incompetent half-assing is rarely this morally righteous of an act too, since your one act of barely-competent-enough incompetence is transmuted into endless incompetence by becoming training data/qc feedback

"La Casa Tomada" (The House Taken Over) is a story written by the great Julio Cortázar. It tells the story of a couple of brothers who live alone in a large house that strangely begins to be "taken" by something immaterial and Ominous. It is never known what exactly it is that "takes" the house, it is only known that little by little the brothers "can not" enter certain rooms, not because they are closed or blocked, they simply "can not". I am not going to tell the ending so that those who have not read it can look it up and read it on their own.

Cortázar wrote the story in the context of a dictatorship in his home country, Argentina. It is impossible not to see a parallel between the story and Cortázar's situation then, living abroad, unable to return home because it has been "taken".

Since all this "digital migration" started in several networks, I have not been able to stop thinking about "La Casa Tomada", in how it seems that little by little the digital spaces we inhabited have been "taken" and now we "can not" to be in them anymore. There are several factors that are causing this: the shittification, the rise of reactionary ideas, the bots and AI, the increasingly intrusive advertising, all an abominable and amorphous amalgam that seems to engulf everything around us.

But let's not kid ourselves, this didn't start with Musk. The Internet has been taken over since Facebook and other social networks came out. It's been slow and systematic, it's just that now it's become unbearable.

The Fediverse has become to a greater or lesser extent a refuge for those fleeing the maelstrom. It is far from perfect, paradises do not exist, but that does not imply that it is not worth fighting for.

After all, the Internet can't really be dead as long as we are here. It has been "taken", and sooner or later it will have to be taken back.

EDIT: More accurate English title of the story. PDF of the story in English. Wikipedia Page of Cortázar.

Credit to Chris Williamson for coming up with this though. I just found it worth sharing.

Reposted:

And what are we pretending to be?

"Humans".

And what are Humans?

"Not animals, that's for sure!"

I don't know if I can actually pull this off, but it's been a thought that I'd like to sound off in the open for others to see.

I follow a lot of stoicism philosophy and I like to follow parables for life lessons. The dichotomy of control, the obstacle is the way, you have two ears and one mouth, Amor Fati, Memento Mori, etc. Most try to put it in every day examples and while I was commuting to and from work, I was constantly fighting the urge not to rage at other selfish drivers. Of course, that comes with the dichotomy of control. I can only control my feelings and actions. But it also occurred to me that no matter what lifestyle you live, what background, character, personality, financial or disability you may or may not have, everyone gets stopped by red lights. There is no competition on who's the fastest, selfish, richest, toughest, or luckiest person. If you're rich and own a private jet, you'll have a chauffeur drive you to where you'll be. If you don't own a car, bikes and pedestrians have to obey the intersections. Runners and wheelchairs, fast cars and slow cars, big ass trucks and mini models. Sometimes you get lucky and it's a green light, but eventually everyone has to stop at a red light.

We're all equal and it has me more grounded than ever before. We have sports competitions and favorite teams, and my needs versus your needs. Political views, be damned. I always think of the person cutting me off or squeezing and now I just let them. Wherever they are going and for how long, a red light will stop them too.

I wish I could be more profound or add so much more to make into a book, but there you go out in the open. Now people can poke holes in it if they like. Haha

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31747128

Instead of creating a platform to automatically match individual profiles, you create a platform aimed primarily at human matchmakers, but with a feature where they can send clients a form to fill out, and then they would have an easy to browse and maintain client database. The matchmakers would advertise their own profiles and meetup and vet clients locally, and if you wanted to make it really easy you could have a poster generator with the platform's logo and their name and a qr code. Instances might start free to get themselves off the ground but eventually charge the matchmakers a small fee to maintain the server (and if they don't like how much they're being charged they could move instances; you could make them be able to export their database as a .csv or something that they could keep backed up and the smart ones would avoid instances that don't offer that option).

So you could look up matchmakers in your area and see details about them like the size of their existing client base, the amount of successful matches they’ve made, and their typical approaches like whether they provide coaching and whether they’re specialized in a specific religious or cultural community. And if they’re allowed to list their own prices and you could sort by cost per size of their client base or price per number of successful matches which would create a cost gradient where you can go cheaper but for less experience. It would be a platform where individual matchmakers could self-host, but similar to other spaces in fedi a lot of people would probably feel more comfortable using matchmakers hosted on larger instances. So you would still have a problem with having to sort through a pile of shitty matchmakers, but it would also be easy enough to find a larger / more reputable instance that vets their matchmakers more and / or promotes the good ones better, and you'd have some really good full-time matchmakers that are highly recommended in their area who can do well self-hosting, but also benefit from sharing clients to other professionals they find respectable over the fedi network.

Then on the client profile they’d all be mostly only visible to the individual client and the matchmaker but they could send the profiles to the people they’re trying to match and if they have hard to match clients they could choose to share them with other local matchmakers. And they’d be able to sort their database based on percentages of profiles that match similar to how OKC used to have. You could also have them personalize questionnaires like maybe have boilerplate / template questionnaires of various lengths to get new matchmakers started but also help them be more transferable for those hard to make matches. But you’d also still have basic info for everybody like gender, age, what genders they’re looking for, and what type of relationships they’re seeking.

As for how this solves the fedi dating service problem: it solves the issue of having women be too scared to make their dating profiles too public and decentralized servers and individually paid human matchmakers would help prevent enshittification because there’s no one large company that’s profiting off making the service shittier.

If you do this, I'll be your first matchmaker, I could use a side-gig ;)

Dreams are basically simulations of our lives that we run, sometimes with different physical constants, resulting in different worldly behaviours. Fever dreams (not necessarily during a fever) are when we are sweeping over a range of constants, so behaviour keeps on changing.

What if someone in a government agency just started printing birth certificates and social security cards for everyone? How would anyone know the difference? Like fake IDs on a mass scale.

Like who tf made up that rule? Maybe it's just a different kind of dirty????

edit 1/26: i apologize for the dumb posts that I make when I am high

Maybe he should return to berry picking and eating bugs.

Good vs Evil. A story as old as time itself. It's a story of a legitimate basketball game, played by the greatest basketball players of all time, as told from the perspective of a Harlem basketball fan.