So I'm working on adding a feature to #NomadNet that allows you to press Alt+r (keybinding not yet fully settled upon) to find the most recently failed message in the current conversation and copy it into the message editor so that it can easily be resent.
I think I've done this, but in order to properly test it, I need to first intentionally cause a message to fail. This is proving more difficult than I anticipated.
The funny thing is that when I attempt to send a message to a destination that I know is offline, it appears to just route through a propagation node even though I've got it set to direct delivery. I don't understand what's going on there. #reticulum #NomadNet
Looks like #gentoo has had a bunch of sponsors pull out. I wonder if this has anything to do with their stance against LLMs. Looks like they're looking for new ones. While I'm not in a position to help out on this, I will at least do what I can to boost the signal. gentoo.org/news/2026/10/07/inf…
Gentoo has had a series of issues, security-wise, management wise, socio-cultural wise (with their "Code of Ethics"), and now this. It seems something like the constant shaking of a wide-gauge screen.
@tom grzybow Honestly, all I know about Gentoo is that they've explicitly banned LLM-generated contributions. Can you elaborate on the issues with the code of ethics (or any of the others)?
I've been working on this feature for over an hour without writing a single line of code. I'm just familiarising myself with this part of the (rather large) codebase. Working with other people's code is fun! #programming #reticulum #NomadNet
@Shannon Prickett Probably has to do with the effect of surrounding themselves with sycophants. They've lost the ability to process criticism because they typically don't ever have to.
@PerryM talk to him if you haven’t he may not even realize what he is doing. I know I used to be horrible about talking over people but with some practice I have gotten better about it and do it a lot less.
@cameron29 Cameron thank you for your concern. 1 of us personally knows the autistic person and has repeatedly talked to him. It is fine for a day or 2 and the behavior returns.
I shared my experience because the person who posted this is autistic and believes that he is not understood and is put upon. I contend, with experience, that his attitude it's a matter of perspective and I know several people who would agree.
I would guess that he is not being treated and is angry!
As far as I can tell, all the dns entries have dropped off the internet.
SDF hosts it's own dns (ns-a though ns-c.sdf.org) and if all those servers go down, and then the ttl expires on upstream servers, it's /all/ gone. It seems that's what has happened.
@jns @SDF.ORG That would explain why the outage is so total, wouldn't it? Oddly, I was still getting an answer over SSH, but with an incorrect key. I guess I had the IP cached?
Yep, if you have the IP cached, you can still connect - and, assuming not all servers are completely down, you should still be able to connect by ssh'ing directly to the old ip addresses.
Oh, it looks like the Mastodon server is still running. @SDF.ORG, is there a reason SSH is yelling at me about a changed host key at arpa.sdf.org? I can't tell if it's a MitM attack, and I obviously can't ask on BBOARD.
I was using my #Kaweko Sport #FountainPen, and noticed that it was making an odd rattling sound. I opened it up to investigate and found that the converter had somehow come detached. Fortunately, the converter doesn't hold a ton of ink, so it wasn't as big a mess to clean up as I would've expected. Besides, are you really a fountain pen user if you don't have ink all over your fingers? I have to say, though, I'm impressed at the capacity of the feed. It had been rattling for some time without any noticeable loss of ink.
I bought that stupid converter even though my best pen friend told me not to. I had the exact same thing happen to me during a client meeting at my law office and I looked like a total dork.
I have since moved on to using a blunt-tip syringe to refill old ink cartridges and my brass sport (as well as my hands) thanks me for it.
@Antonio Giamberardino Yeah, as much as I love fountain pens, when they fail, they tend to do so spectacularly. I keep a small pack of kleenex in the bag I carry my pens in for emergencies.
As boring as they are, I understand why the ballpoint pen eventually replaced fountain pens.
I think people are done with "left" parties that fuck around at the margins instead of solving problems.
Right-wing corruption doesn't bother them because they think everyone in politics is corrupt anyway. And they're mostly right. But that vacuum creates endless opportunities for fascists. Fascists create problems they claim only a fascist can solve.
