A couple weeks ago I had an interview from an organisation called Helfa about TROM and the trade-free idea. I am very happy to be able to answer some questions and present these very important projects/ideas. It was my first interview and I was a bit excited, so I said many ehms, and the video and audio quality are not that great. But I can work on that and improve this for next time :) The interview was in german and if anyone is interested, here's the link: youtube.com/watch?v=r18pyAltRw… Let's see how we can push this movement further and reach more people. #tromwork
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
In dem Interview geht Ricarda den Fragen nach, ob geldfreies Leben möglich ist und wie man dies realisieren könnte. Dazu befragt sie Aaron über die Projekte ...
Our ytb.trom.tf/ and search.trom.tf/ have been improved and seem to work much better. A lot less crashes. We are basically restarting them much often to prevent them from "hanging". So far so good. We may switch from SearX to Searxng this year, since the latter seems better maintained. The transition should be seamless for users.
So basically if you want to use a search engine that has 0 ads and does not track you, plus seem to have better results since it combines different search engines, and if you want to use youtube via a simple interface and 0 annoyances, then use those tools.
You see Netflix is a trading platform. They sell subscriptions. Users have to give them their data, attention (seeing ads), and currency. In return Netflix gives them content. Like with all trading-practices, this too goes downhill quite fast. Netflix mainly wants to keep the users subscribed so it will produce whatever crap, in great amounts, to get you hooked.
Thus, the "documentary" practice has become a complete shitshow nowadays. Well made trailers that attract more viewers, for multi part, badly made series about nothing important.
This is why we continue to recommend our baby project VideoNeat where you can see some properly made documentaries. And it is trade-free. No need to trade anything in order to watch them.
You see Netflix is a trading platform. They sell subscriptions. Users have to give them their data, attention (seeing ads), and currency. In return Netflix gives them content. Like with all trading-practices, this too goes downhill quite fast. Netflix mainly wants to keep the users subscribed so it will produce whatever crap, in great amounts, to get you hooked.
Thus, the "documentary" practice has become a complete shitshow nowadays. Well made trailers that attract more viewers, for multi part, badly made series about nothing important.
This is why we continue to recommend our baby project VideoNeat where you can see some properly made documentaries. And it is trade-free. No need to trade anything in order to watch them.
We are still fighting this endless fight, despite getting less and less financial support. Thus is the nature of this cruel system. If you can please support us here tromsite.com/donate/ .
The new three-part Netflix docuseries ‘MH370: The Plane that Disappeared’ is a podium for baseless conspiracy theories from people who are more interested in fame and notoriety than an actual explanation for the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Fli…
Wow, thank you for sharing that YouTube video. Documentaries about BS conspiracy theories are the worst, its hilarious seeing these people trying to come up with various "explanations" just to cover up the holes in their theory.
NOTE: This post contains many images and text formatting, if you do not see this via our Friendica page then please use this link to read it fully social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc4…
Back in 2015 I wrote a book for TROM about humans and the machines they have created. It is called the Human Machine and you can read it here.
Back then it was one of the first hypes about A.I. And as you may know by now, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Back then Google and Apple started to promote their AIs: Google Now and Siri. You could talk to these bots and they will provide you a lot of answers from many different domains. Ask how many dogs are in the world, ask them to set up an alarm for you, how's the weather, ... show more
NOTE: This post contains many images and text formatting, if you do not see this via our Friendica page then please use this link to read it fully social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc4…
Back in 2015 I wrote a book for TROM about humans and the machines they have created. It is called the Human Machine and you can read it here.
Back then it was one of the first hypes about A.I. And as you may know by now, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Back then Google and Apple started to promote their AIs: Google Now and Siri. You could talk to these bots and they will provide you a lot of answers from many different domains. Ask how many dogs are in the world, ask them to set up an alarm for you, how's the weather, you name it. It would integrate with a lot of apps and devices.
