@rapsneezy @robin@social.riley.pub A lot of these people, it's not that they're opposed to authority, they just want to be the authority.
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Raven Onthill
@ravenonthill@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Just a dilettante amateur political science bird who lives in the US Pacific Northwest. If you want to know what I think, try my blogs at adviceunasked.blogspot.com and shinycroak.blogspot.com. I’ve also been known to write about science fiction, computing, and design.
356 Followers
252 Following
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Joined May 10, 2022
@graydon@canada.masto.host and here we have Paul Krugman and Gabriel Zucman discussing international wealth taxation. It's very strange to see Krugman being radicalized.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-again-with-gabriel-zucman
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@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz That may be pretty much what Fable did. We'll know more when more is published.
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@jessamyn@glammr.us one suggestion is not to use Chrome, which is just loaded with "AI" sea lions. But the thing is just everywhere; I don't think that's a realistic suggestion unfortunately.
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/116743026022460382
At a time when the threats are increasing.
"Apropos of absolutely nothing, we'd like to remind everyone that Kobo distributes to libraries via OverDrive, and it costs nothing to publish on Kobo. Come join us!" #indieauthors #publishing—https://bsky.app/profile/kobowritinglife.bsky.social/post/3mjk2zveqqk2y
(The Kobo sites over here either don't belong to Kobo or have been unused for a while.)
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@graydon @cstross I think we need to keep talking about slave labor. And, yes, we should absolutely propose alternatives but we need to keep talking about it. The slave system in the United States was not abolished because of economic inefficiency; it was abolished because the slave holders were trying to spread it and because northerners were horrified by the reality of slavery.
(Added: miserliness promotes slavery, which is part of why I am critical of it.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/1fp8m9r/comment/lovmkjc/
Why isn't it as easy to input data by drawing as by typing?
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@davidgerard damn. I haven't run into that since I dealt with a skeezy Mac service company in a backwater Oregon University Town. Give them hell!
It is eerie the way my remarks on Chinese slavery just seem to fall into the void, and it is not only China. I think we need a new abolitionist movement. I focus on slavery in China because has the potential to harm human rights globally, by making global energy systems dependent on slave labor. For all their horrors, other slave systems do not do that.
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@graydon @cstross that is also one of the arguments China uses to excuse their expanding slave system. And it is expanding. They've gone from polysilicon and plant fibers (yes, cotton) to all kinds of car parts and especially parts for those electric cars that are doing so well in international markets.
The US founders thought that slavery was going to wither on the vine, then the cotton gin was invented. I fear the sudden global push for renewables may work similarly in China.
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@cstross@wandering.shop hence RICO. Which is also a fruitful source of civil rights violations.
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@cstross he followed up with a clarification; it is a research project. He felt it important to include in his resume that he is a Mormon and they are all at least a little bit weird, sometimes more than a little bit.
The United States, it turns out, was the conscience of the world, and it seems to have had a stroke.
https://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2026/03/global-brain-sclerosis-and-conscience.html
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@cstross@wandering.shop I suppose they're doing it because they need memory safe code for security, especially in government applications. Whether they can do it…I wish I'd heard of a smaller project that has tried this approach. Surely they should do a pilot project first?
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@kissane thanks. I like your summary of Mastodon UI problems, and you even pointed out a few I didn't know about.
The general attitude of FOSS developers about UI is…not good, and this is an instance of it. It is also why, despite its advantages in security and respect for the individual, FOSS has not yet conquered the world.
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@futurebird@sauropods.win if it doesn't matter, why is so much effort spent keeping people from doing it and doing it well?
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@sleepfreeparent@kolektiva.social @futurebird@sauropods.win if you can't tell the difference between fascist and non-fascist, there is something wrong with your vision.
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@corbden@defcon.social @jensorensen@mastodon.social there's some of that. But also our side is massively outspent. Pumping petroleum pays.
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@cstross "It's the trade war. It's the resource war. It's the combined trade and resource war."— seen on Bluesky
Systemd birth date field notes.
This is PII, and totally should not be stored in a plain-text, easily accessible database. For instance, a name + birth date is used by the health care system to authenticate patients. It's a common challenge question, too.
Really bad idea, folks. Theory behind this apparently is that only the parent has admin access, which isn't likely, but if an age must be stored, just store an age in years, that's enough.
I would like to donate to the "Send Netanyahu to the Hague" fund. The US should have cut him loose decades ago. He was the missing stair; the dangerous person who insiders know to avoid, but outsiders like Trump do not. And I think the reason we didn't cut him loose was largely the Christian zionists.
"This report demonstrates that agricultural products from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in China, such as tomatoes, peppers, marigolds, and stevia are tainted by forced labor, coercive transfers of land-use rights from Uyghur peasants to large Chinese agribusinesses, and forced assimilation and political indoctrination of Uyghur laborers in these corporations."
People who don't believe in copyright don't believe in paying writers, artists and musicians, not even the respect of crediting their work. I guess we are supposed to live on light and eat air.
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@davidcelis@xoxo.zone that's the sort of censorship seen routinely on X. Is Musk now dictating GitHub policy? That would be awful!
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@cstross@wandering.shop Problem is, the people who build these things don't really care about accuracy or utility for serious users. My hypothesis that ML text processing is most popular with people who are semi-literate or even functionally illiterate remains undefeated.
My sympathies.
I suspect the package you received may not actually be from the shipper you ordered from—check the shipping numbers. That sounds like a "brushing" scam. If shipping numbers line up, report the seller.
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@kissane just what good is a general strike in Minnesota supposed to do? I could see cutting off services to ICE/CBP/DHS but why make everybody else miserable? It's not going to make a difference to the immigration enforcers; it may even help them out.
If the idea is to get the state government doing something more, that would almost certainly get the regular military sent in. I don't understand this. It's like everyone's mired in the 19th century.
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@cstross It seems that we now have trade in our time, but I think that time is short. This ceasefire only kicks the can down the road. The Gulf Arab states resent paying tolls to Iran. Iran will continue to assert its authority in the future, possibly even undertake jihad. Other nations that sit astride trade routes will also assert their power. It seems likely that in the long run, global trade will be much reduced. Shooting wars wars seem possible.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@philbetts/116842351810600608
To ask the question is to know the answer.
Trump's threatened blockade of the Strait of Hormuz risks World War III. I'm calling my congressmembers (they are Democrats) and asking them to get Congress to kick Trump out. The Republicans own this war, I hope they will see reason.
Wow. Bluesky is buzzing like a hornet's nest that's been poked with a stick.
What will we awaken to?
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@maxkennerly@mstdn.social does Musk intend to operate it as a propaganda network like Fox News?
@billyjoebowers@mastodon.online YouTube.
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@cstross@wandering.shop
The Supreme Leader is dead, long live the Supreme Leader! The Supreme Leader is an Islamic cleric. Of course it's a theocracy! It is perhaps rather like the UK before various reforms turned it into a constitutional monarchy, but the monarch is instead a religious leader. Just because the leader can be replaced doesn't make it less of a theocracy.