"Grinding is a fantasy by which the change you desire can be achieved by continuing to do what you are already doing in small, comfortable increments. Grinding is the copium of liberal democracy: enough small instances of inoffensive protest and general decorum will gradually push society to Max Level. Is Metaphor: ReFantazio an allegory😉 for the Obama administration, some mildly progressive status-quo-ing aestheticized as radical change?" (by Todd Anderson) I disagree with this but it is usefully provocative haha
"Large increases in material output, we are assured, can save liberalism from the civilizational choice between socialism and barbarism. I disagree; refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace."
"An engineering problem is solved when the structure works: a bridge bears the weight. However, a bridge bearing weight does not confirm one's hypothesis that bridges possess an understanding of gravity."
"I am in a position to know and appreciate what a difference education makes to the quality of your life. The vastness of the world it opens up to you while simultaneously instilling in you the curiosity to explore it. The sense of perspective it offers, enabling you to view the events of your life, and the events of whatever historical moment it is yours to live through, in a much larger context, rather than being resigned to viewing them from a standpoint of uncomprehending ignorance, as if they were all happening for the first time and for no discernible reason."
"[G]iven that the cost to use a larger, better capacitor is effectively nil in most cases, you can keep experiencing that exact same level of cognitive load avoidance by just using 1uF or 2.2uF instead, in the smallest capacitor package that is practical for the voltage and assembly constraints you have, and placing it right up against the power pins. It’s free real estate, or something."
"Digital marketing is a fundamental threat to human flourishing, cognitive autonomy, and democratic governance. The industry has normalized a state of perpetual surveillance and manipulation that would have been unthinkable just decades ago. Its methodologies have created a world where attention is constantly hijacked, emotions are continuously manipulated, and reality itself is customized in pursuit of extraction value."
"The fight you're in is about segregation. The government is forcing you to choose segregation -- the obstruction of non white people (and white women) -- as well as queer, trans, and disabled people -- from entering or advancing in your industry." honestly "DEI programs" should have been called "anti-segregation programs" since the beginning
"... the imperfections and bad decisions are what makes Gorton come alive. They don’t feel like a profound misunderstandings of typography, typesetting, or Gorton itself. They don’t feel like abuses or aberrations. No, they feel exactly how Gorton was supposed to be used – haphazardly, without much care, to solve a problem and walk away."
"[E]ven if the growth in AI never materialises, the hype has set in motion a chain of events which, if allowed to go unchecked, can only lead to a rise in emissions.... [G]enerators will want to sell [their excess] electricity and therefore push hard to increase consumption... as they need at least to recoup their investment. Data centre operators also want to make a profit... so even if AI would die an ignoble death, they will try to find new workloads, and again push at consumers to use those new services." extrapolating from this: if it wasn't AI, it would be something else. there's nothing in place to meaningfully stop big oil from selling their product and capitalists from using that oil to power whatever new useless scheme they can come up with to make number go up
"Convincing everyone isn't the goal; noticing direction is, and noticing who aligns with and against simple declarations of truth and decency will do that. Your practiced indifference to convincing your opponents, meanwhile, will deliver the message that truth and decency are things that will be pursued without first receiving permission from indecent liars."
"[E]ssays like pg’s... create the permission structure for people to discriminate against me. [...] I’m better at my job than most. I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015. None of that will matter. It feels as if people like pg, or at least people he hangs out with, who once upon a time believed in me, who lifted me up, recognized my talent, would now prefer that I be relegated to the sex slave caste."
"When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me at work. It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of it."
"Embedding tricks and chain-of-thought prompting simply extends their ability to do more sophisticated pattern matching. The mathematical results imply that you can always find compositional tasks whose complexity lies beyond a given system’s abilities."
"Talking about AI’s environmental impact or its implications for the workforce will not work - they like that, it makes them feel dangerous. Instead of talking about taking money from artists, talk about how it makes them look cheap. If hurting and offending people is part of the point, then we can take that fun away from them by refusing to express hurt or offence, even if we feel it."
I would like to see their methodology, but their results ring true. "...since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe". file under "you treasure what you measure"
"blogging plus feed readers started out a lot more decentralized than Bluesky has, and having one big player enter the room and then exit effectively killed the system"
from the annals of wrongheaded misunderstandings of the purpose of a technique: "Jeffersonian transcription is slow going. On one hand, the process of re-listening to the audio to add more and more details helps the researcher understand the mechanisms underlying the interaction. On the other hand, the laborious process limits the amount of data researchers can analyze. For example, it would be close to impossible to generate enough Jeffersonian transcripts to train a deep learning language model" next up: thicken your description with GeertzGPT
"This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it's targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM's - but really, like the plants it is named after, it'll eat just about anything that finds it's way inside."
"The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics." essentially: metrics normalize
"using Deleuze to explain this idea is like referencing Einstein's general relativity to explain why you slipped and fell: It's not necessarily wrong, but it's overpowered and not particularly salient"
"...the idea of a utopia, a perfect place, seems naive and hopelessly unattainable—unless we revise our understanding to imagine utopia not as an unreachable destination, but as a flexible foundation for thinking critically about the present."
fedora stops accepting code licensed as CC0. the concern seems to be about the patent rights clauses, which may expose users of the code to patent litigation later on
"[T]he intersecting identities of those targeted by gender-based digital transnational repression – namely, their gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, and socio-economic class in the host country, among others – lead to compounded vulnerability. Exiled and diaspora women human rights defenders often lack robust social networks and support structures in their host societies, leaving them further isolated and exposed to state repression"