The most unruly and least considered, most shameful among various Idiomdrottning components and libraries can be found here.
To contact me, send mail to sandra.snan@idiomdrottning.org
M säger ja till att släppa in SD i regeringen om Tidöpartierna vinner valet i höst.
Okej, det stinker och jag är mot det så kan oppositionen samla sig please?! Ja, jag vet att det är väldigt otäcka typer i dom andra tre oppositionspartierna och att bara just ditt oppositionsparti är bra (oavsett om det är borgfredssmygrasisterna och åtstramarna i S, bensinpopulisterna och ribbentroppaktarna i V, grönvaskarna och kommunistfobikerna i C, eller rödlinjedragarna och småföretagssvurmarna i MP) kan jag förstå, ja, jag håller med, dom andra tre partierna är riktigt ruggiga, men tidöblocket är den större ondskan som vi alla vill rösta bort och då behöver ni alla fyra snacka ihop er lite! Skärpning tack, gör en rödgrön röra genast!
Kristersson säger i Aktuellt att det är naturligt att SD axlar invandringsfrågorna i en ny regering
Det är som att säga att det naturliga vore att låta räven passa hönshuset. Det är den frågeställning dom borde hållas längst ifrån (efter klimatet såklart). Deras rauspolitik är den största mardrömmen vi har här i landet. Hela poängen med att hålla dom borta har ju varit det.
Men här har vi ändå Möjligheten med stort M! Jag drömde igårnatt en mardröm som utspelade sig i en annan tidslinje där Kristersson och Mohamsson och Busch väntade med att gå ut med det här SD-gullandet tills först efter valet vilket gjorde att en massa personer som begripligen avskyr SD lurades att rösta på dom.
Nu har dom sagt i god tid innan valet att dom tänker bilda en koalitionsregering med nazisterna.
Oppositionen, samla er please så vi alla kan rösta bort dom!
Snälla Tand-Ringqvist och Dadgostar, jag vet att ni båda med rätta tycker att den andra är kass för det är hon men jag hoppas att ni båda ändå inser att Åkesson är etter värre!
Snälla Helldén och Lind, jag vet att ni vill dra en röd linje mot precis alla andra sju partier över kärnkraftsfrågan och ni har ju helt rätt i att övertron till kärnkraften är en total irrbåk och rödströmming som försämrar klimatarbetet men om ni sätter ett enat Tidö på tronen igen så blir klimatarbetet ännu sämre än om ni inte gör det!
Snälla alla socialdemokrater, jag vet att eran boss önskar hon hellre var med i ett Tidöparti som också börjar på bokstaven S där hon kunde få “strama åt” invandringen så mycket hon bara kunde och komma med regeringsinviter till Busch och Kristersson men nu har åtminstone M och L sajnat med djävulens orkester så it’s time, yeah, it’s time, yeah, it’s time, yeah, it’s time!
It’s time att skärpa sig och låta oss alla rösta bort Tidö vilket vi har längtat efter since basically ever! Ingen haltande dök eller jök utan ett gediget löfte att vi ska få slippa Jimmie! “Oppositionen” leder i valundersökningarna (inte med några jättemarginaler så fortsätt att skärpa er—och det betyder inte “närma er mitten” utan det betyder att faktiskt git gud!) men det finns ju ingen opposition så länge ni hatar varandra!
Alla jag pratar med hatar blockpolitiken men jag älskar den för att:
Bristande finansiering tvingar Uppsala universitet att skära ned på lärarledd undervisning och laborationstimmar. Enligt rektorn har de statliga anslagen till universitetet släpat efter i flera decennier, samtidigt som lokalhyrorna blivit allt högre.
Det är bra att textteve nämner lokalhyrorna och jag önskar att dom hade skrivit ännu mer om det. Regeringens beslut att samhället ska ta ännu mer betalt av sig självt är roten till mycket lidande och kärv. Våra museum, teatrar, skolor och liknande knakar sönder. Sjukhus skulle, om dom inte redan vore sålda.
Det som hände var att politikerna bestämde att alla dom här gamla husen plötsligt skulle ha in “marknadsmässiga hyror”, alltså helt plötsligt från klar himmel ökade deras utgifter drastiskt utan att få mer inkomster.
Det är så himla orättvist. Det är antingen dumt eller elakt.
Det är dumt eftersom det är ett sånt otroligt självmål att varenda barnrumpa borde ha fattat att det här skulle kärva. Det händer ibland att riktiga ekonomer tycker att jag är lite koko när dom läser min hemsida (“O-inräknade externaliteter, lol vilken tautologi, det är ju det en externalitet är” har jag framförallt fått höra. Ja, jo, det fattar väl jag också men det konstiga är att våra beslutfattare tutar och kör som om det inte fanns nåra klimatexternaliteter!) men det vet ju till och med jag att vi har samhällen för minska transaktionskostnader och till och med företag organiserar sig så när dom kan.
Självklart blir det dyrare och sämre för alla. Om du jobbar på en arkitektfirma och du behöver ett nytt ritblock och penna så går du bara och hämtar en. Det måste liksom inte finnas en liten marknad där du måste vinna små auktioner för att få dina pennor. Än värre som det är här, en hittepåmarknad där nån värderare kommit in och “uppskattat” vad husen “borde” kosta. “Och varför vore det så dumt, pennorna är ju inte gratis?” undrar då du om du är moderat. Det stämmer att pennorna har kostat firman en hel del att köpa in. Pengar som det är bra att hushålla med och inte slösa bort på att kärva till hela verksamheten med en massa gnissel och rost.
