Nigel Swan @swansinflight@mastodon.nz

Opinion | Welcome to the United States of ‘Idiocracy’

This toxic idiocy is getting people killed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/30/welcome-united-states-idiocracy/

Always nice seeing photos in print, even just in the local car club newsletter 😁

#motorsport #photography

Commercial software using closed protocols is the reason we have to juggle a bunch of different apps like Discord, Slack, Hangouts and so on. Closed platforms fundamentally undermine the very spirit of how the internet is meant to work.

#fediverse

"Hundreds and thousands of kilometres away and apart, we all converge on the virtual space of an online class for a time specified in a schedule set in a different era to discuss literary works and cultural achievements from a different age. With the buildings outside my window abandoned, the universitas is not a fetishised location anymore. It has been forced to become a community again."

- #DawidJuraszek

https://dark-mountain.net/dispatches-from-a-stricken-world-iii/

Saw a Washington Post story about how Fox News kept people from taking Covid seriously. I would have read it, but it was behind a paywall. Guess what's never behind a paywall? Fox news

@angristan People still use Last.fm? 😅 I used it for years just to see my play statistics and then started sending stats to both last and libre fm .. but then last.fm locked down all their charts unless you paid and I was like 'well fuck that...' .. and I gave up on Libre too because .. eh .. I didn't really care about my frequently listened to stats 😋

Wireless is a trap https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8hxvfZiqH24oqyr6y/wireless-is-a-trap

General-purpose OS, special-purpose OS, and now: vendor-purpose OS

https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/26/Vendor-purpose-OS.html

#blog

Hey fediverse bot authors, this is for you.

Instead of having a bot that blindly follows someone, then having a pinned toot or description that reads, "DM me "unfollow" if you don't want me to follow you any more", how about you do something sensible like looking at a user's profile and discovering whether or not they have #nobot in it first?

Because if you write bots that don't respect #nobot, you're no better than a spammer.

Don't @-me.

I'd like to introduce a new #foss project: Open PGP Signature Verification or OPSV.

https://yarmo.eu/blog/opsv

This eliminates the need to rely on #keybase verify function and, therefore, keybase at all.

Website: https://opsv.foss.guru/
Code on @codeberg: https://codeberg.org/yarmo/opsv
Public stats by #plausible: https://plausible.io/opsv.foss.guru

Time to #DeleteKeybase once and for all

#opsv #pgp

open source e-reader in a world full of amazon-controlled e-readers seems like a good move

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

Someone said that the threshold for calling a car a "classic" is 15 years.

I'm sorry but my 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt is anything but a classic. Hell I don't consider anything made since the year 2000 classic.

I've always abhorred the idea of letting a third-party read what I write like Grammarly does. It's one thing to read business or school email but prose is very different. Though LanguageTool promotes its proprietary offering heavily, there seems to be a local server you can run. The browser extension can be configured to use it and I also found a vim client ​

Mistaking Wealth for Wisdom

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.

-- Adam Smith

https://franklycurious.com/wp/2015/01/23/adam-smith-of-mistaking-wealth-for-wisdom/

#AdamSmith #Wealth #wisdom #FalseCauseFallacy #LogicalFallacy