Notices by a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social), page 2

I think even this sort of armchair podcast level criticism needs to be able to tackle arguments like the one in the palmer lucky tweet they mention head on by actually understanding the point it's trying to make and addressing that point directly first before putting it in the 'great replacement' square hole

Re that podcast about the war department AI announcements: At risk of tapping the sign I will highlight I evidently don't particularly care for defence contractors in general or this type of them in particular, so this is right up my alley in theory, but...

it is however, kind of funny that we are all thinking about dr. strangelove at the same time

like ultimately when somebody is cynically making multiple mutually exclusive arguments against immigration and voting rights in parallel, those arguments do belong in that square hole -- and I can't rule that out in this instance, but if you want to present a case for that and you have one to present you still have to actually present it if you want to convince anybody

or else they just come across as unserious, in the same sort of way as I view chapo trap house as unserious: a bunch of people who when you really look at it have revealed they don't actually care about the issues and are just sitting around using political issues as fodder for chatter and drama they ultimately have no position on in the manner of a sort of debate club

parody really did just die in the past couple of years didn't it

Earlier in the day when this literal news item was just a story reiterating a claim from a borough president about ICE impersonating NYPD and quoting a DHS spokesman's denial, I realized that that organization has a track record now of issuing false denials -- there is essentially no reason to believe a claim is false anymore just because that organization denies it

It's funny, this story has started and ended in the course of a day but what can we possibly take at face value?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/columbia-student-detained-federal-agents

I was thinking about my comment about the idea of nato as "team nuclear weapons" back in the before times, and about the idea of european countries recently pondering the french nuclear capability becoming a kind of umbrella for europe

are we as a human civilization across the world in 2026 more predisposed to the mumbo jumbo that this actually does anything beyond being a persistent existential threat than we were 10 or 60 years ago?

In that way it acts like a roman à clef -- where the key is that you have sufficiently great understanding the actual nature of organizations, or maybe sufficiently low gullibility towards the official line

This made me realize something about -- go with me on this journey -- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

The film is set up to look like a parody and certainly every act is played for comedy and the film functions if interpreted as parody, but actually the scenario is not a parody -- the blanket denial stapled to the front is the same one a politician or political appointee would issue one way or another, maybe without even consulting the facts first

' Julia was twenty-six years old. [...] and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. [...] She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. [...]'

https://bsky.app/profile/d1fferentp3rson.bsky.social/post/3meegmfjl322y

' But she was not interested in the finished product. She "didn’t much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces. ' - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

real life now indistinguishable from parody https://www.npr.org/2026/02/02/nx-s1-5696525/trump-nuclear-safety-regulations-environmental-review

@evan lol, spent a minute trying to figure out what the inverse of an REM single is :P

@thomasfuchs yeah it was clearly designed by somebody in boca raton that expected like maybe 5 or 6 models my dude

reading about companies that I only know about because of a single entry in ralf brown's table of INT 15 ah=c0 computer model values https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_Corporation

LB: This is so inscrutable too, like you can imagine a certain type of ceo guy deciding this is good in-house swag at the defence contrator, but no this is just a straight up publicly-available branding own-goal product

@whitequark @xgranade anyone know how many lines of code are in itunes?

@whitequark @xgranade since this is the proverbial "itunes of ebooks", should I ask a cursed question