Authority is a power imbalance in a social relationship. It does not, in itself, imply domination or monopoly or expertise it happens each time two people are not on eye level regarding something, cannot, for whatever reason, relate to each other as complete equals. If you find yourself having it and are keen on proper praxis then you take on the responsibility to lift the other up as you are capable to do. I think for that reason alone I think it’s important to recognise it as authority, so that we are careful when using it, which, in the end, is unavoidable.

We don’t need to be dominated in order to clean up our garbage. And the state is often really bad at collecting garbage, so just teach people that.

Garbage collection is a non-issue over here, it just works. Couple of neighbouring municipalities own the company and it’s run on an at-cost basis with decent wages. If, suddenly, an anarchist revolution were to happen I’m quite sure the general arrangement would carry over.

…and I took that as an example precisely because (over here) it just works, it’s a baby you wouldn’t want to throw out with the bathwater. I’m reasonably sure that wherever you’re living, you can think of such an example.

Knowledge is power, thus with a knowledge gap we have a power gap. As a bootmaker’s apprentice, my capacity to judge whether or not I’m getting taught proper technique is limited, I can alleviate that disparity by consulting more than one bootmaker, but ultimately that gap won’t vanish until I, myself, have mastered the craft.

Authority is the socially-recognised power to dominate.

…unnatural authority. Natural authority aka the bootmaker’s does not require social recognition. The bootmaker knows more than the apprentice no matter what society thinks, the imbalance is not socially caused.

If you don’t want to call it authority, fine, but saying “as bad as Engels” is going too far IMO. While bootmaker’s authority does not rely on (wider) social recognition it is still a thing that happens in a social relationship, and not in the relationship of a worker to their alarm clock or whatnot. Though arguably in the modern world that line is also blurring, see technological paternalism, OTOH it’s just a reification of the relationship between the producer and consumer of a technology. It’s an unavoidable (unless you’re a primitivist) side-effect of increased division of labour in a technologically advancing society.

Heck I’m myself on the page of “the state is a people, a territory, and organisation”, simply because the classical anarchist definition drifted miles and miles from the dictionary and the lived experience of people in liberal democracies, when you say “abolish the state” they hear “abolish garbage collection”. We can re-do terminology once in a while, it’s a good idea.

I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles.

Because we understand chaos and complexity theory.

Marxism-Leninism: 0%

Phew. Demsoc followed by market anarchist I’ll take it. It’s not like I’d actually know what proper anarchism will look like so how am I supposed to get it as a result.

Parents have natural bootmaker authority and if you want to be a good parent then you realise that the kids also have it: They, or maybe better put their genome, know how they need to be raised, and try to teach you, as well as (with increasing age) seek out the exact bootmakers that seem sensible. Worst thing you can do as a parent is to think that learning is a one-way street.

Classes, as per Marx, are foremost identified by the economical position of people, and not necessary a hierarchy as such, that’s a secondary effect of how classes happen to work towards their own self-interest. If, in an anarchist utopia, one population freely chooses to live in a high-tech skyscraper doing engineering work, and another neighbouring one grows coffee in the rain forest, then their economical position is vastly different and they have different interests, thus they are different classes, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be nasty to another.

Most importantly though this is all just arguing semantics and Marx didn’t get anarchism anyway, mixing the theoretical bodies is usually more headache than it’s worth.

Microservice architectures are ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow, implementations of Erlang, implemented by people who think that “actor model” has something to do with Hollywood.

No, Rust lacks the semicolon elision rules of Javascript which make everyone always use semicolons in javascript because they’re so horribly broken.

Rust is like ML, quite literally, not just by ancestry: The syntax is palpably ugly, but at least it’s sane, regular, and concise where it matters.

Whereas fsck, short for “file system check”, should be pronounced “fisk” when someone in a suit is around, otherwise it’s “fuck”.

Go download ComfyUI (civitai is a good source of models) and Blender. A snappy cycles viewport is something to behold. Do simulation nodes run on GPU? If they do you can do all kinds of stuff with that.

Oh, last but not least: You can swap to VRAM.

Slaves nowadays usually refers to either American-style chattel slavery or Roman-style slavery, both of which were systems much different than Serfdom.

But yes serfs will likely have built it, or were involved with the build under direction of hired stone masons, on order of a noble and with resources a noble paid for, under the general societal rule that serfs were to spend a certain amount of days a year working on infrastructure stuff as part of their taxes. For more details you’d have to dig into the law at that time at that particular place but those kinds of arrangements were incredibly common in Europe in the middle ages. You tended to be able to buy yourself out of having to work, and also pay your way in silver or gold out of paying in grain, livestock, etc.

While we’re talking about Devil’s Bridges, Hamburg has one, too: It was built to make crossing the devil’s ford easier, so called because there were so many accidents there people couldn’t explain it otherwise. A carpenter was contracted, who is said to have made a pact with the devil, that the bridge may stay, at the price of the soul of the first living thing to cross the bridge. On inauguration day, then, the local reverend blessed the bridge and set off to cross it, when out of the bushes a rabbit appeared and sprinted across the bridge. A statute memorialises the occasion:

…the less exciting explanation is that back when Holstein was still under Danish rule there were two bridges close together, and the double bridge then turned into the devil’s one. dövelt -> Düvel in Low Saxon makes a lot of sense but is boring.

