danielquinn

danielquinn, 3 days ago

Don’t these dipshits have anything better to do?

danielquinn, 4 days ago

Could he now sue the people that beat him (or even Sainsbury’s)?

danielquinn, 4 days ago

The minute you automate someone’s job, you do necessarily admit that society doesn’t need that person’s work to get by. The only reason they shouldn’t get to put their feet up and take it easy is political. And politically, we have decided instead what happens is they die.

I have been trying for years to put this into words when discussing capitalism & technology, but I’ve never come across something so succinct. Thank you.

danielquinn, 8 days ago

This line of reasoning is broadly underrated. Sure batteries are a thing, but if a liveable world means regular brown outs, I’m cool with it. The alternative after all is so much worse.

danielquinn, 8 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Honestly, after having served on a Very Large Project with Mypy everywhere, I can categorically say that I hate it. Types are great, type checking is great, but applying it to a language designed without types in mind is a recipe for pain.

danielquinn, 9 days ago

Very cool trick. I’ve never been comfortable with how Python package installation is effectively arbitrary code execution. It’s also a nice reminder that installing packages into a Docker environment is generally safer than going bare back metal.

danielquinn, 9 days ago

Very slick. It looks like a thin wrapper around some pretty powerful tools, and I’m impressed that they’re still useful on such a low-power device.

I wrote an assistant a while back before Whisper was a thing, but now that I see what you’ve done, I’m going to have to go back and refactor.

danielquinn, 9 days ago

What the fuck is with this immigrant blaming? We’re supposed to be better than this.

danielquinn, 10 days ago

I wrote a version of this in Python a few years ago, but it depended on external tools like ffmpeg to work, limiting its portability. The Python requirement was also a major factor for adoption.

If it were ported to Rust, doing the (de)serialisation internally, I believe that it could have far-reaching implications on how we share and consume news:

danielquinn.github.io/aletheia/

If you’re interested, I presented the Python version at PyCon UK a while back.

danielquinn, 10 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

That’s an interesting thought. There’s a lot of cases you see where people have stripped a comic’s name from the bottom of the image, but that’s not really what this project was designed for. Aletheia will guarantee you that the person/company sharing the media is who they say they are, but critically it won’t prevent infringement.

The example I give in my talk is that InfoWars could take a BBC news story and say “we made this”, but it wouldn’t let them modify that story and claim that “the BBC made this”. The goal is to be able to re-connect what someone is saying with the reputation of the person saying it, with the hope that we can start delegating our trust to individuals and organisations again.

danielquinn, 11 days ago

This is the path to enshitification.

danielquinn, 11 days ago

Voyager: One Small Step

It’s one of my top ten favourites, but it’s also a very typical “one off” story.

danielquinn, 11 days ago

Fuck yeah.

danielquinn, 12 days ago

What cowards we are.

danielquinn, 12 days ago

It says it’ll hit “overnight”, but surely in 2024 we can be more accurate than that?

danielquinn, 12 days ago

Awesome, thanks!

danielquinn, 15 days ago

challenging the place of Zionist leaders in mainstream progressive politics.

We really have to stop conflating Zionism with Judaism. Only the Zionists benefit from it.

danielquinn, 15 days ago

You’re probably thinking of Cardassia, which I will also note has a judicial system where the state decides the defendant’s guilt in advance of the trial. In such a system, it’s typical that the rich & powerful simply aren’t prosecuted. So it’s the same system as ours, just with fewer steps :-(

danielquinn, 18 days ago

I don’t understand. Surely if you’ve got a limited amount of water in the lake, drawing that water from a shallow well reduces the available water by the same amount as it would from the lake itself?

danielquinn, 18 days ago

“Deeply frightening” can you name even one thing Corbyn said or did that was antisemitic other than be openly antizionist? Given that it’s Israel’s Zionist regime that’s currently committing genocide, I would think Corbyn would have been vindicated by now.

danielquinn, 19 days ago

Public services aren’t meant to be profitable. They’re meant to provide a service that serves the community.

danielquinn, 19 days ago

That’s a fair point. So long as it’s addressed from a position of “is the community being served well” and not “this should be run like a business”. Canada Post has a difficult (and expensive) mandate: to service all of the country, no matter how remote, and the knee-jerk reaction to such headlines is often to privatise which would change that mandate to “earn as much profit for investors as possible”.

I’m living in the UK these days, with private post, and private water companies. Things have literally been enshitified, with raw sewage flowing down the river Thames, so I’m concerned when I see such headlines.

danielquinn, 19 days ago

Because post is more than just letters, it’s parcels too. Canada Post is infrastructure that ties the whole country together, not just the denser, more profitable cities. Imagine if there were only for-profit postal services in the country. What would it cost to send a parcel to 100 Mile House, or Baker Lake, or whole swathes of the country that only speak French? Think of all the things that go out by post, like Carbon tax rebate cheques and voting information. It’d introduce a massive disparity in service and access to basic services, and so we socialise that cost across the country.

There are always ways to improve of course, but you asked specifically about why the system was socialised.

danielquinn, 21 days ago

I read that quote in Londo’s accent!

danielquinn, 5 days ago

That was just what I needed today. Thank you for sharing. ❤️