Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social), page 3

@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.

LB: at this point VC has been such an enormous net negative for humanity it's not "well, sure it's harmful now but we wouldn't have gotten [beneficial thing] without it" it's "this system should never have been built".

Lynch led his creative life in the way I respect a great deal in artists: behaving as if divisions between "high art" and "low art" weren't worth bothering with. His best known work aired on prime time television and his least accessible work feels like it leaked in from another dimension. He contained multitudes, as do we all.

@mhoye "magnificent frigatebird" - did... did a magnificent frigatebird name this bird?

Still researching various options for a new host (on a new domain) for my personal website. My needs are very modest (a ~1GB, totally static website), I just want a simple setup with a company that is trustworthy and will still be in business in 10+ years. Any recs?

confirmation that FB had some offices remove sanitary pads from men's restrooms: https://archive.ph/zSajm
more than anything, this cruelty reads as performative - making a big show of "turning anti-woke" to please his new master. and his pathetic whining on rogan completes the picture: this is a man who has some idea just how widely hated he is, knows his empire is crumbling, believes in nothing but his own self-preservation, and is kissing the old-new oligarch's ring to save himself.

because here's the thing, he is sacrificing you in the hope of saving himself. that is how little he thinks of you. you should hate this man, your boss, down to the core of your being. you should not be able to be in the same room as him without wanting to [REDACTED]

a critical thing to realize is that your employer is pulling the mask off another mask it was also always wearing - there was never anything sincere about its earlier cooptation of your queer identity, and the only morally positive payment for your years of complicity is to damage that machine's capacities for harm as much as possible before it discards you.

if you somehow made it all the way to 2025 still working for Facebook you should absolutely not quit in protest of their disgusting new policies, you should unionize and make your bosses' lives a constant living hell and make sure the press covers it fairly. at the very least make them pay dearly for firing you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnozAHKTz9o the thing about "clearing the uncanny valley" is that the audacity with which various teams claim they've done it is nearly perfectly inversely proportional to how badly they've stumbled straight into it. and this same cycle has repeated for decades now.
meanwhile, pixar et al have been content to confidently hold a sick handplant at the near edge of the valley, with well-acted stylized characters. at some point you have to ask what ideologies are being upheld here.

@MLNow "two different waymos were causing huge traffic jams so a cop had to drunk-drive one of them away" is an amazing portent for our extremely wealthy new mayor's tenure

one my favorite game code tricks: Quake (1996) defined light styles with a simple string of alphabetic characters, with A as the brightest light value and Z as the darkest.
so style 5, "gentle pulse", is expressed as "jklmnopqrstuvwxyzyxwvutsrqponmlkj" while style 10, "fluorescent flicker", is "mmamammmmammamamaaamammma".
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/qw-qc/world.qc#L329

had an idea for a joke image involving multiple stock images of "cloaked figure" and sure enough i went to image search that, and the results were almost entirely generated slop... never mind then! it's not like the prior era of shutterstock etc was good or anything, i just wanted to make a quick simple joke image that was 100% free of the repellent aesthetics of LLM art, and the people who run search engines have decided that will no longer be possible.

i think maybe a lot of people out there believe that something has to be Important to be worth saving. but the only reason we know much of anything about history and culture is that so many decidedly unimportant things managed to stick around, or people actively decided to save them despite there being no obvious benefit.
i think humanity loses something absolutely essential, the world becomes so much bleaker and our spirits poorer, if we don't do this.

in my opinion it is presumptuous and narrow-minded and vaguely nihilistic to say that it's fine if everything written on the fediverse gets erased forever. we don't know what use what we say here will be to future humans, or even our future selves. given how deliberately destructively a huge % of twitter has been erased, directly and indirectly by its owner, it's clear that nothing inside a corporate walled garden should be expected to survive. it's up to us.

"ad companies know you better than you know yourself" - stop. respect yourself and humanity enough to not say things like this. to these companies you are nothing but a pile of statistical correlations and random scraps they've fished out of your trash cans; they don't "know you" any better than LLMs "know" anything. charlie brown did not in fact have hoes.

may they do grievous, lasting damage to one another's missions