Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)

Oh hey folks, AGI is here. I found it between my couch cushions. Yeah, I'm enjoying it right now. Pretty great. No you can't see it. But it changes everything. It's here and there's no going back. But also please don't yell at me or ask me to do anything. AGI is here.

golf isn't a conspiracy; it's just an outdoor sport like any other, right? sure. it's accessible to the non-rich, more or less. golf courses aren't secret bases for some much more nefarious activity.
but also there's a deeper, more nebulous, psychological terraforming effect where it's a way for capital to visibly and legally occupy large amounts of land, consume large amounts of water, etc. and, say, keep it from becoming public parkland.

the current data center struggles overlap with this in real ways. there are immense practical incentives for capital at work here and very real political battles to be fought, but we also can't underestimate the mass-psychological effects of having so much land, water, and energy set aside for a technological product that is trying to be everywhere, surveil and influence everything, and provide cover for a war on labor. beneath the social-political the psycho-ideological is ever present.

anyone else's ¥7000 direct deposit just come in?

unsure how to declare this for tax purposes so i'm just gonna put "spreading the water libel"

https://www.theverge.com/report/982414/meta-glasses-work-surveillance-labor-security
cryptocurrency and the Facebook Sex Offender Glasses are alike in that they have both an advertised purpose, to justify their existence to the public, but also a truer operational-ideological purpose that flows naturally from their design and the imperatives of the capitalist entities that control them. they want us to fret and argue over the advertised purpose, never speak of the actual purpose nor hold them accountable for its harms.

the horrible bros harassing women with the glasses are a problem for facebook only insofar as they associate their product with that kind of behavior, but the bros are doing FB's ideological work: steadily grinding down everyone's resistance to living in a total surveillance society, every action recorded and financialized, never safe from being recorded for random "viral" content, wearily compliant subjects of adtech hell. that's what the glasses are most fundamentally *for*.

Flock managed a shocking 29% accuracy rate reading license plates, a product that puts people in jail, or worse: https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-camera-misread-license-plate-reader-california-roseville-police-2026-7
Tech companies will sell completely broken non-functional products when they think they can get away with it. "It doesn't work" should never be our only critique of tech, but it's vital to point out when something does not in fact work; we should never automatically concede their default claims that their products work perfectly or even reasonably well.

Yesterday I accepted voluntary severance and am no longer with Double Fine, after a combined 11 years.
I'm not looking for work just yet, but will be eventually. Taking some time to heal first.

If you work in games, please hire the 23 people Double Fine laid off today. They're good people.

Look folks the genie is out of the bottle. The genie went from $20/mo to $200/mo. The genie is spending $8 for every dollar it makes. The genie is reactivating every coal power plant it can. The genie needs 60% of your town's water. The genie is hiding $1.65 trillion in debt. But it's out of the bottle! The genie is out of the bottle folks.

Finally watched the Backrooms feature film.
I've been building imaginary places for well over half my life now so my brain is already so keyed into the kind of stuff it's doing, environmental/storytelling wise, that it felt a bit like reviewing a peer's work. And it is absolutely excellent in that regard. The larger cultural phenomenon is fascinating and Parsons has the best, most sophisticated take on it I've seen.

Really interesting to examine it from a historical-sociological perspective, as a 2020s artifact. Obviously, the "deep pandemic" years created a lot of imagery of not-normally-empty empty spaces, and changed our relationships to spaces in lots of ways. And of course, subterranean spaces and windowless rooms just kind of do something to our brains. And even though we might each relate differently to eg offices, hotels, swimming pools etc, we all understand their capacity for feeling haunted.

@xgranade same yeah. the underlying social tectonics were a tipoff for me... understanding the people most invested (fiscally but especially non fiscally) and who else they were connected to made it clearer what the technology's animating ideology was, what it was really "for". to understand something, look at who thinks of it as normal, desirable, ideal, and who thinks of it as the opposite.

@mhoye "look, we on the left have to meet people where they are and engage with them in the discourse. and that means joining their billionaire secret societies!"

"what if we kissed in the fan-resurrected The Matrix Online server? haha j/k... unless...?"

@mullvadnet @lostgen tell your PR team that this statement is worse than saying nothing.
> We protect the right to express and access views we disagree with. We welcome anyone sharing these core values,
"a group of people doesn't deserve human rights" is not just "a view" someone holds, it affects everything they do, their decision making and that of any org they hold power in, the impact they have on the world. you are complicit in your CEO's actions and the consequences will be dramatic.

you can't deny how useful they are!!

restaurants in major cities need a concept like a non smoking section for not overhearing biz/tech guy conversations

@clarity Pac-Man and its generation of "maze games" are sort of the foundational works of running away as a game-mechanical space.