And people are dumb enough to fall for it over and over again because they're too busy being mad at the establishment.
honestly at this point writing your password down in a notebook or hidden on your desk might be more secure than keeping it online in some fashion. i mean what're the odds of you getting burglarized vs. someone just hacking the system you use
I've got a scrap of paper with a bunch of numbers on it. They're page numbers, and you would have to know which book to look in and have my copy of it so you can see which word is marked on each page.
Bought a new toilet brush from the dollar store. Today I used it for literally the second time and it snapped in half. I don't by any means expect a product from the dollar store to last, but are you kidding me!?
As much as I acknowledge having this same rage and disgust, I have become aware of also having an increasingly antithetical response to the materialism and lack of empathy in our society.
It seems that the worse the world gets, the more open and caring I feel and try to be. Frustratingly, putting this into effective action is often energy dependant, but the sentiment isn't. I don't know how much my near death plays in this, but I'm crushing on so many people these days.
@dabertime this makes sense to me. Amid all the awful, kindness and courage and fighting for hopeful things is downright swoon worthy. 😍 Beautiful fekkin humans.
Physically speaking, it wouldn't necessarily have to occupy the same space, it depends on how the time travel works, but either way this movie is already nonsensical enough that the only answer in-universe is clearly "🤷 whatever"
I get that "laser rubies" are probably difficult to come by, but if it's so fragile and so critical, you'd think they'd have had a spare. I mean $14M in 1970s dollars is nothing to sneeze at. #monsterdon
The first of William Gibson's 'Sprawl' trilogy, Neuromancer is the classic cyberpunk novel.
More information on the [novel's official page][1].
[1]: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp
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Life got in the way shortly after I started reading this book, but I picked it up again a couple days ago and it was a very enjoyable read. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that that they clearly stated that they couldn't send the refugees to Kota for Prime Directive reasons, and then just... never followed up on that.
What really matters is that the digits are carved at different depths so the total mass of die material removed is the same. Compensating for the mass differences of the paint, if used.
@isaackuo Even this will not guarantee they have the same effect on the rotational moment of inertia, because it matter how close to the centre of gravity the material is removed...
For just capturing the output of a command, you can use:
r !somecommand
But if you want to filter a range of lines through an external filter with POSIX ed(1), you need some sort of temporary storage (whether a file, the system clipboard, a tmux buffer or whatever). There's no analog to
:10,20! rot13
offered by vi/vim.
Someone (can't find the post/author at the moment) did hack this functionality into ed, but it's a custom fork of POSIX functionality.
Depending on your platform, you might have xclip instead (similar functionality on X), pbcopy/pbpaste on OSX, or some similar tool on Wayland or Windows.
@Harka Won't work. That won't pass the contents of the buffer as input to !command. The contents of the buffer can either be piped into the command or piped out of it, but not both.
Toronto qed (descended from ed in the late 1970s, not the 1960s editor that inspired ed) has three commands for exchanging text with other programs: >command # send to command's standard input <command # receive from standard output |command # send to stdin, read from stdout, replacing original addressed lines
Of course > and | take an address range and < a single address, like w and r.
I use | quite often either in ed or in sam; latter written by the guy from whom I caught the qed bug.
Implementing | takes some thought to avoid deadlock if pipes fill and block. Qed does it by spawing a temporary process to do the writing, while the main process reads into the buffer.
@ed1conf @buffet Sam runs just fine on Linux; I use it there daily (alongside Toronto qed). I think it has been ported to OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and even Windows.
It amuses me that people associate it only with Plan 9; it was originally written for ~9th edition Research Unix, before the Plan 9 project started. (I was there, and an early adopter.)
Isn't ADHD wonderful for productivity. All you need to get things done is have something else you don't want to do. ... Anyway, that's why I spent the last three hours finally replacing the drain in my kitchen sink.
Chronic depression and anxiety means waiting until things are so terrible they can't be avoided anymore instead. Seems about as useful for getting things done.
