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

“It’s like finding out that the CEO of McDonald’s is married to heart disease; like finding out that Joe Camel goes home every night to a talking tumor.”

A “Guardian” senior editor was married to a Mumsnet founder for 25y:

https://judedoyle.medium.com/so-a-top-guardian-editor-was-married-to-the-founder-of-mumsnet-836cddf8fdc4

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”
Ted Chiang

Either they haven't thought about what they've written, or they're trying to create chaos...

Not sure who needs to hear this today, but remember, your local public library benefits from being used! Usage statistics are how librarians argue for funding! By using this shared service more, you are making it BETTER for everyone else!

It's the glory of the commons, not the tragedy of the commons. Go to the library!!!

I'm here to bring chaos

Neo, unplugging from a particularly rough shift in the matrix: "what a week, huh?"

Morpheus: You believe it is the end of another long week, when it is in fact closer to Wednesday.

“If you say ‘I want to live,’ and I say ‘No,’ what happens next isn’t a debate; it’s murder.”

https://xtramagazine.com/power/what-went-wrong-at-the-new-york-times-246409

#transRightsAreHumanRights

Pleased to report that I was able to melt the snow on my sidewalk this morning by staying inside and radiating resentment at it instead of actually going out and shoveling it

Remembering being told to "try harder to be my best self" when I submitted a harassment complaint. Lmfao.

Honestly, workplaces are a source of so much trauma for so many oppressed minorities. Companies and organizations don't fucking deserve anyone's "best self". I have limited spoons and I'm damn well not spending them anymore so some privileged asshole can buy a bigger house, a shinier car, and otherwise accumulate capitalist points. Eat the rich.

The older I get the more horrifying I find it that we expect kids to spend most of their childhood at school training to be productive workers 🫠

being agender is so powerful. transphobes have no idea what to make of me. you can try to misgender and invalidate me but my existence inherently cannot be contained by your binary thinking. I win. every time, I win

my love language is infodumping and absorbing useless infodumps of others

If anybody is wondering if it is morally acceptable to play Scott Adams adventure games following the recent bout of newspapers dropping Dilbert cartoons.

Yes. Yes it is perfectly ok.

The Scott Adams that's famous for writing Adventure and many other classic computer games is not the racist intolerant arsehole that wrote Dilbert. They're two very different people.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

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.