P E R M A C O M P U T E R
I've ranted quite a bit on my phlog on the state of modern
computing and the direction we're headed. And now with LLM
being a fad, things have gotten so much worse yet again. A
few weeks ago the Washington Post released an article (1)
with therein a widget that lets you look up whether your
website has been scraped by AI or not. I was dissapointed
(but not surprised) to find out that they had scraped, not
only my websites (ignoring robots.txt), but also gopher
proxies, and presumably gemini http proxies as well. What
this means is they likely slurped up all of gopherspace
and gemspace as well. I do not consent to this. Anyhow,...
This is not another rant about just AI. Our problems are
much bigger and wider than just that, or even computing
in general. The perpetual need of the western economies to
expand, from the macro scale all the way down to the
smallest businesses is literally killing us. Stripping the
planet of resources. Messing up the climate. Etc,... Our
entire western way of life is built on the suffering of
third world civilizations, and this too continues. You've
got children risking their lives in lithium mines so some
schmuck in the west can enjoy their Tesla. Etc...
Unfortunately there isn't much I can do to change all that
but the one and only thing I do have some control over is
how I interact with the world, how I do my computing, how
I write my code, etc,.. Thankfully I'm also not alone in
these concerns. Degrowth movements are a thing now, as is
perma-computing.
(1)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/
A few of us have been working on putting some of these
thoughts and ideas into an open letter, and hopefully soon
a community where we can brainstorm ideas, projects,
solutions, etc,... Thinking about how twisted & backwards
the world has become can get very depressing very quickly,
especially when people who swallow the narratives of the
wealthy who benefit from this global clusterfuck are all
over, calling you crazy, because people tend to lash out
when they are confronted with the fact that their entire
world is a bunch of manufactured lies. Knowing you're not
alone can help a LOT! And, perhaps if enough of us get
together to do something about the status quo maybe we can
affect the smallest bit of change!
So please, sign the letter and join us over at:
gopher://perma.computer
gemini://perma.computer