john_henry @john_henry@octodon.social

Just put out a small patch for Every Brick Laid that makes it slightly nicer to play! Why not give it a go, if you haven't already? https://fenreliania.itch.io/every-brick-laid/devlog/29632/small-fixes

Anyway if you want to play a game about the creative struggle, here: https://fenreliania.itch.io/i-must-reach-the-top

i very frequently come to the conclusion that humanity's bottleneck is communication

we're still mostly incapable of communicating precisely, even the people who specialize in this.

we optimize most stuff out of their contexts, except the context hold most of the meaning in most cases, because that's the conclusion we remember, but it's far from enough to *explain* it to someone else, yet convince them it's worth anything.

I used to read news.admin.net-abuse in the early/mid nineties, when the moral/ethical question of whether to block spam was still an open question.

It took years for people to realise that if we didn't block spam, then we wouldn't see anything else on email or usenet.

And that was technical admins who had to realise, not tech CEOs, who tend to be much more stubborn and less able to accept input.

in the future-present we have digitized everything but mostly to prevent you from owning things. personal data is freely bought, sold, and lost; nobody is ever held accountable. firms spin breaches to increase sales.

the public web hosts an ongoing international conflict that nobody wants to talk about, especially not the people conducting the conflict. hostile actors have weaponized clickbait as a form of psyop.

random strangers are often politically-motivated robots.

@aral @starbreaker Basically we need:
1) To ensure money doesn't overpower democracy
2) For ill-gotten gains to be forfeited completely (not just wrist-slap fines)
3) Social programs and safety nets
4) Intrinsic systematic limiting of high-end wealth accumulation (taxation being an example)
5) For businesses to actually pay the social/environmental costs they incur
6) Mechanisms of decentralization to be cultivated

musing: "algorithms are neutral" is techbro for "guns don't kill people"

What would the world be like if, instead of PCs, computing for the masses had arrived in the form of Unix-powered terminals similar to France's Minitel, administered not by the Baby Bells but by the US Postal Service with iron-clad First and Fourth Amendment protections after the US government took the rights to Unix from AT&T under eminent domain, put Unix into the public domain, and put the whole Bell Labs crew on the government payroll?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/28/minitel-france-says-farewell