[HN Gopher] Tiny Mining Handbook
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       Tiny Mining Handbook
        
       Author : bookofjoe
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2022-06-28 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (v2.nl)
 (TXT) w3m dump (v2.nl)
        
       | dongle_67 wrote:
       | It's performance art.
        
       | skeeter2020 wrote:
       | I tried. I really tried to figure out what I was looking at.
       | Catchy title, summary right up front on the linked page,
       | predictable navigation... I cannot figure out what I'm looking
       | at. This community is so far up it's own butt I wonder if they
       | even know.
        
         | foobarian wrote:
         | This very much reminds me of certain amateur communities on the
         | old Usenet discussing physics and posting various crackpot
         | theories. I don't know what it is about the topic that attracts
         | this kind of person. Maybe it's just the asymmetry of the low
         | effort needed to propose an idea, vs. the high effort required
         | to refute it.
        
         | itronitron wrote:
         | I haven't read through the whole thing, but this seems like an
         | exercise in throwing out conventional thinking in order to be
         | receptive to better alternatives.
         | 
         | Such an exercise can be an important practice in the arts.
         | Although without knowing the individuals involved I can't say
         | whether they are doing this as a warm up exercise to clear
         | their collective head, or whether they really believe in the
         | stated mission.
        
         | hobo_mark wrote:
         | It's just an art project, a means for public servants to
         | redistribute excess public cash to their artsy friends instead
         | of improving the common good. Don't read too much into it, at
         | most be angry if you are a dutch taxpayer.
        
           | kennywinker wrote:
           | Yikes. Not a fan of publicly funded art, hey?
           | 
           | I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise, but I am
           | going to put a note here so people think critically about
           | what you said - first off, cultural impact - during the cold
           | war the CIA dumped many uncounted millions into arts funding
           | in an effort to control people's perceptions. By most
           | accounts it was a success, and ideas they funded have
           | dominated the way people think about art, creativity and
           | communication ever since.
           | 
           | Next, value for your dollar. Sweden funds their music
           | industry to the tune of something like $30-40 million, and
           | the industry returns that in the billions. Funding the arts
           | is profitable.
           | 
           | Public arts funding does suffer from cronyism and nepotism,
           | so does literally any other type of government spending - but
           | at least where I'm from most of the arts funding bodies are
           | actively trying to solve that, I don't think you can say the
           | same about defense contractors.
        
             | hobo_mark wrote:
             | I am very much into art, I assume more than the median
             | engineer, and several of my friends are actual artists.
             | 
             | Neither CIA psyops, nor profitability of the Swedish music
             | industry, nor defense companies have anything to do with
             | this article, or with art.
             | 
             | Otherwise thanks for mostly agreeing with my only point, I
             | guess.
        
               | kennywinker wrote:
               | > It's just an art project, a means for public servants
               | to redistribute excess public cash to their artsy friends
               | instead of improving the common good.
               | 
               | Improving the common good is one of the direct effects of
               | publicly funded art, As the swedish example shows. The
               | cia psyops are more of a nod to how powerful it can be in
               | ways that can't be measured via GDP. Not always for good,
               | but impactful either way.
               | 
               | You may not like this piece, but just like in tech
               | startups, you have to fund some failures to find the
               | good.
        
             | lvass wrote:
             | >Sweden funds their music industry to the tune of something
             | like $30-40 million, and the industry returns that in the
             | billions
             | 
             | What a silly argument. I'm sure the US somehow funds the
             | tech industry, but would you attribute the entire tech
             | revenue to them?
        
               | kennywinker wrote:
               | Can you name another country with ten million people and
               | anywhere near the impact on global pop music as sweden?
               | 
               | I'm not arguing that every dollar of that is because of
               | their funding system. But their outsized impact is
               | clearly partially due to their funding system. Denying
               | that is like denying that y combinator helps businesses
               | succeed. Funding when you're getting started matters
        
           | lvass wrote:
           | This is why ancaps exist, folks. I thought everything in this
           | page was some lame prank, but now I fear the staff part might
           | actually be true.
        
             | kennywinker wrote:
             | It's an arts research organization, of course it has staff.
             | The staff aren't working on "tiny mining" they're working
             | on art projects - one of which is tiny mining.
             | 
             | > V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media is an interdisciplinary
             | center for art and media technology in Rotterdam (the
             | Netherlands). V2_ presents, produces, archives and
             | publishes research at the interface of art, technology and
             | society.
        
         | Jon_Lowtek wrote:
         | hint: look at the involved people and notice how its pretty
         | much all artists
        
         | DavidVoid wrote:
         | This page seems to explain it a bit better [1]. Tiny Mining is
         | the, rather bizarre, idea to "mine" rare earth minerals from
         | living humans, instead of from mines.
         | 
         | [1] https://we-make-money-not-art.com/tiny-mining-extracting-
         | min...
        
         | goda90 wrote:
         | Yeah. I was initially intrigued by the idea of extracting rare
         | elements from the body. How much could be extracted? Is it
         | worth the effort? What health impacts does it have? Do
         | biological processes make these elements more accessible than
         | they'd otherwise be?
         | 
         | But the wording in the PDF just immediately turns me off of it.
         | If there's any practical and scientific information, it's
         | bogged down by a bunch of philosophizing and new wave sounding
         | language.
        
       | bookofjoe wrote:
       | https://youtu.be/Z8dwXvDL1V8
        
         | UberFly wrote:
         | I watched most of this video and it felt like I was getting
         | trolled.
        
           | kennywinker wrote:
           | I think, it is a troll. An art project of trolling people
           | into thinking about how they relate to food, how mining and
           | resource extraction works and the human toll of it, etc. As
           | another commenter said said "this seems like an exercise in
           | throwing out conventional thinking in order to be receptive
           | to better alternatives."
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | vageli wrote:
       | It seems to be an art project with an idea of extracting precious
       | metals from one's own body through the use of dedicated diets and
       | special extraction agents. Reading through their "handbook" [0]
       | felt remniscent of "House of Leaves".
       | 
       | [0]:
       | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K_qEkhMZ5YauNUJpEZQnHo6gft_...
        
       | thesimp wrote:
       | Amazing. I clicked on the PDF and got as far as page 4. I really
       | tried to read each word of each sentence out loud and pause after
       | each sentence to give myself some time to reflect on it.
       | 
       | This is as if a GPT-3 model kicked into high gear to generate
       | text and a variation of DALL-E which I shall call CCS-E did the
       | perfect layout. It is beautiful but it is complete gibberish.
        
         | woodpanel wrote:
         | In the days of alledged sentient AIs I have to say that a
         | prequel to The Matrix could definetly be written around an AI-
         | concocted social movement of "self-extractors" ;-)
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-28 23:01 UTC)