Dead Metalpoet's society

Metalhead, polyamorous, bisexual man, living in the Netherlands, originally from South Africa.

I regularly stream on owncast, link in bio.

Pronouns: he/him

My owncast livestream: https://metalpoet.stream

Last Notes

2026-07-22 10:19:44 GMT

Nightmare on LLM street
#ai #horror #LLMs

2026-07-01 13:23:40 GMT

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I actually quoted that line of yours in a debate with a libertarian recently only to get this response.
"I regularly play a pickup basketball game with my friends. We have never needed a ref to ensure fair play."
Apparently I'm supposed to infer that because a friendly pickup-basketball game can be fair without a referee, businesses will always and impeccably fullfill their contractual obligations without an enforcement mechanism ?
I mean they don't even do that now - when we HAVE one, just because they are (often) powerful enough to ignore it...

2026-07-01 11:41:34 GMT

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and I guess they have to be. After all, why would even the staunchest republican voted for a campaign with the slogan "We want to make the lines at the DMV longer !" or "We want even fewer potholes fixed" or "We want to fire all the park rangers".
But call it "big government" and talk about "jackbooted thugs" -- and people think you are talking about shrinking executive power, which oddly is never what republicans actually want to do.
They are more likely to send the jackbooted thugs to your neighbourhood than cut their budget ! Just ask Minneapolis.
And consider the contrast between that and, say, Mamdani's pothole fixing socialism.

2026-07-01 11:35:20 GMT

@npub1fdr…lvhs it occurs to me that something you often say about technology is also true of governments. The right is obsessed with the size of government (at least when they aren't being *openly* fascist) ... but what matters really isn't how big the government is - it's what the government does, who it does it for and who it does it to.
And, in truth, neither the left nor the right wants to either grow or shrink government - they want to adjust which parts of government is bigger.
The right wants to grow executive power, and shrink the civil service - while. the left generally attempts the opposite. Conflating them into "big government" is itself deceptive

2026-01-26 16:25:28 GMT

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You've presented exactly zero evidence that basing your currency on wasted energy (literally on BURNING money from the government) is better than just USING the money from the government and doing something USEFUL with the energy !
In the end you would have the same value in money -AND the value created by putting that energy to productive use !
Okay... but looking at your username, you are very obviously a bot created to push the scam.
So not worth further engagement. Just block city here we come.

2026-01-26 16:00:50 GMT

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No ledger system you could ever invent will make it any less stupid to base a currency on electricity consumed.
Modern currencies are backed by the productive capability of the economy.
Bitcoin is backed on ANTI-production, on literally wasting energy and turning it into heat, without doing any actual useful work with it.
The energy to mine that bitcoin could have run a protein-folding simulation to help cure a disease, or powered a train to deliver a thousand people to do their jobs on time.
Instead you literally burned it up and say "this backs my currency".

2026-01-26 15:22:31 GMT

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they are goldbugs. The electricity is their alternative to the gold standard.
That the gold standard never ACTUALLY kept governments honest (oh so many government gold stashes were filled with painted lead historically, it happened over and over - and many had silver AND gold, and having bimetalism is no less inflationary than fiat currency) doesn't influence goldbug's belief that somehow gold-backed currency was magically better.
What's an even dumber thing than gold to back a currency ? Wasted energy.
It's a currency literally backed by ANTI-production ! Energy LOST to any USEFUL work.

2025-10-15 11:21:45 GMT

@npub1z7x…q5jf a year ago, after a many months painful househunt, I bought a house in Tilburg. Becoming a home-owner is quite tough in the Netherlands these days as I'm sure you know.
There is one major downside: this must be the worst city in the Netherlands as far as car dependency goes. There is no tram service. Busses only run ever 30 minutes. Most streets lack cycling infrastructure.
The train to the Randstad is really nice, but it's also dependent on a single line so whenever there is a problem the delays run 3 to 5 hours.
I wonder if there is a video idea in discussing how the ugly stepchild of Dutch urbanism could catch up ?

2025-09-19 16:01:39 GMT

What I learned about how hearing aid companies are violating right-to-repair and probably disability rights laws:
https://ajmetalpoet.wordpress.com/2025/09/19/hearing-aid-companies-are-probably-violating-right-to-repair-laws-and-maybe-disability-laws-too/
@npub1fdr…lvhs you are one of the people I am talking about the last paragraph.

2025-07-04 19:32:05 GMT

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maybe because they self describe as a pop band?
However Madonna self described as a rock musician until around 1988.
Pop and Rock were not really considered different genres initially and now we retroactively differentiate them in a way that wouldn't have made sense at the time.
Hell U2 described themselves as pop ! And Bono criticised boy-band pop for being too sweet and having nothing to say.
Whether you call the Beatles pop or rock literally just depends on what decade you were born in.
So calling ABBA rock is valid in the period..
But today? Its only rock if the band plays instruments. 4 singers today is by definition pop.

2025-07-04 19:25:20 GMT

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does that mean I have to share my butt under the same licence I received it?

2025-05-07 21:09:20 GMT

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where would you even find one today? Maybe in the back room of a mom and pop electronics repair shop (if one still exists) or in a box in a thrift shop.
Or maybe eBay, targetting collectors. Tapes could be a problem too. Does anyone still make cassette tapes?

2024-11-18 09:52:56 GMT

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which I think adds yet another reason I support your view that we should treat the question of AI training as a labour rights discussion rather than a copyright discussion.
It's not at all clear to me that training AI is a copyrightable activity anymore than training humans is - or should be.
But labour doesn't have that question at all. Labour is first and foremost about human needs.
And making art is definitely a human need.
Making art is what made us who we are as a species.
Most human endeavours we do to survive. But not art: we don't make art to survive, we survive to make art.
if we no longer make art, will we really exist at all ?

2024-11-18 09:40:03 GMT

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so I fully expect them to argue that, for an AI to be trained on your book is no different than for a kid in a creative writing class to read your book and learn techniques they will later use in their own writing.
Now, of course, AI isn't actually intelligent. I don't know if true AI is possible but we both agree that we definitely haven't achieved anything close to it yet.
One could therefore argue that "training AI' is not like learning because it's not a real intelligence and isn't capable of real creative development on top of what it learned.
But do we really want governments deciding who or what is sentient ? What could go wrong, eh ?

2024-11-18 09:36:41 GMT

@npub1fdr…lvhs your latest collumn had me thinking. We use books to train inteligences now - it's one of their main uses and always has been. Nobody has ever suggested that, if you're going to use a book to teach people with, you need to pay for more than buying them a copy of the book.
I fully expect AI companies to raise that argument in their lawsuits: that using a book to learn is definitely not a copyrightable activity since they've always been used that way. Indeed, one of the groups of people who MOST rely on books to learn: is future authors.
Great readers make great writers after all.
As writers, we learn from other writers, by reading their books.

2024-05-21 13:58:18 GMT

I grew up in apartheid South Africa. My formative years were spent watching it collapse. Which made me deeply opposed to fascism and racism. It also drove me to study the system.
I am deeply familiar with how apartheid worked.
On a regular basis people try to tell me there is no apartheid system in Israel.
Invariably their explanation for why Israel isn't an apartheid state, describes a policy South Africa also had, and frequently did more humanely.