Notices by Passenger (passenger@kolektiva.social)

@aral

Denial is, after all, a common response to powerlessness.

@foone

Isn't that trivially easy to bypass though? Change one pixel's colouring very slightly and it'll be a new hash.

@dalfen @aral @noondlyt

I remember when Microstrategy, a then-respected analytics company that made one of the best data visualisation packages at the time, decided to go all-in on bitcoin. When the fad collapsed, it almost wiped them out, and very few analytics people take Microstrategy seriously any more.

Large companies like IBM or Facebook can get away with going in on bad tech. IBM bet heavily on blockchain and Facebook bet heavily on metaverse. Both survived the experience. Likewise, Microsoft will probably survive their bet on LLMs. Mozilla might not.

This is a problem because the world might not have needed Microstrategy, IMHO it does need Mozilla. Allowing Tableau to dominate doesn't harm the web itself; allowing Chrome to dominate does.

@Damon

Oh shit I forgot @Wolven and @aral I'm really sorry! Both are absolute grade-A follows.

I'm probably going to keep forgetting people so my apologies if you're not on this list, it doesn't mean I don't love you, it just means I'm a dumbass.

@Damon

Continued:

@carnage4life
@paninid
@msquebanh
@chiraag
@cendawanita
@timnitGebru
@AnthonyJK

Not everyone listed is necessarily minoritised in the country where they live; an Egyptian living in Egypt or a Malaysian living in Malaysia may be minoritised globally but that's not quite the same thing and this stuff gets complex. My sincere apologies to anyone listed if you don't consider yourself minoritised.

@Damon

Off the top of my head, huge apologies if I've missed anyone:

@Miriamm
@futurebird
@Adam_Cadmon1
@StillIRise1963
@mafeesh

@Damon

Continued:

@obeto
@MightySisserou
@oceesay
@holyramenempire
@NoFlexZone
@anilmc
@so_treu
@Mabande
@Faintdreams

@ifixcoinops

I was going to comment about the possibility of writing a script to go through the sprites and palette-swap any pixel which had a pink skin tone for a different one.

And then I remember that Rollercoaster Tycoon is famously written in Assembly, and I went haha nope, this is well beyond the limits of my skill, here be dragons.

(Presumably if it could be done using a script, someone would have done it already, anyway.)

@aral

I'm reading a book called The Rule of Law by @ChrisMayLA6 . I expected it to be a book laying out the liberal case for the rule of law, why it's good, blah blah blah.

In the fucking introduction, he blows that away. "The rule of law", he says, is a phrase that liberals use which they assume justifies itself and don't really examine further. Does it refer to laws being obeyed? No, he says, giving examples of cases where people condemn certain laws as being "against the rule of law." Rather, it's an ideological thing. It refers to the idea of laws, rather than to their reality. It cannot fail, only be failed, it is circularly defined, and it's vague enough for an advocate to invoke whenever they like while being too vague for a critic to nail down.

The rest of the book is about examining this using the tools we use to talk about ideologies, rather than about actual legal theory. I'm enjoying it and looking forward to finishing it.

He doesn't make the following comparison (so far as I've got) but I'm going to, because it stuck in my mind: liberals believe in "the rule of law" like Marxists believe in "the people." If a communist state faces opposition from its populace, then that doesn't mean that "the people" disapprove of communism; rather it means that the regime needs to repress the populace in the name of "the people." Similarly, a state which passes harmful laws which stunt personal liberty and economic development doesn't mean that "the rule of law" has failed; rather it means that those laws are against "the rule of law."

It's a god one can invoke to do the thing one needs to do to maintain power, same as any other god.