experiment on how long-tail effects mean federated social media will always appear irrelevant as a traffic source, even when it isn't.
https://test.roelof.info/log/how-federated-systems-dissapear/
"I would wager, in fact, that the most common left-liberal position is not that generative AI is just a stochastic parrot, but a product built by powerful profit-seeking firms that’s capable of serious harms. It’s not a semantic or philosophical critique the AI industry should be worried about, in other words, but a material one. AI is viewed, correctly, as a threat to jobs, education, mental wellbeing, the arts, child safety, the information ecosystem, and as possessing little upside for few others then corporate managers and AI companies."
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/actually-the-left-is-winning-the
@brianmerchant@mastodon.social
(h/t @emenel@post.lurk.org )
Last weekend I spent a day upgrading https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com from #Debian Buster to Debian Bookworm. It took some time, but everything went very smooth. Also the @olimex@mastodon.social A20-Lime2 holds up well going in year 8 of the project.
Its such a pleasure to work with that kind of reliable and stable tech.
Only in the Netherlands.
From the new left fusion party: "Our movement always stands up for common people: the nurse, the garbage collector, the teacher, the volunteer, the startup entrepreneur."
https://progressiefnederland.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/PRO_manifest-brochure_accessible.pdf
"It is one thing to value technodiversity and designs for the pluriverse; it is quite another to actually work towards it under intense political economic pressures towards homogeneity coming from all sides. Even research grounded in critical refusal of harmful data practices, beautifully exemplified by the Feminist Manifest-No, is not fully liberated from that which it refuses. Nor should it be: it is a reaction against, a response to. Imagine what STS scholarship might be like if we were freed from the need to refuse at all. Would computational systems be so interesting at that point? What about them would remain interesting? What else would capture our attention instead--and shouldn't some of us start to turn our efforts to those things now, before the AI investment bubble erodes the edifice of consensus that AI is self-evidently interesting?"
@thin_line@mamot.fr turned a #python script I wrote to calculate page and asset sizes for https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com into a #rust executable which is both more accurate, more complete and WAY faster.
Perhaps it is of interest to people here: https://codeberg.org/Pontoporeia/webweigh
"Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.
“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.” "
https://newrepublic.com/post/207693/palantir-ceo-karp-disrupting-democratic-power
(the "vocationally trained working class, often male, working class voters" also stand to lose from types like Karp btw)
Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster
"Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. [...]
Because of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed to most shipping vessels, stranding one-fifth of the world’s exports of natural gas, one-third of the world’s exports of crude oil, and significant quantities of the planet’s exportable fertilizer, helium, and sulfur. [...] The strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.”
Two of NL's most interesting journalism outfits, @FTM_nl@social.ftm.nl and @decorrespondent@mastodon.nl announce a partnership to reduce dependence on big tech.
They are also hiring a freelance project lead for this: https://decorrespondent.homerun.co/projectleider/nl
TIL the Ukrainian trident is a distant relative to the tamga. These symbols were used by horse breeding peoples from the steps as lifestock brands and clan symbols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamga
