Notices by Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)
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Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Nov-2022 13:47:23 EST 
Alexandre Oliva
trying to scale up single servers has a limit and runs into complexities and diminishing returns. everyone scales services by sharing the workload among multiple servers, even when they present themselves in a way that gives the illusion of a single server. we don't have any pressing need to give the illusion of a single server, we can scale our federated network by adding more independent servers, which is both cheaper and lighter. (maintaining the illusion of unity has a significant cost). multiple separate servers also make for a healthier decentralized network, at least when they aren't under control of the same entity. -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Sunday, 06-Nov-2022 07:51:01 EST
Alexandre Oliva
a platform controlled by a third party can give you an audience just as easily as it can take it away. it's not good for your activism to depend on the visibility provided by a profit-motivated third party whose goals aren't aligned with yours. moving to a more decentralized and neutral platform may feel scary, but it will put it on far more solid ground. you and your target audience should be aware of that, and it would be wise to motivate yourselves with it to make the leap together, so as to remain connected regardless of billionaires' whims.
#TwitterMigration -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Thursday, 13-Oct-2022 07:30:41 EDT
Alexandre Oliva
part of the problem, I think, is that long-timers have evolved very efficient workflows, whereas newcomers who've come of age under surveillance capitalism got used to interfaces designed not for efficiency, but for exploitation of the useds. this creates a fundamental tension in which making interfaces more welcoming and familiar to the useds makes them far less efficient for everyone, for nobody's benefit (unless there is someone gathering the information made available by the inefficiencies, which we'd be better off avoiding) -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Sep-2022 22:19:19 EDT
Alexandre Oliva
don't assume software freedom can solve the problems of using computers for voting, it can't possibly. even if some version of the software is fully audited, signed, and earns wide trust, and even if the computers are supposed to only run signed code, how could you, at the time of voting, tell whether the computer hasn't been compromised so as to run a different version? -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Sunday, 20-Feb-2022 04:37:27 EST
Alexandre Oliva
the publishers who criticize unauthorized sharing are precisely those who take nearly all of the money from authors -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Sunday, 09-Jan-2022 14:43:15 EST
Alexandre Oliva
servers are really no harder to operate, but propaganda has convinced people that they should leave it to the experts, as a means to capture their data and make them dependent. reversing that belief seems hard.
OTOH, keeping data stable (safe against loss) in consumer devices, especially ultraportable ones, is a bit of a challenge. the best answer to that so far has been live backups.
I know a better way to approach this: local apps, encompassing all the logic (no client/server separation), using dumb p2p storage for the data.
https://www.fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/draft/decent-computing -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 08-Jan-2022 23:35:29 EST
Alexandre Oliva
he's privatized much of power generation and transmission, so now any efforts to enable rooftop generation are going to be taken as threats to those profits. regulation and public funding could confront that, but I'm not hopeful, it's going to be an uphill battle. which sucks, because our hydroelectric generators are operating at low capacity and a lot of thermal plants are making up. a significant overlap between their owners has led to speculation that reservoirs of hydroelectric plants have been emptied so that they could run and sell the more expensive power from the thermal plants. which sucks for us, because they're not only more expensive, they also pollute more, and the fresh water has not been easy to replenish -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 08-Jan-2022 23:12:35 EST
Alexandre Oliva
meanwhile, in brazil, bolsonaro's government has granted 109 private banks access to citizens' personal records and biometric data collected by government's online services, electoral authorities and by states' identity document issuers
https://gnusocial.net/url/7938242 -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 08-Jan-2022 22:42:31 EST
Alexandre Oliva
when antivaxxers stop believing and spreading lies
after over 9e9 shots total, anyone who thinks it's experimental after health regulators everywhere say otherwise is living in an imaginary parallel reality. and whoever claims the vaccine is riskier than the virus must be able to credibly demonstrate at least 9e7 fatal victims -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Jan-2022 07:33:28 EST
Alexandre Oliva
one would hope that's just a quick patch to get it going while they implement a proper fix, but who knows? -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Jan-2022 02:34:39 EST
Alexandre Oliva
what's most incredible about this date representation is that it was introduced after Y2K. it wouldn't have worked up to [19]99
think about it. someone implemented that after all the many years of preparation and patching decades-old systems for Y2K, knowing (or, worse, without realizing) that it had at most a couple of decades of use. how screwy and irresponsible is that? -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 31-Dec-2021 08:42:53 EST
Alexandre Oliva
.oO cancel debt, not people
happy GNU year! -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 25-Dec-2021 23:38:05 EST
Alexandre Oliva
https://bird.trom.tf/TeaJunkie1/status/1474829160547864576#m
Guess what increases your risk of having a stroke? Getting ill with Covid.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7834121/ -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 24-Dec-2021 05:23:02 EST
Alexandre Oliva
ha! I had no idea! -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Dec-2021 20:24:07 EST
Alexandre Oliva
to me, the right is about depriving people of rights to facilitate exploitation by the privileged, while the left is about rights (oh the irony) to defend from abuse and to promote collective well-being -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Dec-2021 19:42:52 EST
Alexandre Oliva
this might even be compatible with libreboot! -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Dec-2021 17:42:25 EST
Alexandre Oliva
I don't have any insights into what Evan meant, but I hope you don't mind if I offer other possibilities of what he meant that are quite different from how you seem to have taken them:
- a companion AI could be something that helps us sort out the info deluge we live in and bring our attention to things that matters for us. the key is for it to serve *us*, not some third party, as I brought up at the end of the Post-Truth Santa speech
https://www.fsfla.org/~lxoliva/#santa
- calming could be as opposed to alerting. I've seen this term used in relation to traffic, which doesn't mean the traffic is actually calming, just that it's supposed to avoid inducing anxiety like the constant events we get from non-calming, attention-slavery tech -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Dec-2021 00:48:59 EST
Alexandre Oliva
#GNU #Linux-libre 5.16-rc6-gnu sources, tarballs and patches are now available for testing
#Freed-ora 5.15.10-gnu rpms are now in testing, 5.15.8-gnu ones are stable updates. 5.15.9 was skipped upstream -
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Dec-2021 00:27:00 EST
Alexandre Oliva
.oO this woman's son has been kidnapped, gone missing for years, and his captors plan to kill him. please share and help!
https://gnusocial.net/url/7704252
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