People were asking these bots existential questions like what is the purpose of life:
I remember the Google supercomputers generating these weird images and the news outlets calling them "machines dreaming". Meaning, how machines dream:
And that Pepper robot that you could talk to...
These came after a few years of another hype: the self driving cars that were about to revolutionize transportation. In the book Automated Autonomous World that I wrote for TROM in 2013 , I partially fell for that hype and wrote in a very non-skeptical way about them.
To be fair with my past-self, I was focused entirely on how in a saner society the tech-part of the world could look like. So I presented many prototypes and unproven tech. I talked about how we have to change the infrastructure for these to work, and so forth. However, what I did not realized as deeply, was how misleading the world is. You see I naively thought that the big tech companies may not exaggerate as much about their tech. I sourced their own claims from their own engineers. But 10 years later I could say for sure that the vast majority of the tech I showcased in that book, was BS. For the most part at least. That means, the words that came out of the mouths of these engineers and "specialists" that work for these big companies, were mostly crap. Marketing.
That book may be removed from TROM when we do a cleanup this month in preparation for the upcoming TROM II documentary.
Back to AI.
In 2016 I started to be more and more aware of how the tech world is full of bullshit and bullshitters. For that reason I chose to present tech that was already there, working, and when it was just in testing phases I would present it as such and link to scientific papers about that tech.
When it came to AI I already smelled the bullshit. The stupid fear that AI will take over the world, and all of that crap. But I said let's educate myself. And so I said the best way is to understand a bit how these things work. I took several courses and read a bunch of stuff. I learned how AIs can categorize objects:
How it interprets text and speech:
I learned how facial recognition works:
I looked at how AIs learn to play games, drive cars, do science research.
Of course I only scratched the surface of these since they are complex. But I got a solid understanding I think. I realized that these are Statistical Software. Added with a bunch of filters and rules. They are complex, cool, interesting, but nothing WOW in terms of how they work. I learned that data and computer power is what makes the difference. I realized how non-magical these AI look when you have a clue about how they work. The end result is mesmerizing only for those who have a very dim understanding of these pieces of software.
I then talked about how they compared to humans. And of course the conclusion was that AI is just a complex set of statistical software with filters and rules and a lot of data, and has nothing to do with either artificial or intelligence (whatever that means).
Of course there are some applications for these pieces of software that I touched upon in the book, but mainly it was a grotesque hype.
Anthropomorphizing
That's a new word that I learned while writhing this book. It means "to ascribe human form or attributes to (an animal, plant, material object, etc.).". That's what AI are mostly.
The present.
7 years later and the AI "revolution" has resurfaced again. This time it seems even more mesmerizing, although not so much for me. I fee like I've seen this before...
ChatGPT and the like, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, now they have different names and do similar things. They are fun to play with. Can create some weird images out of text, something I was showcasing in 2016 in another book about Language.
And the craze is starting again with people thinking these AIs will revolutionize the world, or will take over, and then no more jobs, no more artists, no more life. If you look again at how these work, they seem a lot less mesmerizing. The companies that push them use anthropomorphism to make them sound like they "think" and are like humans: neural nets, learning, hallucinating, and so forth. In fact they are still the same statistical machines that produce probabilities and that results in interesting outcomes.
Without going into specifics I recommend this funny video that explains the entire situation quite well: A.I. is B.S. ->>> ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=ro130m-f_y…
Also read through the sources of that video.
When I asked chatgpt about TROM I got this:
Which is not bad. But when I asked who made TROM I got a very bad and totally wrong answer:
No idea who Catalin and Andrei are, but it is totally wrong. The project did not start as a research project, whatever the hell that means.
You see although it says some true things, it also says some entirely false things. Because this AI only knows how to put words together. Has no clue about anything else. And it will always produce well written sentences that can be totally wrong. Thus, this chatbot is entirely useless for factual information. And if you think it will get better and better, for one let's wait for that and then "hype" it, but second it may never be able to due to how it works (statistical prediction of what words go with what other words).
