Category: Uncategorized

Reimagination of the party structure through digital platforms. Populism through digitality.

’emerging organisations such as Momentum, the Five Star Movement, Podemos, France Insoumise and many others as “digital parties”, or “platform parties,” […] following the logic of the digital platforms of contemporary capitalism and mimicking operations like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.’

— www.plutobooks.com/blog/momentum-labour-online-digital-activism-social-media-party/

Learned a little bit about FPGAs from Alan of myStorm today. I’m a long way from clocking it all, but I think a couple of concepts sunk in… I’d like to know more about chip design and hardware, the fundamentals.

The BlackIce Mx looks super fun, an open hardware FPGA dev board. Someone was demoing the NES chips built on one, and Alan showed me an implementation of RISC-V. mystorm.uk/mystorm-opensource-fpga-hardware-blackice-mxusing-blackedge/

When you look at the resources required to do quantum research, or even just fabricate silicon chips for that matter, I think that along with small tech, appropriate tech, etc, there’s a need to think about guerrilla technology. The creative use of small technology to counter the misuse of more ‘advanced’ technology by those with access to orders of magnitude more resources. Ways of tackling the asymmetry. Better understanding of the terrain. Small units of organisation with mobility.
I don’t have a great grasp of what’s going on with quantum computing, but I saw a talk today about how it is advancing apace. IBM now at 53 qubits.

Given the stated potential of quantum computers, it seems worrying that they will be the playthings of wealthy states and corporations. Barclays recently used it for some financial application for example. The liberatory potential could be vast, but will it be used for those ends? Don’t want to be a crank, but I’m not feeling particularly hopeful…

I found a book from 1997 on my brother’s bookshelf in the house where we grew up, called Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.

The first section is called Hypertextual Derrida, Poststructuralist Nelson?

It looks pretty amazing. Beautifully, it has loads of pencil annotations from my brother.

I would love to read it. But I’ll be honest with myself, I haven’t started and finished a non-fiction book for a long time. I’m genuinely better in hypertext.

I uninstalled Tusky. It’s a great libre app for Mastodon. But after a morning spent losing about an hour (or more!) of time scrolling through the timelines, before even getting out of bed, I figured it’s something I don’t need on my phone. Keep the firehose at arms length. If I want to for some reason just scroll through everything on Mastodon, I’ll go to a website and login.

(Counterpoint: I did find some really interesting things while surfing the timelines…)

Liked a post by Chris M.Chris M.

Lest we forget, setting up several of these “freeports” is one of the key pillars of the current U.K. governments post-Brexit economic policies. They talk about how it might transform the chosen towns into “the next Singapore” but they never talk about what that actually means. I wonder why 🤔

David Graeber here mentions that the aircraft and tanks supplied to Turkey need regular maintenance and repair, and that it’s not happening in Turkey, it’s happening in other Nato countries. Who’s doing it? Could we push for a down tools like the Rolls-Royce workers did when refusing to service the planes used in Pinochet’s Chile?

novaramedia.com/2019/10/08/rojava-trump-betrays-the-kurds/

In 1976 the Lucas Plan from Lucas Aerospace was outlined by workers – a strategy to avoid job losses by transitioning to production of things useful to society. Some of those things were heat pumps, solar cell technology, wind turbines and fuel cell technology.

“The proposals were rejected out of hand by L.A. management”

Could have been a mini green new deal in 1976…

Story of the Lucas Plan

twitter.com/powellds/status/1181618447798722560

Reposted a post by GNU PropagandaGNU Propaganda

In response to the President Trump (USA)’s executive order blocking all commercial and non-commercial property transactions with Venezuela, Adobe has begun cancelling accounts belonging to Venezuelans.
Regardless of this being a continued embargo, this is a lesson to be learned to never trust softwa…

Went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester today. Had a bit of a brain flipout taking in all the intersection of cotton mills, labour, industry, capitalism and slave materials, looms and textile machines, early computers and computer theory, all the parallels to the current 3rd and 4th industrial revolutions.

Also I now have a hitherto unknown love of fibres and yarn and textile manufacturing machines, they are wild. Also I kind of want to do some knitting.

(A mechanical love that is.  As historical artifacts they are pretty checkered.)

Got problems on my box installing Guix when using UEFI and GPT. But it’s working alright with BIOS and MBR. I’m not anywhere near likely to use a 2TB drive anytime soon. I can live with logical partitions. Do I lose anything else if I just stick with BIOS/MBR? Any performance issues?

#Guix

I think that a personal wiki should be primarily ‘for you’. Keep the barrier to writing in it low. It’s not performative. If it’s a jumbled mess, that’s fine, as long as you can navigate through it. If others’ happen to find some needles of information in your haystack, great. But that’s not the goal. If you want to concretely share some info with the wider world, shape part of your wiki into an article.

Whew boy, there’s a real phalanx of uninspired skyscrapers screeching up in central Manchester right now. Dunno if it’s offices, expensive flats, or what. Who’s building them? Who are they for?