Notices by Angus McIntyre (angusm@mastodon.social)

The first Trump administration felt like a one-man show. This time around, with Trump visibly sliding into senility, it’s more of an ensemble cast: The League of Extraordinary Sociopaths.

Or maybe you can see it as a heist movie, with Donnie Ocean putting together a select team of vicious douchebags to try to steal the entire country.

There's a "Reservoir DOGE" joke to be made here too, but I just don't have the heart for it.

Now that the US is officially aligned with one of the nastiest dictatorships on the planet, if any self-styled conservative utters the words 'freedom' or ‘democracy’ in your hearing, you are fully authorized to slap the words out of their mouth.

It's over. We're done.

(*) You may say that the USA was NEVER one of the good guys, but now we've given up even pretending.

@cstross This smacks of fake news & wishful thinking (although with his current national wrecking spree, I do have to wonder). But imagine the scene:

INT. DAY. KGB RETIREMENT HOME NR. MOSCOW

MAN1: Yuri, you remember realtor I recruit, back in ‘87?
MAN2: Is whiny little turd with small hands?
MAN1: Da. One you say will never do anything for us.
MAN2: Well?
MAN1: You watch TV lately?
MAN2: Holy shit! Is same guy?
MAN1: Da.
MAN2: Blyat! I owe you case of champagne after all!

@cstross Do we need a different word from #enshittification to describe forcible insertion of unwanted #AI features into products or services? As I understand it, @pluralistic’s term describes a quite specific multi-step process, not simply "making things worse”.

I propose “encruftening” for "adding unrequested and undesirable features to an existing product”, which covers "AI", blockchain & whatever other horrors they have in store for us. Other suggestions?

And now for a truly #SuperbOwl. I believe that this is a Pharaoh eagle-owl. It's from a privately-run zoo, le Zoo des Reptiles chez Aziz, in El Atteuf, Algeria.

#owls #birds #BirdsOfMastodon #photos #photography

It’s #SuperbOwl time again. This is a Eurasian eagle owl, the same species as New York's celebrated Flaco. This bird was in the care of the Parks Service, and was shown off at their annual Raptor Fest.

#owls #OwlsOfMastodon #birds #BirdsOfMastodon #photos #photography

@jackwilliambell @gimulnautti @pluralistic When I lived in Europe (where there are actual left-wing parties), I found it comical that Americans thought the Democrats were “left-wing”.

Now I live in the US, it doesn't seem comical at all.

But Trump & friends now claim the Democrats are "far-left radicals”: absurd, but many Americans seem to accept the new lie as uncritically as they accepted the previous one.

Meanwhile, the American right has gone far-right, but still pretend to be moderates.

ATTENTION: new directive from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

"Woke" coders within the federal government have been showing solidarity with radical gay & trans causes by using the acronym LGTM in code reviews.

Millions of lines of code in use in federal systems may have been tagged with LGTM. These commits are now suspect as the competence & ideology of those who approved them can’t be trusted. All such commits must be reverted so we can start over with a clean codebase.

– Elon

Me at 18: I will never hate any politician more than I hate Margaret Thatcher.

Me today: Oh, you sweet, naive summer child.

@pluralistic Mention of "boss politics" & selective enforcement makes me think of “Big Tim" Sullivan, whose Sullivan Act made it a felony to carry unlicensed firearms in public in New York. The purpose was to disarm Sullivan's enemies; it wasn’t enforced against his friends.

Like many corrupt politicians, Sullivan also dispensed patronage. He reportedly used to say “I never asked a hungry man what his politics were. It was enough for me to know he was hungry.” That's not a Trump-like sentiment.

@sean We may need to start vetting @pluralistic's output in case he unleashes any more catastrophes by “predicting" things. The last thing we want is to have him go all “Lathe of Heaven" on us and, frankly, the warning signs are there.

@cstross

So, that’s systolic, that's diastolic, and that last figure is diabolic, because my devil of a cat decided to involve herself in the process.

I knew #AI would come for all our jobs eventually, but I really thought that Holocaust denial would be safe for a little while longer.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-anne-frank-blame-holocaust

@godzero @havvyhh2 @Haste @pluralistic I believe you mean "total liztruction”.

Important addition:

- I will help my colleagues to meet their own goats

I keep reading “goal-setting” as “goat-setting”. So I have resolved that this year:

- I will talk about my goats with my manager
- I will fully commit to my goats
- I will ask my colleagues to help me with my goats, and to hold me accountable for my goats
- my goats will contribute to my personal and professional development
- I will not give myself unreasonable or unattainable goats
- I will have a manageable number of goats
- at least 2 of my goats will be aligned with the company’s OKRs

The great thing about the recent #NetNeutrality court decision is that it allows service providers to get into the #enshittification game. Now they’re no longer required to observe neutrality with respect to content sources, they can (a) deliver an inferior experience to consumers – phase 1 of enshittification, per @pluralistic – AND (b) extort more money from content providers – phase 2.

Welcome to Year 0 of the true enshittocene, when ubiquitous enshittification REALLY kicks into high gear.

Each year, I sit through a mandatory training on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, because – even though I never interact with any foreign officials and have no money to pay bribes anyway – businesses are required to let their employees know that Bribing Foreigners Is Bad.

To judge by the number of major corporations currently rushing to donate to Donald Trump’s inauguration party, however, bribing AMERICAN officials is not only entirely permissible, but even sound business practice.

This is an ad served by Google Ads. It appears superimposed on a (legitimate) web page, with the rest of the page blurred out. I didn't check to see where clicking the Open button would take me, but I doubt it's anywhere good.

Google does allow users to give feedback on this ad, but the only option is "Seen too many times”. There is no option to flag it as the blatant cross-site scripting/probable #phishing attack that it is.

#security #Google #PhishingAsAService #BadActors

@annaleen ... and also reduces the risk that some random dude in a hoodie will appear out of nowhere and put three rounds in your shortbread from close range.