tehn @tehn@merveilles.town
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- nnnnnnnn.co
Joined Aug 2020
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we live on a farm in a forest. we create sound machines and open source ecosystems at https://monome.org. we help build community at https://llllllll.co.
that's the short version.
it's a new day. hello.
fuck the fuck off i just paid an $1800 import tax bringing my $0.90 chips to almost $15/ea.
manufacturing is doomed.
tehn
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"Appeals to decentralization too often fail to contend with the power structures that can take hold of supposedly liberatory projects."
https://reallifemag.com/reconnected/
so designing something is the process of committing to a handful of companies and trusting they'll keep making your stupid-but-necessary little component.
what's more frustrating is every company making their own different solution for applications, so almost no IC's are pin-compatible yet alone protocol-compatible. think usb hubs, audio codecs, DACs/ADCs, power management (guhhh), battery chargers, LED drivers, and especially.... microcontrollers.
early CMOS tech (logic gates/etc) is way more sane: a bunch of different companies make pin-compatible OR gates, for example. there's a standard series of chips that are interoperable.
sadly i think the world will more or less return to normal in about two years.
i say sadly because "normal" is unsustainable but i expect capitalist logic will prevail--- recycling will not scale (it's great for individuals and small groups) and i'm skeptical of the effectiveness/reality of opening more factories.
(fyi our boardhouse is in poughkeepsie, NY, a couple hours away from our workshop)
a glimpse of the semiconductor shortage saga:
$0.90 component is gone, holding up our (relatively small) production of 300 units. component won't be restocked until 2023, if ever again. it's not quick/cheap for us to retool.
purchased parts we need from an overseas warehouse for $5/ea. after paying, were notified that the parts were 16 years old and corroded, but they had 1 year old stock which we could get if we paid the difference for $8/ea.
and i just paid.
welcome to the future.
tehn
boosted
@paul @praxeology Remember when twitter was all about freedom during the Arab Spring? In the late 80s, Ursula Franklin gives four examples of technologies that started out being sold as liberation, but quickly turned into systems of enslavement. One is the sewing machine, which was supposed to give women freedom, so that everyone could make their own clothes - the reality was production line sweatshops. Another is industrialised food - sold as freeing up time, and indeed people do sew and cook less, but then have to work harder in order to afford food and clothes, when food is flown around the world to iron out the seasons. Another is cars - sold as a hobbyists dream of freedom, but then (at least in the UK) train lines were ripped up, and possibilities of active travel were taken away, and we sit in traffic jams.
just discovered i'm trying to fix an old bike with 27" tires, and now i've learned too much about tire sizes
irc, but in the spirit of gemini
tehn
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tehn
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Cool livestream coming up with a bunch of amazing folks!
@nonmateria @tehn
tehn
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“There’s a kind of false dichotomy debate going on right now that biodiversity is at odds with food production, and what we see here is very clearly that it’s not,” said Armstrong. “Forest gardens are one of the examples of how you can get multiple species occupying multiple niche spaces—there are all sorts of ecological lessons there.”
today we discovered the closet was locked, from the inside. a few weeks ago we finished walling it in, not having used the door because the wall was just, well, open all the time.
so we re-opened the wall to unlock the door. sadly this story did not end with the discovery of long forgotten treasure.
i apologize for the simplification: i know there's an extreme amount of nuance and elaboration to be had here.
there's a new grid thing on the market which heavily promotes monome compatibility: in effect, freely tapping into our huge pool of resources and culture by implementing a simple protocol we open-sourced from the start.
something is deeply broken with peoples' perception of open-source. it's not an infinite commons. it's not an externality.
it's a community and an ethos. if you're exploiting someone elses' work for profit, you're helping destroy an optimistic vision of humanity.
augmenting _the serpent_ from last year's _gnostics_ --- video/performance created by collaborator and master juggler jay gilligan.
this was an astonishing, beautiful surprise to find in my inbox this morning. a much needed incantation, infused with wind and lightning.
"...the so-called philosophy of the so-called computer community tends systematically to obscure hardware with software, electronic signifiers with interfaces between formal and everyday languages. In all philanthropic sincerity, high-level programming manuals caution against the psychopathological risks of writing assembler code."
http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Kittler-nosoftware.pdf
farm life spring arrival: from all computers to no computers.
hope you all are doing well.
koreless - sun (2013)
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- nnnnnnnn.co
Joined Aug 2020
