I remember reading that the roomba company tried to send the same unit back after repairs (rather than replacing it) if possible because people got attached to their vacuum robots. Have tried to relocate the source but searches get flooded with LLM written articles about how to repair roombas.

I think it's cool how every single headline now is "should we reward the delusions of morons?" and imply the answer is yes

we've written about this in the past firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Exactly. That attitude results in “theory” delivering policies that make no sense when examined for actual impacts. Techno-Libertarians/Republicans are driven by feelings, rather than data. They exert all effort trying to distort reality to reflect their rhetoric, instead of engaging reality Itself.

imagine having to hear shit like "study confirms giving diabetic children insulin reduces their death rates by 100%" as if that hasn't been known for like a hunred years. that's what being trans is like

It’s so cool to have hitched your wagon 20 years ago to an industry that was booming beyond anyone’s expectations and have it turn out to be stripmined and utterly hollowed out by Shareholder Value, and every other industry you could slot into has been, surprise, hollowed out by Shareholder Value

the year is 2896. scholars in holy Zhongguo have been identified the year 2020 as the year the American empire began to enter terminal decline, but have been unable to verify who was ruling the empire at the time - Joseph Brandon Biden or Donald Joseph Trump?

So much of this masculinity nonsense is just the fact that nobody ever told these fucking losers to their faces that they themselves are the problem. Jordan Peterson's appeal was that those guys themselves realized on some level that they were the problem and needed someone to tell them

yep. my job from 2012-2014 suddenly became explainable to the general public because of the MUSCULAR leak. I got to cutely say I worked on "SSL added and removed here ;)" from that point onward.

(imagine the naivete we all had back then, when we thought a friendly government was not going to illegally wiretap the links between our own datacentres, and therefore the 5% performance penalty of end to end encryption was not going to be worth it)

getting a little tired of hearing cis ppl's thoughts on plastic surgery ngl

This administration heard the term “soft power” and thought it meant something weak

Tonight, Friends of Noise presents an ALL AGES show with four bands will take the stage at The Off Beat Saoirse Dream Trans Panic Butterflys Log Lady Doors at 6:30, show at 7:00. Tix $15, NOTAFLOF. 8440 N Interstate Ave, Portland Be there! 🤘😎🤘

it’s good actually when systems of thought can tell their own bounds. the vexation of incompleteness is the thomist urge to fit the platonic realm into one’s head like a series of pinned butterflies. instead, even abstract ideal processes are intrinsically dynamic and irreducible to a static moment.

people who have never heard the phrase "recursively enumerable" like to imagine we proved there's a loophole in, like, anything and fundamentally decisions cannot be made about anything

Also in 2015 I had to explain metadata to an intercept journalist working on the snowden docs 😭

I'm in the EU through December 8th and refuse to upload identity docs so I have no access to DMs

no way 😭

Epstein emails (2.5 GB) Approximately 20,900 unredacted emails and file attachments sent and received by Jeffrey Epstein's [email protected] email address over nineteen years. ddosecrets.com/article/epst... Help us keep publishing: donorbox.org/ddosecrets

Unicode normalization.

They cut care for trans youth on trans day of remembrance right before the holidays. It's not only cowardly, it's sociopathic. They left families scrambling to find care on Thanksgiving. www.kqed.org/news/1206548...

If you are transgender, you should leave if you can.

Inspired by your post I figured I'd see what kind of infographic AI might produce for your book, A Course in Behavioral Economics. Buckle up!

i have never been nostalgic for the past before i was born and reading history only reinforces this. running water is good. not losing children to preventable diseases is good. human beings not being property is good.

northwestbylines.co.uk/news/health/... @nhsengland.bsky.social destroyed kids lives by forceably detransitioning them. This should be front page news (It won't be of course). Please share this widely. Cc @pinknews.bsky.social, @itsjoshmilton.bsky.social or @goodlawproject.org

if you consider yourself a trans ally I really desperately need you to stop talking about the gatekeeping you have to go through to get puberty blockers like it's a good thing. it's not "checks and balances"—it's trans healthcare being held to a standard that no other care is held to

Some folks drop turkeys, some folks are a public menace & gotta pick up half a ton a garbage

My idea (born out somewhat by experiences with business databases and expert systems) is that a system can be accurate often enough that you come to trust it, yet still fail far too often to be helpful overall. The problem is worse when the failure is hard to detect, such as a wrong answer to a ...

Good enough to make you trust it, not good enough that you should trust it.

The irony is their search has gotten so bad that even when I am sitting in my car desperate to drive to get some last minute thing one of my kids forgot for school or sports, Google can’t send me efficiently somewhere to grab and pay too much for it.

Internal KPIs and McKinsey consultant thinking are leading Google and everyone else to put AI in everything not even necessarily for profit-seeking reasons but because upper management has set up metrics to incentivize everyone to try to maximize usage of whatever feature their bonuses are tied to.

A bigger problem is that "webpages" are being generated by the AI slop engines: more and more garbage that clogs up search results.

i love that youtube gives up after 5 search results and just starts throwing up random video suggestions as a distraction. the system works.

The Eric Schmidt era was the peak: 2001-2011. Then Larry took over again and Google mostly coasted along on reputation until Sundar Pichai and Ruth Porat were given the keys in 2015. All downhill since then.

The peak was sometime in 2008 or 2009. Google was adding tools and services of incredible value through the mid to late aughts, including Google Reader (Oct 2005), News Archive Search (June 2006) and Street View (May 2007). They deprecated News Archives in 2010 and shut down Reader in 2013.

2/2 The two things that killed google search's ability to function: the end of the minus sign (-) to eliminate the tons of garbage you know you will get if you give google the chance and the use of ("") to make the fucking thing focus.

My most recent fav AI result:

reminds me a bit of switching the cars' dashboards from a tactile, physical display of knobs and levers to the absolute usability nightmare that is the new trend of making every control "digital and touch," nobody asked for (it's just a way to save pennies, sold as "innovation").

Had a nightmare of a time trying to buy kitchen equipment for my dad who is visually impaired - nearly everything now is a touch screen without buttons. He just can't see it!

removing the "cached" option was likely the first sign of collapse.

It didn’t start with the AI overviews though; they had been undermining their own search features with “did you mean $OTHERTHING” when you had searched for $THING, and ignoring advanced search syntax entirely (Boolean operators, quotes, etc). LLMs just turbocharged the decline.

Because Google's goal is not to bring you answers, but rather to show you ads. The rot economy ruins everything.

Added it to the bottom here

trans kids trying to get healthcare are vetted harder than members of congress

I just want to say for the record that we're not Enron. Don't put it in the papers that we're Enron.

Ok gang today is the day that I talk about solutions of the Dirac equation in the context of Clifford algebras and spin groups, I look at the parametrized version "spinor bundles" and introduce + characterize the notion of "spin structure", and then maybe talk about KO orientation and Witten genus

whose idea was it to give cats a rumble pack that shit is so cute

crazy week