At current trends, by 2030 you will get 50,000 emails per package delivered, including one for every time the GPS location of the delivery vehicle updates
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Valerie Aurora
@vaurora@wandering.shop
mastodon 4.7.3This account is moving to @vaurora@mstdn.social
195 Followers
1047 Following
32 Posts
Joined March 05, 2023
Great article on the culture shock of returning to visit America after living in the Netherlands for a few years. The author after listening to her friends brag about overworking:
'“I can’t watch you live like this anymore,” I blurted out, mascara streaming down my face as they stared in shock. “This isn’t normal. None of this is normal.”'
It warms my little shriveled heart to see a software company that invested in optimizing their software and got a huge benefit from it, even if it is an AI company. It can at least write wrong things while consuming 100x fewer resources 🥰
I love optimizing software and it's annoying that current software company business theory won't let programmers do that to a first order approximation
One way to reduce climate change is to use less energy. Common ideas for doing this are improving energy efficiency, limiting growth, and degrowth.
But efforts to increase efficiency or limit growth by themselves result in using MORE energy at the global scale. This thread explains why and argues for decarbonization of energy instead. (Hint: Jevons Paradox is just the beginning.)
Thanks to the #RIPE #Green #Tech #Hackathon organized by @becha@social.v.st for making me write this analysis.
Me: I can't implement that with signals because it is impossible to implement without bugs, so instead I will use this library
5 minutes later: this library is implemented with signals
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Much of this is represented in the catch phrase of cybernetics:
"The Purpose of the System is What It Does"
If you try to look inside the system, you will see a lot of people who think their job is about producing petroleum products. On the outside, you will see an entire industry hell-bent on making the earth unlivable. This is the result of the overall economic system that focuses on this quarter's share price to the exclusion of nearly all else.
At least maybe people will stop asking me why I moved from the US to the Netherlands?
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Another interesting point is that the system outsources the bad stuff to individual humans because they have no way to communicate back to the system that things are bad. This brings me back to the discussion of funding open source maintenance at #OW2con. Software engineers in general are burned out because we have to do jobs that require maintenance work but are not allowed to do maintenance work on company time because of the short-sighted quarter-at-a-time planning horizon of business
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But the maintenance work must be done or we will lose our jobs, one way or another. So the software engineers with internal motivation and the ability to work unpaid end up doing the maintenance work - in addition to a full time job. The system has succeeded in blocking the signal that would prevent the focus on generating short-term profits by forcing the negatives onto individual humans. This, but for the entirety of humanity - and that's the polycrisis
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One specific recommendation from _The Unaccountability Machine_ is very simple: if a company does a leveraged buyout of another company (buys the company with a little of their own money and puts a lot of debt on the company to pay the rest) then the buyer should have to guarantee the purchased company's debts - no more limited liability for you. This is one element of Elizabeth Warren's plan to rein in private equity - and the only one Davies thinks is necessary for that
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Hopefully this analysis makes it really clear why "why don't people just individually suddenly decide to do the 'right thing'" is never the answer, in open source funding or supporting the arts or fighting climate change...
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He also argues for not attempting to understand the inner workings of systems but to observe their behavior (a key element of cybernetics) and suggesting we may have to give up on explaining why things happen or holding individual people accountable for things they neither control nor understand. "Accountability sinks" are a useful concept: the customer service agent who can do nothing to help yet must receive the signal from the customer that something is wrong
Heads up: I'm about to start migrating my account to @vaurora@mstdn.social as part of my ongoing project to get off US-hosted/owned infrastructure.
If you follow me on this account, you should be migrated automatically... but last time there were a few dozen people who got left behind, so you might want to double check in a few days!
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The author structures this using the theory of cybernetics, approximately that there are a series of systems that regulate each other at higher and higher levels, using feedback that reduces complex information into simpler signals. When too much signal is lost or the regulating system is too simple to manage a more complex system, the system goes awry. Capitalism and markets are effective simplifiers in that everything has a price, a fungible easily compared signal. This has many downsides
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He argues quite convincingly that one of the types of systems that regulate business, System 3, or "what to do here-and-now" is running amok with little input from System 4, "what to do in the future," which is pretty hard to argue with. The current financial system, shaped by private equity and leveraged buyouts, forces most companies to behave as if they must make a huge debt payment this month or else face extinction. Which matches exactly what we see: Google devouring search for AI, etc.
At FOSDEM, my co-worker Zach Brown will be presenting ngnfs, the cool new distributed file system he designed and I am helping to implement!
10am in the Kernel devroom on Sunday:
I'll be there too, wearing a mask and elbow-bumping instead of shaking hands
Today I said the word "détente" and someone asked what it meant and I had to say, "Based on the general impression I got from reading Bloom County comic books as a 7-year-old..."
The secret to getting good medical care in the Netherlands is to think of the pushiest, most direct Dutch person you have ever interacted with, and pretend to be them
While working on my emergency preparedness here in Amsterdam, I started looking for a backpack to carry stuff in an evacuation, and then realized I will almost certainly be riding my bike! Emergency evacuation hits different in a city with 1.9 bicycles per person
The nice thing about moving across the ocean to a colder wetter climate with only three suitcases per person is that we know exactly what to get each other for Christmas: warm black outerwear
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From Bruce Schneier: "We are in a strange transition. The previous global order, in which states wielded ultimate authority, hasn’t quite died. At the same time, large corporations have stepped in to deliver some of the services abandoned by states, but at the price of privacy and civic well-being. [...] In our current transitionary period, public life worldwide is being reimagined in accordance with corporate values." 1/2
So I am moving off ProtonMail to Fastmail and I still need a Google Docs replacement, and I see so many people self hosting their NextCloud... are you not putting any sensitive docs on that or are you confident you won't get hacked or what? My experience of self-hosting is that someone is actively trying to hack you all the time and I hate dealing with that stress
Edited to add: I want public collaboration so limited access via VPN is no go
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A general problem is wealth concentration, and there are many solutions to that, starting from the nicest one (a global wealth tax) to runaway inflation to massive destruction of capital to guillotines and assassinations and wars. It's been nice to see that a global wealth tax has recently become thinkable in many circles. But ultimately no one really knows what will emerge from the polycrisis
@mrundkvist@archaeo.social "In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of Al during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species." 💀
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lol another good bit from _The Unaccountability Machine_:
"Any organisation can create chaos for itself by having a lot of employee turnover and making sure their operations don’t form viable systems."
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Just realized a good metaphor AND example for the cybernetic view of the poly crisis: you know how phone menus only offer you three options, none of which are the thing you need, and no "something else" or "talk to a human" option, so you choose one option and hope that at some point in the tree you will get a human? That's why people vote for ridiculous reactionary stuff that hurts them, because what they want isn't on offer but they hope it will lead to something that lets them be heard
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"Amidst a tug-of-war between the old state-centric world and the emerging capital-centric world, there is a growing radicalism fueled partly by frustration over social and personal needs going unmet under a transnational order that is maximized for profit rather than public good." 2/2
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/the-hacking-of-culture-and-the-creation-of-socio-technical-debt.html
Arrrgh does anyone have a recommendation for a hugo theme that is very very simple (no sass or npm etc), text-centric, responsive, and accessible? I am trying to move off Wordpress for this site:
Anyone want to do a Wikipedia edit trade? I'll edit a page of your choice in return for you editing my bio.
I just want everything in my bio that is not supported by third party trusted sources to be removed (as the rules describe but doesn't actually appear to happen in reality). Rules are that we can't be friends or have other significant relationship. As an editor, I have a decade+ old account with hundreds of edits so my edits will probably stick