The difference between Canadian and American children’s PSAs
🇨🇦: -I’m a robot, watch me get dismembered by flying saws in a horrifying torture playground. If you lose an arm it’s gone for good, so don’t play in dangerous places. -🎶an abslute ear worm. It’s never going to leave your head. ever. you are thinking of it right now 🎶 PS, if you aren’t sure if something is safe to eat ask a trusted grown up. -here is a video clip that claims in an authoritative voice something you know can’t be true. Please consider if the media you are watching/reading is trying to manipulate you. Yes even if they are acting from authority
🇺🇸: -if you a try single marijuana cigarette you will literally die. -always trust authority figures. always. or you will literally die. -never trust strangers. ever. or you will literally die. -here is some vague morality segment attached at the end of a 20 minute toy commercial.
@me The US did also have Mr Yuk, Time for Timer, & Schoolhouse Rock, the greatest series of educational PSAs ever made. Where else cna you learn about conjunctions, or base-12 mathematics, or how the US government cannot pass legislation without cheating?
To be fair, all I know about Ultraman is what I've been able to piece together from what I've seen of the last few minutes of the episodes that play before #monsterdon
It's a great series, the first one came out of a non-superhero science heroes show, so it keeps most of the SSSP with 2 minutes of Dan becoming Ultraman. Later series get wackier.
Perhaps there's the slightly better message of: don't be mean to people who are different... or they'll turn into jellyfish monster things and kill you... I guess?
Since the lead developer of #Reticulum and #NomadNet has been too overwhelmed as of late to take on feature requests, I'm releasing my fork as it now contains some useful non-trivial enhancements.
My cat's current favourite toy in the entire world: a single Froot Loop that someone dropped on the floor. I don't have the heart to take it away from him.
I just looked on YouTube and it doesn't seem like anyone has made a Dwarf Fortress theme park. At least not and put it on YouTube.
It seems totally possible to make a theme park fortress. Minecart roller coasters. Make rides using gears, giant corkscrews, and pressure plates. Magma tunnel of love. A haunted ride or two would be nice.
All doable.
I don't think you could necessarily make the dwarfs understand what these things are for. But you might be able to trick/force them through a couple of rides.
I however am not the person to do this. It's beyond my patience and cognitive energy. (I never even had patience to design my own coasters in the Rollar Coaster Tycoon games. I went with the prefabs.)
@Unlikelylass People were wierd about seat belts. I wish they could be wierd about freedom and autonomy for something that doesn’t in the general case stop fatalities.
@hardingar @Unlikelylass My middle school library had a bunch of books about cars from the 1950s and 60s, and I read most of them. There was a very strong interest among the car companies in having people not think at all about safety, no different from the cigarette companies. We largely have Ralph Nader to thank for countering that.
@hardingar @Unlikelylass And when it came to seatbelts in particular there was this widespread belief, again encouraged by the car companies, that you were actually better off getting thrown from the vehicle or whatever. And especially before shoulder belts there were certainly situations where you might be better off not wearing a seatbelt.
The same was true of early airbags, because they came out of a requirement for "passive restraints" that had to protect people even if they weren't wearing their seatbelt. The result was that they had to deploy way too fast, which could cause grave injury if you were too close. Once they stopped caring about people who aren't wearing a seatbelt, airbags got way safer.
I was in a wreck at the age of 3 and change in which I was in the front seat, and thrown clear of my seatbelt.
I was too young to be in the front without a booster, but boosters weren't required yet and I'd outgrown my car seat.
I was thrown clear of the car.
I was told, at length after the fact, that being thrown clear of the car saved my life, and in the particulars of this crash a properly functioning seatbelt would have either killed me or left me paralyzed.
The doctors told me this at 4 years old (I celebrated my birthday in the hospital) and through physical therapy. It was meant to make me grateful I think? "You're so lucky. If your seatbelt had worked, you'd be dead." or maybe it was a reminder to my mother that I should be in the back seat, which would have been safer in this crash and in general.
Either way, I became somewhat obsessed with the history of safety belts and car safety in general. I'm neurodivergent, it was a multi-year special interest.
@hardingar @Unlikelylass My dad was in a similar accident in the air force: he was in a car that overturned into a ditch. He wasn't wearing his seatbelt and was thrown into the back passenger-side seat, which was the only part of the passenger compartment that wasn't crushed.
until 1990s seatbelts in many British/European cars (in spite of being legally required, at least in front) were often uncomfortable and in many cases ineffective for anyone other than taller male drivers.
