Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

When we dubbed it the information age I don't think we realized how much of the information would be false.

Holy shit. This from 65daysofstatics most recent Patreon post:

"Here is a major issue we are currently tussling with. Since we started work on Wreckage Systems, the notions of generative/procedural art and, in particular, 'A.I.' have become increasingly loaded terms. As we hopefully made clear in various posts over the last few years (this one comes to mind), we are deeply, deeply sceptical about A.I. and all the algorithmic and technological answers being carelessly thrown at what are actually political and structural problems in the name of progress/infinite growth/capitalism-is-fine-actually-and-will-save-us-from-climate-change-honest. 65LABS has picked a side, and it is Team Luddite. Against us, these tech bros are not only destroying the internet, not only devaluing art, not only making the already-precarious lives for creative workers even more precarious, not only failing to understand that the meaning and magic of art is not contained in its particular combination of pixels or samples but rather created in the ripples of social relations that any piece of art makes as it pushes its way into the world, not only are they failing to understand that making art is, at best, to clumsily capture a snapshot of something larger, a fragile, flawed, always-incomplete communication of intent from one/some humans to others, NOT ONLY ALL THAT, but also (and yes, admittedly more trivially), they have tarnished this curious little space of computer-based art that uses generative tools to make itself. Because they do not use these tools in the name of exploring liquid, impermanent art that flutters around a recognisable core but never achieves a single, fixed state. They are employing them solely to be able to dig faster to the bottom of lowest common denominator Generic Internet Content."

All of this.

I got an email about my Win32 programming tutorial (circa 1999) from a 12 year old girl whose hobby is making "programs in languages used way before i was born" ...

First of all yes, excellent, this is a good hobby.

Secondly, don't mind me, I'll just be over here crumbling to dust.

Just wondering, would it be possible to buy tabacco at this Albert Heijn?

the nice thing about my ADHD is that if my apartment is haunted I will literally never notice it

“silly me, always leaving these cupboards and drawers open and the sink running at full blast,” I say, as a frustrated ghost screams into a pillow in the corner

A new study from Sweden 🇸🇪 suggests that mild COVID-19 can cause several years of "brain fog"

https://www.gp.se/nyheter/sverige/risk-for-flera-ar-av-hjarndimma-efter-mild-covid.f60cbaf7-0ec9-432f-8626-4311a9e2bddd?access=unknown

via: https://twitter.com/killedbyproxy/status/1751280158814715934

Half the U.S. can't afford rent.

But the economy is doing 'better'.

Something is wrong here.

I think this, a discussion of the parallels between "AI" and "crypto", is a good take. I want to dig into the bit on "AI" being different because it has practical use.

"AI" is a marketing term. There's the stuff that was mainly called "ML" up until 2021 or so, which definitely has practical uses. E.g., if you're running a social network and need to help humans find the toxic stuff, ML can help.

But in the last few years there's a wave of hype mainly around the large language models, LLMs, and the large text-to-image models. So things like ChatGPT and DALL-E. It's really not clear to me those have much more practical use than crypto. Certainly not over their costs. 1/

https://sfba.social/@misc@mastodon.social/111754701923644674

Many folks here probably already know this, but it's worth repeating, because I think it's one of the most crucial yet overlooked things about political campaigning:

Always demand *twice* what you're looking to get. People will generally treat 'campaigning for change' like a negotiation, and they will (unfortunately) usually not accept rational arguments by themselves.

If you demand the outcome you want, then your campaign is basically guaranteed to fail; you will get something that's inbetween your demands and the status quo. Doesn't matter how reasonable your demands are, you will not get them.

The purpose of asking for twice what you want is to make the reasonable ask actually *look* reasonable to people, by framing it on a broader spectrum of possibilities.

(If necessary, delegate the "demanding twice what you want" to a separate organization that you can afford to 'burn', so that your main organization looks like the reasonable party.)

Yes, it sucks that this is necessary.

the year is 2050. GTK is still preparing the move to version 4, and has collaborated with the FBI to assassinate anyone who mentions the filepicker thumbnail bug. qt stil has an open source version, but it requires you to have create an account with a valid email address and physical address, and limits applications to only containing one window.

microsoft is still "transitioning away from winforms" to the Multiversal Windows Platform, For Real You Guys, We're Doing It Platform. iOS desktop (formerly macOS) has deprecated all system widgets in favour of the cloud. google has created an artificial intelligence to randomly create and deprecate new GUI frameworks, rendering it essentially impossible for anybody but them to create android apps with "native GUIs".

the only usable framework is electron, but everybody hates it because bloat.

as people struggle to find a desktop ui framework that hasn't been bogged down into uselessness by licensing issues or lack of features, a saviour emerges from the heavens: java swing