Contact your data protection officer, they collected data that did not need.

Both are in there, and neither of those are wrong. Generative AI does have serious limitations when it comes to detail control, and it’s also used a lot by people (not necessarily executives) who don’t respect or understand art – even to create things that they then consider art.

The thing is that we’ve had the same discussion back when photography became a thing. Ultimately what it did was free the art of painting from the shackles of having to do portraits.

One additional thing is that I recommend extremely against trying to try and develop art skills by generating AI. Buy pencil and paper, buy a graphics tablet, open Krita or Blender, go through a couple of tutorials for a few days you’ll have learned more about what you need to know to judge AI output than what hitting generate could teach you in a year. How do I know that the eyes in that AI painting have an off-kilter perspective? Because, for the life of me, I can’t draw them straight either, but put enough hours into drawing to look at both the big picture and minute detail. One of the reasons I switched to sculpting.

It’s incredibly intentional in an entirely distinct but fundamentally related way, since you lack control over so many aspects of it- the things you can choose become all the more significant, personal and meaningful. I remember people comparing generative art and photography and it’s really… Aggravating, honestly.

And that’s not precisely the same for AI… why? Why are the limited choices in photography significant, personal, and meaningful, but not the limited choices people make when generating pictures?

A lot of generative art has very similar lighting and positioning because it’s drawing on stock photographs which have a very standardized format.

Yes. Because the majority of stuff is generated without much intentionality, by amateurs, or both – but so are most photographs, they just don’t ever even get analysed in the context of being art or not because their purpose is to be external memory, not art. And arguably most AI generated stuff should not get analysed in the context of being art.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t control lightning, or that someone who does have a sufficiently deep understanding both of the medium of pictures in general, as well as the tool that is AI, would not, at some point, look at what’s on the screen and ask themselves “Do I want different lightning”. Maybe you do, Maybe you don’t. Like, there’s a reason there’s standard lightning setups, not every work has to be intentional about that particular aspect.

And maybe you want different lighting but the model you use doesn’t provide that kind of flexibility – when you say “still life” it insists on three-point lighting because it thinks one implies the other just as “mug” implies “handle”. You can then go ahead and teach it about different lighting setups, “this is an example of backlight, this of frontlight, this is three-point”, and, with some skill and effort, voila, now “still life with backlighting” works. There absolutely is intent in that. Speaking of models that can do that, here’s usage instructions for one that does.

In principle all samplers are deterministic because they use PRNGs, any and all actual non-determinism you see is due to GPUs, underlying acceleration libraries playing fast+loose with numerical accuracy. Which they do because the models are generally robust against noise which is exactly what lacking numerical accuracy (or quantisation) is, but you can get into situations where, on direct comparison, it does make a difference.

Why not “AI readymades”?

A LLM prompt can’t convey that level of intentionality, because if it did, you would just be writing it directly.

Photography, as opposed to painting, can’t either. Part of the art of photography is dealing with the fact that you cannot control certain things. And yes a complete noob can get absolutely lucky and generate something absolutely stunning and meaningful by accident.

Personally I vibe much more with definitions of art that revolve around author intentionality on the one side, and impact on the human mind on the other and AIs, so far, don’t have intentionality neither can they appreciate human psychology or perception so there’s really no such thing as “AI art” it’s “Humans employing AI as a tool, just as they employ brushes and cameras”, and the question of whether a piece created with help of AI is art or craft or slop or any combination of those is up to the human factor, no different than if you used some other tool.

So in my mind that auction is just as valid as one that focuses on photography. There’s a gazillion photographs made daily that aren’t art, and those don’t get auctions, just as deluges of stuff that AI generated doesn’t make it to that point. It’s still about that “special something” and being a materialist doesn’t mean you need to reject it: It is recognised by a very material computer right there in your head. It’s hard to pin down, yes, if it was easy to pin down it wouldn’t be art but craft.

Cloud saves are for playing on more than one box as well as backup. Achievements, from the developer’s POV, give some insight into player behaviour, you can also drop hints there (I would never have tried to pet the manta in Satisfactory otherwise), make suggestions for tasks people can set themselves, etc. Whether you, as a player, cares honestly nobody but you gives a fuck.

I can tell you, for example, just from the achievement statistics, that a metric fuckton, an absolute majority, of Cities:Skylines players play modded. They do track city building milestones and very very few people are reaching anything even close to mid-game with achievements still enabled.

These public funds should be subject to conditionality, and not be spent on “AI hyperscalers” or “lighting-fast growing unicorns” that eventually reproduce exploitative business models and further consolidate the economic and political power of large tech corporations. Instead, they must be reserved for open digital infrastructure, software, hardware and standards, similar to what the NLnet Foundation and the Sovereign Tech Agency are already doing on a smaller scale.

Boring. Good. Boring is good and Europe does boring well.