Notices by Hugo (hugo@assemblag.es), page 5

just on the off chance: does anyone out there have recommendations for resources to learn the basics of the simplified Yang-style 24-form Tai Chi sequence on your own?

video, online materials, recorded classes, anything else.

saturdays are for... clearing your email backlog. urgh.

enough snow to walk up a small courtyard labyrinth outside the humanities building, as is tradition. folklorists represent.

holy fucking shit.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

the internet of things wasn't stupid enough, apparently.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/29/generative-ai-is-coming-to-your-home-appliances/

grading some student submissions and got my first ChatGPT bullshit essay—in Norwegian. fuck this.

stopped reading a potentially interesting piece halfway through because the author started uncritically boosting garrett hardin.

regular reminder here that garrett hardin was a racist, eugenicist scumbag and an intellectual charlatan, whose "tragedy of the commons" was a simplistic theoretical model based on a falsified historical account, peddled authoritatively as "science."

here's the southern poverty law center on hardin: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/garrett-hardin

here's a piece by @pluralistic, from 2019.

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/07/scientific-fraud.html

@TonyJWells @pluralistic

so much this. my own critique of the concept is really just a mediation of critiques I learned from working with reindeer pastoralists, years ago—in a situation where the state *first* destroyed the existing pastoral commons, by legislating away the traditional tools and measures by which they had been managed, *then* pointed to the resulting chaos and called it a "tragedy of the commons," *then* used that as an argument for saying herders couldn't regulate themselves.

seems interesting to me that with the advent of ChatGPT, spelling errors and incorrect grammar are now a marker of human writing.

incorrect references are ambiguous, but fabricated references are an almost unequivocal marker of bot writing.

wonder if and how written languages will adapt, if the barrage of synthetic spam keeps up.

probably my best prophylactic for the spambot fever of the early 2020s was that I built two simple recombinational markov-chain bots based on my twitter corpus circa 2015, put up a warning they were bots, then spent the better part of a decade watching one stranger after another convince themselves they were actually sentient and occasionally fall in love with them.

for those of us on the outside, spending the rest of the year watching the US succumb to its own fascist heart is going to be fucking rough.

if you had a time machine, what's the point in time where you would intervene to stop america happening the way it did?

boy oh boy. there goes peer review.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468023024002402

trying to transfer money to a US institution but apparently they exist in the 1970s, they refuse all forms of electronic payment and you have to send them either a cheque or something called a "money order".

is this common in the US?

neither of these even physically exist in Norway. customer service person at my bank said they'd never heard of "such things" but referred me to a specialist section within the bank as if to a department of sorcery.

one thing I have a bit of difficulty parsing is that 2019 was five years ago.

counting from the first national lockdown on march 12, our fifth year of the pandemic starts next week.