Bland marknadsivrarna går det en massa ‘storier om hur systemet i Sovjet var så dåligt och felkonstruerat att det uppstod illegala marknader där dom olika statsägda företagen kunde köpa och sälja sina muttrar och skruvar eller vad det nu var av varandra och därför fungerade dom någorlunda smidigare, ändå asdåligt för det var ju Sovjet men någorlunda smidigare än vad dom annars skulle ha gjort. (Atta mig nu inte med en massa “vadå storier, det är ju visst sant” för jag tycker också att Sovjet sucks.) Dom hade liksom inte kanban och sånt vilket annars smidigt skulle ha löst problemet, utan allt var tilldelat utifrån nån sorts femårsplan som hade kärvat sig. Och nu här i Sverige 2026 så är det den tvångspåförda pseudo-“marknaden” som gör att det kärvar sig.
Jag är inte konspiratoriskt lagd (…längre😅) så jag ska inte slösa er tid med en massa tankar kring att det här ihopbrakande kärveriet är avsiktligt för att dom hatar våra gemensamt ägda skolor, teatrar och museum. Det behövs bara höra på deras urhasplingar i valfritt annat ämne (vindkraft, elbilar, kärnkraft, reduktionsplikt, integration) i fem sekunder för att fatta att det inte alltid är så genomtänkt. Folket är dumt också så dom röstar väl på dom ändå. Inte en och en är ni inte dumma, pretty much varenda en av er är en skinande juvel, men tillsammans är vi det och det är inte så konstigt om inte media blir ännu bättre på att göra sitt jobb att upplysa om sånt här. (Dom är redan ganska bra men ännu bättre please!♥︎ Och här kan vi alla hjälpa till. Bli journalist! I wish I could but it’s too late! Men jag gör så gott jag kan med mina kufiga irrtankar här på Internet!)
Men för att nyansera lite så ja det är ju klart att timrohögern hatar allt det vi som samhälle tillsammans har byggt upp “konkurrerar” med deras lobbyisters företag. Dom har redan lyckats förstöra så mycket med sin privatiseringsvendetta: postverket, televerket, tandvården, sjukhusen, skolorna. Att det här på nån nivå ångat upp ur samma anda som allt det, ja det tar nog varenda kotte inklusive jag helt för givet.
Probably the worst part of original GTD is having a list of calls. That just doesn’t parallelize nor serialize well since nowadays each call is a multi-hour affair if it’s a hold/wait system, or if it’s a “we’ll call you back sometime later today” it’s not great to have multiple such incoming calls hanging over you either.
Even the literal 43 folders (which doesn’t make sense to reproduce digitally over just a normal reminder that just gives yoi the file you want on the day you want it) at least historically made sense as something useful for those dealing with a lot of paperwork, but phonelines and waiting has been real for my entire life.
Prefixet “be-“ behövs egentligen inte på svenska, har jag hört. Så istället för bestraffa kan man säga straffa, istället för befria kan man säga fria, istället för benåda kan man säga nåda, istället för betjäna kan man säga tjäna osv osv.
Att klistra på ett be- sådär kommer från en tid då svenska språket, som då hade funnits länge, plötsligt blev mycket påverkat av tyska som var ett riktigt modespråk typ som engelska är i dag.
Men… jag är för det! En del ord som “behöva” blir jättekonstiga utan. “Jag höver frukost!” Och andra typ gripa istället för begripa funkar men har fått ett annat konnotationsbagage. Eller “befalla” mot “falla”.
Ja, jo, man kan kalla dom kvarvarande be:na för fossiler (en “fossil” i språktöntesammanhang betyder ett ord som bara lever vidare i ett idiom och aldrig används utanför det, typ som “ler och långhalm”) men jag tycker vi ska lägga in be- framför ännu fler ord! Bedöda, behjälpa, betämja! Om du ska trash ett kort i dominion kanske det då blir “beträsja”.
In the Butlerian Jihad (from Dune but popularized by many smolnet posters like Alex Schroeder) we rightly hate bots and scrapers but I’m in a bit of a glass house around that, since I’ve made a few scrapers for my own personal use as a way to get RSS Atom feeds out of sites that don’t have feeds. I love scraping and mashing.♥︎ The JS-laden SPA era was a nightmare for me. I hate browsers and server-side styling. I love getting texts from URLs.
An Inhabitant in Carcosa responds:
Bad in intent: it is intended to do something unethical, whether that be LLM training, denial of service, privatizing the commons, or immanentizing the eschaton. This is pretty subjective in an “I know it when I see it” kind of way. Scraping for a search index, scraping for a full-text RSS feed, and scraping for LLM training are all the same act as far as the server can tell, but only the last one is /evil/.
Having a full-text RSS feed as a way to not have to deal with ads or paywalls—even when the reasons to not be able to otherwise handle ads and paywalls are 100% a11y issues—goes against the intent of the server owners.
And I’m not so sure LLMs are evil.
It may ignore robots.txt, it may lie about being another user-agent
Have done both those too!
Either bad intent or bad implementation is enough; a bot doesn’t need both to be bad.
That’s not exactly my philosophy.
I love the open readable simple web where each document has one URL and you can read it on your own terms. I can’t deal with the junk web.
So me and my friends started a new D&D 5.1 campaign and it’s unusual for me to be running so much homebrew. I usually run modules. It’s strange to me because I feel so much more guilty when PCs die (so far two have died across three sessions) or when I try to find the notebook where the special treasures are or when I’ve missed a prep area and have to fall back to tier three truths much more often than when using modules.
I also did not make the campaign deliberately extra deadly “to teach them a lesson to be careful what they wish for” after they wanted to go back to D&D from Fate but I’m really worried that they will believe I did.
Overall I’m having a lot of fun and loving the campaign because the players have been bringing their A-game. I’m so impressed by them and grateful for them.
I created my homebrew world where instead of “elves”, “dwarves”, and “hobbits” we have Skajra, Daab, and Skirm (pronounced more like “skeerm” than firm or squirm) and so on. And 1960s tech like jeans and guns. Inspired by new wave SF like Caves of Qud and James Tiptree. It’s called Gåvoplaneten which is a bit hard to translate… “Gift-related planet”, “gifted planet”, “the planet is a gift” or something like that.
