ABrockwell @aebrockwell@social.cleverlibre.org

@ct_bergstrom

Uncanny Valley theory kicks in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#:~:text=The%20uncanny%20valley%20is%20the,that%20seem%20%22almost%22%20human.

This is probably the best thing I ever posted on Twitter. The memory is pretty dear to me; I'm sharing it here so it still exists somewhere if that place collapses.

Antelmo Ramirez was a dad, grandpa and husband. When he died of hyperthermia while building #Tesla’s Gigafactory, they didn't tell local officials. @gusbova brings us his last hours in this important new investigation into heat deaths on the job:
https://www.texasobserver.org/tesla-texas-worker-death-heat/

#workers #Texas #Austin #news #HumanRights #labor #death #health #ElonMusk #ClimateChange

How media enables white supremacy.

First pic: How NY Times depicted an unarmed Black teen killed by law enforcement—“problematic & no Angel.”

Second Pic: How NY Times depicts a white woman who unapologetically stole $700M & harmed countless people—“a loving mother & a new beginning.”

It used to be that a quick Google search for "how to do [a thing]" would lead you to a web page or a forum post that included the exact command and one sentence about how to accomplish that task. I don't know when the default result became "watch a ten minute Youtube video about how to do this thing" but it is really frickin obnoxious.

Working with people who trust and support you is more valuable than most pay raises when you switch jobs.

This is one lesson I’ve seen people learn the hard way over and over again.

The constant-threats-to-defederate thing is going to kill this place, seriously.

Defederating an instance is an extreme measure and it should only be taken in extreme circumstances.

Finding out I might stop getting posts from people I explicitly follow because they happen to be on an instance being defederated by mine all because a bunch of admins I don't know got in a spat over a user I don't follow is just about the most annoying value proposition imaginable.

https://federate.social/@mattblaze/110317006852580015

Not to brag, but I was spewing out hilariously incorrect information before huge tech companies decided to create AI chatbots and ruin the internet.

As one WaPo commenter put it: "I am sick and tired of articles that seem to absolve the Republicans of their own idiocy and then blame the Democrats for not protecting us from the harm caused by Republicans." https://presswatchers.org/2023/04/republicans-threaten-to-tank-economy-media-blames-biden/

Stop anthropomorphizing billionaires.

The “#AI” debate is highlighting the divide between people who prefer better-*sounding* answers and those who prefer better *answers.*

“#ArtificialIntelligence” #MachineLearning #ML #LLMs #ChatGPT #Copilot #Bing #Bard #OpenAI #Google #GitHub #GPT3 #GPT4

If you become a Supreme Court Justice and your spouse embarks on a new line of work collecting more than $1,000,000 a year from law firms doing business before the Court—that’s corruption.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-wife-10-million-commissions-2023-4

The 2023 Australian National Sheep Dog Trial Championship has been and gone, and I still haven't reviewed my photos. Life has been busy and sadly it's my photography that once again gets pushed to the wayside.

But I thought it was about time to treat myself, so I put a few minutes aside to edit a dog photo or two.

This year's championship was a lot of fun. I think my photography is getting better as a far higher percentage of my shots were in focus this time; those dogs are just too fast!

Luckily this fella was sitting still allowing me to get this great shot through the fence. Unfazed by my presence, he patiently waits for his turn with the sheep.

"Nobody cares about social media decentralization".

That sentence isn't new to me.

You know what? People have been telling me that for five years.

And for most of the time, they were right.

But I've been beating that drum non-stop, and haven't let up.

Now 16,656 follow me on Mastodon because they care enough about social media decentralization.

I'm not going to stop talking about it until the entire Internet cares about social media decentralization!

The problem with #AI tools isn't (yet) “oh shit, this thing can do what I do better than I can.”

The problem is “this thing can do what I do at a Barely Passable Dogshit level, it turns out that actually satisfies most people, and I'm having an existential crisis b/c (1) the time I've wasted overdelivering (2) I WANT to make good things and (3) I can't slack off NOW even if I wanted to, knowing this, because I can't produce barely passable dogshit as fast as the Thing can.”

#chatgpt

I want to be clear that what's happening to Rep. Zephyr is an attack on her First Amendment rights and the rights of her constituents.

The forces who are censuring her want us to go back to when rights were the domain of white male landowners. Generations of Americans fought for the constitution to apply to all of us. That project was never finished, but what we are seeing is an effort to attack the basic premise of equality under the law.

We need to fight with everything at our disposal.

This is first on Mastodon! Please boost this thread. It’s an important one.

Good morning to readers. Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.

Some career news: I’m leaving NPR as part of the layoffs that dramatically reduced the company’s workforce.

I’ve decided to go back into Ukraine to keep reporting.

But this time, alone.

Not the odds, but the stakes.

That's my shorthand for the organizing principle we most need in journalists covering the 2024 campaign. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for American democracy. Not the odds, but the stakes.

This report from the Washington Post is getting there. Have a read of it and tell me if you see what I mean. https://wapo.st/41yXOmI [Gift link, no paywall]

#journalism #USpol #journalists

There’s a lot of talk about the harm social media does to society, but I’d argue that mainstream media is a FAR larger problem.

Fox News may be the biggest example, but there’s a rot in the entire news media complex and as usual it comes down to money. Journalism has increasingly being replaced with “narratives” and both-sides rhetoric, chasing after clicks and views and advertising dollars.

This is how fascism takes root in the 21st century, through late stage capitalism