When I tell chatgpt that the project was not created by those two dudes, it invents new ones:
And so on it goes:
AI is ASS!
AI is actually Anthropomorphized Statistical Software, or ASS :)
We may find good uses for this ASS, maybe when they only rely on a main source of information like some specific research papers and provide exact quotes and sources. They are fun to play with for a bit tho. They may help us create more creative content or video/photo/audio effects. But "they" are as much as "they" as websites are "they". Depends what websites we are talking about. Same here, these ASS are diverse and made for a diverse set of purposes.
But what it is clear to me is that the HYPE is just that, a HYPE. Pushed by companies who want to make these ASS more appealing and sell them, by the bloggers and youtubers who jump on the hype train for clicks and views, by the media that does the same. Combine that with the fact that we live in a dumbed-down society where humans are just workers who have no time to learn/digest any of these things, and we are faced with an Idiotic society that has no clue about any of these.
Our trade based society is at fault here again, for incentivizing humans to hype these things all the time, in order to trade them. And for the fact that it keeps us all busy idiots for the sake of trading to survive. This has created a Land of Confusion.
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The real risk of A.I.
The normal Manjaro Stable updates plus: Docklike stuff The apps panel, where the opened apps are displayed, got an update. One minor change for our default TROMjaro: right click on any app from Docklike then Properties.
“The Killing of a Journalist” tells the story of the 2018 murders of OCCRP’s Slovak colleague Ján Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová. Investigative journalists used leaked police files from the murder investigation to uncover vast corruption at the highest levels of Slovak society.
“The Killing of a Journalist” tells the story of the 2018 murders of OCCRP’s Slovak colleague Ján Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová. Investigative journalists used leaked police files from the murder investigation to uncover vast corruption at the highest levels of Slovak society.
For those who understand Spanish this is a recent review of TROMjaro in Spanish ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=eto-8S1lbW… - many thanks to those who review TROMjaro. Not only that TROMjaro is a very good Linux distribution and quite unique, but the idea behind is the important bit. The promotion of trade-free software. A purely free software that wants nothing from you. Not your data, not your attention, not your currency.
We released TROMjaro 4 years ago and for the past year or so more and more people discovered our distro, and thus came across our main TROM project. This is fantastic!
We have removed most mirroring accounts from our Friendica instance that we have created. These were zombie accounts pulling from RSS sources and reposting on the fediverse. There is no need to spam the fediverse and anyone can follow any RSS feed via our social network anyway.
We've also updated our TROM Videos and it is fantastic that there is a new feature which stops bots from registering. All accounts need to provide a reason why they want to join our platform, like our TROM Social already does, and these accounts are not public unless we manually approve them. This will cut down the spambots registrations by a huge factor. We were bombarded with several bot-made accounts daily.
We will make our TROM Videos more exciting this year, by creating more videos but also by trying to invite others to join the platform. This is where TROM II will be released, and not on Youtube mind you. We have to move away from the trade-based platforms like youtube, facebook, twitter and the like, to alternative ones that are trade-free like we provide via trom.tf/.
Rudy Kurniawan was a rich Indonesian wine collector with a fascination for Burgundy, and he spent millions of dollars on wine and also sold countless bottles of fake wine.
Rudy Kurniawan was a rich Indonesian wine collector with a fascination for Burgundy, and he spent millions of dollars on wine and also sold countless bottles of fake wine.
We are planing to release the TROM II documentary in May. It should be around 5 hours long, divided into 4 parts. It was a massive amount of work and right now we work to do the final edits and prepare it for the release. #tromlive
Two TROM tools have been deleted: our TROM quiz that was based on outdated knowledge and a very outdated plugin, and our TROM "social" (social.tromsite.com) that contained a lot of "memes" - images containing snippets from our books. These too were outdated in many ways and we do not want to "play the social network game" by regurgitating the same "memes" and resharing them on our networks. We need new content that is more relevant.
