Mike Agg has moved @countingquoll@qoto.org

WOOOF: "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

CW: for textual description of child death at the link.

The lockdown project for one of my parents neighbours was to build a scale model of the lake district from Lego. It’s now in the local museum.

The pinnacle of RTO stupidity is requiring people to be in the office some number of days per week, combined with hot-desking. Leads to the fact that people who are ostensibly in the office for improved collaboration now sit at desks spread all over the office space, and then using their remote collaboration tools from the office. Including Teams calls.

Managers implementing this sort of policy deserve a bucket of ice water dumped over their heads.

BBC News - Why private helicopters are still in demand

Bellends? Is the answer "Bellends"?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67635051

Tonight's the night! For anyone joining in at home, here's this month's MathsJam Shout with some puzzles and games for you to enjoy (no spoilers please!) https://mathsjam.com/shout/MJShout.pdf

BREAKING: food bloggers are adding nightshade and other poisons to online recipe pages to defeat “cooked.wiki” and other advert/revenue-stripping robots
https://alecmuffett.com/article/108955
#ArtificialIntelligence #CookedWiki #TheModernNonna #food #nightshade

"What's the lesson here, guys?"
"We don’t know.”
"C’mon, think about it."
"Don't be assholes?"
"Don’t be assholes. Especially to…”
"To the guy with the thumbs?"
"To the guy with the thumbs."

The thing is, we wouldn't even have to eat that many rich people for things to get real different real quick.

"Go to an old cemetery. See all the baby graves from before the 1950s & 60s? After that, hardly any. That's when people started vaccinating their children against deadly childhood diseases. If you're unsure what to do to protect your kids, the answer is literally written in stone." — Michael Okuda

Without vaccines, many transmissible diseases were once an early death sentence. People are so quick to forget how fortunate we are to have access to them.

REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)

Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.

Oh, this is *masterful*

"My husband plays the trumpet, which is a sort of loud pretzel originally invented to blow down the walls of fucking Jericho and, later, to let Civil War soldiers know it was time to kill each other in a river while you chilled eating pigeon in your officer’s tent twenty miles away, yet somehow, in modern times, it has become socially acceptable to toot the bad cone inside your house before 10:00 a.m. because it’s “your job” and your wife should “get up.” What a world! If one was feeling uncharitable, one might describe the trumpet as a machine where you put in compressed air and divorce comes out, but despite this—despite operating a piece of biblical demolition equipment inside the home every bright, cold morning of his wife’s one and only life—the trumpet is not the most annoying thing about my husband."

— Lindy West: The Witches Are Coming, p. 122

I saw this quote floating around the internets a while back and as a husband and former trumpet player I knew I had to read this book.

I'm nearly done with it and so glad I picked it up.

what will be the big hot shit after AI dies out?

I hope it's naps

Pillaged from BlueSky:

It is essential to stop using Chrome.

Under the pretense of saving users from third-party spyware, Google is creating an ecosystem in which Chrome itself is the spyware.

Given Google's overwhelming presence in the browser market, this is unconscionable.

We should all despise the ad-tech business, and have no sympathy for the companies getting whacked by Google's actions. But we should not permit one monopolist to replace them all.

I just started Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy and I feel like I'm 11 years old again. I read her books more slowly than I have read anything in years because I don't want them to end. Treasure❤️

#Fantasy #Bookstodon

A different perspective for those folks who are having trouble seeing women's point of view.

#AbortionRightsAreHumanRights #Abortion

"Earlier this month, Polish hackers known as Dragon Sector accused one of Poland’s largest train makers, Newag, of intentionally bricking its own trains when they’re repaired by third parties. Newag threatened to sue Dragon Sector, but the story exploded as an example of why we deserve the right-to-repair and the company is facing an investigation from the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection"

https://gizmodo.com/how-a-group-of-train-hackers-exposed-a-right-to-repair-1851128745