Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)

@clarity yeah. and the cults that are centered around Being the Most Intelligent are this massive source of validation telling people their neurodiversity makes them a kind of elite

never forget how this cult, exceptional only in its extremity, embodied the poisonously misguided conventional thinking of our current age, by elevating to godhood a man that many of us already knew was a fraud and a fool, and many more know now. never forget how much people equate wealth with intelligence and worthiness and how deeply that harms our society.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211026235448/https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b

the primary function of state violence is to protect capital

Don't let them have "generative art". People have been writing code to make interesting images for about as long as computers have existed.
To combat the current awfulness, why not reply to this with a project of yours, or one you admire, that uses code to embody a specific creative intention.

My interpretation of Miyazaki's "this is an insult to life itself" comment was that he feels that to depict a particular human experience you need to engage with it via your own humanity, and empathy is a nigh-unavoidable response during that process, and if you engage in some other way (eg treating it as a mathematical phenomenon) you will likely be doing so without empathy or thus humanity. So while his comment predates the current LLM etc craze, it addresses its essence.

everyone super impressed by "X, but with a different art style" is hereby sentenced to a year of art history classes to understand why that is an inane, jingling-keys-ass thing to want

RIP. unbelievable amount of engagement on this, most of it useless or actively bad. who the fuck is out there on here with such a huge following they can shit up someone's mentions this thoroughly? did Eugen boost it? god, this platform needs boost controls like yesterday.

going viral on mastodon sucks so bad. i am going to delete that post.

something platforms like this (that started by wholesale copying a decent % of twitter's patterns) really need is "show me a list of who boosted this post, sorted by how many followers they have". when a random person's post suddenly gets a lot of attention it is imperative you help them know where all the attention is coming from. i wasn't being harassed or anything, but people in other cases absolutely will be.

the image is from this post from 2020: https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machine-learning-tool-pulse-stylegan-obama-bias
the code used to generate it: https://github.com/tg-bomze/Face-Depixelizer

still one of the best ever illustrations of the dangers of using a computer program to turn less data into more data

New bot! @vintage_lego posts a random page of LEGO assembly instructions, once a day at 10:30am PST, from an archive of over 1500 sets spanning 1958-2010. Follow if you were ages 4-99 any time during that period. 😀

@clarity lotta people need to hear it apparently!

@clarity "can't do my job unless i've paid my rent to sam altman" is the depths of loser shit

"cars have a big TV on their dashboard now" is not merely a design fad or clownish excess, it is actively evil

https://mastodon.social/@jensorensen/114128424720925610 the connection i wish every american would understand between right now and the final decade of the cold war is that *both* countries fucked themselves irrevocably in the 80s: the USSR in obvious ways and the US by huffing historic quantities of 100% unearned moral superiority and dismantling enough of its regulatory will and social safety net to send it into the long slow tailspin that we're living through right now. do NOT lie to yourself that this decline began in 2016

i've never seen a single commit diff representing more incalculable brand damage than this. entirely self-inflicted, 25+ years of goodwill like it's a gold ring at a pawn shop. even in their wildest dreams of avarice - as if being one of millions of scummy data middlemen were a remotely lucrative enterprise in 2025 - this trade will never be worth it.
shame on everyone who made and executed this decision.

@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: