Biggles @Biggles@social.cleverlibre.org

Every single person in #IT has that one device (server, storage frame, switch/router) that they can't wait to decommission and use a baseball bat on.

Shameful to see the College Board cave to the demands of DeSantis and white supremacists, especially as we kick off Black History Month. Just shameful.

A HS student to their TX school board, which is banning books:

“I’m not going to sit here and talk about the slippery slope that book banning leads to because I learned from a book, that I checked out from my school’s library, that I don’t need to resort to logical fallacy to make a point. I’m simply going to say that no government – and public school is an extension of government – has ever banned books, and banned information from its public, and been remembered in history as the good guys.”

Some #Twitter things that the company didn’t build or invent itself

• Twitterrific was the first mobile Twitter app
• The word tweet made its first official appearance on Twitterrific
• The hashtag was from Chris Messina
• Advanced Twitter Search was originally Summize
• Twitter bought TweetDeck
• Live stream was from Periscope acquisition
• The official Twitter app was originally Tweetie which they purchased from Loren Brichter
• Mentioning people with an @ was user driven and wasn’t linked to accounts because they didn’t consider conversations to take place on Twitter initially
• Quote tweet was adopted from people copy+pasting tweets and adding RT in front of the copied tweet
• Threads were built to accomodate existing user behavior

Did I miss anything major?

When macOS spots a Windows computer on your network it uses a beige screen with a blue screen of death from what looks like an easy 90's VGA screen to represent it :)

This list of pitfalls for journalists to avoid in reporting on artificial intelligence is broadly applicable to emerging tech in general. Useful to anyone who wishes to spread insight instead marketing snake oil. https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/eighteen-pitfalls-to-beware-of-in
Many thanks to @Julia for bringing timely knowledge into my inbox:
https://themarkup.org/hello-world/2023/01/28/decoding-the-hype-about-ai (And thanks to @craignewmark, for funding @themarkup)

Reactor

Parrot

Unwritten office etiquette point number whatever:

If you schedule an hour-long meeting, it is most reasonable to provide an agenda; you're asking for an eighth of a regular work day from people; you'd better be telling them why.

... Really, this rule applies to half-hour meetings as well, but half-hour meetings can *sometimes* be summarized by the name of the meeting alone.

The basketball team the New Orleans Jazz (great name) moved to Utah and became the Utah Jazz (awful name).

It was completely inappropriate but they kept it because the word 'Jazz' had built up a certain cache.

I'm sticking with @TheTweetOfGod.

Some people believe there's no purpose to "liking" something on Mastodon since it doesn't affect any algorithm.

Not the case.

It does something incredibly valuable: it acknowledges people.

Which is incredibly powerful, and is all the more important *because* it's not connected to gaming any algorithm.

By liking something on Mastodon, you are doing it honestly -- without any agenda at play other than that you like it.

So go ahead. Click that like button for its own sake.

in america, we no longer say “the french”, but “people with mental illnesses”, and i think that’s beautiful

@gruber so, too, does (open source) Tusker, which deserves more attention: https://vaccor.space/tusker/

The programmer for Bink video encoder had a fun 2013
http://www.radgametools.com/bnkhist.htm

Well McSweeney’s never misses https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-have-made-it-impossible-for-me-to-want-to-pay-you #layoffs

“the macroeconomic environment has shifted in ways none of us could have foreseen, from an economy in which I did feel like paying you, to one in which I’d rather not”

Unsurprising update:

Every lawyer reading this is cringing.

RT @robinsthol@twitter.com:

I also don't have much experience with traffic court, but I think most human lawyers would agree that it's a bad strategic move to subpoena opposing witnesses when you'd prefer they don't show up.

The AI defense is off to a great start...

Reply Win :-)

> It could perhaps be argued that an LLM “knows” what words typically follow what other words, in a sense that does not rely on the intentional stance. But even if we allow this, knowing that the word “Burundi” is likely to succeed the words “The country to the south of Rwanda is” is not the same as knowing that Burundi is to the south of Rwanda. To confuse those two things is to make a profound category mistake.