Election 2020
Back in 2016 I predicted a recession, violence, and suffering. We saw the violence and suffering but I didn't realize you could postpone a recession by just printing money and giving it to rich people. As for the future I don't expect to see any of the last administration's crimes prosecuted. When you're rich the rules don't apply to you. I expect the next ruling party won't be as nakedly corrupt but we'll continue our wars and make no effort to address the vagaries of laissez-faire capitalism. The republicans and evangelicals will return to their preferred role as victims and will refuse to concede an inch while the democrats dither and bicker and relent.
I read an interesting argument recently.
- The United States of America has the highest prison population in the world (both per capita and in raw numbers). source 1
- We have so many people in prison allowing them to vote could swing an election. source 2
- A government that denies it's prisoners the right to vote is government with a vested interest in jailing it's political opposition.
- A disproportionate number of black and latin americans make up the prison population and more than half are being held for non-violent offences. source 3
- Prisoners still get counted in the US census which means the more prisoners a county has, the more representation it gets source 4.
- The southern states have the highest prison populations in the world. source 5
So the southern states can increase their political power by jailing minorities.
Our election process seems designed to favor the right wing.
What would all those professional victims would say if the colors in these maps were reversed?
- Before the 2020 election the 'justice department' closed more than 1000 polling stations in areas prone to racially discriminatory voting practices.
- Voting isn't compulsory (but jury duty is) and the people who neglect to vote are typically left wing.
- Puerto Rico, Washington DC, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Mariana Islands, and Samoa are American territories without political representation.
- Monterey county has a population almost as large as Wyoming but we don't get any senators. My opinion counts for less because of where I live. One could argue that because I live in California, I'm less of an American.
- Puerto Rico has a population greater than twenty other states but has no representation at all.
This election might have gone to the less openly racist and authoritarian candidate but it seems like everyone is ready to go to war.
For once I wish I could vote for a candidate who supported the things I find important rather than being given the choice of selecting the least worst of two.
update 20210120:
I didn't expect a coup. Today there's a lot of relief that the inauguration wasn't violent and the guys on metafilter are getting emotional about having adults in charge again but I'll reserve my judgement to see if they squander this opportunity to close the loopholes that got us into this mess to begin with. Americans are clearly excited to elect a fascist - it's only a matter of time before a competent one comes around.
Streaming DRM
I'm sifting through a new batch of music at the moment and it's tiring because most new music is bad. After a day spent programming and deleting files my brain was tired and I decided to take a break by bringing up a link from an email I got from John Flansberg of TMBG advertising his online radio show
This is it! https://www.mixcloud.com/radiocatskill/low-stakes-w-john-f-oct24/ Flansy’s next radio show will be broadcast Friday night on www.wjffradio.org, and will post at https://www.mixcloud.com/radiocatskill/ the next day.
I tried to get the link working in my locked down browser but after unblocking 5 different external sources in umatrix I got tired of guessing which 3rd party script they wanted me to run next and I brought up my insecure firefox profile.
firefox -P insecure
I have several firefox profiles with a variety of security settings and plugins and I keep one called 'insecure' which has ublock and nothing else. I use this profile when I get shitty but critical requests from work or online when I'm willing to sacrifice my privacy for stuff like, earning money to live.
I brought up the mixcloud stream in this browser and after watching all the elements move around for several seconds as all the unnecessary scripts wrestled for position, I started the stream. It was nice for a while then he played a song I didn't like so I skipped forward a bit. Then there were several good songs followed by one I really wished to know more about but when he started listing the artists and song titles I missed the name of the one I liked and when I tried to scroll back to hear it repeated the click didn't register. I clicked some more thinking it was a window focus issue or an issue with my new mouse and a few seconds later a popup appeared on the screen for a few milliseconds and I realized they were deliberately preventing me from rewinding the stream.
I guess this is some very stupid DRM preventing me from rewinding their livestream over and over again, illicitly listening to that one good song and robbing some poor record executive of the fruits of a middlemans labor. Of course since I'm not allowed to rewind I don't know the name of that artist so I couldn't give my money to a record executive even if I wanted.
You know browsers make it really easy to play media these days. You can basically just serve a mp3 and it will show a nice media player.
<audio controls>
<source src="horse.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
<source src="horse.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
</audio>
Here's what it looks like in your browser.
Sorry John, I like you and your taste in music but this sort of bullshit is the reason I will never listen to your audio show again.
Using game design to make virtual events more social
The recent roguelike celebration game design conference was organized as a text based MUD. Participants attended using their browser by walking around a roguelike map. When they entered a room with an ongoing talk they would see an embedded livestream of the speakers.
I really like this idea but it seems like it could be better if they didn't limit the livestreams to particular speakers. You could keep the livestreams in the conference rooms but make it so everyone can livestream by proximity when outside the designated rooms - like a virtual proximity based chat-roulette. Being able to walk up to two people already in conversation, see them and hear what they're saying, and having the option to join in seems to be within the bounds of the tools we have today.
