Dave T-W @davoloid@qoto.org

“Silicon Valley as a whole is still wrestling with how to reconcile competitive pressures with safety.”

➡️Are they though? It seems to me that those in charge (i.e. VCs and C-suite execs) are really only interested in competition (for $$).

“But ChatGPT’s remarkable debut meant that by early this year, there was no turning back.”

➡️False. We turned back from lead in gasoline. We turned back from ozone-destroying CFCs. We can turn back from text synthesis machines.

>>

@timkmak

This reminds me that Mastodon needs a reminder bot like Reddit has to remind me to check back in 40 hours....

The US should invade the US, set up a framework for democracy, and build roads and schools.

I have a new game! And it is out now:

Drift Mine Satellite is a maintenance text adventure about a person living underground in a limestone mine, and their work on the local communication network that has sprung up there.

It is a utopian apocalypse fantasy, a forever-camping world narrowed to linear miles of RVs parked under a mountain, the people who live in them, and the systems that interconnect them, both social and material.

Find Drift Mine Satellite here; http://solarprotocol.net/sunthinking/#pipkin

🛰️

i try never to judge people's knowledge by how they speak

i had a prof with a thick hill-ppl accent who couldn't pronounce a multisyllable word properly to save his life

he was a world-renowned expert on Russia who had consulted w the CIA, the State Dept, and major corps

i had a prof from Brooklyn who couldn't get thru a sentence w/o at least one "fuck"

he'd forgotten more about 17th c literature than most ppl have ever known

ppl talk how they talk. it has nothing to do w expertise

> Altruism stops for a child crossing the road.
>
> Effective Altruism keeps going so as not to
> delay the hundreds of people in traffic behind.
>
> "Longtermism" swerves to hit the child so no
> one will ever again be delayed by them or
> their descendants.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> — Rúnar @runarorama@twitter.com, Sep 2022

#EA #EffectiveAltruism
#Longtermism
#TESCREAL

It dawned on me - this was the entire purpose of Twitter all along.

To give fascists and fakes the same weight as the truth tellers, and in fact, tip the scale toward the fascists and fakes.

It was always the point. Creating unreality and forcing people to live in it is necessary component of fascism—to train people to not believe their eyes—to erode trust.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heidicuda/p/tokyo-twitter-rose-bigfooting-the?utm_source=direct&r=1tfo38&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

@mhoye "Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'."
-Terry Pratchett

Congratulating a former minister for pushing through the biggest prison-building programme in over a century doesn’t sound like the accolade it is meant to be. It is manifest evidence of an utter failure of government.

If under your watch you’ve had to hugely increase the number of people in jail then surely you have been doing things wrong. Maybe Mr Sunak and colleagues should ask why this has been necessary and what it is about their policies over a decade and a bit that has required this.

Quick thread to answer @Loukas's (excellent) question:

"Were first Royal Navy aircraft carriers were built slower on purpose because they were designed to stay with battleships?"

This is something that does come up a lot in 70s/80s books. But the answer is... no.

This seems to have mostly been a bit of a misunderstanding about how carriers WORK (no really).

Let's look quickly at the reasons why: 🧵 #histodons #histodon #navalHistory /1

I feel you Cyan Cartridge, I feel you.

@breadandcircuses "If Americans adopted the carbon footprint of their European counterparts, their emissions would already be cut in half."

@statto The fact that all of these new technologies are couched in this Utopian language is deeply disturbing. And every one has brought highly asymmetric benefits to society. And not precautionary anything. Imagine pharmaceutical companies saying we're going to spray the world with our newly inhalable vaccine against common disease because that way everyone will be healthier… No need for a clinical trial. No explanation of what's in the spray… And governments just sit by watch it happen.

What is the point of games?
For Lizzie Magie, the idiosyncratic genius who inspired Monopoly, the answer was clear: she thought games are educational.
Klaus Teuber, the equally brilliant designer of the board game Catan, had a different view: he thought games are fun.

https://enterprise-sharing.ft.com/redeem/2ff8d3fa-d127-45e2-9b73-d0928a2d1cba

@AstroKatie @hollie We just launched a volunteer-driven site http://SpreadMastodon.org to help explain it and make signing up crazy easier. Mastodon is our best shot to #TakeBackSocial. I hope it might make Mastodon more approachable to people like your colleagues (who are far from alone!).

You will not go to space today. Well done to everyone who got that monster rocket off the pad.
via https://youtu.be/eAl3gVvMNNM