Roberto von Archimboldi

https://kolektiva.social/@RobertoArchimboldi

Born following the unholy union of a duck and a cardboard box, Roberto von Archimboldi entered the world as a broken, diseased disaster. He has been searching for joy ever since.

My profile picture is of an apple, the upper third of which is brown because it is rotten, held lightly between thumb and fingers

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npub1zjt9gsux04neazh04a9hd4400z9lqr5t9h8lnjl9rggs72aycmnssp6a2t

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robertoarchimboldi_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2025-10-09 15:12:12 UTC

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I agree about the place for targeted economic boycotts. The key word being 'targeted'. I won't be buying an HP product as long as they are on the BDS list. I am aware that every computer contains Israeli tech.
I find framework an odd target given the kind of nonsense that the rest of the hardware industry are involved in, but if people think that they should be run out of town on a rail, they are welcome to get their posse together.
It is the individual deciding not to spend her money on X because X is spending some of it on Y, that I find ludicrous

2025-09-20 08:22:54 UTC

The idea that you don't explain what is wrong with fascism and you don't engage with terfs are both shibboleths on the left. Yet here we are. The far right mobilised 100,000 people and are leading in the polls. The actual government are committed terfs. They are also the most far right government of my lifetime. I think that it is time to change tactics.
#UKPol, #FarRightRally, #Racism, #terfs

2025-09-18 07:09:14 UTC

Genuine question: why has everything moved to the cloud when memory and processing power has got so much cheaper?
I'm asking because both the universities I am involved with require me to use some sort of Microsoft account for emails and file storage. When I was a lad, they ran their own server. You could access it remotely with ftp and read your emails in any old email program. They still have a tech support team. What's in it for them?

2025-09-15 18:04:02 UTC

According to the guardian, at the far right rally on Saturday the flags of Islamic State, Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine were ripped up on stage. This interests me.
Obviously the organisers were trying to claim that Islamism was taking over the country and that they were fighting back. That is annoying, hateful anti Muslim racism. Islamism is a nothing more than a conservative, reactionary ideology. It is not some incomprehensible, diabolic foreign plot.
What is more telling is linking it to the Palestinians. Of course the hey day of Marxist revolutionary nationalism is long over and varieties of Islamist politics are prevalent in the Palestinian struggle, but I don't think that was the link they were trying to make. Instead they were opposing the left generally and trying to demonize our support for Palestine. It is to say that the left are a danger to Britain, Europe and the white race because they are anti-imperialist.
That I think is the real reason the establishment promotes these far right goons. They need to make anti-imperialism suspect. They back Israel because it is part of the atlanticist imperial project. Israel takes advantage of that to fulfill its ethno nationalist fantasies of greater Israel free from Palestinians. That in turn undermines support from atlanticism back home.
You have to make support for Palestine suspect unless it spills over into opposition to the whose raison d'etre of the establishment. That is, unless it turns revolutionary
#Palestine, #FarRightRally, #UKPol

2025-09-15 08:44:58 UTC

@npub1854…hexw , hey lovely people, I know this a really basic question, but is there a way of doing public transport routing in your fantastic app? Thank you
#Maps, #CoMaps, #PublicTransport

2025-09-07 09:06:13 UTC

A wise person said that instead of chanting 'free Palestine, free Congo, free Sudan' people living in 'the west' should focus on freeing Europe and the US. This seems profound to me.
Too many people, myself probably included, think that because we more or less got rid of kings by the 19th century and replaced them with bourgeois rule, the rest is free. We then sit in judgment over others. We forget that capitalism, the rule of the bourgeois, is a world system and that it oppresses the working class globally. Imperialism was the means by which people outside of Europe were brought into the market and forcibly made into a proletariat.
As consequence you see the appalling spectacle of people thinking that Herzog determined the make up of Starmer's new cabinet or that somehow the Jewish lobby is setting the government's foreign policy. It is as if the government would not be imperialist without them. You see the idea that we have to vote blue or get the Tories out, despite it being a vote for genocide.
If you are serious about the liberation of Palestine and the end of oppression, you need to build a revolutionary movement at home. You need to recognise that your own government, your own ruling class, is the problem and look for ways to sweep them away.
#FreePalestine, #FreeEurope, #FreeTheStates

