Notices by Mark T. Tomczak (mark@mastodon.fixermark.com)

@RikerGoogling OMG I want to start saying this. "LLMs lie because they're not trained on Big Data, they're trained on Big Lore."

@dalias @AnnaAnthro Ah yes, I forgot the classics. How foolish of me.

@dalias @AnnaAnthro Yep. Turns out the only actual problem with games journalism that "gamergate" pointed to is just a problem with "journalism."

@owl @schratze @CatsWhoCode @loren "THAT FOOL RICHARDS THINKS HE CAN INVENT NEW TYPES OF SCROLLING? HE WILL FAIL. SCROLLING BELONGS TO DOOM ALONE!!!"

@mcc One second, let me find a link.

https://eventsforchange.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-starfish-story-one-step-towards-changing-the-world/

tl;dr a fiction about someone throwing individual starfish back into the ocean when they wash up on a beach.

@mcc I spent a lot of time star-fishing on Twitter and Facebook, trying to get people to change their behavior.

I'm not sure it's useful. It may be the case that you're not here to change their behavior so blocking without explanation is fine and if they want your wisdom they can do the bare minimum work of, like, reading your profile or something.

(I mean, unless you are here to change their behavior; not telling you what to do. "I'm a shitposter, not a cop." 😉 )

@WarnerCrocker I feel this way about both my Ayn Rand phase and my Paul Graham phase.

My conclusion is "I guess I didn't actually have that much to compare those ideas to."

@jk Yep. Because the UI abstraction stack never actually got good.

To its credit, it did get less bad than it was when JQuery was king.

@futurebird Oh God, it's following me now.

Visited the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for the first time this weekend and they have fossils of that fish in five different places. It's IIUC the state fish fossil.

I swear, every time we turned around, it was staring at us. I'm going to remember "The Dunkleosteous had a self-sharpening beak" like I remember the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

@blogdiva Yes, all of this.

I've told people in the past that the power-move Apple made was to jump up and give the RIAA everything it wanted: format control, a very generous resource split, and encryption on the local files. They kept iTunes dancing to their flute until the alternatives had died.

... and then one day they turned around and took all that away, removed the encryption and changed the revenue share. And they said "What are you gonna do? Go to our competitor? Michael McWentBankrupt? You gonna build your own? With what talent? The talent we hired?"

It was a coup. A huge coup.

@rauschma Small-brain energy: "They should have stuck with the original Scheme-inspired design; that'd have been much better."

Big-brain energy: "They were smart to go with a language design that mirrored what people were familiar with. Yes, it had design flaws that we probably shouldn't have tolerated in what would become the assembly-language of the web, but there was no guarantee at the time it would hit the way it did and it's better we have something than nothing."

Galaxy-brain energy: "So that's why I'm announcing SchemeScript, my Scheme-inspired compiles-to-Javascript language with compile-time or run-time options for..." 😉

Americans: "Oh no, we couldn't possibly replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20; what kind of precedent would it set if we just started changing the picture on our money?"

Australians:

@mayadev @ton @ariaflame @cstross I agree it has consequences. My point is it should not. Source of authority on one's gender should be the person, not some document they didn't have agency over.

This unfortunate circumstance is giving the lie to the entire British government policy of caring deeply what one's birth certificate says about one's gender. It's an absurdity that proves the farcical nature of the whole system's approach.

@cstross "They'll assume our daughter is transgender" is big "And why should that be a problem?" energy.

@AnarchoNinaWrites Fair enough. I don't know you and therefore have no opinion of you. Only opinions on the likelihood that support for Israel or for Palestine was a major factor in this election.

@AnarchoNinaWrites 2021 was after people voted for Biden over Trump; they were still locked down when they were voting. And the lockdowns meant a lot of people who often can't vote because of other issues (like juggling 1.5 fulltime jobs and other responsibilities, y'know, the kinds of things that might lead a person to think "I bet the Democratic platform would make my life better") couldn't go to work on that Tuesday, so they voted.

Believe me, I'd like to think genocide was a major issue that made voters stay home. But it's hard to suss out this number set (as well as the fact that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016) without thinking "It's probably the pandemic."

Harris pulled more votes than either Clinton or Biden did.

@AnarchoNinaWrites BIden also beat Trump on "We are currently in lockdown due to a pandemic and that asshole is the one in charge."

It's hard to disambiguate what had a larger effect. Figuring out why people vote how they vote is the stats problem from hell.

@mekkaokereke This was pretty much the take in chaos monkeys, a book by a former ad exec at Facebook.

His take on the CA scandal it was that it was basically tea leaf reading. While there was certainly a risk that they could have hound some kind of fundamental breakthrough in shaping people's voting patterns through micro targeting based on social network, there wasn't very much evidence at all to suggest it worked. But what it did indicate is that the campaign was willing to spend money on everything--- They were trying tea leaf reading because they had already spent all the money they planned to on standard channel marketing, while the Clinton campaign thought that he was so obviously beatable that it wasn't worth the money to spend on counter advertising and grassroots campaigning in "fortress" states. The party instead moved a lot of the money from the presidential race to the down ticket races.

CA was a warning, not a cause of victory.

@mcc Recently learned that Einstein was pretty bearish on black holes also. In that case, it was because (IIUC) his process was often "Think about a possible model for how the universe works, think through the consequences of that model, test those consequences against reality..." And when he applied that reasoning to the gravitational singularities in the math he went "But that would imply there would be these... holes in space. We've been looking for thousands of years and we don't see any holes; where are all the holes?"

I can't remember if he lived long enough for astronomers to get back to him with "Well now that we know we should be looking for 'wild bullshit happening around nothing'... We turned our telescopes towards that and UH-OH!"

@mcc Yes, I love this.

This is the thing I sometimes think is missing from a lot of science education--- We can get so hung up on having students memorize explanations for things that we can forget that the whole point of the explanations is that there are real phenomenon that make no intuitive sense whatsoever and the explanations are the best we can do with unifying all these otherwise disparate, random, mad world behaviors into something approaching a human-shaped story.

Time dilation sounds like nonsense idea a person made up to troll you until you find out the history of people conducting experiments to figure out the speed of light and getting baffled by the observation that the damn thing doesn't change!