@beadsland @omnivorous_narrator @leechindustries
"A mild case of Covid in 2022 caused a loss of 15% of my lung capacity that I've not yet gotten back."
Most people are not hyper-measured the way this guy is.
I wonder how many people lost 10-20% of lung capacity and just... don't realize?
For sale: baby shoes _______________
Darmok and Jalad? In this Tanagra?
RE: https://todon.eu/@MediaActivist/116897002424163363
Let's turn up the Gen AI datacentres more! Kill people with heatstroke and thirst and famine as much of the Earth becomes uninhabitable! All so Elon Musk and Sam Altman can control the thinking machine they made millions dependent on, and Cory Doctorow @pluralistic can spot typos in his drafts! Yeah!
A: "The house is on fire!"
B: "Okay, let's put on flame-resistant cooling suits and wear smoke filters over our faces for the rest of our lives."
A: "Shouldn't we put out the fire?"
B: "No."
A: "I can't afford a suit and filter."
B: "Haha, I can. Sucks to be you."
A: "What happens when the fire gets worse and suits and filters don't work any more?"
B: "Actually there is no fire, the house is going through a natural cycle of being temporarily hotter and smokier."
A: "There are flames all around us!"
B: "That's your interpretation. You don't have the monopoly on truth, stop preaching at me. You should be more nuanced and pragmatic."
In A Series of Unfortunate Events book 5: The Austere Academy (published in 2000), the protagonists are worried that Count Olaf, the villain from the first four books, will try to find them at boarding school and kidnap or otherwise harm them.
They share their concerns with Vice Principal Nero, the embodiment of bad school administrators. He assures the protagonists that they have nothing to worry about, because an advanced computer will alert him immediately if Count Olaf tries to enter school grounds. He has not tested or validated the computer warning system in any way, but it's an advanced computer, so obviously it can't be wrong.
Later, the protagonists try to tell Nero that Count Olaf has already arrived on campus in disguise. Nero dismisses the protagonists' warning, because the infallible advanced computer hasn't notified him, and therefore it must be impossible for Olaf to be on campus.
When I was a kid my mom told me that ASOUE was unrealistic.
Is it . . . ?
Which long-winded blog post should I finish and post first:
• A detailed account about my Covid quarantine isolation chamber
• An essay about using an abundance of caution to remain the rare Covid virgin princess baby this deep into year seven of the pandemic
So over 12,000 people were killed in a one-week heatwave last month, just in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, and Germany!
One could have expected bigger headlines.
The negative backlash over Meta's new feature that allowed anyone to use someone's personal photos and likeness to generate AI content without even notifying them (which had automatically opted in all public Instagram accounts of anyone over 18) was so overwhelming that they are removing it just a few days after it was introduced.
Sure, sneaky practices to normalise AI slop and the use of people's data without explicit consent aren't disappearing overnight, but this is a win regardless. It's also a reminder that "it's the future, it's inevitable, we should embrace it" is plain false.
Nobody, even those who made AI Ghibli avatars or generate 2 sentence response emails through ChatGPT not knowing (or caring) about all the negatives, wants their images, and the faces of themselves and their family to be fair game and their privacy to be violated. Maliciousness on the internet is not a new thing, but features like that give bad actors new tools to spread false info, create revenge porn, discredit, humiliate and target anyone, especially women and marginalised groups. How we react to them sets a precedent for the future.
https://deadline.com/2026/07/meta-removes-muse-image-ai-feature-backlash-1236979605/
Oh, wow. I hadn't considered this angle: "There's also the risk that conversations between an attorney and client could become fair game in legal proceedings; a New York federal judge in February ordered a criminal defendant to provide prosecutors with documents he created for his lawyers because it already had been shared with a third party, which was Anthropic's Claude." https://www.fastcompany.com/91571498/ai-notetaker-work-meetings-privacy-data
The most reliable homelab service is usually the one with the least clever magic around it.
Plain config files, boring backups, obvious alerts, and a manual fallback beat automation that only works when everything is perfect.
Friday sysadmin rule: if I can understand it when tired, future me has a chance.
That is not laziness; that is operational design with better marketing.
Some of the conversations I have on this topic are students and other early career researchers asking how they can "keep up" if everyone around them is using LLMs to "speed up" their science.
To that, I want to urge folks to rethink which race they want to compete in. I know it's not that simple, because there are incentive structures that are drastically misaligned with doing deep work in most fields (and anything CS adjacent more than others, I'd guess).
>>
If anyone is wondering how well ‘AI’ in hiring is going:
My partner just tried putting her CV through some ATS checkers that use LLMs. Her name can be turned into a male name by deleting one letter. Doing so caused her score to jump 10 points.
Anyone using these tools for hiring is going to have some massive discrimination lawsuits in their future.
This point needs to be made over and again:
The main purpose of wealth taxes should not be to raise revenue. That's a small and secondary benefit. The main purpose should be to *reduce the fortunes of the ultrarich*. Why? Because those fortunes present a massive threat to democracy and public life.
Tech Tip:
You can disable the new #Instagram AI by deleting your account.
I live in a very car-centric society.
not just because of how many people drive or how shitty public transit is.
our department of motor vehicles doubles as the crown corporation that has a monopoly on car insurance. they also issue non-driving provincial ID for people like me who do not drive (because why not, they have the equipment).
but I just got a notice in the mail that my ID is expiring next month and I need to go renew it. it was in a thick envelope, because I had to go through five pages of information on how my car insurance rates are increasing. 🤔
RE: https://mstdn.ca/@thenarwhal/116892280647989537
Wow, @thenarwhal 's framing here is :chef_kiss:
If [pipelines a]re such an economic boon, why are taxpayers footing the bill?
Why indeed?
Why are Canadians paying to subsidize exports?
If the world market can't afford to pay for fossil fuels, why should we cover the cost?
https://thenarwhal.ca/three-pipeline-announcements-2026/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=grassroots
#CDNPoli #Canada #Politics #FossilFuels #OilAndGas #Pipeline