surfs-updude

[surfs-updude]

“What are you reading?” “How about you?”

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995) dir. Richard Linklater

[surfs-updude]

I want to work on something more elaborate but basically what I want to say comes down to this:

Too many people waste their time staying informed about things they'll never change while ignoring the vast amount they could - and that is only to the benefit of everyone they profess to be against.

My recommendations:

Block ads - they track and sell your data on and offline; they're whole goal is to further capitalism/consumerism

Get off of social media entirely (especially Meta platforms) or move to decentralized platforms; decentralized ones at least aren't optimized to keep you on them

Leave streaming platforms (Netflix, Spotify) limit or avoid endless content platforms (YouTube). They have a vested interest in you not feeling satisfied, tiring you out so all you can do is consume them.

When you do consume, switch to more free/low cost media from collective sources like libraries (books, DVDs, music, Kanopy or Hoopla) and direct from creators (indie books, zines, games, etc). This supports your community and cultivates valuing exchanges outside of commercial factors.

Learn about security and privacy issues - consider degoogling, switching to Linux, using a safer phone OS or downgrading your phone, infosec online, etc.

Mask as often as possible with the best quality mask you can afford. This is not as effective at blocking facial recognition as has been reported but it does limit spread of many deadly viruses and saves lives.

Create an archive and back it up of work you enjoy or find useful. Have ways to access it completely offline. Prepare for an internet that is controlled by autocrats or cut off entirely. Make it so you can share it with friends and family if need be.

When you're less influenced by tech and business oligarchies, you're better able to think critically for your own and other's benefits. When you value spending time and consuming outside of their reach, you aren't a cog in their machinery - spending that time feeding them content they can train AIs on and spy on you to sell you to others. When you care about privacy and security and take measures to protect yourself, you help others who have to take those measure to protect themselves because they're targeted - activists, marginalized groups etc - by making it less easy to flag those people. When you mask you protect yourself and others from disease while the health care system is getting attacked and dismantled.

These are meaningful and concrete ways of assisting others that are getting completely ignored in favor of more performative ways of "helping" or not helping at all. And I just...wish people knew it wasn't all or nothing.

You do not have to consent to autocracy. You can resist it.

[surfs-updude]

Daniel Craig in Skyfall

[surfs-updude]

18 years apart 👋 hi daniel

[surfs-updude]

— James Baldwin, from If Beale Street Could Talk

[surfs-updude]

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

[surfs-updude]

CH

[surfs-updude]

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris 1970 – directed by Terence Dixon

[surfs-updude]

[surfs-updude]

'mobsters' are part of a 'mob'. and so you'd think 'lobsters' would be part of a 'lob', but ohohohhohoho, life just isn't so simple

[surfs-updude]

[surfs-updude]

My colleague just sent me this picture from our conference a few weeks ago. This is why you can't take me anywhere.

[surfs-updude]

Still drawing them

[surfs-updude]

i think getting an undergrad degree should come with a free "second try" voucher, where if you want to go get a second different degree from any school because you picked the wrong thing as a 17 year old, its totally free to try again

[surfs-updude]

Fancy tricks

[surfs-updude]

I saw this post on Facebook today, and was gonna make a joke about how he's so good in the lab because, when it comes to experiment samples, he knows you gotta keep 'em separated.

But I happened to search the lyric online really quick, and found this:

AMAZING. It's actually where the line came from! Bravo, sir.

[surfs-updude]