Mark Goody @marramgrass@nitech.online

In reply to a quick conversation with Lord Bethell of the UK Parliament on Twitter, I composed an open response.

You can find the original (ongoing) conversation here: https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1692547122850111667

The the open response here: https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/LBResponse.pdf

So, if everyone had their needs met, I imagine a world bursting with all kinds of art and creativity.

Elsewhere there's a conversation about how artists would be "compensated" in a post-scarcity, egalitarian society, and some find it difficult to imagine. I happen to find it easy to imagine, here's one vision:

If everyone had their needs met (eg food, water, shelter, safety, care, community, this is not exhaustive, you know what humans need), I imagine most people would engage in the arts. I see everything from small community to global-spanning projects, multigenerational artists' schools, hobby groups, local art fairs and continental expos, in-person, online, private and public.

Art pre-dates money, it will outlive it. Ask archaeologists and historians around the world and they will tell you so much about the diversity and complexity of the art-forms, and that's only the stuff that's preserved. Song, dance, sand sculpture, anything that washes away or decomposes away or erodes away - our ancestors were singing, painting, dancing, storytelling, sculpting, thinking, rhyming, drumming, in as many different ways as there are people who ever lived.

What if you could spend just a few hours more on listening to music, editing videos, writing or speaking poetry, sitting in nature, dancing in your kitchen or painting a landscape you'll only ever show your loved ones, because you knew your shelter, food, medical care, education, weren't dependent on working a third of your life for someone else?

Artists would be FREED if we smash capitalism, we'd be able to create our hearts' desire for the audiences who need it, and we would be "paid" with admiration and community and opportunity to expand our craft.

Neelix is the Anti-Garak.

My grand unified theory of punditry is that many (most?) have a few good ideas at first, but as attention grows they need to keep publishing more stuff to feed the beast, so they venture into areas they have no idea about and quality control goes down.

Finally, they say something dumb and instead of reassessing, they double-down and are drawn into the Rogansphere.

what a lot of people don't seem to understand is that even if there are individual concerns about productivity, if what we know increased productivity was actually the driving force behind company policies we'd have a very different work environment

we wouldn't have 40 hour work weeks, little to no time off, as few breaks as possible, etc, etc, because we know that all of this hinders productivity

as does work being a soulsucking crushing activity

the data's there

this is why on its face the discussions about productivity are an obvious smokescreen

#LazyWeb request:

What's the easiest way to get something like this storage backup setup for my Mac?

• I only want to back up specific folders (mainly Logic projects, audio stuff, design and dev files)

• I would ideally like a redundant backup of those backups

• I also want a drive (or partition) to keep videos and other big files I don't use often off the Mac

• I would ideally like an extra back up of that stuff too

• I don't need masses of space (~4TB or less)

(Boosts appreciated)

I think these barges are an excellent idea. The Tories are espousing that these barges are an acceptable standard of accommodation therefore, a couple of these moored on the Thames would remove the need for MPs having to claim for second homes nearer their place of employment.

This kind of brilliantly stupid shit is what I miss from the early days of the internet

My idea: CLOTHES SHOP FOR DADS

You roll up at the facility, drive over to the JEANS hut. Dinnerlady-type in her wee hole says "What size luv," you go "thirrehfourthirrehtwoluv" while making a mental note to go easy on the pies so you can get back to 32/32, she goes "Right you are luv, tenner alright?" and chucks you a bin bag full of dead blokes' jeans that aren't too far gone and you give her a tenner and you're done, move on. T-shirts next.

T-shirts are more complicated, your jeans were the simple one to ease you into it. Pull round to a bloke eating a pasty. He asks "Size," you go "Medium or large depending y'know," he nods, "You wanting colour, drab, black or mixup?" you think about it a moment and go aye, go on then, "Mix it up mate, colours and drab," he goes "Plain or wi' shite on, plain's two quid extra," you're sure as hell not gonna advertise some bugger else's T-shirt business on your body, so you give him twelve quid and he hands you Bin Bag 2.

There's a pub on-premises that'll do you some chips or a pasty and you can watch the JCB sorting out the clothes while you drink your pint and furtle through your bags to see what you've bought.

It'd be brilliant. Buying clothes would have nae stress at all, plus if you ended up wearing shite and looking a bit of a muppet you could just go "Aye well it were in the bag weren't it" and everybody'd nod and go aye, fair do's

I listened to a podcast about Jason Aldean yesterday, and it left me fuming at how much bullshit these days passes for journalism.

Started to mute and block the "AI can code"-stans and "LLMs-can-program-like-humans" enthusiasts because it's like talking to a wall.

The response to "LLMs is using statistics to autocomplete code that may or may not work, they don't actually understand or can reason about problems (the number one thing programmers do)" is always "but the next version will fix this". Since like 3 versions ago.

It's a category error to assume AI will ever be able to write complex software.

Dune predicted AI getting banned but it'd be funny if instead of some all out robot war it'd just be because of copyright violations.

To be clear: I have a lot of privilege! Like, shitloads. But also I appreciate what I have, I value it, and I don't measure others against what I have. And I also don't think having or not having X, whatever that variable may be, says anything about a person.

That's why people get so pissy about privilege, I think. Using what you have as a tool to look down on people is a shitty thing to do, and they know it.