They got refined with better airbags, pretensioners etc around 90s, various child seats mandated for kids even up to their early teens (I had to remember all this for my theory test) and are now much more effective, albeit with the issue that in UK a used car is often totalled for a minor clout if any of the airbags or pretensioners deploy as insurers don't want to shell out for new parts.
The car can often be put back on the road (I see a lot of Youtubers doing this), but will have CAT N/S (salvage title)
Maybe seatbelts in cars and Helmets on motorbikes were once revolutionary?
But the only thing that held back domestic radios (1921), TVs (1935 & post WWII), Colour TV, PC, fax, mobile phone, game consoles, smart phones, tablet computers, internet was cost.
There were anti-vaxxers in the Victorian era. Often encouraged by people selling "quack" cures. The guy struck off for dishonest claims about MMR & Autism (no causation) was promoting an alternate.
There are others who are just wanting to rubbish anyone educated and logical because that is dangerous to their power.
@david_chisnall well the surgeons just didn't give a shit about pregnant women (or at least not enough of it to challenge their beliefs about proper bedside manner)
I agree they aren't the greatest, but one might argue that the lesser evil - when one considers the large demographic of all internet users - is passkeys (rather than the insecure passwords which most people can't help themselves but to choose).
But for most people today a passkey is going to be tied to their phone, and then when they lose their phone or get a new one, they're locked out of whatever services used that passkey.
we're straying off-topic, but unfortunately the answer to a lost passkey, is that a second one needed to also exist, and be enrolled (having thought ahead).
In many cases, the second one could be software-based - say as created and stored in a password manager (like KeepassXC; many others also now support this). Thereby saving the cost of buying a hardware-based one.
It really is fascinating seeing the same arguments that were used by the corporates to prevent people from adopting public keys, now getting used by their victims, and this time ignored because the corporates think they figured out how to control your public keys.
But to address your complaint, that's why you backup your master key, and use it to authorize each device's key, so they can act in its stead. If Apple doesn't provide the means to do this, well it's been a known practice for the past 40 years, so they don't really have an excuse.
Most people sync their passkeys with Apple's iCloud Keychain or Google's equivalent, so if they lose their phone they just need to remember one password and they can restore all of their passkeys. It's only people who are concerned about that centralisation of control (who, sadly, are a minority) that don't have that recovery path.
The normal way of implementing things like pass keys is to have one secret and use a key-derivation function that takes it and something public (domain name and maybe a random string) that can be backed up easily, so the only bit that needs a secure backup is the secret.
The hard part of this is making it easy to sync this between devices that the user trust and hard for a malicious person to trick the user into syncing it to something else. This is hard because, from a technical standpoint, those two processes are identical, but from a user's perspective one is important and the other is harmful. I'm quite sad that Apple seems to have completely punted on that by providing an export button.
the textile industrialisation is exactly such a thing. Workers rebelled against the trend as it was shifting jobs to less qualified employees, reducing wages. They smashed the machinery for a while and ultimately, trade unions emerged out of this. It was a revolutionary change and our lives today would be very different without it.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather we went back on the whole AI thing, but I think revolutionary changes can and have come against the will of workers.
@PierricD Sure, but the technology itself produced results that were measurably worse than the things that were done by hand and in environments that were significantly more dangerous.
That revolt wasn't about the machines, it was about who owned them and how they were used.
you have. it's cars. there was tons of opposition to cars when they were first introduced, similar to the opposition to AI and data centers today. cars were shoved down peoples throats by the industry lobbying governments to pass laws making streets exclusive to cars, and by the invention of modern marketing as we know it. cars were so unpopular they literally had to reinvent marketing to get people to use them!
@glitzersachen I think passkeys are a better choice (the "lesser evil") than when compared to "hardware attestation" (like the way banking apps are locked to an app on an Android or Apple phone, and you can't use, say LineageOS, for some transactions - you also can't do them on a laptop with no "hardware attestation").
Also once there is enough pain felt from an "AI worm", as is being predicted, people will be willing to adopt a more secure solution.
my mind keeps going to the helio centric model of the solar system, because that required some work to prevent people using it!
