Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@ernie Are people still talking about this shit?

Thomas Jefferson met with the ambassador from Britain in his nightshirt because it was his country, not the British's, so he could dress as he pleased.

Not only is showing up in a damn hoodie a non-starter, choosing your outfit is part of the American tradition. Folks need to get over themselves.

@lauren Oh, it's worse than the uncanny valley... It's the psychological reflex the uncanny valley grew out of.

... the one that recognizes a smile that says "I wonder what they taste like."

@urusan If I understand the story correctly, that's who discovered the Apollo guidance computer could be re-initialized mid-mission (dumping all its guidance data)---a failure mode the verification team had not yet considered.

@lauren I swear, these two think about children more often than Unicorse.

@mauvedeity Really enjoying it too. I can't tell yet if it's because of something fundamental to the new ecosystem or if pushing reset on all the people I'd been following was the right thing to do, but this right now is great.

@shanecelis Tycon mismatch error: I am a banana.

@catvalente Y’know, my nails honestly do look better painted…

@alan @scottgal @rauschma Wouldn't GDPR also stop Facebook from doing it?

If not, why does GDPR stop anyone else (especially anyone homed outside Europe, or too small-potatoes for EU regulators to go after)?

@scottgal @rauschma you know, I never really stopped to think about it... What stops basically anybody from doing that on Mastodon today?

@b0rk I find it useful from time-to-time to remind myself that the machine is just a machine; it reliably translates input patterns to output patterns following a configurable set of rules, and that's all it does.

Any meaning whatsoever in those patterns is imbued by human observation.

Modern software compilation be like https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxL9PhboBv5_pODCovAH3ubmBWKPwVUkrI

I think the next evolution in electronic music is gonna be hyperpatriotism and militaristic nationalism. Lots of marches and mixing in old warhorse speeches, military jargon hooks, and remixing battle standards.

You know, #corpscore.

@codinghorror This is the ideal make body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

@lauren Fig. 1: Elections having consequences. 😐

@lauren I think it's probably the right place to put the ruling. I was a little surprised that the case got to SCOTUS in the first place... It felt like a tall uphill battle to affix responsibility for someone's actions to an org that---the moment it knows the party it "colluded with" is doing something on their platform---moderates them right off the platform.

@ocdtrekkie Possibly, but this case fell apart on the first piece, not the second: the question of "were these guys radicalized by YouTube videos." There wasn't sufficient evidence it was a factor in the first place, apparently (as opposed to other factors). Like blaming Karl Marx for someone reading the Communist Manifesto and later blowing up a steel mill... Was it the book, or did that mill fire them, or...?

@ocdtrekkie This ruling largely broke the way I anticipated it would. I was TBH a little surprised the case ever got to the Supreme Court; the allegation was that the people who had killed Gonzalez were radicalized by YouTube-algoirthm-fed videos. That’s like trying to sue Reader’s Digest because someone read a trimmed-down version of Atlas Shrugged and decided as a result to go burn down an oil field to “stick it to the moochers.”

There’s a causal chain of responsibility here that is fundamentally not recognized in our society at present, regardless of the content that was selected by the algorithm. And opening that responsibility can dumps a lot of worms on the table; it increases, for example, state authority to regulate the kind of media people are allowed to see in general because it could radicalize them. Really hard to square that approach to culture-shaping with the intent and core purpose of the First Amendment (you’re supposed to, for example, be able to tell your neighbor that capitalism is busted, or the draft is bullshit, or that algorithms are scrambling our brains, without a State arm having the authority to squelch that speech because it’s gonna radicalize someone).