tired: 88x31 #web button
wired: 31x88 web button

The real villain of the #tech sector, and capitalism in general, is self-awareness. Marc Andreessen blurted it out openly: he refuses to have any second thoughts, any reflection, any introspection. He wishes to act solely upon his basest impulses and appetites—that is surely a common sentiment among the technological elite. They have been conditioned into regarding all their impulses as freedom itself: to stand in the way of Elon Musk's or Marc Andreessen's impulses is to be a hater and saboteur of greatness. Second thoughts are obstacles to acting on pure impulse, hence Andreessen and the others attempt to banish them from their lives by any possible means. They strive to purge their existence of "negativity".

(etc.)

The dead-and-gone aspect of this high-tech nostalgia for when it was easier to grift one's way into the headlines is aptly symbolized in the idolatry which Marc Andreessen and other technology executives practice towards the California Gold Rush. They don't care what a disaster that really was, not with their gauzy and mostly fictional perspective on U.S. history. What matters to them about the Gold Rush was that "wealth" was just THERE, ripe for the plucking. All you needed to do was dig it up (or to work out how to swindle other prospectors and "entrepreneurs".) But the Gold Rush is no longer possible. Similarly there's no way to bring back the days when computers seemed so brand new as to be practically magical.

(cont'd)

The Dan Olson / Foldable Human video on Decentraland is a bit out of date, now that the "metaverse" fad has faded back into the general burble of #technology scams (I assume there's still considerable private and semi-private interest in a corporate 3D landscape somewhere in cyberspace). But it's still a good reminder of what the whole high-tech scene is like. If it's not "Decentraland" it's something else, some other "killer app" that becomes a global phenomenon worth gazillions of dollars. They're chasing the dragon, in the addiction sense: they remember when it was so much easier to scam because the tech was very very VERY new.

(cont'd)

I don't like doing this. It ruins my day no matter how hard I throw myself into constructive activities afterwards, baking or learning how to navigate BSD or whatever. But how else can one break through the armor?

The techbros have been working on this narrative for so long, they actually believe it now. They still think of themselves as a liberatory force even as they thirst for police and military contracts and cozying up to politicians. They think that evil #Apple #1984 ad is somehow REAL and not a dystopian corruption and coöption of George Orwell for no better reason than spicing up sales for a friggin' personal computer.

The Apple corporation is not a hero of any story but their own.

~Chara

"How can Silicon Valley be fascist, they made the Mac II" was a bit of #tech sector babble I wasn't expecting but welp there it is, unless the communications professor decides to delete it

BTW "Generative #AI" fanboys: you must hate the word #slop of course. That's why I've switched to sludge.

If you get tired of that one I'll use glop. Or mush. There's so many good words that are all accurate descriptions of the intended product of #LLM sludge-generation.

"Grey goo," that's a good one.

First I'd like to remark that #HarryPotter seems bizarrely apt to this kind of nonsense precisely because there's so little substance to the writing. "Harry Potter" is a stock character practically, shepherded from book to book through that lowest form of #magic that can be found in fiction: plot magic, i.e. arbitrary happenings where it's clear the author wants a pre-decided outcome more than they want to figure out how to make that outcome plausible.

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There's been a fair amount of chatter lately on a weirdly specific phenomenon pertaining to the #HarryPotter fandom, which is the strange part played by a certain "Harry Potter" fanfic well known to those engaged with combating the pernicious influence of #effectivealtruism and other "dark intellectual" cult idols which have fed into the fascısm of the #technology sector.

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Could any #astronomy or #astrophotography person tell me: has any attempt been made to apply 60 Hz (and harmonic) filtering to sky images in an attempt to cut back on light pollution's effects? The stars would be steady while there'd be a strong 60 Hz component to at least SOME of the scattered artificial light.