I practice radical transparency when DMing (even when specific instances of it are really really annoying to players who just wanna immerse I think the overall policy has huge benefits for buy-in and stakes) so I’ve truthfully said things like:
I mean things generally fall into:
…and I’ve been trying to brutally honest about what is what. Maybe that is an overcorrection but I came up in the “cult of GM secrecy” era of 90s gaming and I really belatedly ended up resenting and regretting that playstyle.
It’s actually the year 613 already, diegetically, because our first three sessions have spanned three hundred and seventy-nine days.
We have a ton of houserules in place old and new. We use spell points as per the DMG option, and when it comes to hitpoints, hit dice, and exhaustion, a short rest is 10 minutes while a long rest is a full week, and it takes a year to level up (which is going to become two years later). And we use the “roll high or low, not middle” from Suldokar’s Wake. The players really really hate that rule so far!
As for choosing 5.1 over 5.2, that’s not as slag on 5.2, it’s just that we’re all still on old books. I did give them the option to do PCs that are either…
but that we’re using exhaustion and stuff as per our pre-existing, already heavily houseruled 5.1 setup.
So far no-one took me up on that and all showed up with 5.1 chars and I appreciate that since I don’t have the 5.2 books available yet. We’re not saying 5.1 is better or anything, it’s not edition warring, it’s just what we’re doing practically.
I actually think AI is fun and good. It’s just that if we don’t solve the problems it’s not worth it (if the problems will destroy us all).
It’s like cars. I oppose cars but I actually love riding in the shotgun seat on the open road bopping to that hecking song that goes “and all that I can see is just another lemon tree”. Yeah, yeah, I get motion sick on small bumpy country roads but being in transit, being on the way between places, feels good somehow. And that joy of course pales in comparison to all the good cars do, what they enable, all the problems that cars solved.
It’s just… We only have one planet and so many ways to mess it up.
Humans, like other eusocial species, have a tendency to create systems and structures larger than themselves. We create these runaway processes like whoops we invented the stock market (or it emerged, rather) and now corporations sort of kinda metaphorically are alive and are trying to kill us. So not only are direct fossil extraction and burnination bad, other runaway systems are also risky AF because look at where we are with these billionaires and corrupt policy processes. Yeah, yeah, maybe the solution will also come in the form of a runaway process but let’s make sure we fix the problems before we wreck ourselves here.
People (including me) make fun of young Earth creationism (that has got to be an exonym, right? Because whaddayamean “young” when in their world view the Earth is literally the oldest thing that exists) but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how even though the actual Earth is super old and it’s in a universe that’s even older, and hominids like us have existed for many hundred thousands of years, the world of writing is actually pretty young. Only a few thousand years.
We’ve managed to destroy the planet in an embarrassingly short time. That to me really goes to show that we’re doing something fundamentally wrong and that wrong thing is called fossil fuels so leave it in the ground. And our entire protcol for resource and task distribution thrives on exploitation loops widening wealth gaps and destroying the environment in many ways.
I use the word “exacerbate” way too much and unlike some of my other pet phrases (like “a li’l”, “on the cinder”, “the life-changing magic of”, and “probably better known as”) it’s starting to sound weird to me now.
It’s too fancy and weird and specific of a word to be jammed three times into every essay. Normally I try to not put the same word or phrase twice in the same paragraph (I don’t always catch it for first publication but I go back and edit older essays all the time and this is one of the things I’m always on the hunt for) or even in the same essay if it’s something that’s really out there, pet phrase or no.
The reason for this is that I’m Swedish, I think in a weird mixture of Lisp, English, and Swedish, and in Sweden saying something has made something else worse isn’t some strange X-laden Latin word, it’s just common-place words like “förvärra” or “försämra”.
I like to be specific and not say something “caused” something else when I’m not sure whether or not it did. For example, maybe it’s not money’s fault that people actually are evil (although saint Paul wrote that love for money was the root of all evil in his first letter to Timothy), maybe money just rewards and exaggerates and spreads and… exacerbates it.
Last night as I was lying in bed I was thinking “wait, wasn’t there some book I was reading that I wanted to continue?” and that thought made me happy but then I became sad because I remembered that I already had finished it that morning. Reading this was a mistake because it was so much better than all the, I dunno, eighteen or nineteen other books I’m currently reading and now I almost don’t wanna go back to them.
Yes, it is very derivative of True Grit so if you’ve ever wanted to read a version of True Grit that’s actually good, well, here you are.
Except for the copaganda ending which I didn’t like (I oppose prisons, and the Phantom Zone is a nightmarish version of that), this was a fantastic read.
You really get to feel that you’re Supergirl’s friend on this long odyssey through space. The pacing and scope is masterful. This beats any other novel in the areas this is good at.
Okay, this one was a disappointment. Not that bad but not good either. 3 out of 10.
Having an ingenious timeline and a clever solution and an eccentric detective and a very video-gamey setup are all plusses in my book. The meta-stuff “let us admit we are characters in a novel and not make excuses” is tired now but perhaps wasn’t when this book came out in the thirties.
But what then sinks the book somewhat—not all the way to the bottom, but down from the lofty perches of modern classics, is unclear, dense, overly witty writing without clear attribution to who is saying what when. This would work better as a comic book since it’s a formless of talking heads where you always need to keep careful track of parity to know who is saying what.
In my lefty ancom bubble I’m sometimes seeing rhetoric opposing meal replacements, but I’m not on board with that. Some brands have a low climate impact per calorie. It’s so much better and more empathetic than the usual “carnivore” trends pushed by the fash.
While I don’t necessarily recommend them (as always, be careful with food stuff) the witch hunt against them is growing to be a peeve of mine.
Normally the wedge issue right wing are the ones hating on vegans, pushing keto, or fearmongering against entomophagia. We can do better.
