Required reading for anyone choosing to engage with freshly wavering MAGA types:

I can see you are regretful. It’s good that you are. There’s a lot to regret. We are deeply sick as a culture.

The diagnosis is supremacy—an abusive human spirit that seeks and causes genocide and slavery. We are all infected with it, but we haven’t all been harmed in the same way, or to the same degree.

Some among us have been grieving the world they inherited, the theft of what is theirs—but we have not been robbed in the same way.

We are grieving the harm caused by the inheritance that we chose.

Now you have been abused by this culture of abuse we inherited and chose, and that has brought you to the edge of awareness. I’m there at the edge of awareness as well, maybe just a little closer. I’ve been there for a short time; only a decade or so.

This isn’t always going to be easy, and it’s going to cost us. We inherited a societal sickness that infected us but made others sick. To heal ourselves, we must first seek to heal not ourselves but others.

You have likely been abused in your life, and that is not your fault. And yet what is being done to you is being done first and worst to others, as an automatic function of our society. We inherited that, and we bear responsibility for that. And you have aligned yourself with that for long years, and there is responsibility there, too—a responsibility and a cost. You will not be welcomed by everyone. You won’t be forgiven by everyone. You won’t even be liked by everyone. If you are doing this to maintain your influence, or become the hero, or to gain cheap forgiveness, or to avoid the cost of awareness and conviction and blame, then you won’t last on this healing path.

Healing will involve many pains and many costs, and it will require radical transformation of our beliefs and our lives.

But healing is what we need.

And healing is its own reward. Don’t look for any other.

https://www.the-reframe.com/one-thing-you-can-never-say-is-you-havent-been-told/

The video is on YouTube (for now).

Here’s her being introduced (to listen to the entire speech), and here’s the sequence the article is about at around 1:21:10.

https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/buffet-infinity

It looks like you can stream it from Apple or Amazon.

60 minutes of self-congratulatory blathering from olympic-level athletes in the sport of failing upwards.

They’re speaking with the underlying presumption that agi is a real thing that will happen. It’s not, and it won’t. https://www.404media.co/google-deepmind-paper-argues-llms-will-never-be-conscious/

On the topic of Google’s influence over Mozilla being the primary source of their funding: “It’s complicated, it’s entangled, but it seems to be working alright.” JOURNALISM!

Any-LLM platform: Mozilla’s new middleware for developers allowing them to hop between models and LLM companies.

Mozilla data collective: Mozilla’s marketplace platform (platform?) for making “training data” (any content of value to LLM companies) monetizable for the owners of that content.

In resposne to the loaded question ‘hey, isn’t it bonkers that your “rabid” users forced you to build a “dont do AI shit” setting in Firefox?’:

“It’s being reactionary to our community and reactionary to our users. They’re asking us for that. And so I think in some ways, both we need to respond to that and we need to lead them through it, but we need to provide these other alternatives.”

Because, clearly, the user’s aversion to these tools is a childish phase that they need to get over.

44:10: The ex-head of self-driving at Uber talks about letting his Tesla self-drive, with his kids inside, trying to take over driving and having the car crash into a wall at 30 mph. Lesson learned: “I’m not blaming the software” and (human) “passivity is bad.” Remember when that guy got shot in the face by Dick Cheney, then he held a press conference and apoligized about getting shot?

Some grade-A Texas sharpshooting around “could AI invent punk rock?” They argue no, but they’re misunderstanding the premise. Punk didn’t get a cultural foothold because of the music alone. The philosophy, the artists, the choices, the industry and the scene behind and around the music made that happen. LLMs are a million monkeys on a million typewriters, just like artists. Given enough time and resources one will evenutally fart out something unique that resonates with the culture and captures peoples’ interests, and we all conveniently forget about all the failures. The brilliance of human artists is that our failure rate is significantly lower. The reply to this should not be “let’s keep working to make failure cheaper so that it’ll evenutally be economical to retire human creativity.”

They attest that the nightmare scenario is that we all become the fat useless humans in Wall-E (which, on its own, is a ridiculously optimistic vision, ignoring the potential hellscape of a ravaged environment, digital feudal lords and impoverished serfdom), but they refuse to stop building all the infrastructure to make those precise futures actually happen.

But it’s ok; we’re going to get lead through it.

Whoops, I misread that!

Toby Hooper, always pinching those pennies!

🫥 telling everyone on the internet that you know what your mom’s towel smells like

Update: i misread the punchline.

This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

To spend enough time in genuine self-reflection that they confront the underlying reasons behind their attitudes about trans folks.

There’s a really weird amount of defense and sympathy for the estate of a rich dead child molester in this thread.

Somebody at my last job showed me how to do this to speed up searching within internal tools at work. It’s only saving a few seconds and a few clicks, but it blows people away every time.

I’ve got a ton of them now.

Chocobo erasure!

Interesting… but I wonder how they would make such a thing not an unbearably gut-wrenching read.

Not bad for the estate of a serial sexual abuser.

I’m really getting sick of this.

Gassing up rumors of a false flag assassination attempt isn’t helping.

Or, as Cory Doctorow put it, “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”

deleted by creator

( ( stares at the Fibonacci sequence… ) )

This has to do something…

…strogen

Roger that. Thank you!