Rowley @Rowley@qoto.org

@SiliconJets
JFC- that's 5 people putting out
225 *TONS* OF CO2 IN A WEEK!
I wonder if the next generation of guillotines will be #privateJet engines.
#environment #climatechange

"ll the big, exciting uses for AI are either low-dollar (helping kids cheat on their homework, generating stock art for bottom-feeding publications) or high-stakes and fault-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology, hiring, etc.). Every bubble pops eventually. When this one goes, what will be left behind?" asks @pluralistic in this interesting take on the AI bubble. https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

"And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America."
https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

Who could blame it?

*Boy, Spain and Italy are dong great, cheerfully said the American. guy who spent a lot of time in Italy and Spain

Do not get me started on PUNK EVENTS that require me to open and interact with FACEBOOK in order to buy tickets. Fucking FACEBOOK. You're meant to be punk, goddammit.

This is brilliant.

It’s called being condescending; maybe you’ve heard of it.

@ai6yr

I always was of the opinion that you could hold the shift key down on a keyboard and bang your head on the top row...

And you'd get some sort of valid perl code.

I’m still pissed at Elon for two things:

1) making me learn how to spell Mastodon
2) that he didn’t buy and ruin LinkedIn instead

An ex-philosopher friend remarked to me yesterday that academicsjudging prestige and success by citation metrics incentivizes the same thing in slow-motion as social media algorithms judging success of content creators by engagement metrics, and it has thrown me into an existential crisis.

#philosophy #academia @academicchatter #publishing #academics #clout

HO. LEE. SHIT.

MURDERBOT SERIES! With Martha Wells as consulting producer! YES!

Ngl, Alexander Skarsgård's name, there, caught me off-guard, as I always read SecUnit as AGGRESSIVELY agender. Like, if I had my own personal druthers Murderbot would be portrayed by a particularly buff Asia Kate Dillon or Vico Ortiz.

But I also a) love Skarsgård's work, and b) take heart that Martha Wells is directly consulting. So I'm gonna stay in "Cautiously Hype" territory.
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/apple-murderbot-series-alexander-skarsgard-1235838405/

Choosing to illustrate this stupid advice-column question with a picture of @AoC is a passive-aggressive, misogynist slap from The Times.

This is spectacular.

"What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity.”

— William S. Burroughs

Dear Microsoft. Here is a list of things I want the Start Menu to do:

* Show my installed programs
* Search my local files
* Provide access to system settings

Here is a list of things I do *not* want the Start Menu to do:

* Show the weather for a randomly-selected town near my network's public IP infrastructure
* Show tabloid headlines
* Show programs I *don't* have installed
* Search the web via Bing
* Show adverts(!)
* Attempt to engage me in conversation with a hallucinating LLM

Thanks.

“As humans we so often feel helpless in our own smallness yet still, we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things and this is where the meaning of life resides.”

It's just one of the many compelling lines that the outstanding Nick Cave created. Listen and enjoy Stephen Fry reading Nick Cave's letter about ChatGPT and human creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGJcF4bLKd4

#ai

“You there, boy, who’s the CEO of OpenAI?”

Esta es la rana Paedophryne amauensis, un anfibio endémico de Papúa Nueva Guinea en Oceanía. Mide solo 7.7 milímetros (menos de 1 cm) y es el vertebrado más pequeño del mundo. Fue descubierta en el año 2009.