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I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...
Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.
It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.
And here's the thing: None of this stuff makes me angry. Annoyed, sure, but I've been around computers since I was a toddler, and I have to solve shit problems like these for myself every day.
What makes me angry is: What about all the folks who aren't computer people? How the absolute fuck do they survive in a world where you can no longer function as an employee, a family member, any sort of citizen without encountering this stuff?
Those people are fucking heroes, and I'm angry for them.
This shit is why, when banks announced they were going to stop processing physical checks and a whole wave of elderly folks protested, I understood. It's one of the last fleeting vestiges of anything in their lives that still makes sense, and arguing about the cost of supporting obsolete systems is an absolute red herring.
It's not about the money. It's not about the tech. It's about kindness, and being fucking human to each other.
It was nearly two years ago that I wrote this article1 about the EU #ChatControl surveillance directive on behalf of the @cryptpad team.
Very little has changed since then. Experts in technology, law, and policy all agree that the proposal undermines basic European rights, that it will be abused by authoritarian member states, and that the proposed tech solutions cannot possibly do the job the supporting legislators have claimed.
Nevertheless, they have persisted, claiming the support of "expert testimony" that overwhelmingly consists of unsupported claims by lobbyists associated with law enforcement and defense contractors who stand to benefit financially from its implementation.
A vote is expected to take place on June 19th. These have been scheduled and delayed multiple times already, but this it feels like they might get away with it. There is a lot going on in the EU at the moment, and people are both distracted and tired from fighting this for so long.
I'll try to make resistance easier by collecting some suggested actions below, with links.
There are many challenges when designing federated applications. Here I share thoughts that I've been developing with the Commune group, as we envision a fediverse of agents, not a fediverse of servers.
One technology which I think deserves more hype (it is getting a little) are Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs)!
I made sure to include it in my exploration of a minimal yet inclusive OS (upcoming page), quote:
"In just the past decade Computer Science brought us the concept of CRDTs! Which represents your document as a series of edits, which combine such that no matter in which order these edits you recieved we get the same result!
The FTC on AI: "Don’t misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods." #AIhttps://werd.io/2024/succor-borne-every-minute
The responses to the Trump verdict offer an instructive – and alarming – reminder of what defines the American Right today: They are out for bloody retaliation, all dressed up as patriotism.
Across the world the right to repair is gaining traction... in the UK Jay Blades & his colleagues on The Repair Shop have pushed repairing into the mainstream.
This has been going on for some time, including cycle repair Co-ops, repair clinics etc. Every now & then it pops up in the mainstream media... and here is this week's iteration.
Repairing is the future, but the Tech firms don't want us to embrace it - resist!