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beckman466on Open Source Tractor

the west is literally trying to provoke a huge war with china because china is no longer dependent on the west's intellectual property. your framing seems ignorant to me.

Vijay Prashad: What's the Left to Do in a World on Fire? | China and the Left, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8w3ONjv6Y

Vijay Prashad: No Cold War with China, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj1ggllXmws

beckman466on Open Source Tractor

> I doubt that IP of tractor designs is a major factor in third world poverty.

what's your logic here? the intellectual property system is the way the global north propertied class dominates the global south; i.e. renting out the commoditized blueprints/designs and charging insane royalties [1]

[1] Vijay Prashad, https://mronline.org/2019/09/29/iphone-workers-today-are-25-...

beckman466on Open Source Tractor

> This demonstrates the power of open source. These engineers are to be commended.

if you haven't seen the famous Open Source Ecology pitch by Marcin Jakubowski, you're in for a treat!

Open-sourced blueprints for civilization | Marcin Jakubowski, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEMkvT0DEk

beckman466on Twitch source code and customer data has reportedly been leaked

Palantir next?

beckman466on Curiosity Is Better Than Being Smart?

Every child is born wonderfully curious. Meeting walls instead of bridges sets the boundaries.

"science is a symphony of ongoing fractal rhizomatically-connected feedback loops. something happens and humans go "oh shit, what was that?". then we ask questions and then through making theories and testing them (designing feedback and sub-feedback loops) slowly we understand a new emerging pattern. 1.) the universe responds to something in a new way we hadn't seen before, 2.) we document it, we repeat it to make sure the universe ain't fucking with us, and 3.) that's a completed feedback loop we can pass on: knowledge. we rinse and repeat for more, to infinity, slowly reverse-engineering all the beautiful natural phenomena. this product, our new actionable knowledge, is technology: if i hit these rocks together i get a fire; if i put round tree trunks under some heavy thing i can then roll the thing on top of it very easily ("wow, we can move rocks and make pyramids, here we go!..." "oh fuck, the slavery/misery...") etc., a continuing evolution right into the modern world. billions and trillions of feedback loops. neverending feedback loops. feedback loops racing at us from the past, intertwined with the thousands of open feedback loops revealing themselves today.

but what has happened to science under capitalism?

since the 1970's especially, the propertied class [...] has been pushing for global systems for intellectual property 'protection'. what does this mean? they want to spread their mind virus to make you think they are your baby daddy. they want you to put them high on the pedestal. to have you think they are unique inventors who have survived their deathly privileged upbringings, not cheaters who stole feedback loops from the commons."

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle/comments/pvlc...

beckman466on Unwanted Corkpull

do you mean 'the subscription model' where giant profit-seeking firms retain full ownership of tech, and who can therefore jack up the price of 'service'/usage at any time?

yeah fuck that. i live in an apartment block where i pay €3 for every wash. that's a fucking ripoff.

the solution is modular open source hardware and software.

seriously, why are you so people to give up all their power?

we need to start thinking outside the boundaries of the capitalist profit-motive.

to see the devastating impacts of planned obsolescence (e.g. the disgusting amount of e-waste shipped to African countries) and then think we should give more power to corporations is a bit of a mindfuck to me.

> Stripped of the class jargon

easy to frame or dismiss something as jargon if you're benefitting from the status quo, eh?

beckman466on Abolish Silicon Valley: tech's problems can’t be solved by half measures

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876351

beckman466on Google developing own CPUs for Chromebook laptops

yeah i was hoping to see more skepticism

beckman466on Google developing own CPUs for Chromebook laptops

> Many people are seeing all these different vendor specific CPUs as a win. I'm a bit more skeptical, but perhaps that it unwarranted.

Yeah i think we fail to see this common pattern of negative (even monopolistic) long term effects because we are distracted by the trade-offs or benefits the company promises us initially (but betrays later).

beckman466on Google developing own CPUs for Chromebook laptops

Apple M1 didn't come out of nowhere, they learned from everything that came before. Your comment sort of implies that the innovations came solely from being developed behind closed doors (or in some kind of vacuum), which denies credit to workers who made the thousands of incremental breakthroughs that landed in the commons and which has helped us to arrive in the place we are now.

beckman466on What Happened to Treehouse?

I wish Treehouse had become a worker owned coop with democratic decision making and transparent finances. it could have even expanded and allowed others to create courses on it's platform, even better if they became a platform coop. I love the modularity of TH courses/'tracks'.

beckman466on Google developing own CPUs for Chromebook laptops

what's are the most prominent bottlenecks with lithography?

beckman466on Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change?

hey you forgot 5g

beckman466on Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change?