Usually they are the ones punching down and not recognizing that other people might have different needs, capabilities, spoon deficiencies, tastes, or preferences.
There’s only a decade between Lord of the Rings and Dune but the latter is way more post-modern. Not that LotR isn’t pomo, because it is, but Dune takes it a couple of notches further.
It’s so wild to me that this book came out in 1965, a few years before the six days war and on the bleeding edge of LSD hyperawareness, because this book is a trip and a half. Then again, it’s three years after the Lawrence of Arabia movie.
It’s a bummer that, also like LotR, the dose has been so diluted by the osmosis effect of knowing the gist of the story through video games, movies (it’s been adapted directly three times—I had seen the first half of the second movie of the 2020s version—but so many of its ideas have been in other movies like Star Wars), and board games. The “War for Arrakis” game pretty much spoils the entire thing. Because finding this book off a shelf without knowing anything about it and just taking a deep dive into the text as it is would’ve been such an experience.
Even diluted by the aforementioned pre-exposure through osmosis, this book packs a heckuva punch. I’ve been diving into New Wave SF lately (K. Le Guin, Tiptree… and I’m running a new-wave–inspired D&D campaign) and loving it, and wow is this book a tour de showcase for the new wave! Strong worldbuilding, fresh new perspectives, out with the old.
Except not entirely. Some moldy old baggage is still in here. Not only do we have the tired old evil “white, blue-blooded savior with the Magical Royal Bloodline” tropes that plagues Star Wars, there’s also a Cerberus-esque idea about “the only man born to a tribe of women and he is immediately a Marty Stu Messiah of Ganondorfian proportions” with inner lights and voids that seems ripped from the pages of Reads. Not into it!
The translation by Gabriel Setterborg is also hard to review since for the first several chapters it seemed the work of a true poet and then for the latter half of the book it seems he completely dropped the ball and phoned a first-draft in (inluding the glossary at the end, which has several errors). Overall it’s okay and the book definitively stays readable, compelling even.
I’m gonna land on an overall reco for the book and the less you’ve been exposed to Dune already (through other media versions) the more I recommend it. I’m giving it a 7/10 and I immediately started reading the next book in the series (and I’m fifteen pages in on that as of writing this).
I’m writing this a few years before Bitcoin’s twentieth anniversary as one of humanity’s biggest mistakes.
Bitcoin is three things:
I’ll try to be brief on why the token thing is bad.
Y’all know I think a post-scarcity, pay-it-forward mindset can be explosively productive in the digital world. Sharing is caring. Introducing a limited, scarce resource—whether it’s an artificially created one or not—into that mix does a lot more harm than good.
The blockchain ledger exists just to enforce the contracts that emulate those money-like tokens. That is why the ledger was invented and the tokens named the project.
Money is bad and I’ve spent the past twenty-five years arguing against market capitalism. The tokens share all the drawbacks of money and add a whole bunch of new ones.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that either you actually like the token thing, and/or that you’ve found other valuable uses for the ledger, so we can get into where Bitcoin really messed up:
The ledger is built on a peer-to-peer network of nodes. If you’re an Xennial like me you’re thinking “that’s awesome! P2p is great!” with fond memories of things like BitTorrent. Hold your horses for three seconds because BitTorrent becomes better the more reciprocators are connected. That’s actually a problem that PeerTube is struggling with; that so many of the clients and federation approaches don’t connect to the WebTorrent part of it and just hotlink the upstream copy of the video, leaving the servers overloaded.
Bitcoin’s not like that. Bitcoin becomes worse the more people are connected. So much worse. It provides the same block rate and transaction speed whether the entire network ran off one dinky li’l pocket computer as it does now when it’s over 70000 nodes, but the more nodes that connect and “help”, the more energy the whole thing uses.
Because they’re not helping, they’re competing. Instead of just making the network more resilient or better, they are racing each other, distrusting each other. The pool that burns the most gets the most rewards.
I know that humanity has a long history of creating systems that reward and exacerbate greed and injustice but this one is a doozy.
Other proof-of-work schemes like the “hashcash” anti-spam proposal and the new “Anubis” website blockers are really bad and I hate them (it’s not fun when my dinky li’l e-reader hangs for five rapidly battery-draining minutes just because I wanna look up a Dominion game card. If you wanna put a penalty or payment for connecting I’m not stoked that that payment is going directly down the drain. It’s like putting a toll sign on a bridge saying “burn a dollar bill in front of the camera in order to pass the bridge”) but at least they have constant difficulty rates that are manually settable by admins. Bitcoin’s difficulty scale is managed by a computer (and increases automatically so that the block rate is constant) which has led to it increasing to 150 trillions times higher.
“It’s not waste, it’s worth it because of the benef—” It is waste. It’s a penalty for participating. It’s a deliberate deterrent as an attempt to mitigate the “Sybil” attack (the risk of someone starting a bunch of extra nodes to overwhelm the network in order to falsify transactions). So in the infinite unwisdom of Bitcoin’s founders, they put in both a deterrent for participating (the recklessly limitlessly scaling “proof-of-work” hashing) and a reward for participating (the “mining” rewards that will be gradually metered out for over a hundred years, if there’s still a civilization then).
So in our “burn a dollar on camera in order to pass the bridge example from earlier, it’s like if on the other side of that dollar-burning-bridge there’s a two-dollar-payout. So lots of money burnery in order to make money. Destructivity that the clumsy invisible hand of the market can’t distinguish from productivity so it runs amok. Instead of creating good and useful products or services it’s pure destruction (repeating myself a bit but the purported “benefits” aren’t increased).
Except it’s even worse than the dollar-burning-bridge for two reasons. First is that instead of one dollar vs two dollars, it’s about 70 k on either side of the equation (margins are pretty tight—that’s how economics work) so it’s a rich man’s game, and the second reason is that dollar burning was an environmental disaster. It’s as if it was a poison dollar that killed birds and even humans as it burned because energy externalities is an unsolved and urgent problem.
