Notices by Reg Braithwaite 🍓 (raganwald@social.bau-ha.us), page 2

Can we just stop for a moment and appreciate how well C.S. Lewis foretold the fall of the American Empire in “The Last Battle?”

I have yet to see a better metaphor for oligarchs convincing Evangelical Christians to embrace a mendacious, dishonest, godless, sexual assaulting, adulterous narcissist...

Than a donkey wearing a dead lion's skin being presented as God by a conniving ape.

https://religionnews.com/2020/12/31/why-the-last-battle-is-the-one-cs-lewis-book-you-should-read/

You show me a bullshit metric, and I'll show you a bullshit game.

I have worked on collaborative editing, and I tried to solve the sync problem while creating a product before. It left me sympathetic to this line:

"It’s also ill-advised to try to solve data sync while also working on a product. These problems require patience, thoroughness, and extensive testing. They can’t be rushed.

"And you already have a problem on your hands you don’t know how to solve: your product. Try solving both, fail at both."

https://www.instantdb.com/essays/sync_future

"Edit This Page," @davew, 1999

http://scripting.com/davenet/1999/05/24/editThisPage.html

@stux "In-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it. Alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it."

@ildiavolorosso @pluralistic @cryptadamist @oof In the 70s, the frisbee—I beg your trademark, "disc sports"—scene was mostly about freestyle, and World Champion Ken Westerfield from Toronto would spray an Amway lubricant on the undersides of his discs so they could delay on a fingernail indefinitely.

We all made the pilgrimage to his dealer in Scarborough to get cans of the stuff, and yes: The dealer had a garage full of Amway goods!

It was a warning, not a blueprint.

#1984GeorgeOrwell #apple #ChiatDay #RidleyScott #SuperbowlAd

@futurebird @mattmcirvin @adriano That's "verisimilitude," and it's what makes Generative AI so awful.

"I'm not really a fascist, I'm just kissing the ring and going along with it because shareholder value" is the "I was just following orders" of our time.

@fox Start here:

It is forty years since Macintosh debuted. Everyone remembers the GUI changing the world, but developers from that era also remember that Macintosh championed undo everywhere and a consistent UI everywhere for common things.

I suggest that we as an industry ignored undo and a consistent ui across web sites for the most part, because we were too lazy to really care about creating great user experiences.

Yes that is the original coffee cup icon from Macintosh OS forty years ago, signed by the artist, Susan Kare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare

And oh yeah, some other things that actually brew a cup.

@aral If a salesperson says, "Trust me, _____," do you trust them? Or does saying this make you realize that they spend a lot of their time being distrusted, to the point here they're now trying to pre-detonate criticism of their ethics?"

I get the same vibe from "AI you can trust." They're literally telling me that AI can't be trusted, but I should take their word for it that they're different.

Without being given any reason to trust them.

Many years ago, I worked in computer retail. Above and beyond our salaries and commissions, we also had a form of perfectly legal corruption called "spiffs." These were bribes paid by vendors to salespeople for selling the vendor's product. Salespeople would push products with spiffs first.

And if we asked a salesman what their favourite product was, 10-1 the answer would have been whichever one paid the pecuniarum, promptly.

Now let's talk about the profession formerly known as "journalism."

If Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel was alive today and creating children's stories about totalitarianism (Yertle the Turtle), capitalism creating class differences to divide and loot a society (The Sneetches), environmentalism (The Lorax)...

He would be banned from school and public libraries. Illegal immigrant Elon Musk would tweet non-stop about how he must be prosecuted as a woke agitator.

@SnowshadowII

I have the Uber Eats app. It has a distracting badge showing me how many ads I'm missing. No problem: Settings > Notifications > ...

Nope! Uber Eats is not under notifications, and I can't find anywhere to turn the badge off like I can with other apps. If anyone knows how to change its settings, let me know. Until then, it's easier to delete the app and reinstall when I want to use it.

There are a lot of apps I now delete between uses. It's how I cope with enshittification.

🎓 @pluralistic

Chant it with me:

"In-groups who are protected by the law but not bound by it, alongside out-groups who are bound by the law but not protected by it."

🧢 @craiggrannell

https://social.bau-ha.us/@craiggrannell@mastodon.social/113673243610450507

@c0dec0dec0de @drunkenmadman @pluralistic @nullagent @cstross

A small variation on this reasoning is that AI may not be able to do your job, and management knows it, but if a critical mass of companies replace people with AI, everyone will just lower their expectations and management will be fine.

See also: Self-checkout in retail.

@quinn Not the only person, no, but I maintain a small quantity of empathy for demographics such as users who speak English as a second language.

If even unreliable genAI can help such a person write a cover letter for their resumé that gets them an interview, I get it. The fact that I prefer to write my own text by 1000% doesn't change the fact that my preference is grounded in a strong English and communications education.

JM2C, most of genAI is absolute 🐕💩

@benroyce @WrenArcher Euderus Set is a hyper-parasitoid. But wait!

The Fairy Wasp predates a variety of insects, including parasites and even hyper-parasitoids like the Crypt-Keeper Wasp.

Scientist have discovered chains of predations four and five levels deep. And some theorize that the induced head-plugging behaviour exists to keep fairy wasps from predating the cyrpt-keeper's offspring.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/inception-but-with-parasites/514211/.

@benroyce @WrenArcher Fairy Wasps are little more than five neurons dressed in a trenchcoat. Amazing that such a small brain produces any behaviour at all.