This is a perfect encapsulation of how I feel about technology.

A very large percentage of the 16K accounts that follow person have no pfp, 0 followers, and 0 posts. I wonder what that's about...

Amazing how often people who post 50+ times a day and have 50K+ followers do some version of: "Unpopular opinion but (something super ableist that like 90% of people reflexively believe by virtue of living in a super ableist culture)" Yes, you're so brave.

Turns out all the fictional references in Danielewski's "House of Leaves" were a prophecy not a parody.

Kael? The guy who made the classic Civilization 4 mod Fall From Heaven and is now working at Amplitude as lead designer for Endless Legend 2? (I hate this timeline)

Seems to me that one of the core functions of the current AI craze is to put another layer between users/customers and companies. By filtering any attempt at communication, from troubleshooting to complaints, through AI systems companies avoid the accountability that comes from direct engagement.

Fun Capitalism Fact: There is an effective vaccine for humans against Lyme disease that used to be available but isn't manufactured anymore because it wasn't sufficiently profitable.

To be clear the "abject failure" is a moral one. Obviously public health has largely accomplished what it *wanted* to accomplish, which was to ensure the economy was "open" and "back to normal" as quickly as possible, regardless of the costs.

Someone in my family is about to have a baby, so I reminded them know that between 0 and 6 months is the most dangerous age for COVID infection. I was told not to worry because they're "draconian" about making sure everyone they're coming in contact with is boosted and not currently sick. 🫠

There is so much wrong and annoying about the current AI craze but this is a huge underlying thing that continuously annoys me. So much of what now gets called "AI" is stuff we've been able to do algorithmically (and cheaply at that, on a local machine) for, in some cases, literal decades.

“She explained how much Covid could hurt her & how vulnerable it felt to be unable to wear a mask to protect herself. She was a perfect example of why other people need to wear masks even if they don’t personally think Covid will hurt them” If you want to honour Alice Wong’s memory, please mask up

A lot of the "we can't possibly do anything about COVID so we shouldn't even try" people on the left are perfectly fine making demands and expecting political action on climate change that far exceeds any ask from those of us who just want you to wear a mask. Make your politics make sense, please.

Want to honor Alice Wong and her work? Wear a damn mask!

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”

ALSO. If you're just coming across this news now, and thinking about what you can do to support disabled people like Alice in your community. WEAR A MASK.

We should make the world Alice Wong wanted. We have to.

My entire millennial life has seen an almost continuous and unrelenting revelation of horrors committed by people with wealth and power, none of whom are held accountable or face material consequences. If anything, it has only gotten worse in the past decade.

So basically everyone with political power is Humbert Humbert, minus the ability to construct a coherent sentence. Cool.

"Hey, wanna do some rollplay (Katamari)?"

A fun thing is when you turn off push notifications many apps will bombard you with pleas to turn them on again whenever you open them.

Looks like the Globetrotters beat the Generals yet again. Funny how that always happens.

What we are seeing is a replay of the surrender on Covid protections because it was going to impact the wealth class in a way that would make it harder to accrue wealth without consequences. Liberals already made the choice to kill millions to maintain the wealth class status quo.

This is fucking brilliant, and you should read it: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

CW: Suicide As someone who once lost a close family member to suicide, this article is one of the most devastating things I've ever read. I simply cannot imagine what kind of a hideous soul you would have to have to work for OpenAI knowing that even one story like this has happened.

Fortunately we haven't actually created AM from "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," but Ellison gravely underestimated the degree to which people would willingly submit to their own existential attenuation.

Elected Democrats spending more time today praising Dick Cheney than Zohran Mamdani is a great case study in abject fucking moral failure.

Keep in mind that most of the neocons that worked with Dick Cheney to orchestrate the Iraq War are still alive, and many of them are DEMOCRATS now. This includes Bill Kristol, David Frum, Max Boot, and others. They never changed. Instead, the party shifted far to the right to accommodate them.

I don't believe in Hell but there are days when I wish I did.

If you've stopped masking in public for whatever reason, now is a really good time to start again

The sheer amount of AI slop in the replies to basically every viral or semi-viral post these days is not encouraging!

Baseball the cruelest game by far, nothing else within miles of it

Again, this precise use case is why these systems exist-to proliferate people’s racist (transphobic, misogynistic…) imaginary at scale. This should not be seen as a “misuse” but rather the product being used exactly as intended.

Reducing ableist language use is, by the way, fundamental to the fight against fascism. The core ideological underpinning of fascism is eugenics. Ableist language is a reflection of eugenic attitudes. Be less ableist = be less eugenicist = fight fascism. It's not the whole game but it's essential.

Once again confronting the apparent impossibility of calling fascists evil without using ableist language. "Cruel" is good, but the other three are a gut punch. The thing that sucks about (insert person here) is not fatness or stupidity or dementia. The PFP is quite the kicker.

Weird because I could have sworn the NYT told us we shouldn't worry about these viruses and should just get back to brunch

youtube decided they're gonna ai upscale sd content by default and if you have a youtube channel you should turn that shit off

Our beagle Lucy generally doesn't like being picked up and carried, but as she's gotten older she sometimes struggles to make it up the stairs. Last night for the first time she actually waited in front of the staircase up to the bedroom so I could carry her. It was very sweet and a little sad.

To use it like this is to teach children that a statistical composite is better than their own imagination. It is morally wrong on that basis alone, before you even get to all the harm required to produce it

I told them I would always rather see what they had drawn themselves. "But I can't draw it as pretty" I hate this fucking technology and it should not be anywhere near a classroom

As a former middle school teacher, this is pedagogical malpractice.

This was a great episode and a wonderful salve if you're feeling run down by certain aspects of the recent discourse. Very happy to see it in the main feed so I can recommend it to folks.

Yep. The most recent @citationspod.bsky.social news brief talks about the quite intentional (and well-funded) effort by several different new ostensibly center-left organizations to push this exact thing. Worth a listen imo: citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-t...

Love to see a bad faith argument about how mask advocates are ableist, actually, from someone I've been following since like 2010 on Twitter (and was mutuals with on that platform). Anyway, getting COVID over and over is cooking your brain.

When we say “everyone should mask” we don’t actually expect people will. We know how selfish people are. But we say it because: 1) it’s factually true 2) if even a few people listen to us that’s a few more lives saved and, as the Talmud says, every life is a universe.

Looking at Sherman again makes me feel good

Define your music taste in eight artists. Don't normally do these kinds of posts but... Thelonious Monk Beethoven The Bad Plus The Glitch Mob Bach Scott Joplin Keith Jarrett Michel Camilo Honorable mention to Cake, Tower of Power, Ani DiFranco, P-Funk, and Clifford Brown (who died far too young).

A prime example of bad faith misrepresentation of genAI is omnipresent in the ongoing baseball playoffs. There are commercials that say "Google AI found..." followed by something you could literally calculate with an Excel spreadsheet. Like, running a basic linear regression is not freaking "AI".