“But (setting aside that almost half of it is dirty energy), when we use renewables, it’s making use of extra energy during peak hou—” It’d actually be less bad if that extra energy from solar and wind were wasted than it going into Bitcoin’s ASIC e-waste poison mill because you’re not helping by mining. You’re only increasing the difficulty scale for those dirty coal-fueled Bitcoin miners out there.
Bitcoin is a runaway train, a headless constrictor, a gray goo apocalypse, and it’s incredibly difficult to fight. Some approaches to stop it involve regulating energy externalities (which we need to do anyway in order to stop climate change) or tanking the value of BTC by making it harder to interface it with other goods and currencies.
Klimatminister Romina Pourmokhtari (L) vill avskaffa ett av de mest omstridda klimatmålen—det så kallade transportmålet—och i stället införa ett annat mål.
Hon dömer ut det nuvarande målet som orealistiskt. Pourmokhtari anser att det nuvarande målet »har brister och fokuserar väldigt mycket på vad som inte ska göras, i stället för vad som ska göras«.
Transportmålet går ut på minska utsläppen från transportsektorn med 70 procent från 2010 till 2030. L vill i stället se ett »elektrifieringsmål«.
Nej men snälla avgå genast, en klimatminister måste förstå att det viktigaste för att jorden inte ska dö är att utsläppen minskar. Under din regim och som en direkt följd av din politik har dom tidigare stadigt minskande utsläppen från transportsektorn ökat med en fjärdedel på ett enda år. Som jag har skrivit om tidigare är det faktiskt viktigare vad man inte gör än vad man gör. Ja, mer elektrifiering skulle kunna bibehålla en del av vår livskvalitet när fossilbrännandet minskar, så den skulle kunna vara ett verktyg, (och därför är det jättekonstigt att din regim avskaffade elbilsbonusen och sänkte bensinskatten vilket krympte dom relativa TCO-fördelarna med elbil med runt tvåtusen kronor i månaden) men vi måste aktivt se till att utsläppen minskar också. Jevonsparadoxen, har du hört talas om den?
Hur mycket av politikernas klimatförstörelse både här och i USA och Ryssland som är okunskap jämfört med hur mycket av den som är drypande illvilja och grymhet är omöjligt för mig att veta. Men vilketdera det än är så är du så otroligt långt över gränsen för vad en kompetent klimatminister borde göra. Det är mänsklighetens framtid du leker med.
Utsläppen inom transportsektorn hade minskat rejält tills du drastiskt och avsiktligt ökade dom. Våra konsumtionsbaserade utsläpp hade faktiskt sjunkit stadigt innan tidöregimen och det är ett otroligt trendbrott hur fort dom har ökat som en direkt följd av er ansvarslösa och/eller hänsynslösa politik.
Att i en sån situation ha mage att säga att du vill ta bort målet är det sjukaste jag någonsin hört. Låt oss säga att det istället hade varit
Målen var ett löfte och Sverige hade inga problem med att dunka sig själv svinhårt i ryggen när dom löftena gavs som om dom redan vore kirrade. Nu när ödets klocka rullat på och det inte visade sig vara så lätt så visar det sig att dom löftena var en väldig hög av inget. Det fatt’ man ju.
The other day, someone told me that “Discord is a good product”. And I’m grateful for that phrasing because it helps me explain why I’m having such a cow about Discord.
Because it’s not a good product. The worst part about it is how mandatory it is. As an analogy, let’s take some soda… what’s a really gross one? Pepsi? Pepsi has a lot of problems but it would be a heck of a lot worse if it was a “mandatory” product. If everytime you went past a grocery store you would loose all control over your hand and it’d drag you into the store and grab a bottle and you’d physically be forced to get it, even though you have water at home—or you’ll lose your friends or not be able to access product support or an event or even in some cases housing.
While normal, free, common-sense alternatives like email, IRC, XMPP and Fediverse are “products” in some senses of the word (they are produced things that exist and you can use them; and this goes extra for commercial but FOSS-friendly forums like Discourse or Vanilla), they’re products the same way breathable air is a product. If someone were to take away your lungs in order to sell you bottled oxygen that’d not be a product I’d be a happy customer of. I might be buying but I’d be pretty sad about what they took away.
In one way it’s even worse than heroin—not in all or even most ways, and not to make light of the opiate crisis, (stay in school, kids!) but with dope there’s at least multiple vendors.
That’s what Discord did. We have free ways to talk to each other, but they made a way that they own.
With Discord you have to make an account with this one company.
There are no other “products” like this, “mandatory” products, outside of the internet. It’s even illegal. Antitrust laws date back to the Roman Empire. But we tolerate it online for some reason (and that reason is that we have to because it’s mandatory).
You might’ve heard this slogan before, but with Discord’s business model, “you are the product”. We’ve known about this stuff since 1973 but people still get sucked in (because they have to).
While the people who participate in a forum on Discord don’t have much of a choice, the people who start the forums do. If you are a community organizer, don’t choose Discord. At least not only Discord. The normal, classic internet tools like email, IRC, Fediverse or XMPP still exist.
And if you’re a lawmaker, a policy-maker, it’s time for you to step up.
I get this a lot from people who have a bad client for email or IRC or XMPP or whatever it might be. Yes, there are bad ones. But there are also good ones.
In the seventies Frappé popularized an idea that vegetarians should combine protein sources, i.e. eating grains with beans, just like traditional food cultures have done for longer than recorded history, is a complete amino acid profile as opposed to just eating grains with more grains or eating beans with more beans.
In just a few years this was “debunked” with scientists (correctly) pointing out that the body can easily store up amino acids way longer and combine all kinds of protein even if you don’t take extra care at every meal. You can eat all grains one day and all beans the next and you’ll be fine and you won’t get protein deficiency. Or maybe spreading it across days is pushing it but across different meals in one day is fine.