2025-09-02 15:44:02 UTC

What do Yvette Cooper, Keir Starmer and friends have to say and do to convince people round here that they are deeply racist, reactionary and into austerity? People still seem to think that they are pandering to the far right. I have news for you. They believe this stuff.
#UKPol

2025-08-28 09:54:20 UTC

Fans of ceilidhs, fans of love and fans of homes for refugees (surely equivalent sets) are in for a treat this Friday. It is the T4 Ceilidh in Brighton. See you there:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/thousand-4-1000-ceilidh-2025-tickets-1403871029039
#Brighton, #Ceilidh, #Migration, #RefugeesWelcome
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/105/770/614/808/264/original/a4eea874a76b8d6b.jpg

2025-08-15 10:35:13 UTC

J'ai un problème. Je voyage à bordeaux mardi prochaine. Je suis handicapé et j'utilise une lève personne pour me déplacer entre le lit et mon fauteuil. Bonne, ni l'un ni l'autre est problématique mais...
On a loué un appartement du mardi au samedi et le propriétaire insiste que si je loue un lève personne je dois être là pour la livraison et la récupération. Je ne peux pas trouver une entreprise qui ramasse leur matériel samedi. Est ce qu'il y'a
1. Quelqu'un.e avec un lève personne pliable qui peux me le prêter ?
2. Un asso des personnes handicapé qui pourrait m'aider ?
3. Un autre solution ?
#AidezMoi, #Bordeaux, #Handicapé, #FauteuilRoulant, #FediMagique

2025-08-04 12:02:17 UTC

So, if I had and old desktop computer lying around and a home internet connection, how easy would it be to turn it into a very basic server. I have few skills but can follow a recipe. I don't want to do anything much more complicated than having an ftp server to store files and a CalDev server. At most I might be tempted to run wordpress so that I can not blog.
Is it has simple as installing Debian, and any other software, giving the machine a static IP and then sorting out a DNS registration? Do I even need the later if I don't want to use WordPress?
#DIY, #HomeServer, #Debian, #HelpNeeded

2025-07-31 07:34:56 UTC

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thank you. I will play around

2025-06-29 13:54:11 UTC

I have been trying to use CoMaps to add some places to Open Street Map. They show in my version of the map, but not OSM. I'm logged into OSM in my CoMaps app. I can't work out if this is normal and it does a monthly update or if there is a problem.
#OpenStreetMap, #CoMaps, #Maps

2025-03-22 11:09:27 UTC

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I think that discussion of work and disability and benefits is a red herring. The issue is not the number of people on some form of income support because of disability. The issue is the cost of rent. The benefits bill, including disability benefits, is so high because rent is so high and housing costs are including in the numbers being bandied around. Benefits are a massive subsidy to landlords.
If this government was serious about reducing the benefit bill it would bring in measures to prevent rent seeking. The obvious would be the end of assured short term tenancies. More subtle would be enhancing renters rights and beefing up enforcement, both with more inspectors and massive penalties for infringements. Even just paying for the enforcement of existing regulation would be a better use of money than job coaches. None of this will happen, as Reeves' only vision for 'growth' is further inflating the property bubble

2025-03-21 08:48:57 UTC

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thank you very much for that. It looks terrifyingly above my pay grade. I will give it a go and report back
I thought that bullseye was the next stable upgrade from buster. This was probably my first mistake

2025-03-20 23:22:38 UTC

A little group I am part of has its own server. It hosts our website and a nextcloud instance. It is on a Hetzner machine. OK so far so good. The problem is that the person who set it up has left and I am the only one foolish enough to try to maintain it. The problem though is that I don't know how.
It is still running Debian Buster. I tried to follow a guide to at least upgrade it to bullseye, but something breaks. I think that it is something to do with its network configuration. This is mostly because I saw a comment that said if you are using a KVM Host with bridged networking, then you need to add bridge_hw eth0 (or whatever your network interface is called) to your network config otherwise the network won't start and you won't be able to reach the server. Weirdly I can SSH in after the upgrade, but the console shows lots of networky error messages and the website and nextcloud become unreachable.
Fine, I don't any one will be able to help from that error description, but maybe you can point me at a foolproof guide to upgrading. I can't find one in the Hetzner docs.
#HelpNeeded, #PleaseHelp, #Debian, #Hetzner, #Buster, #Bullseye, #HelpMyServerIsARadioactiveDisasterZone