Same with written language.
The interesting thing there, I think, is the reason there is an effort to force this, while in the past effort was made to prevent use of other technologies, is those technologies increased freedom and diversity of thought, this one reduces it.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 11:21 PM)
The market share is dwindling, they are losing economies of scale. It is being out flanked and out maneuvered by cheaper and cheaper solar and battery technology everyday.
They can't give it away for free even with sycophantic bots promising the world.
About three dozen people at this point have suggested seatbelts.
The thing there, though, is that seatbelts existed as a technology with proven lifesaving potential for many years before we forced them on car drivers.
They weren't new or revolutionary, they were just safety.
People hate safety. I dunno why, but there's probably a great sociology paper in there.
I've also never met anyone who has survived a major auto accident who is at all hesitant about seatbelts (and, until the modern propaganda campaign against them, I'd never met anyone who had someone survive a serious illness who was at all hesitant about vaccines, which fall largely in to the same bucket.)
In both cases, these are not technologies that we are asking people to use on an ongoing basis, but preventative measures that we're putting in the hands of people who have not been effectively educated about the mechanisms at play or the efficacy of the preventative measures (and, in the case of both vaccines and seatbelts, there was a concerted propaganda campaign against them, so any education that was being done had to fight against anti-education propaganda first.)
I didn't have the energy yesterday to type this out over and over again to the people who said seatbelts, and I still don't, so now everyone else who said (or will continue to say) seatbelts gets a link to this thread.
I got lots of responses pointing out technologies that had to be forced on people. I've thought about them. The ones I agree with are:
- Internal Combustion Cars - Telephones - LLMs and GenAI
The internal combustion engine in general didn't have to be forced on to people (farmers, for example, loved it both for their tractors and also for other makeshift machines they'd construct around their farms)
Cars as a class didn't have to be forced on people, high society types in big cities loved having electric carriages. They were clean, easy to maintain, and quiet. They were also reliable enough that they didn't get replaced often enough to become an industry.
But, while the rich were driving around in their electric carriages and the poor were walking, taking horse-carriages, taking trains, and riding cable cars (and people were experimenting with electric and steam cars) Henry Ford decided that, if he could get the US government to heavily invest in a roadway system and trick a bunch of municipalities into giving up a bunch of green space and pedestrian space to cars, he could make a lot of money while also leaving people responsible for both driving (which is dangerous and should be left to those who are interested in learning how to do it effectively, not a requirement for participation in society) and maintenance (which is expensive, and prior to Ford was largely a public expense for a public good.)
Cars introduced a lot of new freedoms for people, but were perhaps the worst of the several available alternatives to do that in dozens of ways, and we're still trying to overcome that fallout. There were significantly more (and significantly safer!) transit options in my region before cars.
Cars, as I've said before and taken blowback from, are usually bad. They are, at best, a necessary evil. There was a time when they were not necessary.
Telephones are a really interesting case that end up in a similar situation to Cars, but for different reasons.
Many people loved the concept of the telephone and were eager to use it. Public phones and communal phones and the phone as a replacement for the telegraph were all pretty popular.
But private ownership of telephones resulted in a major upset of etiquette and an erosion of the separation between home and public, an encroachment.
Many people of the day resented that.
I've never know a world without a telephone, but I knew one without a cellphone.
I miss being unreachable. The telephone was, ultimately, more good than harm. The cellphone (though perhaps not the smartphone) probably the same.
But I can absolutely understand how and why some people would have been resistant to it. I still know people without cellphones, I knew people without a phone of any kind not that long ago ("Write me a letter or come over. If it's not important enough to tell me in person, it can wait on the post")
The advent of the telephone coincided with a serious reduction in mail service, which had previously run as often as 4x a day in large cities, and generally resulted in the further isolation of people from their communities (even as it enabled people to connect to new communities!)
I think the telephone is good, and I'm glad that it reached widespread adoption, and I think it would have done so regardless.
But I also love to think about what adoption of the telephone, or the cellphone, might have looked like if there was less money to be made in monopolizing the system.
It's a useless thought experiment, but it compels me.)
the main thing about llms and genai, unlike the car and the telephone, is that they don’t work AND that’s why they are being pushed. It is a regression, not a progression. I’d argue it’s not even a technology.
