Tiny Mining Handbook | Hacker News Reader

Tiny Mining Handbook

v2.nl

41 pointsbookofjoe26 comments

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.

Reminds me of some of the segments in the "Genius: the transgression" tabletop RPG. A game focusing on mad scientists, and the differences between mad science and science.

https://sites.google.com/site/moochava/genius

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" ;-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

>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?

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

It is evident that the emphasis on supporting rhythmic music since ABBA (~1970's) has really borne fruit, so much that their brand has recently started business to IP music. However, there is still a sense that not too many pop music will be recognized on equal terms with other kinds of music and other cultural expressions, financially and otherwise.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Oh, man...I remember Archimedes Plutonium, Kibology and the TimeCube guy. A kinder/gentler golden age of batshit nuttery (although folks like Valery Fabrikant and Serdar Argic showed us the darkness that was to come).

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.

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.

From what I read, it's an art project and the goal isn't practicality but to "rebel" against the traditional egocentric relationship between humans and nature (as in, humans extracting resources from nature) and to view humans as a part of that nature, and as vulnerable to resource extraction as the rest of it

hint: look at the involved people and notice how its pretty much all artists

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_...

Good to see this getting more attention. I got into this hobby over the pandemic, managed to self-extract a few micrograms of manganese. Hard to do much more with entry-level equipment though. If you want cobalt or selenium you need to drop at least ten grand.

https://youtu.be/Z8dwXvDL1V8

I watched most of this video and it felt like I was getting trolled.

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."

It's performance art.

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