True.
But protein deficiency isn’t the entire story. A complete amino acid profile in one meal (i.e. yes to combining grains with beans) does a better job at triggering the release of satiety hormones like PYY and GLP-1 in the gut and ghrelin right in the mouth—so far, so proven, but it’s also hypothesized that the combo also is more satisfying for vagus nerve satiety along with learned taste/sensory satiety (i.e. your brain has learned that eating these two things together will be more satiating in an hour so it already craves it on the tongue). Eating a meal of grains+grains or beans+beans as opposed to a mixed double just immediately feels less satisfying and if there’s a psychological component to that, that’s not weird because the psychology is created by these weird hunger and satiety hormones too.
Conclulu: you don’t have to worry and stress that you’re gonna get a deficiency or problem if you don’t combine. The “debunkers” were right in taking that particular load off your mind. But, what the debunkers were wrong about and traditional grandma cooks going back millennia were right about is that there’s an opportunity here for you to make a satisfying meal called a peanut butter sandwich where there actually is a synergy between the two ingredients.
There are situations where the word “NIMBY” applies. It’s short for “Not in my backyard”, like someone might think needle exchanges and refugee housing are great but don’t want them in their own neighborhoods (FWIW, I used to live in a neighborhood that had both and it was great). When something is good for everyone including the people who live there but the people who live there are squeamish for bad-faith reasons, NIMBY has been a pretty appropriate slag on them.
But it can also be completely misapplied. If the Galactic Empire wants to excavate your entire planet to death in search of kalkite for its Death Star, and you protest that, it’s not really fair to trot out the old “NIMBY” slag as you’re under the boot.
I’m not saying I know all the ins and out of each situation. I was pretty surprised when Thunberg protested a wind power installation—I thought wind power was good?—but I’m not fully read up so I’ll hold off on coming to a conclusion on that. Similarly, lots of communities here have been protesting uranium mining. Since I’m pretty sure nuclear isn’t the solution we’re looking for, I’m leaning in their favor even more than the wind power thing.
To my surprise, an acquaintance of mine said something like “Oh, what NIMBYs they are!” and it made my jaw drop. “Calling NIMBY” seemed like fair game as long as it was between peers. Like “Oh, stop being such a NIMBY, we both live in this neighborhood and I think we should shoulder this responsibility for good the entire city” or, at the very least, although distantly second-tier, something like “Oh, stop being such a NIMBY, we both live in equivalent neighborhoods and if my neighborhood had been selected to have to have the garbage burning plant, I would’ve gladly said yes, it’s my duty for our city”. (Bringing to mind the old “two cows” joke: “If you had two farms would you give one of them up for the motherland?” “Yes, of course!” “And if you had two cows?” “…” “Why do you hesitate?” “Because I have two cows!”)
But if I’m part of the oppressor/exploiter class, there’s no way I’m gonna call someone under my boot “a NIMBY”! That’s one thousand percent impolite and inappropes!
Now, I know I usually like to zoom out and take the holistic “whole-forest-rather-than-a-single-leaf” approach in these essays so I’d better call out that this time, I’m not doing that. This isn’t me making a final judgment call on the whole “uranium mining yes or no” situation. I’m leaning no on nuclear, it’s just a really inefficient and destructive non-solution as far as I can tell, but the fossil-burning situation is a desperately urgent emergency and if we doom the whole in quest of preserving every part, all parts will die anyway. So a lean no on the uranium thing but a decisive no on the whole NIMBY shaming of these folks. That was strong “let them eat cake” vibes as you sat in your palace fueled by what they had and your class took from them.
Let’s say a land wanted to make burglary illegal. They notice that a lot of people who do breaking and entering wear shoes when doing so. So they make wearing shoes illegal.
That’s sort of how many EU laws are.
I’m getting a li’l frustrated with how my particular headphones and DAC and app combo I can’t hear anything except at the highest volumes. But every once in a while the audio will cut out entirely and I have to fish out the LP3 from deep inside the bag and fiddle with the volumes and up pops the legally mandated volume warning dialog. This is really frustrating and also pretty dangerous if it happens when I’m outside. I don’t want to stop and fiddle with this stuff on the sidewalk or an escalator. I get that it’s well-intentioned to not have people blast their own ears off but the phone can’t know the decibels from a particular DAC/headphone combo so this isn’t really a vector of regulation that works in real life.
There’s also the whole “Do you love cookies? yes/sure/yep/legitimate/accept” click maze on websites. They should’ve made tracking ads illegal instead. This is an even better example than the headphone thing since here they didn’t even criminalize the end. It’s as if in the burglary analogy, they only criminalized the shoes, not the actual theft.
This is also the problem with “Chat Control”. Unlike some very frustrating and self-foot-shooting and frankly gross and horrific anti-Chat-Control ad campaigns here in Sweden, I don’t have a problem with the EU going after abusers. I’m glad that those ends are criminalized. CSAM is actually bad as much as that might come as news to some. I only have a problem with how they do it, by undermining all e2ee which is only enforcable through super dubious methods.
I don’t want to paint or write long-form fiction in the age of AI.
This isn’t me going on strike or anything. It’s just a report from my soul-crushed inner landscape of not feeling like making art and not having felt like making art for the past few years.
Doing everything by hand feels pointless and tedious like writing a desktop app in all assembly without macros would be in the age of compilers. “Kind of like construction work with a toothpick for a tool.” as the lyric goes.
While combining AI and my own penstrokes into one image is taboo in this age of anti-AI sentiment. Using AI for flatting or backgrounds or art assistance is just as frowned upon as full-on prompt-jockeying and slop-pushing.
I can’t bring myself to paint or write longform. It’s like how stairs become that much more tedious to climb once an elevator is installed next to them. The hacker mindset, right? We want to do things for the first time and solve problems generally and recursively, solve a whole class of problems in one go.
