Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

What is it called when you un-fix a problem that was previously fixed?

The American left needs to get organized. I know you're out there. I meet so many people who self-identify as socialists. Recent rallies in Vermont had tens of thousands of people come out, but at every other kind of organizing, be it a meeting, canvassing, strike support, phone bank, etc., there are the same few dozen people every single time.

People in power know this. They used to get nervous when they saw huge rallies, but they've learned that they don't represent an organized threat.

A reminder that the anti-Iraq-war protests were some of the largest demonstrations in human history and they failed. The "carrying signs and yelling at empty buildings" theory of change comes from a sanitized retelling of past movements.

Today, every group with a twitter is calling for a demonstration in their town, but movements that don't cause power to feel pain and don't have the institutional capacity to negotiate if/when they do are doomed to failure.

Ever seen an ad for ground.news and wondered where they get their data? Well, they too get it from Dave. Depending on the metric, they average his scores with either 1 or 2 other so-called "trusted ratings systems."

He uses a comically naive rubric to generate the data. It is the exact political theory that just-some-guy-named Dave would have. Had the site been DavesOpinions.com, no one would use it. Transmorgify them into data, pick a neutral name, and make a UI, and researchers use it credulously without even knowing who Dave is, yet upon him rest the conclusions of hundreds if not thousands of studies (>500 on arxiv alone), representing unknowable amounts of computation and thousands of hours of labor.

Digging further, we find that MediaBiasFactCheck.com isn't run by, say, a lab, or a panel of experts, but is just some guy named Dave. Dave is a healthcare worker in North Carolina with a passion for bias in the media working with a couple volunteers. According to the site, he makes all final editorial decisions.

Our paper's sources leads us, through several schema transformations and an intermediary, to MediaBiasFactCheck.com, a commonly used source for those studying misinformation, media bias, etc. It rates The New York Times as further left than @FAIR, an explicitly progressive outlet, which regularly criticizes NYT for being a right-wing rag (my words, not theirs). This is obviously wrong.

Since 2016, the number of papers on mis/disinformation has skyrocketed. It's hard to imagine another phenomenon for which there exists such a complete dataset, but this field must label things as true, biased, etc., sticky concepts to define at scale. How can you label millions of tweets as true/false?

If we pick a paper and follow the provenance of its data, I think that we can learn about not just this field, but the role of data and computation in society.

https://theluddite.org/post/spectacle-of-computation.html

One reason why you still may want to keep that 20 year old scanner: Scanners in cheap modern multi-function printers typically use contact image sensors that have essentially zero depth of field.

CCD based-scanners however have enough depth of field to image non-flat things such as populated PCBs.

HEY!

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if you are an eligible kidney donor or want to find out if you can help, please check out their bluesky post and website

*your location MAY NOT be an obstacle. if you are willing to help, they'll find a way to fly you out.*

https://bsky.app/profile/iggydinosaur.bsky.social/post/3lsk4gxqgzc2f

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#mutualaid @mutualaid

Anyone know of a good IRC client for the #blind? I wanna use IRC.

"The project of Gender is one that was/is explicitly deployed as a tool of the settler colonial project on the land mass we know as the 'Americas' including 'Canada,' forcibly deployed onto indigenous nations in an attempt to eradicate indigeneity (nokizaru 4-5). This was done due to the fact that a vast majority of indigenous nations not only structured their socialites in non-patriarchal makeups, but specifically had conceptions of gender that did not at all correlate with the European model (Lugones 25). "

-- Chris Coles, "Paradigmatic Bio-Logic: Against Biology and Towards Translife." p. 28

"To be clear, when I say that Gender is inherently a violent structure I do not mean to say that gender identity in the abstract is bad. Rather, I mean to articulate the way in which a dominant conception of Gender has been created, deployed, and enforced in such a way that it demands people fit into specific gender-identities that they did not determine. Thus when we critique and call for the abolishment of capital-G Gender, that does not mean the eradication of gender identities that exist outside of said paradigm like the Hijra, Two-Spirit, Fa'afafine, etc. but rather for the destruction of the system that makes said identities unintelligible."

-- Chris Coles, "Paradigmatic Bio-Logic: Against Biology and Towards Translife." p.28

have The Talk with your friends:

no, artificial intelligence isn't real now, nor is it just around the corner
we need laws to prevent capitalists using LLMs to try to circumvent labor laws; we don't need laws to stop "rogue AI" because that's sci-fi bullshit with absolutely no bearing on reality
no, "ai" is not "inevitable" -- the bullshit word extruders that are being positioned as the next big thing right now are snake oil garbage, and not even profitable snake oil garbage, and there's no path to develop them into anything else because that's just how they work
if you hear someone talking about how "ai" is going to change everything, treat them the same way you'd treat a scientologist talking about whatever the fuck scientologists believe in: it is bullshit cult nonsense for marks and rubes
remind them to ponder the question of "cui bono" -- who benefits from the narrative that "ai" is the "next big thing"? the answer: mostly filthy rich american fascists, filthy rich chip manufacturers, filthy rich data center operators, and filthy rich silicon valley entrepreneurs

do your part to counter bullshit fucking propaganda from capitalist scumbags 👍

Edit: this seems to have resonated with a lot of people and I've rejected a lot of nonsense replies or people being contrarian and annoying I don't care if you disagree! Write your own post about it! :')