Reading "On Revolution" by Hannah Arendt.
There's something charming about a footnote taking up almost the whole page 206. 🙂
That footnote is about the source of authority when a new form of government is formed.
Old: "authority comes from god".
New: authority comes from mutual agreement between groups of people.
That assumption about the source of authority is a key part in the US Declaration of Independence, but existed earlier.
Anyway, I warmly recommend this book.
Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is PDF Arranger
You can use it to merge or split PDFs, and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages.
What’s sad is realising you live in a world where every exaggerated analogy you used to make a point is actually happening:
Having Google in schools is like having McDonalds in nutrition class. (I find out that McDonalds does, in fact, sponsor nutrition classes in US schools.)
Having a surveillance capitalist sponsor a conference on free and open source/human rights is like having an oil company sponsor a climate conference. (Forget sponsoring, turns out head of #Cop28 runs an oil firm.)
🤬
Just make chatGPT CEO of Open AI. It shares a lot of qualities with your average CEO:
- Steals other people's ideas
- Valued by the market at much more than it's worth
- Doesn't remember things it previously said
- Says patently absurd things with absolute confidence
- Doesn't know what it's doing
- Doesn't really believe in facts so much as what it feels is probably right
Filmtips: "Midvinterduell" av Lars Molin, från 1983. Finns på svtplay öppet arkiv. Fantastisk film.
Jag känner igen mig en hel del i hur huvudpersonen tänker.
Någon frågar: "Vad gäller det då?"
Svaret: "Jaa, vad det gäller, det gäller ju allting. Det gäller ju alltihop!"
Frihet, det är vad filmen handlar om.
you can find mojeek now in the list of another browser, and it's a very good one! 😎 👇
Kan Mastodon leverera bandmedlemmar tro? Jag behöver hitta folk att spela med i Stockholm, nån form av punk och DIY är enda kraven. Eller kanske att de borde vara över 25 också, men det är mer ett önskemål än ett krav. Spelar själv gitarr så behöver nån som spelar bas, trummor, nån som sjunger och gärna en till gitarrist. Boosta gärna inlägget! <3
Interesting read in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/10/swedens-schools-minister-declares-free-school-system-failure
Swedish schools minister Lotta Edholm is quoted as saying this:
"It’s not just a problem that it is a number of schools, but it becomes a system failure of everything."
It's true, and the sad thing is that it has been obvious all along. The Swedish school system has been a way for companies to make easy profits (cut school costs, increase profits) with money from taxpayers.
"A system failure of everything." Yup. For 30 years.
Just updated my profile here with a little more description and a link to my web page, and on the web page I added a link to here with the rel="me" attribute so that page should show up as verified here.
So you should now see, on my profile here, a "My web page" link marked as verified. Is it working?
Does this book exist?
"How Universities Lost the Internet"
or has someone done research on this topic? That is, the fact that on many North American universities have ceded all technical capacity to Microsoft, Google, etc?
It used to be students could get web hosting, email, and even some cool experimental online stuff through their schools. Now every online communication channel is locked down.
Just nu frågas Ylva Johansson ut av EU-parlamentet om kontroversiella #ChatControl. Om förslaget går genom kan all digital kommunikation övervakas.
Mer läsning i Dagens Nyheter: https://www.dn.se/varlden/ylva-johansson-fragas-ut-om-lobbykontakter/
Länk till livesändning:
Bli medlem i DFRI och stöd oss i att motverka massövervakning som strider mot våra #mänskligarättigheter: https://www.dfri.se/bli-medlem/
Human being. Programmer, sailor, researcher, teacher, student, parent, child, etc. Free/libre and open-source software (FOSS/FLOSS) enthusiast. Likes human rights, including digital rights such as privacy of communication. Lives in Stockholm. He/him. No DMs.