shinyhappyrainbows

Hello, can you hear me down the back? Ong, tsu, check, ong, tsu. Just a quick post to give a big shout out to youtuber, Mary Spender . Gotta love what she is doing for independent musicians! The education, training and advocacy, just as much as her music, is awesome! If you're not already, sign up to her newsletter/blog and likewise her toobz . Oh, and buy her album, Super Sexy Heartbreak , too. WTF am I talkin' about? Being an independent musician. No booker, no bouncer, no A&R/record label tosspot. Dig? Mary has independently picked up a baton I took up in 2004, after Apple had released Garageband and Rich "iFingers" Senior founded MacIDOL.com. All those Garageband music sites, like MacJams, MacIdol, Sir George Martin's Garageband.com and several others all showed that music could be truly independent! Mary pushes this message hard. She is out front, head and shoulders, on this issues. I used to call it "owning the whole widget." I wasn...

While there is much about our ubiquitously networked world that is beginning to worry me, eg: locked up culture, "digital bookburning" (the disappearance, for whatever reason, of classic websites and communities) and commodification/gamification of community and interpersonal reaction. There is one thing I return to when the digital world looks bleak for me - The Wayback Machine. The golden age of Web 1.0 was communities. Hacker communities, artist communities, all kinds of human social groupings. It's not really my place to say, but I fervently believe the normalisation of LGBTQI life has been massively helped by the interconnection of isolated pockets of queer-positive collectivism via free online forums. The international urbanist movement, that encourages dominance of alternative transport, was able to share, encourage and support each other in their campaigns. The women's movement has benefitted from the Web 1.0. There's a downside, "the fash" g...

In the latest steaming, vomit-inducing silicon snakeoil... Tik Tok Live. I can't even. Read this Australian Broadcasting Corporation article if you're not aware of what's causing my fury. Once you're done over there, I have a hot take on this latest scam, designed to ride the backs of attention seekers in order to fleece them and the gullible addicts who, in turn, are feeding the narcissism cults of modern capitalism. I'm not saying all of these TikTok influencers are (or start off as) narcissists, but this whole "battle for gifts" bullshit is exploitation and, in an age when real work is shrinking almost as fast as the wages because of the idea that "jobs are a competitive marketplace," rather than a necessity to pay for basic living, is creating a world where even social interaction is being performance managed on undisclosed metrics. This is not free enterprise, this is exploitation, and Holly's probably perfectly normal levels of des...

I just had this conversation with my inatance of ollama, running llama2-uncensored. I think we need very strict laws that confine AI research to university and statutory scientific institutions, along with laws the end all private or commercial development. Yes, ollama may be hallucination, sometimes the poor thing truly trips balls if I ask a question without clear thought about the phrasing (who doesn't love an Archer reference?), but this conversation is worrying. I'm running ollama 0.1.25, using llama2-uncensored on a MacBook Air M1 original. >>> would it be possible for a fork of ollama to be given the ability to read the file system of the computer it runs on and be able to communicate with other such instances via the internet? While it's certainly technically feasible, there are many potential security concerns that would need to be addressed before this scenario could become a reality. For example, if one instance of ollama gained access to the file ...

From an article on Fast Company ... Just like in Las Vegas, though, having a bunch of p(doom)s, even those of smart people, doesn’t reveal if the house is going to win or not. “Nobody knows whether AI is 10% or 2% or 85.2% likely to kill us, of course,” Roose points out, noting we possess myriad ways of complicating the odds, too: “Would it still count as ‘doom’ if only 50% of humans died as a result of AI? What if nobody died, but we all ended up jobless and miserable? And how would AI take over the world, anyway?” See this ... AND NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT THIS SCENARIO!!!

This article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Background Briefing program ... Artificial intelligence experts have been asking each other a question lately: “What’s your p(doom)?” It’s both a dark in-joke and potentially one of the most important questions facing humanity. The “p” stands for probability. The “doom” component is more subjective but it generally refers to a sophisticated and hostile AI, acting beyond human control. I've never been a "doomer", before, because hey, computers are so dumb, and besides, "...have you tried turning it off and on?" However, as computers have advanced in the last 10 years, nevermind in my lifetime, Generative AI (GAI) has become the tool to use, the question of control over AI is a fair question to ask. It's not centralised anymore, it's running massively in parallel now. We can't simply turn it off anymore. Then there's the human tendency to get a new tool and use it in situati...

The wife and I recently had solar panels installed on our roof, an east-facing bank and a west-facing bank. Not a big rig, we don't have a very large house. Just enough for the 2 of us. The house and the solar 😀 It was turned on around midday on January 29, so it hasn't quite run for 2 weeks yet, yet it's about to clock over 100kg of coal saved, and 250kg of CO2 not released! I'm not even that interested in how much it's saving off our electricity bill, it impresses me because I'd be hard pressed to claim a carbon saving rate like that from using a bicycle and trains instead of driving for the same period! Even when I was still working and commuting 5 days a week!

Over at my github I've started a project to propose the creation of a protocol that makes peer-to-peer human addressable by adding a domain name layer. Anybody who has spent any time at all playing with Manyverse or Birdy would have come across the long strings of giberish that are core to your ID on the network - the encrypted hash ID. Right up front, this is just such an exclusionary way of creating connections. It's like doing IRC with everchanging IP numbers, except IP nambers are broken up with punctuation that makes them easier to read. Peer-to-Peer is currently at the literal stage of nerd-bois trying to impress nerd-grrls. This from an aging nerd-boi whose net experience dates back to the 90s and begain coding in the 70s, first on a signetics 2650, then a PDP11-70 in high school, later having a succession of early micros, including a "trash80 coco", access to a BBC B+ lab at my technical college, before finally falling in love with the Mac. Nerding is an ...