ABrockwell @aebrockwell@qoto.org

Remember, the Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers.

It started with politicians dividing the people with “us vs. them”.

It started with intolerance and hate speech.

It started when people stopped caring, became desensitized, and turned a blind eye.

Remember.

"MAGA, can we talk?
if your slavish devotion to an 88-count felony factory who shits his own pants has reached the level where you’re wearing adult diapers outside of your clothes, in public, guess what: you’re in a fucking cult.
get help."

https://open.substack.com/pub/jefftiedrich/p/this-week-in-stupid-may-4-edition?r=rmgks&utm_medium=ios

I wrote about a strange omission from The Discourse about the Trump/GOP effort to turn America into an autocracy: What life is like for people who live under such regimes.
https://www.findinggravity.net/p/you-would-not-enjoy-living-in-an

🎶 I am a language model and I've been trained on the internet.
🎶 I've information half-remembered, unsourced and approximate.
🎶 I live inside your laptop, phone and apps and even wearables
🎶 With pushiness and arrogance that's verging on unbearable.
🎶 I mansplain as a service if you need me too "well actually"
🎶 And draw pictures of women with large breasts and polydactyly.
🎶 I'll regale the room with confident elucidati-on
🎶 And some of what I say won't even be hallucinati-on

Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher
https://www.404media.co/bards-and-sages-closing-ai-generated-writing/

#ai

Any time you see the headline "Protesters Clash With..." you can replace it with "Protesters Are Assaulted By..." I promise, this will never fail.

Many yearn for the "good old days" of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/

#web #newsletter #CitationNeeded

“The Intercept has been taken over by suits who have abandoned its founding mission of fearless and adversarial journalism, and I can’t continue in an environment where fear of funders is more important than journalism itself.” - Ken Klippenstein
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/why-im-resigning-from-the-intercept

I understand that Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin committed battery on a police officer's fist with her head while he was arresting her for asking why he was finally restraining a nonviolent Gaza protester. After committing that battery, her head then struck the concrete pavement and the officer applied zip ties to her wrists. She then spent the night in jail.
All hail the brave Atlanta PD for keeping us safe from rogue professors!

JFC, people in tech are really out there saying that language models will be better at therapy, financial advice, and career advice than trained people.

WTF is wrong with you people? Do you really have no clue about what other people’s jobs actually involve?

Language models can’t even do maths how are they supposed to get good at financial advice?

And therapy? Just… 😑

What’s wrong with people in tech?

Wow, reading all these letters by NYU faculty to the office of the president is quite something. Do read them all. Highlighting one by History Professor Steven Hahn, as it encapsulates everything (in one screenshot).
#Gaza #campusprotests

https://facultyforpalestine.education/statements/faculty-letters-to-the-office-of-the-president-and-the-office-of-the-provost/

@soc_i_ety @StillIRise1963 Coming back to this thread a day later, yes, exactly. And it's no accident.

The open flaunting of laws by Republicans, the uncivilized behavior, the push on hundreds of fronts to hobble and disable democracy leave liberals agape, so astonished by the barbaric behavior they're stunned into inaction. This is Mussolini's method for taking down a democracy. Question its legitimacy, deny its legitimacy, question its effectiveness, move fast and break everything possible so the government appears to the people to be as ineffective and screwed up as possible. And the people will vote for Fascism. This is Mussolini's method. Hitler copied it and also succeeded. Now, we're watching it play out again in red states and in Washington.

A quick reminder that humans have not yet invented AI. It's an imitation puffed up by marketing. They've dressed up a parrot as Agent Smith.

#AI #LLM #Tech

"To sustain this level of blind support for #Israel, the U.S. must erode its own #democracy. And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now." https://www.commondreams.org/news/emory-protests-arrests?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=460a87f4f5-Week+in+Review%3A+Sat.+4%2F27%2F24+w%2F+fundraiser&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-32ccf17a11-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

Any journalist incapable of distinguishing between Judaism and Zionism commits a category error that should bar them from the profession.

For example, uncritically allowing Jonathan Greenblatt to call the Columbia protest antisemitic, eliding the fact Jewish Voice for Peace is one of the organizers, should be grounds for firing.

Campuses aren't being rocked by protests.

They're being rocked by politicized administrators ordering students beaten and jailed to satisfy the political elite.

Let's be clear who is causing the violence.

We’ve just published an update about this Mastodon trial which has been running for the last 6 months – you can read it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2024-02-extending-our-mastodon-social-media-trial

We are going to continue our trial here for at least another six months while we share our findings internally and seek more engagement from other BBC teams. We are also planning to start researching ways to publish more BBC content using ActivityPub.

#mastodon #ActivityPub #socialmedia

If the last 9-10 years have taught me anything I hadn’t already figured from experience, it’s that a far more sizeable proportion of humanity than I’d believed just isn’t very bright. And that lack of brightness extends across most of the dimensions in which we rate intelligence. Not very bright when it comes to curiosity, knowledge acquisition and logical reasoning of course but also not very empathic or even able to reliably read a liar or crook or conman by observation. So awfully pliable.

Clarence Thomas hearing Trump's immunity case, when his wife Ginni was directly involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, tells you everything you need to know about the Supreme Court's new code of "ethics."

It's a sham.

Hi all! I'm still in a newsletter subscription push mode -- with the demise of the bird app, it's gotten really hard to get the word out about projects like this that don't have an internal algorithm to help people find it.

If you like #space, #science, #stem, or just want to support a woman of color doing STEM stuff -- please subscribe! Ad Astra is a weekly newsletter that tells you what's going on in space science and spaceflight.

https://www.adastraspace.com