If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices
istewart
joined 1 year ago
On the other hand, bombing foreign data centers, likely located in densely populated urban areas, would be justified and morally upstanding if it seems like they might be incarnating the imaginary computer god! I'm glad we have such a nuanced thinker guiding our modern morality.
I sharply disagree, but this is a subtlety that's lost on a lot of people. The tech industry's success since at least the 1990s, up until the mid-2010s, was about making technology easier for the individual user, a more accessible and (potentially) more efficient means for accomplishing many routine interactions. Tech devices existed as tools in service of the will of the end user, and if you were really willing to drink the kool-aid, extensions of the user themselves, Jobs' "bicycle for the mind."
The expectations being cultivated for AI now set it up as an entirely separate entity from the end user, and one that is potentially more capable at some point in the ill-defined future. This opens the door toward resources being reallocated towards this nebulously powerful entity, and the allocation of shared resources is at the very core of politics. This is a hard pivot away from how technology was designed before! You and I know it's a load of complete hogwash, but that doesn't prevent the potential bamboozlement of the lagging generation of policy-makers. Even someone as relatively young as Kamala Harris or her likely successor Gavin Newsom could be roped into this bullshit, if only because they know where their biggest donation checks come from.
The future in which the current crop of AI retailers enjoy a successful political program is no longer one where a rising tide lifts all boats. But, for the time being, it can still be pitched as such due to deeply embedded cultural expectations.
LOTR fans stay losing
Atlantic writer: "better dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuh"
Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.
This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobs' widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot "GW Bush Did Nothing Wrong" Cohen.
Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?
why do we want people who can't deliver viable technology raising more kids?
why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?
How interesting, a volcel who only thinks he’s an incel. Many such cases
LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as "Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy"
It's slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it's going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.
what do we pay this dang guy for, anyway
Come now, he was always about consing chodes into lists... Given his excessive self-seriousness, I doubt he's taken the time to pick up the skill of juggling them in the years since