As a painter I embraced G’MIC and brush-editing and scripting and path effects. 3D-modelling some blocks to help me with perspective lines that I then painted over. The digital equivalent of stippling with a toothbrush instead of placing dot by dot with a finetip. That was core to my whole art ethos: I make tools in order to make my art. I’ve made auto-masking scripts, Emacs comic lettering modes, auto-hatching brushes, stamp sprays, feathering path effects. For writing it’s been working on outliners and text metadata and timeline sorting tools.
I always try to look for the general solution.
Please don’t get the wrong idea that I’m trying to blame this bleak ennui on the anti-AI crowd. I think some of their arguments are great and I don’t look at AI art either. This isn’t a manifesto, I haven’t figured out an answer yet.
I’m not trying to push a context where I could combine AI art and my own art into one work, where I could make a comic mixing my own drawings and AI, where I could figure out some way to have AI assistance when writing that’s still primarily my own voice, without it getting hate and without me getting bans.
I understand full well the reasons why it can’t be like that. People in my bubble hate everything that AI has touched and they hate it not out of irrationality but for good reason and I do to.
It’s just me feeling hopeless since everything I used to do—write, paint, make music, write programs—that’s all gone. I don’t have any other skills. I can’t do anything else and everything feels so meaningless and tedious.
So that’s the main soulcrush: I wish I could use the tools in conjuction with my own hand, like how a camera was both a blessing and a curse to realistic painters. When the camera was invented it ate that them but they could also use it as a tool for reference. But mixing in AI with art production is rightly condemned since this time around the camera is evil. It’s more like horse&buggy vs a gas-guzzling, earth-wrecking automobile than it is like canvas vs lens.
The secondary soulcrush is that even if I make art, publishing that art into this AI world doesn’t feel fun either. Not that I worry that AI would learn from it (I have consented to that. This web site has 1300 text posts and 300 images all made by me and most of them CC-BY-SA and I have not minded if AI wanted to learn from them. That’s been OK by me. I haven’t fought scraping), but trying to upload music into in a world where 40% of the hit list is fully AI made just isn’t something I want to do. I don’t want to be put on the same plate as an AI dish.
I know I harp on the Monet/Turner/Twombly exhibition all the time but putting Twombly up with Monet and Turner felt so wrong. I don’t want to slag Cy Twombly because I do like his art too. It’s just that it felt like such a staring-at-finger-and-missing-the-moon moment. “Oh these three artists all look blurry so they belong together” where Monet and Turner are impressionists, the ultimate right-side-of-the-brain sublime-what-you-see conduits, Twombly is a lexical symbolist. That is the opposite.
If I were any one of the three them I’d feel slightly offended to be equivocated is what I’m saying. All three of them are good but it’s like “If you think we are the same you don’t understand what we were trying to do”.
I pour my heart and soul into this stuff—I’m “painting my nightmares” as a friend said when I was painting with him around—and I don’t want it served up on the same menu as a bunch of machine talk.
Or for another version of the same metaphor: ever been to a party and as you’re in a productive but exhausting conversation with some privitive screwhead that you’re giving the 101 to, up comes a even more wrongheaded schmoe and starts “agreeing” with you and now you’ve got two problems because you’re stuck in the middle of the original argument and the “whoah what did you just say?!” Completely hecked-up new argument.
Yeah, yeah, when I hate AI the least I can think of it as sort of a rhyzomatic L-space, an organism that grew through roots of a million voices. It’s not a machine talking, it’s us—it’s just been filtered and composted and regrown into new meaning by this organic-like ginormous ANN. But any such appreciation for AI I could possibly twist and turn and force my mind into feeling, I’m gonna put on permanent hold until the two biggest problems—first is is the extremely externalized and un-accounted-for costs to the planet and to other humans, and second is the increased centralization of means-of-production ownership—are solved, and it’s looking right now like they’ll never be.
I’m right there with y’all: When I find out that a song I’m listening to is AI, I turn it off. That’s happened twice now. I believe I can tell right away when a text or image is AI made but I know for sure I can not tell when it’s music. So it’s not out of repulsion I turn it off. I don’t know why. I just do.
I fear that a misread of the main text and of this appendix is as some sort of passive-aggressive slag agaist the AI-hating crowd. That I’m trying to be all sly and smug and friends-romans-countrymen about it. But that’s not it. I do understand where the hate against AI is coming from. I think some of the arguments are really bad and I don’t agree with those parts of it (as a copyright hater I’m especially sickened by those arguments relying on a proprietarization of visual expression) but I’m trying to be super frank and transparent about that. I’m not trying to be swifty or satirical here. We’re all stuck in this wrongheaded world during this utterly misguided era and navigating it best we can. To the exent that people feel threatened by AI, I do too and that’s the whole point of this essay.
My entire reason for living has suddenly been swept away and with it my footing. I don’t know what to do for a job and I don’t know what to do for leisure. It all feels so meaningless. Don’t worry, I’m not about to [end it][ei]—my mental health toolbox is jam packed and I get by with a li’l help from my friends. For now. But on an existential and philosophical level (and on an income level because what’s my job gonna be?), I’m like what the heck? Where do I even go from here? I don’t know how to do anything other that this. I thought I was renaissance and multi-field with my writing and music and art and programming and game-design but it’s all been fell-swooped by this slop singularity. I’m too dyspraxic for woodcarving or sewing. All I could do was this stuff.
I’m not saying never. Maybe I’ll just pick up the pen or the guitar one day when I for some dumb reason feel like it. The most recent batch of art I made was all pen & paper. Scribbling every mermaid scale by hand. Gillian Welch has a song lyric “We’re gonna do it anyway even if it doesn’t pay” (originally a pro-copyright screed and that part does not sit well with a copyright abolitionist like me, but that’s okay since it’s such a great song). Yeah, maybe we are. I just don’t feel like it and I haven’t felt like it in a long time.
