No need to read the full article. Clipped ear shows it got neutered, so now it has more time to focus on business things.

Thanks a lot for sharing this. I’ll keep it bookmarked for later reference, looks very cool!

But is FOSS actually more vulnerable?

I was leftie before I was techie. If you don’t know anything around tech and computers you wouldn’t know what to do. Even as a fairly tech-adjacent professional it took me quite a while.

Then again, I only became a real leftie again after kicking all the corpos out of my computer.

Tech used to be (and still is) obscured by heavy gatekeeping. We who understand a little more like to joke about those who don’t, and I guess we’ll have to stop that if we really want to unite the left. Don’t ridicule, explain. The person might never have had a chance to learn the concept.

For speech to text I also found Speech Note (not to confuse with Speechnotes, some similar thing from a different team I believe)

I do think it’s a problem that doesn’t need solving, but would maybe some sort of instance integrator sites help keep the fediverse open and easily explorable?

I found KDE Simon, and Numen … I’ve only ever used a commercial product, Dragon Naturally Speaking, many years ago. It was used so I could speak instead of typing texts but it did have functions to assign commands as well - don’t think it worked on Linux though.

That is some excellent writing - I went through a little of it and found it well laid out. I’d say you make very efficient use of your time and this is an important contribution for the fediverse, keep doing you!

anti-intellectualism and distrust of “so-called experts

Experts or authorities?

Here some conspiracy for you: A lot of psychiatry (not all) is made up shit rooted in old white guys’ ideas about how to keep unruly youngsters and women in check. The DSM is a vague symptom list sponsored by the pharma industry and gets changed every few years or so (glad they took the gay out).

I consider the output of (the scientifically connected side of) psychiatry, together with the output of my peers, together with my own perception when I make decisions about my own wellbeing - if that alone is anti-intellectual and conspiratic to you, you might be adhering to scientism rather than science.

Weighing in for Southern European mental health care, family support and abuse support. Believe me, you will be better off talking to friends or fellow sufferers online or offline than trying your luck in the public system. Pills is all you get here, and prescribed somewhat hit-or-miss after what amounts to a 15 min interview, most of which are spent by the doctor typing your data into his computer.

If you need help for domestic abuse, be prepared for hours of bureaucracy while reliving and retelling your trauma to a host of police and social security professionals repeatedly. Then relocated to somewhere where you receive the bare minimum of care. I was lucky to never need it but have witnessed it, and frankly would consider any offers from unknown van-dwellers before this.

The only way to get the help you need is to research your stuff well beforehand, and then wheedle out of the system what you need by annoying the bureaucrats till they give up.

Maybe some non-Europeans could weigh in with their perspective as well.

Same with real people out there. I grew up in conflict with my parents before the internet and had the exact same issues you describe, just offline. it comes down to taking any and every advice with a grain of salt, no matter. Online and offline self help groups can be great, and life saving.

I do see the problem that a valuable set of global data is ultimately held by a US-American organization. I do know regional subsidiaries exist and in the case of Europe often seem to be run by public organizations, so that offsets this problem. I also wouldn’t know how federation would work with something like inaturalist. Maybe keep instances of regional data? I could see a use case there.

In my country (non-english speaking), facebook is definitely the default for group organization and it really bugs me. I don’t want to use facebook, so I end up not organizing with anyone in the surroundings. Then someone set up a Telegram group and that was sort of an improvement, but impractical, and still nobody posts events.

First time I read about Mobilizon, it fits the bill of every local community internet thing facebook is currently having its dirty corporate fingers on. But what kind of server would I need to set it up? Any old laptop run from home good enough?

It’s a straw-bale filled cube desert, a monoculture hell. The Spanish are really good at creating these.

That’s it, negative externalities. Thanks for reminding me of the word. Which group would I support if I wanted to change something in Portugal? I have found a lot of middle class ‘feel good activism’ (planting trees which then die, talking endlessly about what to do, pass the same old advice to fellow citizens …), but that doesn’t really cut it. The country is a beautiful banana republic and has a few nice valleys to hide in, and I have been living here long enough to want to help protect these places. How can we hold accountable the industries who want to come here to destroy and extract?

I would say the only environment where I would want to see such a thing is dense urban environments. But then, maybe we shouldn’t have urban environments so dense that we have to build skyscrapers for our salads …

I keep waiting for the final shudder but it keeps going on and on?

It also means using Amazon which is not better than Nestle really

‘Crazy train’ describes well the feeling I had last summer. Like the ‘this is fine’ meme. And this summer will be the same. You hide, keep your garden watered, and hope the fires won’t get you this year. All while the officials keep advising to plant more Eucalyptus for profit and organic matter is blamed for the problem and burned for biofuel or on people’s fields - instead of reincorporated into the landscape as it should be. Here in Portugal, for animal bedding, most buy straw bales from the overheated because desertified Extremadura instead of cutting the Giesta (broom) as people used to do. Why are the Spanish straw bales cheaper? Because fossil fuels and the big scale agriculture attached to them create a fake price for the straw (I’m not an economist and don’t know the right terms, but it’s like the prices for fossil fuels and their derivates don’t contain the environmental damage caused by its use). And the Giestais, unused, grow and spread the wildfires.

I used to talk your talk, because I parroted it from other smart guys in Academia. Then I got into small scale gardening and permaculture, and started studying traditional food production. I have to tell you, big ag has been lying big time about their efficiency. Yes, they can produce more per hectar of one crop, but that takes an enormous input of fossil fuel, heavy machinery, fertilizers. In a permaculture system you might not get a ton of x per hectare, but 100kgs of x, 200kgs of y, 300kgs of z … with less input of fossil fuel and less environmental destruction. Of course if you just count the tons of grain, industrial ag wins. But you have to count both input and output plus long term sustainability to know which system really works better. Combine animals, plants, mushrooms, microorganisms in the right way and you can create a very resilient, nutrition-dense system with little energy needs. Spain is turning itself into a dust bowl for the profit of the few, and a lot of the monoculture propaganda is made up and spread by landgrabbers who are too happy to buy up smaller farms in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘feeding the multitudes’ - it just sounds so much better than ‘I bought my neighbors land because I have more money than him’.

I suggest you visit a well-run forest agriculture and permaculture place to see how you can achieve results that are even more positive than huge technological solutions like vertical farms or desalination water lines crossing the land.

With renewables only the energy itself is an ‘infinite’ source (nothing is infinite, but for example solar is quite infinite in our terms, geothermal a little less so). The mechanisms for harvesting said energy and for running vertical farms and desalination plants do need finite resources to be built and maintained, however, while a diverse ecosystem basically runs itself. Big engineering has become so normalized that we believe we need this to make a big impact, but I think we have to think smaller again. Big tech has brought us here, let’s be a little more careful with it in the future.