[[Capitalism produces high degrees of inequality]].

Started using org-transclusion at work for making a status page of all the various projects I’m working on.

• Very nifty so far.
• Couple of bugs encountered, one pretty wild, but not a total showstopper.

[[Capitalism creates and shapes desires]].

[[Capitalism tends towards the commodification of everything]].

Jammed: Pretty in Plums by Shida Shahabi

Read: [[Repairing Our Way out of Commodity Fetishism]]

• [[The desire for new things is essential to the continuation of the capitalist system]].
• [[Commodity fetishism disconnects us from where objects come from]].
• [[Repair reconnects us to the materiality of objects]].
• [[When we repair something, we think about its history and provenance]].
• [[Repair undercuts commodity fetishism]].
• [[Repair is anti-capitalist praxis]].

Bookmarked:

• Fixing as Repair – Fixing Futures
  • tags: [[Repair]].

[[compost.party]] is fun.

• A website running on solar power on an old phone.

• Repairing Our Way out of Commodity Fetishism
  • h/t: [[Panda]].
  • tags: [[Repair]]. [[Marxism]]. [[Commodity fetishism]].
• Global data empires: Analysing artificial intelligence data annotation in China and the USA
  • tags: [[AI]].
• Our Mutual Friend: The BBC in the Digital Age | Briefing | Common Wealth
• The Home Office’s new "ChatGPT-style" LLM tool is riddled with mistakes that could mean life or death for people seeking asylum - Foxglove
  • tags: [[AI]]. [[LLM]]s.
• Why capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic
  • tags: [[Capitalism]]. [[Democracy]].
• OpenAI explores platform to rival X, following $40B funding round
  • tags: [[Platform capitalism]].
  • See the point from Nick Srnicek about platforms all converging towards each other…
• International Civil Society’s Tech Stack is in Extreme Danger
  • tags: [[Big Tech]]. [[Reclaim the stacks]].
• Criminal Court: Microsoft’s email block a wake-up call for digital sovereignty
  • tags: [[Microsoft]]. [[Digital sovereignty]].
• Negatechnology | POST GROWTH TOOLKIT
  • h/t [[Panda]].
• We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard….
  • tags: [[AI]].
• Livin’ on repair: The workshops, garages and cafes of Berlin’s thriving DIY s…
  • tags: [[Repair]]. [[Berlin]].
• Apple launches Self Service Repair for iPad, expands repair programs - Apple
  • tags: [[Apple]]. [[Repair]].

In the latest episode of ‘Neil tries to update something related to Emacs’ (see [[2025-05-27]]):

• I thought that I might be able to process org-roam.db on my laptop, as that is faster, and then sync it to my phone.
• Two problems: firstly, it doesn’t work. Not sure why but it must be checking something else other than version to check whether it needs processing. Secondly: the DB contains links to file locations, which are different between devices. So, ultimately a no go anyway.
• Ho hum. I’ll need to think of a way of doing a full update of org-roam.db on my phone somehow without it taking an eternity / bombing out.
• At least I have an updated Emacs on my laptop!

Later: I fixed it by moving the files out of the org-roam dir for the project, then moving them back in and processing then in batches of 1000 at a time.

• Still took ages, but didn’t crash and I just let each batch run while getting on with something else.
• I also learned that the slowness is probably down to me having the files on the shared storage rather than on termux’s home. See e.g. https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2174

Going to start moving some repos from Github and Gitlab to [[Codeberg]].

[[Four in five Britons want the government to do more to support repair]].

Liking [[elfeed]] so far.

• A bit more setup to do though. [[Setting up elfeed]].

Found this rather excellent-looking site referencing some of my some of my info on how to publish your site with org-publish: https://drollery.org/build/

As part of the above saga of updates, I will now endeavour to update org-roam to 2.3.0 on spacemacs on my laptop.

• That will involve updating packages.

Found this rather excellent-looking site referencing some of my some of my info on how to publish your site with org-publish: https://drollery.org/build/

• That means I should probably also update spacemacs itself.
• One or both of those will probably break something.
• Yeah, already failing when trying to update packages. Sigh. Try to update spacemacs first then.
• Now: error message that I need at least emacs 28.2. I’m on 28.1. Sigh.
• Tried it from flatpak. That still doesn’t work.
• I’m going to try building from source. That worked once before…
• OK, it wasn’t that bad to be honest. The compilation, at least. Took about 10/15 minutes?
• Now installing 305 packages… annoyingly you can’t just leave it unattended, as occassionally it asks to compile something.
• Miraculously, that seems to have worked!

I should find out if there’s a way of pinning packages to particular versions in both Doom and spacemacs, so that:

• (a) I can make sure they don’t randomly update and break at a time when I don’t have time to do anything about it.
• (b) I can make sure they’re always on the same version between mobile and laptop.