Notices by Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫ (petealexharris@mastodon.scot)

@si_irini
I'd work on what needed to be worked on, but I wouldn't be selling my labour at an unfair price under the threat of poverty to someone who skims off the value of my labour to play Number Go Up games.

Work isn't unpleasant. Being robbed (stolen from under coercion) is unpleasant.

"Socially conservative" just means bigoted, doesn't it? We can just say they're bigots, right? Unless there's a counter-example I've missed.

If someone wants to keep to their own values, they can already do that.

But the very project of insisting *society* not change too much is inherently about telling other people what they mustn't accept and what they can't change, from a position of ignorance (you don't have the information a million other people have about their own lives).

So, bigots.

@KimSJ @selzero
OK I wasn't being entirely fair.

@selzero
That's on them. They've had plenty of time to come up with something worth talking about.

Again the BBC demonstrate that by their criteria, criticising established power is bias, but sucking up to it is impartial, since sucking up to established power is normal and natural and a completely morally neutral thing to do.

Exercising journalistic power against the more powerful is right out: a resign or be fired offence. It's *taking sides*, you see.

Wielding a journalistic platform carelessly against those without power is, again, normal and natural therefore impartial.

@Infoseepage @cstross The capabilities may be strategically important. The details of the implementation may not be.

@Infoseepage @cstross

I suspect "maintaining something like a Starlink constellation" might not be an optimal design goal for solving the problem. Like, we aren't building the equivalent of the cybertruck or hyperloop either.

@MediaActivist
The bar was so low, so fucking low.

I think there's some recency bias here. Boris Johnson bullshitted us chaotically out of the EU and was caught partying while people's grans died of COVID. He's objectively worse.

All Starmer had to do to reap the popularity benefits of being Not The Tories was simply Not Be A Tory, in policy or affect, and he shat that bed so hard that he's now less popular than the guys who were openly defrauding the taxpayer during a deadly pandemic.

I'm not going to be cooperating with any kind of new government identity scheme until the government respect the gender identities of trans people, including non-binary genders.

Fuck you, make me.

I've found a use for AI. If you start typing a sentence and it successfully autocompletes what you were about to say, it was obviously something trite and overdone, so delete it and think of something better.

@ai6yr
Always fascinated by the "journalistic after".

"Reuters even reported that a man died after pursuing one to an address it gave him in New York."

We all die "after" a lot of things. I'm pretty sure the story of how going to a particular address in New York killed a guy is more interesting than the AI part of the story, but we'll never know.

@rustoleumlove @ai6yr

You're right to disagree: I was wrong about it being more interesting.

I'm fully on team "LLM chatbots are dangerous", to be clear. I just think the media aren't making any effort to understand or say out loud WHY they're dangerous and cannot be made safe, and it's not primarily this kind of thing, tragic and cruel as it is.

There was never any reason to believe a stranger on the internet was a hot girl who wants to meet up, even before LLMs could sound like one.

Trump may or may not be dead, but it's an experiment in whether psychic powers are real: can millions of people hoping it's true finish him off?

@Frank Everybody who already talked like that can't understand why we don't trust anyone who talks like that. They had a focus group delve deeply into the question, and one thing seems clear — more research is needed.

@Nickiquote

Labour are avowed centrists now, and centrism is a form of extremism that denies morality in politics. There is no right thing or wrong thing to do, there are only middle things to do.

They've let the far right decide where the middle thing is on trans rights by letting exterminationism be one of the sides to find a middle ground with, instead of rejecting the idea of debating human rights *outright*, which a progressive party would do.

@eniko @amy @kryphos

None of the previous software hype cycles have turned out to be as inevitable as claimed at the time and none of the future ones will either.

Nobody is using expert systems written in Prolog to automatically generate all their software from natural language specifications, and nobody is "missing out" or "left behind" as a result of that never happening.

@bifouba @aral

Exactly. It's not about how many, it's about who was killed and with what intent and rhetoric.

If there was any safe number of an ethnic minority countries were allowed to murder before it was officially a genocide triggering sanctions under international law, you can be sure some countries would be killing that many minus 1 every year.

The problem is Israel has realised there may be no number of Palestinians they can kill that will cause any meaningful pushback by the West.

A dragon sitting on a pile of treasure is a profoundly amoral being.

You don't slay it to get the gold "back", you slay it because otherwise there is no end to what it will demand as tribute. It'll burn a city to increase its pile even by a small amount, and it will *never* not demand the pile get larger.

All spaces should be safe for all women.

Any attempt to designate specific safe spaces for women as a benevolent gift of the patriarchy (outside of which boys will be boys) harms women.

Any attempt to carve out exceptions to who counts as sufficiently a woman to deserve safety as a woman (especially legislated for by the governments and courts of the patriarchy) harms women.

If a 56-year old white man can understand this, anyone who claims not to is a liar or a dimwit.

If #Musk is allowed to say "#CivilWar is inevitable", we're allowed to say revolution and the uncompensated nationalisation of the assets of billionaires is inevitable.