RE: https://mastodon.social/@Moltz/117412471988888375

remember when technology had knobs?

"Language models manipulate form, but without reference to meaning. " -- Professor of Linguistics Emily Bender

there it is. If you've ever wondered why fascists are so impressed by the damn things, that's why. They are apalled by the thought of words having reference to meaning, and in love with an ideal of a Goebbelian erasure of all reference to meaning.

Is this how using Unix actually felt in the 1970s

don't worry, our surveillance network is LGBT friendly—LG televisions, Bluetooth scanners

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@adamshostack/117236366773531776

"russian" roulette has been upgraded to american roulette: You enter a robotaxi. Will it take you to the destination of your choice? Or to the workcamps? Or to DHS offices to be deported to a mysterious "third country"?

if you eat ice cream, you probably have a favorite ice cream softening powder. What's your favorite?

oh good, arthro-pod is finally doing an episode on fire ants!

#ants
#invasive

on second listen, I've decided to tag
@futurebird , even though its main focus is on two ants as invasive species.

hello duck tape my old friend
I've come to sew with you again

#sewing
#idolatry

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116199504927810945

from one perspective, this is true, but from a different perspective, at the same time, calling "AI" skills "just documentation" is also a cruel and horrible insult to all good documentation and everyone who ever tried to write good docs ...

cereal port is when you decide "to heck with milk in cereal, on this morning we put port in our cereal."

in order to cope with today's DRAM pricing crisis, i propose we look to the solutions of the past

all these new generation copy-on-write filesystems, and yet no one has been brave enough to name theirs simply "cowfs". then they could call the package containing its mkfs, fsck, etc. "cowtools"

Our innovative new CD-ROM technology doesn’t need a laser at all—we use an LLM to predict the contents of the disc. Introducing the world’s first sloptical drive

@futurebird @KateShaw
(Beebe seems not to have known that army ants normally carry their brood with them, and so the larvae didn't indicate they were searching for a nest. Historical issues aside, it's still neat. )

@futurebird
@KateShaw
look at this neat historical observation, from more than a century ago!

"... , including the larvae of the Painted Nest Wasplets. For an hour at noon during heavy rain, the column weakened and almost disappeared, but when the sun returned, the lines rejoined, and the revolution of the vicious circle continued ..."
-- William Beebe, _Edge of the Jungle_
https://archive.org/details/edgeofjungle00beeb/page/290/mode/2up

2/3
"— to the outhouse again, and on a large fallen log, a few feet beyond the spot where their nest had been, the ends of the circle actually came together! It was the most astonishing thing, and I had to Verify it again and again before I could believe the evidence of my eyes. It was a strong column, six lines wide in many places, and the ants fully believed that they were on their way to a new home, for most were carrying eggs or larvae, although many had food ..."

1/3
"At six o'clock the following morning I started out for a swim, when at the foot of the laboratory steps I saw a swiftly-moving, broad line of army ants on safari, passing through the compound to the beach. I traced them back under the servants' quarters, through two clumps of bamboos to the out -house. Later I followed along the column down to the river sand, through a dense mass of underbrush, through a hollow log, up the bank, back through light jungle —"
#ants
#Beebe

#antMill

the problem with providing a single value for an estimate is that most people will read into it degrees of confidence, precision, and accuracy that are impractical or impossible.

the problem with providing a range is that half the audience will focus on the more exciting of the two bounds of the range, while the other half will hear only of that more exciting bound and never know a range was provided at all.

the problem with providing a graph of the probability distribution function is ...

The Helpless Perplexity of Volition would have been a great band name.