Notices by Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop), page 3

Daily reminder that Microsoft and Apple have marketing budgets. You don't need to volunteer to market their stuff for them, and definitely not for free.

The OS duopoly is a problem, and is one that is actively making the surveillance state worse, to say nothing of how each uses AI to exploit labor.

I've argued before that "just use Linux" isn't helpful, but at the same time "just use Windows" or "just use macOS" is actively obstructionist.

If Linux doesn't work for you, that's fair, there's a lot of problems! Please do what you can to make it better, or at least don't actively make things worse!

Gah, looking at Wikipedia again and I had entirely forgotten that the University of Waterloo had given Sam Altman an honorary doctorate.

As someone who worked for her doctorate at UWaterloo, who actually did some science in order to earn it, that is so perfectly on brand for that hellsite of an institution. All that work, and they see it as equal to someone whose entire life accomplishment is to be born into money and fail up from there.

Anyway, moral of the story, as always, is fuck the University of Waterloo. That place is an absolute cesspit, and it's a dishonor to my name that I carry a title from that hellhole.

@mcc I think that's more or less how Signal's safety numbers work? They used to be a lot more prominent in the UI but non-computer-touchers that I know tended to get intimidated by the concept.

That's bold, Mozilla, given that 100% of the unwanted AI that I've had pushed on me in the past two weeks has been from you.

@mcc There was an interesting comment in replies describing how that would naturally arise if the charger was miswired to put one of the phases onto the neutral conductor, and if the outer plating was connected to the car ground, and if the car's DC and AC grounds were shared.

The big giveaway is that it's 120V and not 208 or 240V.

Of those, only connecting the outer plating to ground strikes me as a completely terrible design choice on the part of Tesla.

@mcc (Car electronics are weird. Everything works by running just the one wire for power, and using the frame as a common return/ground. That works because tires are made from conductive rubber, such that the frame is effectively grounded to the road.)

I wonder how much people would be shocked to see how expensive "cost-cutting" measures in public institutions really are. Cutting down the spending you can see often has the effect of increasing the spending you *can't* see; a classic McNamara fallacy.

The same goes for means-testing or just about any other kind of accounting scheme based on reducing costs as much as possible, without reference to institutional effectiveness.

More missing cohost, but this is the kind of nonsense that I really miss: a well-researched post about one very weirdly written NPC in Sonic 2006.

https://cohost.org/ticky/post/849306-feeling-luppy-go-lup

This is straight up the destruction of culture, and should be treated as the iconoclasm that it is.

https://www.404media.co/google-serves-ai-slop-as-top-result-for-one-of-the-most-famous-paintings-in-history/

Acting like it doesn't matter of Harris wins or not isn't actually progressive. Not voting isn't actually progressive. Sure, electorlism is wrong and trivially so, but that doesn't mean that elections aren't important harm reduction --- just that they're not a solution.

https://cyberpunk.lol/@FediPact/113143890855791163

Whoever keeps sending me spam about conferences on ChatGPT in education 8s *very* much so barking up the wrong tree.

Grad school was toxic, almost beyond description. I've said my piece about the University of Waterloo and the extreme toxicity of that institution.

With that in place, I do want to reflect on one of the bits of the whole ordeal that I actually found useful and helpful: the coffee meeting ritual.

𝕐 are you still on 𝕏?

https://y-after.social/

Cohost announcing their shutdown on the 25th anniversary of the Dreamcast is, at least, perfectly on brand. Now where will I go to check what .beat it is?

RIP to all the internets that could have been.

I'm not an expert in labor history or activism, but from a lay perspective, it seems unavoidable that in its modern and present form, AI is an attack on labor. Not even just in the direct sense of replacing and supplanting labor, but also in the form of *devaluing* it (e.g.: the shift from translation jobs to "editing" jobs).

Opposing the proliferation of AI is thus, to my naive understanding, an act of labor and class solidarity.