Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)

@cwebber right wingers when yet another right winger does yet another mass shooting: don't make this political! he was clearly mentally ill!
anyone reasonable: so he should have had easy access to mental health care...
right wingers: absolutely not!

one thing i wish every leader understood is how weak and incompetent and unworthy of respect it makes them look when they come into a situation with no context and start making snap judgements and ignoring advice from experienced workers and generally wrecking shit. you may claim you're being decisive or demonstrating your power or whatever but you're just a destroyer and everyone beneath you sees that plainly and despises you for it.

@MastodonEngineering it's encouraging to see this particular form of consideration, thank you:

@404mediaco the 20 year old hitler youths recruited from the exploding car company and the monkey trepanning company aren't actually good at computers? SurprisedPikachu.jpg

We live in the Fourth Age of Runts.

@hacks4pancakes

had no idea there was a cancelled Deep Space Nine point n click from 1994: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2025/02/deep-space-nine-the-hunt/
if 95% of the art really was done, that sounds like *ideal* raw material for a fan project... with some good writing and puzzle design it could be great. feels like DS9's esteem has grown considerably since the period when it aired.

final para of that Defector piece goes especially hard
https://defector.com/the-future-is-too-easy

the right to Customize one's Character must be enshrined in the constitution

gender stuff obviously, but feel free to use your imagination about what else it could mean

@clarity i think they really do want to have it both ways, they want to seen as both born geniuses and incredibly hard workers who have earned their right to dominate everything, both chosen by god and fully deserving of more than we'll ever have.

@clarity skill is kind of an interesting currency in this worldview, it's either something to be coveted and uncritically regarded, or something that is proof of innate goodness and worthiness to rule other humans. and the distinguishing factor is unsurprisingly "usefulness to capital"; an artist is someone with an inborn talent that was never worth particularly much, whereas someone who is "good at business" (always nebulous) is a higher form of life, born to greatness etc blah blah

when the men who tore down the stars burned the True History,
they sought in part to erase the original, truer purpose
of the GPU: to Paint -
every color we humans ever imagined,
castles in the sky,
flocks of starships, fleets of pegasus,
rainbows and waterfalls and violet-green fire and pearlescent ooze; everything -
and still we dream of these,
in the songs we pass down
in secret moments of hope

personally i think i would probably just screenshot the post, make the <img> a link to the original post, and provide a full transcription in the alt text. twitter created millions of holes in webpages, some of which excised what the entire focus of the news story was and memory-holing vital context. it feels bad to do if you believe (as i do) in the ideal of the web as a good faith cooperative effort where trust matters but we've been shown that trust is worthless to the corporate platforms.

pros and cons of embedding a social media post in a news story / blog post in a post "twitter turned to liquid shit" era:
+ links to original "full context" post & poster (but so would <a><img></a>)
+ any edits to post are visible, for platforms that support it (but maybe unedited version is the story?)
+ live-updated engagement counts
- you are trusting the platform holder to draw something on *your* webpage
- it is going to become an empty hole in your webpage at some point in the future

when you look at the "our sponsors" page of an open source project and it's this

@cwebber i think a lot about the social construction of the concept of intelligence and i don't miss the word as a person-descriptor https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/113391715578894582

@jonny "it will/would/could work", on the other hand, isn't usually worth the energy to litigate because it's all fantasy anyway. "my cloned hippogryph will beat you up by FY2028" ok sure man

@jonny i think "it (the current thing you are plugging) does not do what you just claimed it does" is important to say, but i see it as but one table leg of the larger, more important political/ideological arguments around labor and capital (which is obviously what this is really all about). whereas ceding "it actually works" gives them unearned tactical rhetorical advantages - because they unfortunately control the media narrative. https://web.archive.org/web/20250107105052/https://cohost.org/vectorpoem/post/5421000-please-avoid-getting

half a trillion dollars from our new fascist president to the "AI" industry, in an ever deepening alliance with the fossil fuels industry.
i'll say it again: fuck everyone who built this world, defended it, normalized it, spread it into critical social infrastructure that will fail us in increasingly disastrous ways as the crises mount. a crime against humanity.