This entry was edited (Thursday, September 17, 2026, 2:52 PM)
Cars were inferior in nearly every respect to robust public transit, and internal combustion engine cars succeeded on the market only as a result of regulatory favor and planned obsolescence. It was a worse product than the alternatives in public transportation (so much so that Ford worked to dismantle the cable car network) *and* a less reliable option than the electric cars of the day, *and* less fuel efficient than the steam cars of the day. It was just cheap enough and pushed hard enough.
this is not what I am saying. I am saying that the promise of a car as a technological object is rational: a car is a n-wheeled personal vehicle that can take m people for point a to point b within energy reservoir range, etc. As a technological object, it does work. llms ans genai makes an analogous promise but the object cannot both by construction AND definition be what it claims to be. It doesn’t work. It’s not even a technology.
This entry was edited (Thursday, September 17, 2026, 3:03 PM)
i would argue that llms and genai, as an invention, belong to the same category as capitalism as a “technology” that promises one thing but delivers another. Neither works as advertised by design. Neither works at all.
This entry was edited (Thursday, September 17, 2026, 3:07 PM)
True we have to compare what public transport was with what cars used to be. Nowadays public transport has been decimated so badly, and cars have improved so they are the logical choice for many. That said, if I hadn't married someone who knew how to fix cars, I probably would've chosen where to live based on where I don't need a car. I find owning an electric car a better experience.
One of the things I've seen people bring up in this thread a couple of times is the Luddite movement, and their pushback against automated looms and sewing machines.
This was raised, I think, as a way to say that these were technologies that were also being forced on people, and that they were not good.
There's nuance to this discussion that I'm probably not correctly equipped to capture, but I'll do my best.
The Luddites weren't against the adoption of tech in general, they were against that technology being used to push people out of work, to make worse products, and to create a less safe work environment. It is my understanding that, by and large, they were in favor of sewing machines and automated looms when those things were owned and controlled by workers, and used to make good things faster or better things.
They were against these technologies when they were used to make worse things, or when they were used to displace workers, or when they were used to create an unsafe working environment.
Many people make the argument that this directly parallels LLMs and GenAI. That if this technology was in the hands of individuals and being deployed to make good things better, or to make good things faster, or something to that effect, that it would all be okay.
This is bullshit.
If no one forced factories to use automated looms and sewing machines, they probably would have adopted them anyway because they enabled new ways of making things, but many people would self select out of that group, continuing to do things by hand. (and, in fact, many people do.)
If no one forces workers to use AI, the workers who do not want to use AI will continue to not use AI and the workers who choose to use AI will get rugpulled when the full cost of the machine bears down upon them or when the bubble pops.
Vaccines were absolutely a revolutionary technology! Continue to be!
But Vaccines relied on science that most people didn't understand, and felt like magic, and still depended on people internalizing external risks but then also added doing something painful that many people were afraid of, and then feeling sick for several days (and, to be fair, the absolutely abhorrent and racist Tuskegee experiments was more than enough evidence for many people that vaccine mandates were untrustworthy.)
In both cases, these were not technologies that we were asking people to use on an ongoing basis, but preventative measures that were put in the hands of people who had not been effectively educated about the mechanisms at play or the efficacy of the preventative measures, and who had (or, in the case of vaccines, continue to have) huge amounts of anti-education propaganda fed to them.
So, to my original point, people fought over who would own and control the looms and sewing machines.
People were tricked into not wearing seatbelts.
And there's a concerted effort to keep people from taking vaccines that has, at various points, included intentional infecting people with illnesses under the pretense of vaccination.
In each case there was a fight over these technologies, but the fight was not simply a one sided campaign from people in power to force the use of a given technology or kill all alternatives.
there's a folk tale, probably at least partially true, that engineers at Volvo developed the modern inertia reel seatbelt, and immediately made the patent freely available for any manufacturer to implement. Volvo were, at least until the Ford ownership days when safety tech was fairly universal, one of the few auto makers who genuinely took safety seriously. The P80 platform Volvos of which I have now had (counts on fingers) five are one of the few pre-2000 cars that I not only feel safe in driving myself, but would not hesitate to carry my family in when the day comes. In fact, my previous one saved my life, which it probably couldn't have if I hadn't put my seatbelt on despite getting in the car intending to never get out.