"According to Keith and co-authors, “counter-geoengineering” could be effected through “counterveiling with a warming agent, i.e. injecting even more GHG into the atmosphere, and neutralising impacts with a physical disruption.”13

Counter-geoengineering represents the final step towards climate militarization and borrows directly from Cold War deterrence thinking. The authors are unfazed by this explicitly militaristic dimension: “Military action to stop SRM deployment by a powerful state would likely only be launched by another powerful state or states, potentially triggering a systemic war.”14

It is no coincidence that in the United States, geoengineering is supported by individuals and think tanks with ties to the military.15 At the end of 2017, a bill was introduced into Congress, which, if approved, would develop a strategic research agenda for Solar Radiation Management.16

The upshot of the US officially pursuing a geoengineering research agenda while simultaneously withdrawing from the Paris Agreement might be a strategic intensification of existing geoengineering research elsewhere, such as the government-led research programs in China and Russia.17 It is not only the deployment of geoengineering that has high-stakes geopolitical and security implications, but also the current pursuit of strategic technology development."

https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering/geoe...

beckman466on Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change?

https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering/geoe...

beckman466on Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change?

> Also there's no technical need for global consensus. It seems quite possible to me that a country, say China, will decide to just go do it. That's terrible politically, and could be dangerous. But it may happen.

it's not Chinese billionaires who are pushing their scary technofixes on talk shows.

https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

beckman466on Apple's iPhone privacy changes signal desire to enter advertising -RBC

i'm referring also to the near zero-portability of a person's data. the multiple lock in mechanisms of most platforms.

why can't i download a git archive of my google docs? the versioning feature only works on the proprietary web app - google's platform.

these are all inter-related problems, and all strategies used on purpose to lock people in and make them dependent so as to be able to extract economic rents.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

beckman466on Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change?

"Philanthrocapitalists are driving massively profitable schemes dressed up as eco-friendly, pro-poor solutions to climate disaster.

[...]

Geoengineering comprises of large-scale controversial schemes to intervene in the earth’s oceans, soils, and atmosphere in attempts to manage the effects of climate change.

Many of these schemes are extraordinary—such as blocking the sun to stop temperature increases, increasing the whiteness of clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, and sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with industrial-scale fans.

In order to have any impact on the climate, they would have to be done on a planetary scale so the potential risks are many: they range from destabilizing weather patterns, creating droughts and floods in Africa and South America, and acidifying the ocean, to polluting the atmosphere and locking the world into unstoppable management of the atmosphere.

Many proposals for removing CO2 from the skies require huge amounts of energy, chemicals, infrastructure, and land in size equivalent to several countries. Yet crazy, inequitable, and dangerous as geoengineering may seem, it is currently been embraced by polluting industries and increasingly some governments as a supposed “solution” to an off-kilter warming world.

[...]

Gates’ approach to climate change is to champion the technofixes that will enable the fossil fuel machine to continue pumping more oil. He is after all personally invested in the infrastructure that relies on their success.

It is also unsurprising given the pervasive technophilia of our time, that even influential personalities like Trevor Noah whom many look to for critical analysis on global issues, would so willingly engage with Gates, offering him a platform for his climate solutionism.

It would do well for us to remember that Gates is not a scientist, or a public health expert. He is a mega-billionaire who made his fortune avoiding government regulations and dominating competitors with monopolistic practices. His money is now being channeled toward a wide range of projects that are deeply unpopular among many in the global South.

Beyond climate technologies, Gates is investing in controversial “extinction” technologies of gene drives, a biotechnology tool to re-engineer natural populations. This is ostensibly being developed for malaria prevention, but is being vehemently resisted by social movements in West Africa where a Gates funded project wants to test out their tools.

He has also been the principal funder of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an agricultural program started in 2006 which claims to be working for small-scale farmers but, in fact, promotes high-tech market-based industrial agriculture in Africa. A report in 2020 revealed that the program had failed in a number of ways. Rather than improving farmer’s livelihoods, many went into debt in order to pay for the high costs of commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizer.

[...]

