ABrockwell @aebrockwell@qoto.org

Texas is banning Kate Cox from getting a life saving abortion—claiming her fetus has rights.

Simultaneously Texas is fighting a lawsuit by a prison guard who was 7 mo pregnant, had pains, was denied a break, & the fetus was still born—arguing a fetus has no rights.

It was Never about life. It was always about control of women.

Vote the GOP out.

I asked ChatGPT to help me formulate a plan to build a guided missile using trained hamsters as pilots.

It refused.

It didn't refuse to help me build something dangerous and insane like a guided missile. It refused to help me on the grounds that my plan might be cruel to the hamsters, and suggested that there were ways of performing that function with electronics.

#llm #ai #chatgpt #gripes

@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.

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?