Among the friend group I inherited from my dad, the most common killers have been cigarettes and car crashes.
There is a similar misconception about the Amish. Many believe they reject technology outright. But really they assess each new innovation’s potential impact on behaviors and culture. And then decide what to adopt and any restrictions thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how…
there was a hell of a lot of resistance to seatbelts when they were first made mandatory; I'm interested in your analysis. Was it a vocal minority, or how expensive they were to get installed, or what?
100% agree about vaccines though; all this resistance we're seeing now is astroturfed and relies on having a whole generation of people who don't know what it's like to not have vaccines.
As I like to say, in 1838, Samuel Morse revolutionized communication forever, by perfecting a technology to send coded messages over great distances at the speed of light. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell hacked a phone app on top of it.
So in a way the Internet (Tele-net?) is older than the telephone. We just forgot that the wires were sending coded signals in the first place, and started converting our coded signals to sound waves, not knowing they're converted back to coded signals to be sent over the wire.
Letter writing was such a great way for people to get in touch & stay in touch. Even people who did see each other in person regularly would write letters, because doing so allowed them to express themselves in depth in a considered manner, without interruption. People who wrote letters got to know each other really well.
And of course, driving now without a cellphone is virtually impossible. In case of emergency, there are no pay phones, and call boxes have been removed on most roads that ever had them.
I recommend reading "The Victorian Internet," about the early history of the telegraph.
That invention radically impacted the spread of information, and had a similar effect in eroding the home/public distinction; commodities traders could no longer go home at night without having to deal with developments half a country away that would impact their futures market.
the smartphone did in fact have to be forced on me in that i continued to use a flip phone until my job forced me to buy a smart phone in order to use their scheduling app
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I think what trips people up about cars et al is what I've heard called "manufactured consent." The reality is that consent is a red herring, and they have us worried about that so they can get us to approve of exploitation. But it goes along these lines:
1. Hey don't you want a telephone? - aggressive marketing 2. Cover the sky in thousands of telephone wires. - hidden costs / gotchas 3. Why are you complaining? You wanted this!
'*actually* Revolutionary' does a lot of work here, you may be tired of examples, or counterpoints.
'money currency'?
If you follow Hudson/Graeber's work, the requirement of tax collection in state issued currency deposed credit systems and gift economies, this would be revolutionary but also resulted a centralization of control and power.
I'd accept that this is not revolutionary as an emancipatory technology.
@houba I don't know that I'd consider currency as a technology, and I don't know that I agree with the whole of Graeber's work (I've read some compelling counterarguments from people with a lot more experience in the field than myself, and haven't done a deep enough study to know (or care) either way)
But I'll concede that Currency does fall into a similar camp to the telephone, restructuring the whole of the social order.
(The thread is getting longer, I apparently had a lot more to say.)
Sometimes tech is used in a different way from which the manufacturer expected. SMS text messaging is the classic one. It surprised the networks by becoming a massively popular service. After all, you would want to talk on the phone rather than use an inferior texting system 🤔😄 but users had a different idea.
@eest9 @NewsHund i used to get very pissy about forms (both online and physical) that mandated my phone number. Now i've realized i don't particularly care because there is literally zero chance of me ever answering it anyway
@d1 Aaand got blocked for my (I think very reasonable) response (or the other one) by D1. 🤷♂️
I mean, how thin skinned can people be? First replying with a diatribe on the problems of hardware attestation and then 5 mins later without waiting for a reply, blocking.
Already makes me regret wasting my time talking to them. Which is likely the purpose of such a block.
I wonder, why one would then not add "I don't like to talk with poeple" to their profile.
One of the features I'd like to add to my #NomadNet fork is the ability for the user to change the default keymap. Unfortunately, with the way the code is organised, this would be a rather involved change. I'm sure I could do it, but then it would be a tremendous PITA to keep my fork in sync with the upstream repo. #reticulum
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • •fedipossible reshared this.