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"
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
"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."
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.
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