Not enough to achieve something, but enough to pretend that it might do something.

I can’t really bee nice here, so pardon the language, but as a second generation Fijian Australian…

Fucking LMAO. Australia is an outsized emitter of greenhouse gasses, let alone the hidden emissions caused by how much oil and gas we export. Scott Morrison, the former PM, even went to the Pacific forum during his incumbency and essentially mocked them regarding this. This turn from the Labor government is probably one of the starkest demonstrations of liberal diversionary political theatre and colonial violence.

Absolutely revolting.

I’m not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).

Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn’t mean it’s good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?

Also of note is that the UN OHCHR is also bluntly critical of austerity as a human rights abuse, due to the way it targets minority groups: https://www.ohchr.org/en/social-security/austerity-measures-and-right-social-security

Not mentioned is the way it helps established disabled people as a permanent underclass. We are simply less than human. In Australia, the more disabled you are, the more you’re exposed to being killed or maimed in an institution, or slightly “better” winding up homeless and exposed to violence and other crimes (if your state likes packing people into shelters like sardines) or the elements (if they don’t).

According to Owncast’s documentation, object storage services can be used to distribute live streams to viewers, even though it’s arguably an abuse of object storage for streaming.

Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.

Sorry if my tone isn’t exactly right. You have my unconditional respect. I’m learning that I’m just not always a clear communicator, sometimes I get fired up and sound harsher than what I mean, etc.

I think this is actually a major mental blinder put in by the supposed “evidentiary basis” of modern neoliberalism. If you’re receptive to philosophy, I think you might like Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. And then following from that, statistics mean nothing to the worst off in society. I’m currently fighting Australia’s health system for my human rights, why does it matter to me or people like me that statistics say Australia is doing okay? If I die, then what? What value are statistics to my corpse, and all the others who have been killed before me?

I think it’s also important to distinguish “social liberalism” from “socialism”. This is another instance of tricky words that have distorted people’s understanding of history and the trajectory of societies in crisis. Fifty years ago, what you are calling “socialist policies” were just liberalism, social liberalism in particular. This authoritarian meatgrinder we live in is also liberalism, albeit the neoliberal strain.

Socialism isn’t when you have your rights accepted and provided for, it’s the destratification of society along lines of resource ownership. Also, as an anarchist-adjacent I would say a further goal is the collective custodianship of the natural world and the proliferation of a culture of symbiosis and egalitarianism :) (but that’s me).

I don’t mean this as a slight, but I’m very sick and don’t have much energy, so I’ll just make some other offtopic remarks related to what you said, if you’re interested in personal research:

“Confederalist” is different from “federalist”. For instance, Catalunyan syndicalists were federated, in a confederalist system. The Kingdom of Spain is a Federalist system of government–and one that has very recently blocked Catalunyan autonomy. Also, the Fediverse is “federated” but confederalist in character. But you’re right, it is ambiguous.

I say “Bookchinite” because I’m somewhere hanging around the anarchists, but I’m not totally married to anarchism, and there are anarchist tendencies that I have mutual antagonism with; much like Marxists I’ll never be friends with. I’ll take whatever I can get so there is less horrific evil in the world. Social liberals, social democrats, Marxists, anarchists, whatever. Bookchin’s post-anarchist writings are the most aligned with my beliefs, values, and personal context.

I just have a dim view of liberalism as a durable and stable system with the way the world has turned out. Same way I think vanguardists are misguided.

Unfortunately I live in a country where “social wages” and an actual wage freeze were later used to suppress labour actions, and then retracted anyway. There’s a homeless crisis and mental illness suicide pandemic now. Oh yeah and Canada is euthanising “lost cause” disabled people, and Sweden let COVID cull off some of the elderly population…

Social safety nets can always be retracted. Social liberalism has run its course as a viable strategy, much like vanguardism (which is what people mean when they think of “communism”). We need perdurable systems, and as far as I’m concerned, confederalist systems are the only empirically successful systems, although even then it’s hit or miss; see the collapse of syndicalism in Catalunya due to socialist infighting.

Anyway I’m a Bookchinite and currently making peace with the idea I may not live to see 2024, so that’s my context.

Absolutely indeed! I’ll never buy an Nvidia card because of how anti-customer they are. It started with them locking out PCI passthrough when I was building a gaming Linux machine like ten years ago.

I wonder if moving people towards the idea of just following the companies that don’t treat them with contempt is an angle that will work. I know Steph Sterling’s video on “consumer” vs “customer” helped crystallize that attitude in me.

I use it with DuckDuckGo and startpage, it can be configured for a few search engines.

Firefox has uBlacklist, might be on Chrome too.

Not just the US, Australia has slavery* for disabled people and the long-term unemployed, as well as private prison slave labour. Guess which group keeps getting sent to prison for no reason too.

(*legally distinct from slavery, as determined by the courts)

It’s usually tracking protection breaking the site, in my experience.

Now someone needs to study goats and pigeons!

On a serious note I love studies like this. You also see it in other interspecies relationships. Always interesting to see empathy in commensals and parabionts too (obviously doesn’t include horses and humans). In another life I’d love to study ethology.

I hope not, because I’d say that’s pretty unfair to all the cultures that understand that humans are just another part of the ecosystem around them.

I might have misunderstood what you’re trying to imply, but unfortunately the bulk of people going to be displaced and killed by this “fever” are not the ones causing it.

Finally, it’s Plan 9’s time to shine!

It was a genuine question, because I’m honestly not keyed in to the marketing buzz, and I’m generally disinterested in big publisher marketing. Also, “Daggerfall in space” wasn’t a dig; I absolutely love No Man’s Sky, but that game to me, in terms of ethos and mechanics, is Space Daggerfall in all the best ways.

I should also stipulate, I’d say “creativity” to me means exceptional aesthetic qualities, writing, or mechanical novelty. There are many very good and fun games that I wouldn’t call “bursting with creativity”. I love Skyrim, it’s an incredibly entertaining, beautiful, and compelling game; but it was a step back for the series in terms of innovating the genre the way Daggerfall and Morrowind did.

But yeah, to be perfectly honest, with small developers who treat their workers well like Motion Twin, Supergiant, or Hello Games, I can’t really get invested in any Bethesda games beyond being kind of curious.

I haven’t followed the hype cycle but is it looking like it’s going to be anything more than Daggerfall in space? Which is a great core concept, but it’s not exactly “bursting with creativity”.