2025-03-08 12:13:41 UTC

Like a lot of people, I use the onomatopoeic word 'zjuger' for 'hand blender'. How is it spelt?
#Spelling, #Words

2025-01-31 09:48:24 UTC

What the world needs now, but YouTube doesn't have, is a barbershop version of Khia's 'my neck, my back (lick it)'.
#SmallCheeringThings (to come)

2025-01-29 10:22:49 UTC

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in my, not very techie experience, almost everything they say about Linux is a lie. It is very easy to use. It just works, unlike windows where you have to find weird drivers that then seem to do everything but operate your peripherals. People are super keen to help you out. It is just lovely. I do wish that I could get my scroll arrows back in cinnamon though

2025-01-25 12:27:43 UTC

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what nonsense. I would rather not be surveiled at all of course, but if I am to be subject to mass surveillance, I would rather that my data was being hovered up by a government with little to no power over me than one that has the power to destroy me and my life.
This NYT Muppet confuses being the target of individual surveillance as a quasi agent of the US government with being a civilian so to speak subject to indiscriminate data collection. It is just reds under the bed propaganda that serves only to make people forget that their real enemy is their own government

2025-01-20 11:03:30 UTC

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Hamburg is nice. I think that you deserve a beer

2024-11-28 21:32:46 UTC

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I have read two, the poisonwood Bible and lacuna. I enjoyed both very much

2024-11-25 09:02:00 UTC

Here is something that puzzles me but is totally trivial.
If you want to watch the BBC's iPlayer you need to have an account. If you want to do it legally you need to have a licence. It would seem trivial for the BBC to require you to link a license to your account. Presumably you have a database linking licence numbers to names and addresses with license numbers. Instead they don't. When I signed up, I could use a non existent email address, name and physical address. I'm happy about that. Why don't that make it a bit harder to cheat the system?
#InfoSec

2024-11-24 18:36:08 UTC

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I loved them for it, but I think that they had made an error. Our dependence, I'm a western guy, shouldn't be fully catered for. It comes at the expense of an enormous quantity of suffering and the biosphere.
I want a world in which we have power, that is to say, the ability to do something. You can only do something by working with others. Unless you are prepared and capable of putting a gun to their heads, what you do won't get you what you want. It involves compromise, sharing, finding something that you and me and him and her and they can agree upon. That's OK most of my wants are illegitimate. That is why the planet is burning. Something like that.

2024-11-24 18:17:16 UTC

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yes absolutely, but I will tell you what got me started on this train of thought. I once went to a squat in London. It, the squat, didn't last very long. They don't anymore. The wonderful people of the squat had put in loads of work to change the front step to a ramp, digging out concrete, rehanging the door, I don't know what else. Serious labour and resources. They could have done other things with their time, limited money and limited muscle power. Had they just knocked up a ramp out of an old table, I could have got in. I could have also got in had they tipped back my heavy wheelchair. These are all adjustments. Why did they go for the ramp? Because they thought that anything that involved a disabled person having to talk to another human being wasn't access, because it would make me dependent on someone else. I am already dependent on other people, just like every human being.
I really appreciate the fact that my life makes my dependence so transparent. It is the actual human condition and one that capitalism tries to deny, usually at enormous cost to people and planet.

2024-11-24 15:05:20 UTC

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I'm not against services. We need them. I agree. But it can't simply be about hiding labour and interdependence. I'm no more independent when I can get on a train without asking anyone because someone raised the platform than I am if I have to find someone with a ramp or a crew of people to lift me. Obviously the railway companies are rich enough to sort out their platforms, and they should. What I should not be is excluded from the train or restaurant because I am disabled

2024-11-24 14:32:09 UTC

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I suspect that you are referring to this post of mine,
https://kolektiva.social/@RobertoArchimboldi/113508912826055973
I stand by it, by and large, although the pushback from two different people was edifying. I don't think that disabled people should have to sort out access for ourselves by ourselves. I do think that the idea that access is anything other than a collective responsibility that requires effort from both the disabled person and their community is an offensive, capitalist idea. It is one that either strips me of all my agency or turns me into a tyrant.

