To employees, contractors, and freelancers of Mass Media: Until you are no longer afraid to call somebody who lies a Liar, until you stop spinning election polls to make a landslide look like a horse-race, until you stop saying settled Science like evolution or climate change is controversial, and until you stop saying the phrase "both sides" in any context, until then you don't get call yourselves journalists anymore, and you are not welcome on Mastodon as far as I'm concerned.
Will Driving Electric Cars Solve Global Warming? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30q8eIJyzBQ
Oh NOOOOO! 6 giant African snails intercepted in baggage in Detroit. These are banned in the USA as an agricultural pest, and also carry human parasites that can cause meningitis 😱🐌 https://www.capitalpress.com/nation_world/nation/african-land-snails-found-in-luggage-at-michigan-airport/article_832708c1-518d-55a6-8ffc-5ad00415b093.html
@ct_bergstrom It's the information analogue of the "Grey Goo" scenario.
@ct_bergstrom With so much hype, one might wonder if it's an attempt by the marketing department to goose the stock price for a failing investment before the flaws are common knowledge.
The confluence of this technology with the information ecosystem that we described in our paper from a couple of years could be an epistemic catastrophe.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025764118
I’m coming to think that releasing these tools was a reckless act with the potential to generate negative externalities we have barely started to imagine.
The threat isn’t rogue superintelligence. It’s bullshit at unprecedented scale, reflected back upon itself and iteratively amplified.
Since Amazon doesn’t let DRM-free audiobooks into Audible, @pluralistic is self publishing his own audiobooks through Kickstarter for a while. Since I’m a really big fan of Cory and want to support his fight against DRM, I support his Kickstarter each time. (Although I usually go for ebooks, because I'm not good with audiobooks.)
If you want to support Cory and buy his latest book “Red Team Blues" in hardcover, DRM-free ebook or audiobook, here's the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell?ref=thanks-copy
On March 25, 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire took the lives of 146 workers, most of them immigrant women and girls, and galvanized a movement for social and economic justice.
Each year since 2004, on the anniversary of the infamous blaze, we fan out across NYC to inscribe in chalk the names and ages of the Triangle dead in front of their former homes.
Still looking for a few more chalkers for Brownsville + the LES
I do really like this -- but also wonder how many wrecks it might cause 🤔 https://bc.ctvnews.ca/giant-spider-sculpture-on-skytrain-route-shocks-vancouver-commuters-1.6316282
Twitter, silencing women, awareness
For those of us who still have a Twitter account, @Florie , the head of Pirate Parties International, has been permanently banned from Twitter following her testimony on sexism and sexual violence she had endured in her past. It looks like Twitter moderation has been instrumentalized to silence her. Thanks for any help raising awareness on Twitter and putting pressure on this so-called « Free Speech » social network. The hashtag is #freeflorie .
We were in the neighborhood, so we stopped by the vacant lot that once held The Demon House in Gary, Indiana. Legend has it that there is a portal to Hell under this tree. We didn't see any portals, but perhaps it wasn't business hours. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2014/05/the-200-demons-house-a-skeptical-demonologists-report/
Non-practicing intellectual