ceoln @ceoln@qoto.org

Things AI is good at now:
✔️ analyzing a massive log file
✔️ illustrating Will Smith eating spaghetti
✔️ fixing grammar and phrasing

Things AI is not good at now:
❌ medical or psychiatric advice
❌ driving
❌ illustrating people in cars

From the fabulous If, Then series: On Friday, March 22 at 1PM Angela Chang will lead If, Then-ers in a Remix-a-thon for Taper, an online literary magazine for small computational pieces, published by Bad Quarto. Taper is "a twice-yearly journal that hosts very short computational poems and other sorts of digital literary work, composed under the strictures of poetic compression and using practices of sizecoding. org by Carly Schnitzler and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScr_VqI7As7gQvYaDVgYBiKzLbGGNi_Cy85FjqVITm12mWjMw/viewform

Yesterday the Rachel Maddow Show featured my scoop on a Russian disinformation op: Fake news sites meant to look legitimate sharing allegedly "leaked" audio of 2 US officials discussing backing Russian opposition. Take watch, and read: https://www.thedailybeast.com/victoria-nuland-and-jim-obrien-impersonated-in-russian-influence-hoax

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar notes that GOP gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, Mark Robinson, has said, “I don’t care if you’re 24 hours pregnant. I don’t care if you’re 24 weeks pregnant. I don’t care. If you kill that young’un, it is murder.”

But Robinson admits he himself has paid for an abortion — so he's admitting to murder.

Kareem concludes, "Bad for Black people. Bad for North Carolina. Bad for America. But good enough for Republicans."

#MarkRobinson #GOP

https://kareem.substack.com/p/france-just-took-over-as-world-leader

Josh Kovensky reports,

"A men-only, Christian-only, right-wing secret society with the aim of installing certain kinds of Christians in a future U.S. government does not want to be called Christian nationalist."

#ChristianNationalism
/1

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/experts-place-new-secret-society-squarely-in-the-christian-nationalist-revival

Billionaires are taking over everything. How can we stop them? I have some thoughts. https://youtube.com/shorts/0BKGYKboVZQ?feature=shared

When eight-year-old Emma Glenfield wanted to know more about why magpies swoop at people, her teacher (Luke Carr) encouraged her to gather data and analyse it.

She noted that the birds seemed to target tall balding men, and created an online survey with the help of her mum. The survey went viral, with over 30,000 respondents.

The results, as shown in a brilliant Lego graph, demonstrated that the birds do target balding men more frequently (with less than 1% margin of error, thanks to the large sample size).

"According to magpie expert Darryl Jones, professor emeritus at Griffith University, it's the first time anyone has ever examined the link between magpie swooping and appearance."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-09/magpies-swoop-bald-more-often-survey-finds/103297520

The ABC article includes more details, along with this excellent Lego graph (and other great pictures).

#MathEd #Magpie #Lego #Australia

Gravity waves caused by complex terrain over the Tibetan Plateau can enhance the intensity of spring rainfall https://phys.org/news/2024-03-gravity-complex-terrain-tibetan-plateau.html #science

in honor of women's day, here is an extremely incomplete list of fellow women on Wikipedia who are iconic to me

I just finally deployed something I've been working on for a few weeks now: a feed of my writing, posting, reading, and other various activity that lives on my website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed!

I've admired the POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE; "Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere") model for a long time, but only finally found the time and energy to put something together that I'm actually happy with.

indieweb, POSSE

@donutage @nix @Defiance
I made all the music I released on my circa-1999 mp3 store free to download, if you like 90's bay area punk and some weird stuff:

https://www.newdisorder.com/mp3store/bandbrowse.php

On Donald Trump talking about cutting Social Security and Ben Shapiro saying the quiet part the only way he knows how (loud) https://www.findinggravity.net/p/work-at-the-mill-until-you-die

RANDOM REMINDER

there is no "left of center" in a country where the elites have coalesced around two parties and now one of said parties has openly embraced fascism.

you are either fascist or antifascist. there are no moderates or centrists in that political equation.

Drugs are cheap, government-granted patent monopolies make them expensive Drug companies DO NOT want a free market https://cepr.net/in-a-free-market-drugs-are-cheap-government-granted-patent-monopolies-make-them-expensive/

I remember when the mushroom people were angry about something like this a few weeks ago. Someone had published "books" on amazon that claimed to be edible mushroom identification guides.

And they were AI garbage. Garbage that could get people very dead.

Since English is my first language the bad writing gives some of it away (but not always) but please don't think that people being tricked by this ocean of meaningless garbage isn't a real threat.

We've made the internet useless.

"I guess it is a bit like begging. I am debasing myself for this, for him, for my cunt."

NEW #AudioPorn - exclusively for Patreons at the moment - by the incomparably filthy @Mollysdailykiss

Come listen to 'needy bitch' - and if you're not yet subscribed, now's a good time to do an annual sub because you get 16% off, which is the biggest discount Patreon allows...

https://www.patreon.com/posts/needy-bitch-new-100154960 #NSFW #cunt #begging

NEW research: https://sparktoro.com/blog/who-sends-traffic-on-the-web-and-how-much-new-research-from-datos-sparktoro/

The wait's over. Thanks to the amazing team at https://datos.live, we can finally answer questions about:
- Who sends traffic to the open web (besides Google)?
- How much? Does it go to the long tail, or just the top few sites?
- What's changing?

If this research is valuable to you, I'd truly appreciate amplification (the reach is how I'll justify getting to do more studies like this!)

My dearest Bryce,

I can. And I do. And I will continue to do so. I will use whatever tools exist today however I please to try and bring about the better world I want to live in tomorrow. Now kindly take your fascist “love it or leave it” demagoguery, shove it up your ass, and fuck off out of my mentions. https://infosec.exchange/@NationMeta/112077178052261355