Mainstream media has been all too willing to uncritically engage Bill Gates’ preferred image as a well-meaning nerdy philanthropist in a cuddly sweater—offering him countless opportunities to share his “expertise” and promote his technofixes. It’s time to look beyond the rhetoric of this billionaire philanthrocapitalist and listen to those who realize that climate change will only be “solved” when we begin by identifying its primary cause: capitalism." [1]

[1] Bill Gates and his technofix dream for the planet, https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-techn...

beckman466on Archivematica: Open-source digital preservation system

Does it do versioning of documents?

beckman466on Apple's iPhone privacy changes signal desire to enter advertising -RBC

> and Apple haven’t yet (at least to the same degree)

Do you consider Apple's participation in the NSA's PRISM program to be worse than selling info to advertisers?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

beckman466on Apple's iPhone privacy changes signal desire to enter advertising -RBC

yeah add to that the fact that icloud backups aren't e2e encrypted (no SV infrastructure services are). we need zero-knowledge systems now.

beckman466on Babies are full of microplastics, new research shows

> Hey HN reader. Get rid of plastic from your life. Doing future you a favor.

No. We need to help the working class become system -literate, and then demand systemic change together. This is not the 'individual choice' problem these call the actions make them out to be. We need to fully map and understand the undemocratic black box systems and their obfuscated rules that we live under.

Governments and firms could end plastic packaging/usage today, yet don't because of perverse incentives that send the same foods in the opposite direction which means food has to stay fresh for much longer while traveling much too far.

"Many urbanised people have lost touch with the sources of their food, and may not realize that the distance their food travels has been steadily increasing. In the US, the average pound of food now travels 1,500 miles before it reaches the dinner table, and the distance continues to grow.

Much of this transport is needless: every day, identical commodities pass in opposite directions, criss-crossing the globe. The ‘logic’ of the global economy leads the US and other nations to import hundreds of thousands of tons of staple foods each year, while simultaneously exporting roughly the same amount. In an era of dwindling fossil fuel reserves and rising CO2 emissions, this is both senseless and wasteful. But it is a trend that is accelerating as governments systematically promote a single, globalized food system."

- Helena Norberg Hodge [1]

A horrible example of this is when a country like Ethiopia, that's been neo-colonized by global north capitalists, exports rice and other foods while the Ethiopian working class people are starving and pushed into slums in cities (away from their land). [2]

The video by Annie Dillard called the Story of Stuff [3] is still a fantastic summary of this (as are her other videos).

[1] The Case for Local Food, https://www.localfutures.org/the-case-for-local-food/

[2] Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isiYYVmvn2U

[3] The Story of Stuff, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM

beckman466on Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

many argue that silicon valley firms are de facto extension of the US government [1]. a swiss army knife (haha) in their toolkit that allows complete control over the flow of information. i mean seriously, just look at how fast the Crypto AG story was forgotten. only this Dutch article [1] and a handful of others properly dives into the profound impacts that the CIA backdoored Crypto AG devices likely had on world events in the past 50 years. [2]

so yeah if SV firms were not extensions of the US govt. (hardware firms too, not just software), they would have already been broken up years ago.

the senate hearings are just a charade used to stroke the ego's of the 'visionary' SV tech bro CEOs. they also show us how tech illiterate the working class has been made. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pVfYmttcag, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9oMYL2M_tE

[2] https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/cryptoleaks/2020/...

[3] https://jacobinmag.com/2015/03/socialism-innovation-capitali...

beckman466on Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web

it's decentralization if it runs on two separate hard drives in the same AWS data center, right? right!?

beckman466on Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web

> They have to know that people know how fraudulent and awful the whole cryptocurrency space is, right?

unfortunately not, as this was on the front page for a while

Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics (tue.nl) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28715881

beckman466on Web3 – A Vision for a Decentralized Web

yep, the name of the game here is misdefining: intentionally distorting words, terms and definitions away from their original meaning

beckman466on Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

the point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc.

Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

i don’t want to give my children a dead planet either.

beckman466on Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

And most devices have backdoored CPUs too (Intel ME)

I wonder what the next Crypto AG (CIA front) will be

beckman466on Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

this is a half-baked ‘solution‘ that just makes eating meat a luxury. a thing only for the rich.

it’ll be like crimes that are punished by a fine - they just become the ‘fee’ that allows the propertied class to do whatever they want.

beef is deadly for humanity because of destructive water and land usage (Vice had a great video showing the Amazon deforestation due to beef production).

edit: my point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to be able to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc.

Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

beckman466on NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

Thank fuck someone said it.

Similar angle:

”Are NFTs DRM by Another Name?

[...] What do NFTs do that DRM doesn’t do? Not much. To me, the only interesting thing is that NFT schemes make public the identities of people who paid money for the NFTs that point to digital objects, so that those people have help from the NFT platform in exercising bragging rights. DRM technologies generally don’t do this, though they certainly could.”

https://copyrightandtechnology.com/2021/03/15/are-nfts-drm-b...