2024-11-22 11:49:42 UTC

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but to a dead tree? I don't think that you did wrong. It is just sad all round. A dead tree, a sore head... the world is not made for us, but it doesn't have to be so blatant about it

2024-11-22 11:30:43 UTC

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oh no. This sounds tragic

2024-11-22 11:28:24 UTC

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true, yes. But it is exactly what so many I see round here seem to want. They want moderation that shuts down positions that are thought to bottom out into hate and, with the exception of my people and Zionism, often do. You can't moderate like that. If someone is prepared to talk, they are prepared to treat you as part of the human community, even if in the end they are committed to your inferiority.

2024-11-22 11:19:28 UTC

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sounds tough. I hope that it was a friendly tree at least

2024-11-22 11:05:42 UTC

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this is bloody awful and I am sorry. I am now going to get on my hobby horse. This is a consequence of a particular and terrible politics of 'trust and safety'.
You cannot ban people from large, public instances for expressing views in good faith that some or even most people from a minority group finds offensive. For a start, the minority group might be wrong. Jews who adopt an anti-Deutsche style of view of antisemitism are just wrong. You can ban them from your niche instance that serves a different purpose from being mass media, but don't confuse the two.
Anyway Mastodon.social needs to grow up and restore your account

2024-11-21 16:23:40 UTC

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hopefully you had 'safe search' turned on though

2024-11-20 21:50:29 UTC

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he certainly agrees with you about farmers holding valuable land but living off low incomes. It is why the land is clearly overvalued when considered as an input into the farmer's business.
He doesn't consider the passing of farm land in terms of land management. He is rather dismissive of the idea that farming should be an inherited profession.
I guess the challenge you face is explaining why encouraging heritability of the profession is a better way to encourage good land management than by reducing the value of the land to its value as input into the business.
You presumably want your kid to inherit the most value, so you look after the land. That makes sense, but if we moved to a model in which farms were bought and sold because they were businesses that people wanted to invested, you are also incentivised to maximise the value of the farmland as farmland.
My suspicion is though that the land value as farm land is low, given the food business, so you will in fact be incentivised to run down the value of the asset to extract the maximum rental value now. In other words, to hell with the land, après moi, la déluge.
As I keep saying, I don't know. I can follow the argument enough to see how it works but don't know enough to evaluate it.

2024-11-20 20:48:56 UTC

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Richard Murphy, has been arguing that the tax break is what has pushed up the land values because it has turned farmland into a finacialised asset used precisely to avoid inheritance tax
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9J0GpnXNhY
I have no ability to assess the argument. It seems plausible, but more plausible still is the idea that land values are high in the hope that the land will be rezoned and available for housing. Speculation as much as anything else

2024-11-20 19:35:43 UTC

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are you sure that he is not betrayed? Elizabeth looks up at mention of Tristram's misfortunes beginning 9 months before he entered the world (Vol 1, chap 3) and we know that Walter is not the world's greatest lover, even if he is the world's most punctilious. He has also being suffering from sciatica since December.
Tristram is born a little short of 9 months from the fateful accident, the night of 9-10 March 1718, Tristram being born 5 November 1718 (Is there a connection with the gun powder plot?). If I remember, we later discover that there is a bend sinister accidentally painted on the coat of arms on the Shandy coach.
I always hoped that Elizabeth had other options than Walter, delightful man though he is in many ways. I'm sure you are right though and I am off on a digression

2024-11-19 09:29:17 UTC

I am disabled. I have a very straightforward, physical disability so my access needs are quite simple. Nevertheless the idea that I can expect them to be met in a way that requires no effort and no compromise from me, something that some parts of the disability rights movement seem to believe in, strikes me as entitled, capitalist, offensive and wrong.
Building ramps, door openers, lifts, fixing pavements, removing street furniture and accessible design takes effort. It is work from other people. It makes the world worse in other ways. I can put the work in to deal with other people or go the long way round. Sometimes it is on me to put the effort in. That is how community works. That is what it is to be human. It is only the capitalist who thinks that all their wants and needs should be met below the cost it imposes on others.
A social media that is fine tuned to be just what some subset of users want is capitalist. It is a virtue of the fediverse that it is really irritating and requires a load of effort. It is human like that.
#DisabledLife, #Disability, #Access, #Fedi, #Mastodon