These two tools, although we put a ton of effort into making them, were outdated. We will do more cleaning for the website in preparation for the new TROM II documentary.
TROM will become more active after the release of the documentary.
Trom - Jaro | Manjar Based Spin | Trade Free Linux Distro | The Linux Tube
A TRADE-FREE OPERATING SYSTEM BASED ON MANJARO LINUX
Designed for your brain, but you can install it on a computer.
Its nice to see TROMjaro getting more attention these days, lots of reviewers are taking a look at it and they like it for the most part. I'm glad to be a part of this small distro 🙂
I did wrote the code for it but you're the one who did all the research and found out the XFCE commands we needed, and you also designed all those beautiful layout buttons, couldn't have done it without you 😊
Take a deep breath and experience the complex world of ocean waters. Get a never-before-seen look at how life underwater co-exists in a marriage of necessity.
Take a deep breath and experience the complex world of ocean waters. Get a never-before-seen look at how life underwater co-exists in a marriage of necessity.
School can be seen as an abusive and inefficient system that has little to nothing to do with "education".
Children are forced to wake up at a certain hour, every day, 5 days a week, for 12 years. They are categorized by ages and their "knowledge" level. School creates a competition between the kids, makes then hate science and learning in general, it is a boring and colorless place for these young minds, and overall ends up not teaching children much at all about the world we live in.
In a trade-based society the parents NEED to trade themselves in a job, so these kids need to be "livestocked" somehow. That's what school is, a place where kids can be while their parents trade to survive in this society. More to that, Universities almost exclusively prepare these young creatures to become workers, like their parents.
All in all, kids go to school to compete, memorize, get ready to be work
... show more
School can be seen as an abusive and inefficient system that has little to nothing to do with "education".
Children are forced to wake up at a certain hour, every day, 5 days a week, for 12 years. They are categorized by ages and their "knowledge" level. School creates a competition between the kids, makes then hate science and learning in general, it is a boring and colorless place for these young minds, and overall ends up not teaching children much at all about the world we live in.
In a trade-based society the parents NEED to trade themselves in a job, so these kids need to be "livestocked" somehow. That's what school is, a place where kids can be while their parents trade to survive in this society. More to that, Universities almost exclusively prepare these young creatures to become workers, like their parents.
All in all, kids go to school to compete, memorize, get ready to be workers. NOT to be EDUCATED.
If humans could have a decent life without trading in this society, they could have the time to engage with their kids, discover, learn, enjoy. And schools could be places where kids of all ages can go because they want to. A place where experts can teach them about the world and how to do something productive.
EXAMPLES:
Tell kids: See this red dot? This is the farthest thing we can take a photo off. They call it a "star". And you show them a real photo taken by the WEBB telescope. From there on you and your class of kids will investigate what this red dot is, and in the process you'll teach kids about light, physics, maths, distances, stars, the universe.
Or show kids a real dinosaur bone and tell them: Our mission is to understand how old it is and what creature this is. And thus you can go into a journey of discovering what geology is, paleontology, rocks and fossils, and so forth.
Or tell them that our mission is to build a robot. And they will learn mechanics, programming and so forth.
We could create real schools where kids can become curious and learn so much about our world. So that they can become the next Einsteins, the next Teslas, the next ones who can discover new things.
That's the world we should have had by now....
And we wont be able to have it unless we change the trade-based society into a tradeless society. Where humans are not forced to trade in order to survive. Where humans like "teachers" can engage and develop such schools as explained above, to have time for that, not to go to school because that's their job since they have to pay their rent so they are forced to do it.
We create documentaries out of our eBooks. These documentaries are entirely based on the books themselves but they may differ here and there in terms of the script and overall presentation, but in general they are the same as the books. All sources for all of our videos are greatly detailed/sourced in the books they are based upon. These videos are also available without the narration voice so anyone can dub them into any language.
Rokosun
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