Adrian Cochrane @alcinnz@floss.social

I'm convinced that the h264 codec really is actually chaotic black magic.

I make a 25 minute generative video with a bunch of circles expanding in a rippling effect? FFMPEG crunches it into 133mb. Take those same circles and make them fall downwards in the screen? 58mb.

Check out our brand new animated video, "Fight to Repair," which illustrates why it's crucial to allow users to view, change, and fully control the software they use, including in "autonomous" vehicles. Share with #FighttoRepair! https://u.fsf.org/fight-to-repair

I want to do a comparison of communication technologies and include some extinct forms. I'm doing this in reverse chronological order because I'm trying to avoid playing into false narratives about progress. I'm a firm believer that innovation does not actually represent progress unless cultures utilizing the existing technologies can survive and continue their cultural distinctiveness, because social darwinism is colonizer bullshit and its adherents don't understand ecology

Loss of diversity is an externality to capital and the termination of a liability for imperialism, but preserving diversity should be an ethical imperative. Local knowledge and culture have intrinsic importance for survival and quality of life

In the near future, as in already demonstrated but yet to be commercialized, we have AI video compression, real time translation, and other applications of generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs are a neural network where an encoding layer and a decoding layer share an intermediate vector representation. The encoder can compare a set of features to a reference to produce a set of vectors for transformation. When those vectors are applied to a reference by the decoder, the same transformations are applied to the reference held by the decoder. If the encoder and the decoder have the same reference, the resulting vector transmission is a significantly higher quality and lower bandwidth than lossy compression formats currently in commercial use

GANs are currently the center of a shit storm of ethical controversy, so it's important to remember that the concerns of industry and capital are not necessarily aligned to our personal interests or the good of humanity. When entities issue press releases expressing concern about these technologies "falling into the wrong hands" license training sets exclusively to problematic companies like Microsoft (OpenAI) or fire ethicists who refuse to apply the company mandated spin (Google), our operating assumption should be that this technology is already in the wrong hands. So we must prepare to mitigate the inevitable harm and insist on democratizing the benefits

Glenn Greenwald goes full retard

It starts with his apologia for the unhostin of Parler. Greenwald’s argument hinges on emotion, insinuation, invective, a completely unfounded premise, an absolute absence of evidence, and no consideration of alternative explanations: an overwhelmingly plausible ongoing law enforcement and national security operation, likely under sealed or classified indictments or warrants, in the face of ongoing deadly sedition lead by the President of the United States himself, including against the person of his own vice president and credible threats against the President-Elect and Inauguration.

Which I address here:

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/0d607970375101390289002590d8e506

Since writing that, widespread (NPR and elsewhere) reports of multiple sealed indictments have emerged.

(And apologies to the innocently mentally disabled.)

#GlennGreenwald #GoingFullRetard #parler #uspol #Jan6Coup #sedition #insurrection #coup #reputation

@theruran @humanetech @alcinnz Yes, "technology" is the most general term in the sense that etymologically it predates almost every other and "techno" literally meant "to create" (masculine version, there is also feminine version, with different meaning), IIRC.

Technology however doesn't include science (Open Access), and arts (Creative Commons), which seem to share much of the ideology. So if we're looking for most generality, the question is still open.

But there is actually no need to generalize the terms as much as possible, software has it's specifics, and so does hardware, same for mechanical designs, chemicals, or lifeforms (bio-engineering), the latter also have issues with patents and access to the sources.

My initial point was that one should use more accurate terms, not throw everything into one bucket, called "FOSS", or "IP", or whatever else nasty terms there are.

The J1 Forth CPU
https://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html

@emsenn @alcinnz haha, so excited you typo'd my username; love it.

this is very cool though! I love the bidirectional binding. it makes me wonder if it could be made even better using ... a structural editor!

@JohanEmpa @elliptic @alcinnz "Hey, yeah, here's this program I made; AND here's the code I wrote to make it. You're hereby allowed to legally use it and modify it for whatever purpose, but GOD FORBID you actually do that!"

@elliptic @alcinnz yeah, it's literally the point of open source that anyone can do whatever they want with the code (according to the given licence).