Today is Trans Day of Remembrance. Since 31st October 2024, at least 340 trans people have lost their lives to anti-trans violence, or suicide. Transphobia kills. Please be an ally every day. tdor.translivesmatter.info/reports?from...

Seriously, the one idea we need to bend society towards for the back half of the 21st Century is “The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men.”

TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS!!! 🏳️‍⚧️✨

This is a really good campaign that I thoroughly enjoyed playing through.

Remember: they used thousands of academic books too! If you’re a scholar, check for your books too. This isn’t just novelists and pop writers, it’s academic books too!

I do not want to “Do my own research.” I want to pay trained accredited experts to do the research, trained accredited experts to report on findings, and trained accredited experts to make policy based on them. I am busy af with my own job, I don’t need to do eight zillion more.

LLMs by their design cannot function as search engines and cannot cite their sources because they don't do any analysis or synthesis. "LLMs can only produce an amalgamation of a response that takes the form of text. They create a generic imprint of a response that appears coherent" (Williams, p34)

NEW: The first two years of Massachusetts' millionaire tax has raised $3 billion more than expected. And rather than driving the rich away, IPS researchers found that the number of millionaires has *increased.* Tax the rich. Greg Ryan in @bloomberg.com:

Especially if you are going to Dragonmeet this year, please can you boost this post? Would love to meet new faces at the hang out and have a good attendance to our panel 💜

that’s what I’ve been saaaayying maaan

Media: it's really bad how young men don't read anymore Also media: Lol look at these dickheads READING in PUBLIC

as a computer scientist, i am BEGGING people to realize that there is no cognition inside of an LLM no reasoning, no thought process, no self-awareness I read a lot of arguments (for AND against) LLMs, and both sides seem to think there’s a consciousness or intentionality or even a moral alignment

This is one of the reasons as a humanist who does not believe in the supernatural, I am still not anti-theist. Everybody needs different frameworks to deal with the curse of consciousness and motivate right action, if it gets you over here on Team Decency, we can argue about the terms as we go.

Always worth stopping in.

Already signed the petition but flagging this again. Small pressure groups should not be able to overturn the actual users of the pool.

I switched a bunch of stuff from Hide to Warn. Follow instructions in this thread.

succubus - female demon that seduces men incubus - male demon that seduces women vengabus - non-binary demon that likes to party

Also a good time to check ALL of your Bluesky moderation settings A couple of them were put into "Hide" without my action

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

It's going to be a difficult few days for racists. No sooner do we discover the attacker was a British man called Anthony Williams, we then discover the rail worker hero who almost gave his life to save others is called Samir Zitouni. We can't wait to hear the hot takes on whether he is British...

spread Samir Zitouni’s name far and wide

Let’s take a look at the whole “there are too many black people on TV” thing, shall we? After Pochin claimed Black people in TV adverts “made her mad”, all her supporters tried to use 👇🏼 as their excuse for why she was somehow justified in her overt racism. Spoiler - she isn’t! 🤨 🧵 1/22

As a biologist, It really is a great analogy. Also trees. It's like saying, "There are trees and grass, you have to be one or the other." Ok... where is the line that defines "is a tree?" what about bush-like grasses? Palm trees? NON-tree palms? What about horsetails and their tree-like ancestors?

I don't care how good the content is, if you use GenAI images for illustration I'm not opening, reading, or sharing your work. Even beside the disrespect to creators - I don't trust the laziness to stop at the images.

The posts of people I have chosen, presented in reverse chronological order. That's it.

Personally, the best parts of bsky for me are the lack of algorithmic intrusion (chronological following feed if you choose that) and ample blocking options.

looking back on the cartoons and children’s media that mattered to me when I was young, I say this with absolutely zero irony: I think we need to start scaring the shit out of kids again

Finally got one! #celebrityttaitors I was just bouncing around the lounge waiting for that particular penny to drop and that vote to happen.

Quite aside from everything else he’s flat wrong about who was protecting the Hobbits. That was the Rangers, Gondor had entirely forgotten about the Shire.

I had absolutely no idea that Amazon even entered the gaming market and tried to beat Steam. What an amazing failure. Like they said, though, unless you can provide me with a system that’s much better, and with the frequent sales, there’s no reason for me to change.

As a trans woman who played women’s cricket for decades without comment but was suddenly banned for no sensible reason I am grateful.

Have never used an LLM, have no intention of doing so. They’re not everywhere, but those who make them want you to believe they’re inevitable.

the nyt posts this stuff like avoiding AI for 48 hours is hard and meanwhile i have literally never once intentionally used an AI program for anything ever

Just as an aside: tell EVERYONE you know about this. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Reposting with Alt-text:

Vulcans have a fondness for five letter male names starting with S and ending with k, in honor of Surak, founder of Vulcan logic. Examples on screen include Sarek, Spock, and Sybok. This means that a perfectly logical and appropriate Vulcan name would be Shrek.

Asylum seekers, housed in hotels in Manchester, are reaching out in their own words to address the concerns of the local community. Please take a minute to read their letter, & share it with the people in your life who need to hear the truth about the people they are protesting.

It's time to say it again. It's always time to say it. It's always true. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.

It's really OK to change your mind when new facts are presented. It really is.

please watch movies and read books and play games and look at art, please view it with your own eyes through a lens you made yourself and not just through video essayists and ending explained videos please im begging you

Dear authors, never apologize for telling us about your new books. People are hungry to support real art, made with the human brain, and the human heart, and typed by human hands. Please scream your work from the rooftops. You are so necessary and you deserve your flowers.

the Muppets have been real quiet since the Louvre heist

This is the kind of incredibly niche moment I love discovering.

Irony has been tortured for years in an improvised dungeon under a split level in a suburban neighborhood of Palo Alto, and has just been found dead by neighbors investigating a strong smell.

Picked this up today, mostly to read We Called Them Giants and the rest of WicDiv.

It's kinda cool that Gary Larson is doing new cartoons because he picked up a digital tablet, taught himself how to use it, and it made him love drawing again. www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/

‘96% of healthcare professionals said the model helps to reduce children’s anxiety, and 46% reported a lesser need to use sedation after the children played with the set.‘ ‘Lego doesn’t sell the sets and instead has donated more than 10,000 of the kits to hospitals around the world.’

Caught up with Celebrity Traitors last night and now oops, I’m invested.

I don't like him personally, but David Simon on AI is the final word on the subject.

This is Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and considered to be the first person to write a computer programme which was for Babbage's Analytical Machine. She died in 1842 In her honour, today is Ada Lovelace Day and is all about encouraging women and girls in mathematics, science and engineering.