ABrockwell @aebrockwell@qoto.org

@taylorlorenz Best of luck to everyone walking off at WaPo today!

What’s sad is realising you live in a world where every exaggerated analogy you used to make a point is actually happening:

Having Google in schools is like having McDonalds in nutrition class. (I find out that McDonalds does, in fact, sponsor nutrition classes in US schools.)

Having a surveillance capitalist sponsor a conference on free and open source/human rights is like having an oil company sponsor a climate conference. (Forget sponsoring, turns out head of #Cop28 runs an oil firm.)

🤬

#MSNBC deserves all the flak it's getting after canceling #MehdiHassan for "daring to practice journalism." https://www.commondreams.org/news/mehdi-hasan-canceled?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=7b6237f33e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_11_30_07_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-7b6237f33e-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

Today’s inspirational message:

This shot of a little wattlebird on a leucospermum (?) might be the best single frame I shot in Australia.

(You may need to click to see the image, given the portrait orientation.)

#birding #birdwatching #birdphotography #australianbirds

Fake AI generated content “marks a staggering fall from grace for Sports Illustrated, which in past decades won numerous National Magazine Awards for its sports journalism and published work by literary giants ranging from William Faulkner to John Updike.” https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers

The "effective altruism" and "effective accelerationism" ideologies that have been cropping up in AI debates are just a thin veneer over the typical blend of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, inflated egos, and greed. Let's try something else.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AIEthics #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAccelerationism #newsletter #CitationNeeded

More than 260 journalists (and counting) have now signed this letter. I’m one of them. https://form.jotform.com/233177455020046

The use the term "artificial intelligence" for stuff like chatGPT and LLMs is like how people use the name "hoverboards" for things that ride on the ground and do not in fact hover.

Typography: It's Important!

#humor #humour #writing #writingcommunity #signs #typography #graphicdesign

Microsoft paid money for this.

Lately on my mind has been... horseshoe orbits. ARE THEY 4 REALZ?

These come up all the time in planetary science and I know IN THEORY how they work: 2 objects share an orbit (e.g. moons, or a planet & asteroid) and from the perspective of one, the other appears to move in a horseshoe, approaching and then making a U-turn.

LOOKS TOTS UNLIKELY

So I made a #blender3d animation to prove this, by the camera observing the planetary system and then chasing the planet to view from that perspective.

It seems worth reiterating that the chaos roiling the tech sector today appears to come down to a conflict between two factions: one that is happy to boil the oceans and smother the world in nonsense if by doing so they can make a buck, and another that believes they are building a literal robot god whose infinite power can only be constrained by a priesthood steeped in the ideology of their weird cult

Man why does it seem like every country has to elect their own right-wing nutjob to independently (re-)discover what a bad idea it is?

Did we ever doubt people like Trump exist? No, of course not. We even knew this when we were in elementary school. But to think that such a large percentage of the population either don't believe reality and/or don't care about reality — and, instead, have deep desire for a despot to lead them — is so very difficult to believe. And yet here we are. This is the species to which I belong?

“Biden in recent days has accused the former Republican president of being “determined to destroy American democracy” and being out for “revenge” and “retribution.””

Hmmm… perhaps because he IS?

https://apnews.com/article/8ff0337afec92264ae6fbaf36f55e683