We already have something like this in modern video games (see for example phasmophobia) but MMOs always limit the number of participants on a single server because of the necessity of showing nice graphics and keeping everyone in sync. Our videoconferencing tools seem to be able to handle 40+ participants in a virtual conference without issue. So the problem comes down to checking proximity, making connections, and deciding when to enable audio. It's probably not an easy problem but it's worth investigating and I wish I had more time to learn about this technology because low-hanging fruit abounds.
Gemini
Firefox has definitely gone downhill and after learning about user.js files my faith is even weaker. I run ublock origin to keep advertisers from monitoring what I'm doing, I run https_everywhere to keep my isp from monitoring what I'm doing, and I run umatrix with a javascript whitelist to block all the rest of you fuckers. Apparently it isn't enough.
I used to have an large and well-curated hosts file to block entire domains, including the hundreds of URLs associated with facebook and google, but firefox moved to DNS over HTTPs making this obsolete (they claimed it was in the interest of my security to send a list of my every dns lookup to cloudflare). Comcast complained bitterly until they setup their own encrypted dns server so they could continue to collect and sell your browsing history.
User.js example 1 example 2 is a firefox configuration file designed to disable all the bullshit mozilla adds to your browser. I encourage you to take a look at this list because it's insane what you have to do to try to run the browser safely.
I recently ran into the gemini project which is an attempt to fix the web by starting over. The specification is as simple as they can make it but requires a suitable client
Gemini is focused on text with very limited markup and no support for inline images. In fact there's no support for any compound data at all, you send a request, the server sends you a single uncompressed block of data and closes the socket. You can specify links in the markup to other gemini pages or to http content like youtube but it's up to the client how to handle them. My client just opens my browser to view videos and images. The limited markup is designed to prevent tracking but I have no romantic attachment to usenet or gopher. It seems like if they made the markup slightly more complete and allowed linking to self-hosted images (static jpegs and pngs or webp files only) it would greatly increase popular appeal.
I don't think this project will go anywhere (and hackernews is conflicted on this as well) but it is refreshing and the more I read about it the more I want to setup my own server.
For a client I'm using castor and AV-98 though you can find html proxies if you just want to poke around.
I like the idea of calling a mulligan on the internet and starting over with the view of redesigning things to make it very difficult if not impossible for the marketers, scam artists, and nation states to track, manipulate, and monetize you. I'm also very interested in scrapping the entire html markup language and moving to something sane. Solderpunk's explanation why he didn't want to use a subset of http and html makes sense. (gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/gemlog/why-not-just-use-a-subset-of-http-and-html.gmi)
I setup a gemini server - agate. If you want to play with gemini you can check out my server at gemini://trousermonkey.net. If I can find the energy I might even write something to extract my blog into gmi files that can be hosted there.
Nero Wolfe
On the Ken and Robin podcast Ken mentioned he was using the pandemic to read every Nero Wolfe detective novel. His description of the novels sounded interesting so I started checking out books from the library and three weeks later I've read 6 novels and 3 novellas, running down to the library every week to drop off the last set and to pick up new ones.
Rex Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novellas and short stories featuring Wolfe from 1934 to 1975. He was nominated for the best mystery series and the best mystery writer of the century. I'm not sure how I missed out but Ken's introduction was the first I'd heard of him. I'm not a big mystery reader but these novels feel like when I discovered Sherlock Holmes in college and read most of the stories standing in the aisle at the library.
Nero Wolfe is a Sherlockian detective, supernaturally deductive but limited by his great weight. He's commonly described as weighing a ton and he spends most of his time sitting in his oversized chair drinking beers. The stories are told in the first person from the point of view of his sidekick Archie Goodwin. Archie is gregarious and active and is responsible for going out to talk with clients, looking for clues, and getting into trouble. The stories usually involve Goodwin going out to collect suspects and arranging for them all to arrive at their shared office at a certain time (because Nero never leaves the house) where the great detective will speak to them until he unravels the mystery.
Inspector Cramer acts as his Lestrade. In most stories the homicide detective thinks he has a case wrapped up and when Nero tells him he's gotten it wrong he blusters and threatens to arrest him for withholding material evidence but is ultimately convinced to change his mind.
The writing is light and full of humor and it reminds me of the fast talking newspaper reporters from his girl friday. The 1940's slang has started to seep into the speech centers of my brain.
I did some research before checking out his books. People kept mentioning how re-readable the stories were - how it didn't matter if they knew the answer to the mystery and I agree, the characters are so well established I can see how it's comforting just to visit them again.
It doesn't really matter which order you read them so if you happen to see one of his books check it out, you might like it.
The infrequently updated blog.