Last time the world faced this problem, just over a hundred years ago, what happened was modernism. When the machine (the camera, in that case), mastered the means more than we could, what was left to us was pure ends, pure expression. Maybe this time around the machine has encroached a little bit too much on the expression part of things—for sure it has on the slop algo side of things, but that particular variety of suffering is optional—but maybe it can still become a vehicle, a communication tool for what we want to tell each other.
One unexpected game design lesson from Rebirth’s Ireland side for me is this:
The game has random distribution of “Tower” powers and in a two player game, a random eight of the twelve goals will be public and a random two will be available as private goals and two won’t be in a game (in a four player game all twelve will be in the game).
That setup variability doesn’t matter that much.
Now, I’m not saying it matters zero. It does matter. A little. I usually like to start near one of the 2× tiles, for example (since I often like to rush for the 24-point connect-four-castles goal) so it matters to me where that tile ends up. And knowing when to use a “time walk” tower or a “brainstorm” tower is a key part of the tactics in the game. Perhaps the biggest difference caused by the random tower setup might be towers that are next to several citie spaces versus the ones that aren’t, since splitting up your farms is so expensive while splitting up settlements is fine.
But the flip side is that usually most of the players will visit most of the towers especially at 2p. Even at 3p I’ve noticed players take care to at least get most important towers on their itinary. Eventually.
Same with the goals. We sort the public goals after drawing them so they’re easier to keep track of (settlement goals, coastline goals, connection goals, surrounding goals etc) so which eight are drawn doesn’t matter as as which two aren’t in the game (because they’re the two goals at the bottom of the private goal deck).
It’s “false variability”. The game wouldn’t be that different (and the setup time would be shorter but the i18n story would be way harder, at least for goals if not for towers) if the goals and towers were pre-printed on the board. I’m not saying to literally do this. The little variabiilty that is there is fun. Kinda. Even though it feels like it’s much much less than other vartiable setup games like Chess 960 or even Caylus or Star Realms.
Because of the lacklusterness of this setup variability I started worrying a few plays in that the game would feel samey and not have legs.
Then over Christmas I had the chance to play Samurai again. It doesn’t have any variable setup at all. Yet every game feels different—because of what my opponents are doing and how they are playing and the decisions they’re making (along with the luck of the draw throughout the game, just like in Rebirth). When we got back home we brought Rebirth [Ireland] back out and wouldn’t you know it? Same thing. The games started feeling different because my opponent stepped up his game and started becoming more aware of bottle necks and blocking and edge patterns. Some of the thick layer of sameyness that had gathered on top of this game (in just a little over one year since it was released) was cleared off.
And that’s the game design lesson of today: how putting in a variable setup on the Ireland side of Rebirth’s game board kind of hurt the game because that draws the eye, that makes me think “Okay this is gonna matter, this is what’s gonna make each game different” when it’s not at all. That’s not where the variety is hiding. The variety is all in what my opponents do and how I need to react to that and vice versa. I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying it’d’ve been better if the towers and goals had all been fixed, (because once we can see through the illusory nature of their variability, we can appreciate the little variety it does bring without placing undue expectations on it), but maybe. Yeah, maybe a little. Affordance and conveyance is a huge part of game design, and a fixed setup would’ve more clearly conveyed the reality that “hey, this setup is more or less the same as it always is so what matters is what ruckus you are gonna bring so step up.” and not as much “hey, wow, look at these eight random goals that were drawn, can you catch them all, they’re gonna super matter and so is the tower distribution, you’re gonna really be where all those 3s and 13s are” which is only such a small part of the game compared to basics like points from clusters, settlements, and castles.
I’ve said before that the first food farm I play away from my big cluster is -12 points. The second one is -11 points, and the third one is -10 points. It might not look like that if I play away from it in the beginning (“I’m only giving up three points with this play since my existing cluster is only two big”) but that’s gonna be the end result once all your food farms are out, and ditto of course for power farms. There’s not a lot of goals that can compare to 12 points. A castle is a 10 point swing in a 2p game and most goal cards are only 8 points. Now, conversely, this doesn’t apply to playing apart but connecting up later. 1, 2, 1, 4 is correctly read as only two points short of 1, 2, 3, 4. The “away” I’m talking about is a food token so far away that you’ll won’tc connect up to it in time. That’s worth it but only when it results in a commensurately big point swing somewhere else. Like, playing a loose food farm next to the final 13p tile is minus twelve plus fourteen for a 2p gain so it’s better there than in your main cluster. Or, a loose food farm that cuts off and isolates three tiles from your 2p opponent might cost you twelve points but cost them ((12+11+10)-(1+2+3)) = 27 points if they were gonna link them all up, for a net +15 point delta for you, making it worth it to play away. This sort of play is often worth way more than the goal points, tower points, and off-shore farm points. (And yeah not every farm away is gonna be -12. The average value of farms in a big cluster is 6.5. Pretty good compared to playing four tiles in Dublin for 4.25 points per tile. But I like to think of the farm tiles as worth 12, 11, 10, 9… etc, i.e. mentally reversing the order of them compared to the order they’re actually scored just so I can remind myself early on of how valuable they actually are; I give up twelve points with the first played away, eleven with the second played away and so on. If I end up with a cluster of say eight farms, that’s only 8+7+6+… uh, 4.5 points per tile! I could’ve gotten way more if I hadn’t played away as much!
So while I’ve started becoming a li’l suspicious that Rebirth might not go the distance, I’m not counting it out just yet. The comparison to Samurai—a game without any setup variability at all—made me remember how vital the actual interplay of farm placement can be. Real interaction with a real human.
Now, I’m still not happy that the Scotland side has so few of what we’ve started calling “meadows” and too much “forests” where food farms must go and “mountains” where power farms must go. That kind of fixed, paint-by-numbers game play that reduces the game to only a matter of timing and miai values is a much bigger threat to the game variability interest than any fixed-vs-varied setup issue.