deathmtn

How do SVG tags look in RSS readers? A test.

At lunch with samb, I learned that the following things are approachable:

- Making your own notebooks
- Making your own tortillas

I think I'm gonna try these! My son also makes a lot of his own stuff, like headbands and dinosaur zip lines. I should think about making more of my own stuff because it's kind of nice to be invested in things, to care about stuff.

I've been thinking about sources of jobs that are palatable, and a lot of it boils down to "Who has money that's not evil?" There's not many answers to that.

I'm trying to not listen to music as an escape for a while. If something is unpleasant or there's something I don't want to do, I'm trying to just write in a notebook or walk around. No idea how long it'll last, but it's reduced the intensity in my life a tiny bit and also keeps me out of spending a lot of time flipping through playlists.

Was just asked what the states the other planets have.

So, this actually happened: I watched a video game trailer, and it looked mechanically a lot like what I normally liked, but it's, like many games, a war game. I literally thought, does this really need to be centered around violence?

I guess I'm old for real!

Over the weekend, thanks largely to amplification on Twitter, MAGA-hatted high-school kids from Kentucky — and whether they did or did not harass a Native American elder during a march in Washington — eclipsed all other news. At first, the Twitter mob went after the kids from Covington Catholic High School. Then, as more details of the incident emerged, a mob went after the people who’d gone after the kids.

Yup, sounds like Twitter. And you know what Twitter got out of all these threats, disinformation, and callouts about threats and disinformation? Engagement, which helps to sell data to advertisers. And that money will help to create more hostility and disinformation. It's what they call a "virtuous cycle" in the industry.

This interview with Shoshonna Zuboff about surveillance capitalism had this apt comparison I hadn't though of before:

. I am fascinated by the structure of colonial conquest, especially the first Spaniards who stumbled into the Caribbean islands. Historians call it the “conquest pattern”, which unfolds in three phases: legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate the declaration. Back then Columbus simply declared the islands as the territory of the Spanish monarchy and the pope.

…

Google began by unilaterally declaring that the world wide web was its to take for its search engine. Surveillance capitalism originated in a second declaration that claimed our private experience for its revenues that flow from telling and selling our fortunes to other businesses. In both cases, it took without asking. Page [Larry, Google co-founder] foresaw that surplus operations would move beyond the online milieu to the real world, where data on human experience would be free for the taking. As it turns out his vision perfectly reflected the history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the market sphere and declaring their new life as market commodities.

We were caught off guard by surveillance capitalism because there was no way that we could have imagined its action, any more than the early peoples of the Caribbean could have foreseen the rivers of blood that would flow from their hospitality toward the sailors who appeared out of thin air waving the banner of the Spanish monarchs. Like the Caribbean people, we faced something truly unprecedented.

First, you take something from people that don't realize that thing can be taken. Then, you tell them they already agreed to it, and it's too late for them to get it back.

This is something I noticed about tech giants, but I actually think this is an aspect of advanced capitalism, rather than surveillance captialism, meaning that this an inevitable end for unchecked capitalism and that General Motors would have done this if they could:

Second, by historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ relatively few people compared with their unprecedented computational resources. General Motors employed more people during the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of market capitalisation.

Julio Le Parc made what looks like today's generative art in 1959, using paint, no computers.

I actually have not heard of op art until now. It looks like my jam!

2-10-4-4-3-3. Good enough!

I showed Observatory to my brother-in-law last night, and this casual "test" revealed several shortcomings, which are legit, even though it's unfinished:

- It's hard to tell how long a single project has been going.

- It's hard to get an example of a large, small, and average project.

- A lot of the descriptions (most of which are just descriptions from the GitHub repos) aren't very descriptive.

To be honest, I'm tired of working on it, but I think there's less work to do than the amount of work I've already done, so I gotta see this through.