Finally the TROM II documentary is done and it was sent to the ones who took part in it for review. From now one there will be no change, unless they notice anything that is REALLY REALLY bad and needs to be fixed. Or typos.
4 parts, some 5 hours long. Soon we will make a post about it and about when we plan to release it.
Stay tuned and follow us on the fedierse trom@social.trom.tf or via our updates tromsite.com/live/
I cannot promise watching all 4 hours long videos, but I would suggest "beta-testing" it with people in the community already. I could watch one of these mainly yours as I have provided feedback on some of your writings already, but then you did not seem to see value or have time to deal with my previous feedback. Actually some of my feedback, mainly about the health ones, now I kinda agree considering I watched the videos you did with experts on the matter...
Unaware of your feedback but I (Tio) try to reply to every single email. Currently I will be busy with releasing this documentary so I may take some time to reply but you can always contact us via the contact page on tromsite.com.
Not sure how you plan to introduce it, but definitely as you have 4 long vids, I woud suggest an introduction with idk 5 min max, and something way more short like 10-30s for publishing on social media to grab quick attraction.
Will see, but we are not here to "grab quick attention". I (Tio) personally am tired of that. I tried to "reach" people with these projects for too many years. Now I do stuff and share them. That's all.
That was not what I meant to imply (attention economy), sorry. I meant reaching as many people as possible in an accessible way considering the formats people are familiar today, so they would then be more interested in seeing the whole thing, I assume as a non-professional.
I clearly say this in a way that would be more effective in sharing the vision of your project which I think is very important to highlight all things leading and maintaining unfair inequality, exploitation, resource and capital accumulation, attention economy (which is what I assume you are tired of just as me). It is your project anyway; that was just a suggestion. I'm already glad you're going to release the vids.
Yes would be fantastic to get more people to be interested in what we talk about. We will see how things will progress after the documentary is released.
It seems that the Manjaro team got very excited these past weeks with 3 stable releases in just about 2 weeks. All good, we are keeping TROMjaro up to date too. So nothing new for this ISO, just the normal updates. Grab it form here.
The World Health Organization wanted to create a worldwide healthcare system basically, to take care of all humans at no cost. Because healthcare should be a fundamental access for all humans. Many decades later and there is no sign that this will ever be achieved. WHO did a lot of good in this regards when it came to several virus/bacteria outbreaks and poor regions of the world, and worked with many volunteer organizations. But the trade-based society we live in incentivizes people to shift their focus from such goals.
Things like: companies creating trade-based health services and promoting them aggressively, drug companies that need to be paid if anyone wants to access their drugs, entire tribes (cough USA!) who have no incentive for this since their healthcare system is private and a huge trade-machine overall; the fact that most humans are busy with their jobs, with consuming and being consumed by whatever is traded best....
So we are this, as a species:
We would worship football players and other celebrities, or make movies about fantasy superheroes, while ignoring the real superheroes, the ones who volunteer to save lives and who want to create a better world for all of us.
The trade-based society is, again, the creator and instigator of such situations.
Subscribe to Dima here videos.trom.tf/c/soberpirate/v… - he is doine some very interesting and important videos about volunteering. He is also part of the upcoming TROM II documentary. #tromlive
Join me in this inspiring adventure as we clean up Croatia's caves and witness the shocking amount of trash that has accumulated over time. Learn about the r...
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.
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in reply to TROM • • •> to "grab quick attention"
That was not what I meant to imply (attention economy), sorry. I meant reaching as many people as possible in an accessible way considering the formats people are familiar today, so they would then be more interested in seeing the whole thing, I assume as a non-professional.
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