2024-11-18 16:00:18 UTC

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how kind of you to share your insights into that wonderful, life affirming work of genius. It never ceases to astonish me. When people far smarter and more knowledgeable than me set out on a hobby horse like that, my life is enriched

2024-11-18 15:52:29 UTC

Let no one ever speak ill of Mastodon again.
@npub1e3s…wd03 is providing a read through of Tristam Shandy. Social media has fulfilled its purpose.
#TristamShandy

2024-10-28 19:05:35 UTC

What is it that people in the US object to about Nazi because it doesn't appear to be the genocide?
#

2024-10-02 18:21:32 UTC

I recently installed #LinuxMint on my laptop. Can anyone point me to a resource that will show me how to restore the scroll arrows to the scrollbars? I tried modifying the various theme files in /usr/share/themes/... to include 'Scrollbar-has-forward/backward stepper true', or whatever the exact syntax is, but no joy. I couldn't find a setting in the GfK4.0 folder so maybe that is the problem. I'm using the cinnamon desktop BTW.
The other issue that I would love to find a solution for is a way to simulate and mouse button press and hold. I seem to remember that you could use 'mousedown' in a config file. It is a big problem for me as my hands don't work and I can't click and drag. If I remember, Microsoft claim a patent on their 'clicklock' feature and so disabled Linux users have to DIY it.
Many thanks
#HelpNeeded, #FOSS, #Linux, #Mint

2024-09-11 18:59:15 UTC

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I am replying here even though Christopher's helpful stuff appears in a different chain.
I take what you might term a naïve view of thought and talk, namely to grasp the content of a sentence or mental state you need to understand what makes uses of that sentence or propositional attitudes involving that thought correct. That, simplifying slightly, is to understand what it is for an assertion or belief to be true. In turn that requires truth to be a substantial evaluative property. LLMs came along and I thought: this is grist to my mill. LLMs don't care about truth. They are only interested in the syntactic plain. They don't have any interest in intentionality. But then you see what they can in fact do and you start to think that maybe there is something in some variety of deflationism.
Now if I understand Thomas right, you think that actually the 'accuracy' is a statistically predictable consequence of the data set containing more true tokens than false ones. I guess that I am still surprised by how good LLMs are even on quite obscure topics. If you asked it to write about me, it would be nonsense on stilts. I am a nobody. Although it would do better writing about Emma Goldman, I reckon that it would do a reasonable job about Phillip, a published academic. That is interesting to me, because there must be very little about him, true or false, in the dataset. Maybe that is just what happens when you have enough nodes and enough data to calibrate them to the nth degree.
I think that Christopher, you think that the calibration creates something new. That new thing is a preference for chains of reasoning that allow its performance to go beyond mere, given x, y is most likely, at least in the sense of 'mat' tends to follow 'the cat sat on the' (I am handwaving at this sense). Instead because it has been fed enough multiplications, it predicts the right answer according to some sort of rule. at any rate in calculating the probability of x given y, that rule is given significant weight and hence it is not the world's worse calculator.
Is that about right?

2024-09-10 21:19:47 UTC

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here is a little placeholder to say thank you very much for the thoughtful responses. I need to digest them. I definitely don't understand them fully. I'll have a go tomorrow morning.

2024-09-10 10:47:33 UTC

There are probably some actual AI researchers on here, maybe they will be able to answer this:
LLMs are next word prediction machines. It is extraordinary to me that they have so much semantic accuracy. In other words it is astonishing that they ever produce anything truthful in response to a query. It fact they are so accurate that people have begun to talk about hallucinations. The machine never believes anything. It just churns out plausible sentences. It is striking that the subset of woefully misleading sentences is small enough to merit the label of a hallucination.
I get the impression that developers think that without changing the basic mechanism, ie without trying to give the thing a semantic model, you can solve the hallucination problem. Why is that a realistic assumption?
#LLM, #AI

2024-09-08 07:41:17 UTC

Trying to work out what I personally want to see more of on here. I like working class history and current affairs, news from outside the imperial metropole and discussion of art and literature. I do like a niche interest post, even when it is not my niche. You do find a few people who can provide a decent, thought provoking analysis of our current political predicament and response to the big news of the day. I think what that adds up to is an indymedia version of the new york times.
I don't find much of that. Maybe I just need to find my hashtags and my people