Strypey @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz

"Our collective objective should be, to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offence, or the disadvantage of anyone."
- Buckminster Fuller

#Introduction career activist and professional volunteer from Aotearoa (NZ). Co-founder of numerous community projects, including a community newspaper, #CoWorking space, #MicroRadio station, #SocialCentre, the Aotearoa sections of #Indymedia and #CreativeCommons, and the Aotearoa Permaculture Network. These days, I publish long-form blogs at #Disintermedia. I'd love to hear from you about common interests, my contact info and more about my project history is here:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/danyl-strype

"You cannot understand what is wrong with rationalism until you are capable of being rational. You cannot go beyond rationality until after you can use it reliably. You cannot become meta to systems you do not appreciate and do not understand how to deploy."
- #DavidChapman
https://meaningness.com/metablog/stem-fluidity-bridge

Or as #KenWilbur might have put it, you can't transcend a stage until you can include it.

The proposal seems to be that a positive belief in not-God is like the theological equivalent of anti-matter ...

"The important thing about god is not whether or how he exists but what your attitude is towards him (obedient, fearful, awestruck, angry, etc). It appears to me that all these noisy atheiests are defining themelves by an attiude towards god and are just as captured by the concept as any believer."
- MTraven, comment on the #Meaningness meta-blog:
https://meaningness.com/metablog/new-age-appeal-and-limits/comments

"American first-past-the-post voting rules force a two-party system."
- David Chapman, 'Meaningness'
https://meaningness.com/political-left-right-rotated

In my observations of over 20 years of #MMP (#ProportionalRepresentation) in #NZ, any kind of #MajorityRules electoral system forces a two-party system. Third parties are always evaluated in relation to which (if any) of the two legacy parties they may or may not join a coalition government with. As a result, our politics are roughly similar to any state within the US.

#XMPP needs a generic term that serves the same function as "email" or "fediverse", something easy to say and remember that describes the network as a whole, without just using the name of the underlying protocol. Imagine if when we tried to popularize email people were calling it "POP3/SMTP", or if we were going around trying to get people to "use ActivityPub for social media".

I had a very strange experience earlier, where my browser was blocking any domain name that had a "z" in it. I think it was something to do with #EasyList, one of the block lists that #uBlockOrigin uses?

"Once we understand that we’re dealing with an economic logic, not digital technology—digital technology is perfectly easy to imagine without surveillance capitalism; impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without digital technology. So we’re talking about the puppet master here, not the puppet. The digital is merely the puppet. Surveillance capitalism is the puppet master."
- Shoshana Zuboff, author of 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/1/big_tech_stole_our_data_while

There are at least 5 totally difference software projects, some #FreeCode, some proprietary, all called #Apollo:

* https://ctripcorp.github.io/apollo/ - #Apache2.0 configuration management system
* https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo - Apache 2.0 self-driving car software
* https://github.com/ApolloFoundation/Apollo - #BlockChain under a vanity license
* http://www.apollodb.com/eula.asp - a non-free database
* https://www.biblionix.com/products/ - non-free library software

#FacePalm

I wonder how much work it would be to build a #FreeCode audio podcasting studio? One that:
* records audio tracks from hosts and/or guests who are not necessarily in the same physical location
* automates as much as possible of the editing and offers a friendly UI for the rest
* compresses and uploaded finished episode with a single click
* creates automatic transcriptions
* auto-generates new entries for the podcast website
* allows for live-streaming during recording

The current stable release of #Pitivi is 1.999. The most recent version available from the 16.04 repos that #Trisquel 8 depends on is 0.95. I'm looking forward to Trisquel 9 being released, hopefully by the end of the year, so I can start drawing on the latest versions packaged by Ubuntu in the 18.04 repos (at least until 20.04 ships).

#Pitivi 1.0 is due out on May 20! If it ships on time, tomorrow will be a milestone day for #VideoEditing on the GNU/Linux desktop:
https://blog.pitivi.org/2019/05/10/call-for-testing-the-pitivi-1-0-rc/

#Javascript is the motorcar of the web. It enabled many things to be done in a web browser that couldn't be done with just HTML/CSS (although some like media embedding now can). But like cars, it came with a whole bunch of negative externalities. Too often URLs now point to 'scriptsites', not websites, where even text and static images can't be browsed with JS turned off.
#MakeJavascriptOptional

Now the silly stuff. It would still be illegal to smoke ganja anywhere other than your home or a licensed premises, although I wouldn't expect this to be heavily enforced, since it isn't really now. For some bizarre reason they've decided on R20, not R18, so it would be legal for a 18-19 y.o to drink spirits, but not to smoke ganja #FacePalm. So if the Yes campaign wins the vote, and Parliament carries it out (it's a non-binding referendum), there will still be more campaigning to do. (2/2)

It's a mixed bag. I would have preferred the 2-question ballot supported by the Drug Foundation, to make sure we at least got personal decrim, but the 1 question we got is a good one. It's a simple yes/no on a draft law that, if passed, will set up a regulated recreational cannabis industry, allowing both cannabis cafes and home use, including grow-your-own. That's the good news. (1/2)

So, details of the 2020 cannabis referendum in #NZ have finally been announced:
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/112525322/explainer-the-cannabis-referendum-and-why-it-isnt-binding

> "It’s like one those post-apocalyptic science fiction novels whose characters hunt wild boars with spears in the ruins of a modern city. Surrounded by machines no one understands any longer, they have reverted to primitive technology."

He paints such a vivid picture. Indeed it reminds me of a quote from one of #KenMcleod's novels (The Star Fraction?) about how the green anti-tech freaks master dozens of DIY technologies, "while we wander like savages in our own cities"

Contrast this with my wife coming down with a crippling illness here in China. We went straight to the nearest hospital with a Mandarin speaking friend. We were in and out, with a diagnosis and medicine, in a couple of hours. The care (including a blood test) )was cheap enough that we could afford to pay cash, and my wife's employer will reimburse us (she has health insurance in her contract).

> "We need you to call the hospital and ask them to fax us the records. 'Fax'? Why not send clay tablets in wicker baskets on the back of a donkey?"
https://meaningness.com/metablog/post-apocalyptic-health-care

It's disturbing when a large and experienced open source steward like #ASF (Apache Software Foundation) decides it can't sustain community-hosting and needs to create new dependencies on #DataFarms. This is exactly the opposite of what ought to be happening, especially since GH was acquired by Microsoft.