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

There’s a bizarre feedback loop in large language models. If, as they often say, the data used to build them mostly comes from the web then we have to consider the social and economic forces that shape that language … one of the biggest forces in shaping the way people write on the web is algorithmic advertising and algorithmic recommendations (which has become hard to separate from advertising) … now llm’s are being pushed for “search” and recommendation applications …

so the language that comes out of these models is already highly shaped by the corporate algorithms we’ve been dealing with for the past 15 years and is now driving the continued proliferation of that style of English … it feels like a cybernetic system with negative feedback, slowly moving towards homeostasis … another way to put it is that it is a massive homogenizing force for language, specifically a type of Silicon Valley English that has already spread across the world via corporate algorithms.

this is what i mean when i say that we've been lying to ourselves that Hollywood is liberal or progressive. it's not. while superficially, the sci-fi, comic book, and speculative fiction movies and shows appear to wave a progressive flag in the culture war, the bones of products like "The Last of Us" are profoundly reactionary, libertarian, conservative.

two assumptions in the speculative world of "The Last of Us" that bother me: 1) society will immediately collapse and turn to ultra-violence in the absence of a top-down capitalist structure telling everyone what to do, but also 2) capitalist products like bullets, fossil fuels, roads, and men standing around with guns are a natural part of the world that can be expected to exist in the absence of capitalism.

Intelligence is not an entity's property that you can measure. It's a fuzzy external attribution of a right to agency.

Producing Transdermal Estrogen: A Do-It-Yourself Guide

https://crimethinc.com/estrogen

In this report, a small collective details how they produced and distributed transdermal estrogen using reproducible do-it-yourself methods. This is an experiment aimed at securing the agency and autonomy of everyone who seeks gender self-determination.

had no idea the 3d filesystem from jurassic park was actual existing software and now i'm questioning every over the top CG hacking scene i've seen

If we construct transmascs and transfems in opposition to each other, then we simply recreate the binary of gender. We can't let that happen, and I personally can't let that happen.

The thing about CW etiquette and a certain kind of new user(*) is that it’s exactly like teaching manners to small children. You have to start with simple rules and clear boundaries because they’re easy to explain as a basis for more nuanced understanding that comes later. And the responses are largely the same too - “that’s silly”, and “you can’t make me”, and “technically it doesn’t count if I do it this way”.

(*) cishet white guys who’ve apparently never been asked to change their behaviour before

My sci-fi stories include cyborgs and augmented humans. They’re also set in a world where being trans is just a normal and accepted part of society. You can’t have transhumanism without trans people.

lifehack that's saved me many times: if you need to untie something but it's pulled too tight to get a purchase on the knot, twirl one of the free ends up until it's very stiff and then push it back through the knot. works every time.

“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”

This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.

Venture capital destroyed the internet that I grew up with. It destroyed all the good, interesting, weird things. It destroyed the API-first world we had. It infected the internet with surveillance capitalism.

Venture capital destroys everything it touches. It's going to try to destroy the fedi, and it's upon us to resist that.

American journalist discovers a train

If I have to use a mailing list instead of a chat room or a forum to ask a question, I'm probably going to avoid asking the question.