𝔰𝔥𝔦𝔟𝔠𝔬

no first-principles thinking survives first contact with reality

Weaponized Design and the Digital Identity Event Horizon with @shibco.newdesigncongress.org

Cade is Head of Research at World Ethical Data Foundation and founder of @newdesigncongress.org, confronting the gap between what is said and what is happening in digital societies

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youtu.be/5MFiY8Q7RfE

Graphic showing a screencap from There is Pain in the World But Not at This Con: Furry and the Para-real".

Panel highlight! 🎉

We were honored to have Ån (VRChat Systems Design Lead) and Shibco (New Design Congress co-founder) join us at #FuralityUmbra for an unmissable talk on furries, VRChat, and the third space between digital and physical. 🌐

VOD 🔽

www.youtube.com/watc...

My talk with Shibco from Furality Umbra is online (scroll down for the video):

There is Pain In This World But Not At This Con

foxriot.com/talks/there-...

Certainly an interesting moment to need to deal with a spambot attack on my Ghost instance. 🤔

Been off GitHub for years. And based on the news coming out over the last 24h, absolutely zero regrets. Having absolute control over your repositories is, uh, "fucking based."

A screenshot from the game Roblox. It shows a character lying in an open grave, smiling. The character is blocky with a yellow face, wearing a brown shirt and blue jeans. Above the character is a text bubble that says, "before we continue this funeral, i’d like to thank our sponsor Nord VPN." The setting has a grass-textured ground and other open graves in the background

Yesterday I was on a train towards Ostkreuz, one of the main stations in Berlin, when a neo-Nazi couple, a man and a woman, got on and stood next to me. The man was obviously fascist: for one thing, apart from his hairstyle and general demeanour, he was wearing a Team Germany t-shirt. He also had the build of a buffalo, after years spent in the gym. The woman, in all black, was less easy to spot, but her energy gave her away: she was scanning her surroundings with a quiet hostility. They got off the train and she turned and looked at me for a long while and said a few things to her partner, then they went downstairs to the far-right protest. And I thought: this is your identity, this is how you live: you get dressed thinking of us, you go to bed at night thinking of us. You dedicate your wardrobe to hate. A rage-fuelled existence sounds exhausting, but maybe it’s satisfying - either way, it’s all-consuming. And I thought, I don’t like it, but I think I get it. No wonder you’re so invested in it. This is how you choose to spend your Saturdays, this is all you have.

How could you have spent the last decade not preparing for this moment. For fucks sake.

You read a headline that says, "You can't defeat fascism online"—a true statement—and accused the author of being pro-eugenics. That's a pretty galling leap. If you're finding monsters everywhere like this, than perhaps you are already isolated and alone, even online. This is not solidarity.

Did you read the piece

The Slop Society In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too pol...

Newsletter: Mark Zuckerberg's MAGA pivot is really just the continuation of years of rotting out the core products of Instagram and Facebook - and begins an era of unrestrained, unrepentant growth where tech will proudly make their products even worse.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-slop-society/

A screenshot from the game Roblox. It shows a character lying in an open grave, smiling. The character is blocky with a yellow face, wearing a brown shirt and blue jeans. Above the character is a text bubble that says, "before we continue this funeral, i’d like to thank our sponsor Nord VPN." The setting has a grass-textured ground and other open graves in the background

The neofeudal tech narrative of the 2010s was always suspect. Two stark refutations:

1. Tech CEOs eagerly courting the new admin's favor
2. The seismic C-suite anxiety post-UHC CEO assassination

The corporate invincibility narrative cultivated powerlessness. What could've been achieved without it?

The thing about "ai ethics" is that the people using the tool don't go to your conferences. So even if you get the devs onboard--putting aside questions of poisoning the ethics well by inviting palantir or whoever into the room--you're missing out on end users. Whose demands devs need to meet!

It’s a matter of time, Chinese media/bots will eventually target this platform as well.

zen-browser.app

You just need to look at Zen Browser to see what a modern FF-powered browser could look like 🫡

Also FF on Android has zero keyboard support and is an accessibility nightmare. Awesome!

All good! Sorry for being terse! Its a very unfun subject!

I am very aware of Mozilla's ties to Google.

Frustratingly, none of these sources are particularly organised into anything comprehensive. I've been thinking of doing that myself, but soooo little time right now.

I'm being shameless!

YouTube video by iMAL Brussels BetaCamp part II - SuperTele (Saturday live from Brussels)

Sorry to continue to drop NDC links at you @robin.berjon.com, but here's an interview with the Brussels-based iMAL, from earlier this year: www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4rs...

My theory is that in the mid 2010s, Valve's Gabe Newell—like Epic's Tim Sweeney—saw the vertical integration of MS and Apple hardware/software as a direct threat to their existence. The FOSS collaborations is an investment in Valve's future. The Steam Deck is a marker of economic warfare.

Reddit - Dive into anything Welcome to /r/AMD — the subreddit for all things AMD; come talk about Ryzen, Radeon, Zen 5, RDNA 3, EPYC, Threadripper, rumors, reviews, news and more. /r/AMD is community run and does not represent AMD in any capacity unless specified.

www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...

www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/...

www.tomshardware.com/software/lin...

www.theverge.com/23499215/val...

www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/03/coll...

As an aside, it would be very hilarious if the DOJ found this evidence.

The famous X-Files I WANT TO BELIEVE poster. Featuring a flying saucer in a forest.

🥲

I see this accusation thrown around a lot, but there isn't really any evidence that Google's money came with a requirement to sabotage Firefox. AFAIK, the deal was a sort of preemptive cost to avoid anti-trust attention from the DOJ. If such evidence existed, it would be devastating to Google.

Or the rise of Godot as a viable alternative to attempted monopolisation of digital culture by Unreal and Unity, something I've written about previously: newdesigncongress.org/en/note/2022...