Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

In a secret chamber buried deep within Earth's outer core, a gigantic robot named Unix is counting to 2.15 billion. There he has sat undisturbed since January 1, 1970. Unix is up to 1.7 billion. He's very tired, but he must count. One day, 14 years from now, he will have counted to the highest number imaginable. Boiling water will no longer make steam. The moon will emit a Glow That Is Not Light. Out of volcanoes, the winged beasts will emerge. And Unix will finally know what it is to rest

"The artificial intelligence community has prioritized verisimilitude at the expense of veracity. They didn’t have to do that; it was a choice, perhaps influenced by Alan Turing’s idea that an intelligent machine should be able to impersonate a human."

The result: "an endless supply of plausible bullshit"

@gleick in @nybooks

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/11/23/a-genius-for-mimicry/

An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the wider world: he’s an ignoramus.

His technical knowledge is shallow and careless, full of parroting and fantasizing.

People who’ve worked on the small amount of code he actually wrote long ago describe his work as an unskilled mess.

At every company he runs, there are teams of people devoted to keeping him away from the engineers, who largely succeed to the extent that he forgets they exist.

1/3

One of the likely paths that concern me is a cycle where more extreme and brutal acts by the administration results in more protests which result in more extreme and brutal suppression AND more right-wing private-but-endorsed violence, in a feedback loop.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3laor4eaolc2s

Via Marc Elias:

If you are a Democrat who is spending time attacking Kamala Harris or her campaign rather than focusing on the fight ahead, you aren't helping anyone.

Over 50% of Americans cannot read at a high school level.

But we're going to try to tell them about Trump being an authoritarian or fascist.

They don't know what these words mean and they lack the intellectual framework and knowledge of history to understand the explanation.

The end.

@leemeade @pluralistic

"all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they'd never sell out."

#MAGA #TrumpLies #TrumpFascist #RoeVWade #HarrisWalz2024 #WomensRights #Healthcare #WomensHealthcare #ReproductiveRights #VoteBlue #BlueWave #LastTrainOutOfGilead #stopproject2025comic

Happy MorrisWormiversary to all who celebrate!

Mike Johnson’s phone sent an alert that his son was looking at porn but it turned out he was just watching a Trump rally

@brouhaha we can definitely cut back to 1 tide per day.

I don't care how much safer and secure they make my computer. If software updates reset my settings every time they run, I'm going to disable software updates.

Can’t overstate how dangerous it is that vaccine denial has completely captured one of the two major parties. We’re an election or two from unraveling one of humanity’s greatest achievements. The potential long tail damage is millions of preventable deaths. Just absolutely bonkers.

The only thing that makes UDP jokes bettter than TCP jokes is that when you don't laugh at a UDP joke the person doesn't tell it again.

Citizenship cannot save you from fascism https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/citizenship-fascism/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

This is rather sure sign that our faith in a President following the laws is not grounded in reality.

TFG will violate every law, and his people will as well. They have learned they are largely immune, protected by potential pardons and commutations, and that any action by courts will be at least years away. And SCOTUS added to the mess by making the President a King with royal immunity.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/31/trump-transition-process-jan6-president/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f001

Protip:

When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,

"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes

I'm not even ANGRY with you, I'm just disappointed."

What kind of a world do we live in where ballot boxes have to have internal fire suppressant?
https://floss.social/@downey/113387281091862923