Notices by Ooze 𓁟 (ooze@aus.social)

@Viss @nixCraft Good.

@riskybusiness You do cybersecurity but you are using Adobe products?

@cnx 🫂

@juergen_hubert When I did my PhD they expected us to do marking for free.

@azonenberg And it could have a life force meter that slowly drops until by the time you have a PhD you have no will to live.

@bhalpin It is almost as if you train people to kill and send them off to actually kill people then when they come home they still kill people.

@aral This is the kind of sweeping statement that only serves to reveal your ignorance of religion as a phenomena.

@TheSauce @razhael @pluralistic WP should be that but it hasn't been for ages. Especially so since they allowed paid editors.

@krig 100% Fear.

@SeaFury Using AI to write is 100% plagiarism. It is also dumb because it is paying for something to do the job that academics are trained to do but which is worse at it than they are. And it's a great way to male the next generation of academics worse.

@CStamp @MisuseCase @mekkaokereke @tob @wendinoakland The concept of a preacher is limited to a very small set of religions so you are mistaken.

@bedast Just another reason why using Discord for your instances' moderation is a big mistake.

@bedast Some mastodon instances use discord to run their moderation process. There is a bot on the server that sends a message to a discord channel to alert the mods to view reports.This is a bad choice for a number of reasons.

Why did I spend five hours on my tractor today so that I now ache like a motherfucker? Because it is awesome fun and way better than spraying poison on weeds! I will regret this tomorrow. Pray for me.

https://www.choice.com.au/consumers-and-data/data-collection-and-use/who-has-your-data/articles/connected-cars-tracking-your-data Excellent work from Choice yet again.

#privacy #enshittification

@HistoPol @resilienceSci "One of the most common patterns that has jumped out is how extreme inequality shows up in nearly every case of major crisis. When big gaps exist between the haves and have-nots, not just in material wealth but also access to positions of power, this breeds frustration, dissent and turmoil."

@tokyo_0 Deleting your account will stop it entirely.

@tayledras @johncarlosbaez What you call balkanised I call diversified. Calling Mastodon a mess when Twitter is as it is is completely unjustified.

So Academia.edu is using an AI to alledgedly summarise academic works. I was able to see part of the summary for my PhD thesis in the source of the page where they were trying to get me to pay them for this nightmare. I cannot speak more clearly than this about the trash that their abomination had output. THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID AT ALL!!!!!

Today I contacted them to ask them to remove this feature or to make it opt in only. If they are unwilling to do either I shall be morally obliged to remove all my work uploaded there.

#AcademicChatter #AI #LLM

Death Drives A Pale Limousine

Humans love anthropomorphisms! It makes it easy for us to think about concepts if we dress them up as humans. Death is no exception. Western culture has the grim reaper with his long black robe, scythe and his pale horse. But where did this Death come from and what came before him?

What is possibly the earliest known representation of Death, found at the Neolithic settlement at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, shows Death as gigantic black birds, of vulture like appearance, who menace headless human corpses1. But this culture is mostly unknown to us so an understanding of this representation is beyond us at present. But they are black, which is the first attribute of our Death.

In Mesopotamian times the personification of Death was Nergal. In early lore he was handed charge of the underworld by his parents Enlil and Ninlil2, but it later times he was said to have obtained his dominion by marring Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below3. He is the first known representation of Death wearing a black robe, and he is armed with a scimitar and a staff4. Nergal is not a punishing Death but he is an inflicted death, which is reflected in his also being the god of war and pestilence. He is the essence of destruction, but there is no intent, no sense of death as a moral consequence, though deaths are sometimes brought about by him by means of daemons.

Read the rest of this post at https://ooze.net/death-drives-a-pale-limousine/

#Death #histodons #Religion #History