Mike Agg @countingquoll@social.cleverlibre.org

Roman Marble and Limestone Mosaic (2nd Century BC; Ptolemaic Period), depicting a sitting dog. It was found in 1993, during the construction of the new Library of Alexandria,
from Bibliotheca Alexandrina Site, El Shatby, Alexandria, Lower Egypt.

#archaeohistories

Firefox is officially and directly fucking with Google and I am here for it!

I wrote a piece on a #Coop alternative to Etsy that just launched, one that puts power back into the hands of artists & makers:
@coopartisans (glad they're on Mastodon!)

I didn't realize the extent to which #Etsy had become toxic to sellers until starting interviews for this piece. It's clear that artisans are being drawn to this because an alternative is long overdue.

(there's a tech issue with the authorship at the top; it names me as the author at the bottom)

https://www.shareable.net/artisans-cooperative-an-etsy-alternative-owned-and-run-by-artists-and-makers/

Cat attempting photo synthesis

I wish we lived in a world where we didn't have to hear about the AI boys and their new ventures all the time. Every use of AI that is supposed to save us time always seems to produce subpar results. Generative UI? Not accessible. Auto generate alt text? Missing context. AI code? Who knows if its useful. AI generated extras for movies? People with hands growing out of their foreheads. Like, when are we going to stop rewarding these people.

My Ideal Man Has All 5 of These

1. walrus gumboot

2. ju-ju eyeball

3. hair down. to. his knee

4. gainful employment

5. toe jam football

Just read something discussing what the writer hoped for from a Denis Villeneuve adaptation of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer,' and in it the writer discusses the core premise of the text as being about the dangers of escaping into virtuality, saying they feel that Villeneuve would be best able to communicate that in film. Thing is, I think that reading misses something crucial, and i think what exactly it misses is really quite telling.

Neuromancer as a book and cyberpunk as a genre aren't (just) analyses and critiques of digital escapism, they're analyses and critiques of the material conditions which LEAD to that escapism. And unfortunately people lost hold of THAT understanding long before they lost hold of the "Do Not Uncritically Fetishize These Aesthetics" part; in fact, they lost the latter SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE they lost the former. It has "punk" in the name for a very specific and conscious reason.

The continued lack of critique of capitalist and hegemonic structures, here, is part of why C2077 and even the most recent GitS series just didn't work for so many people: Netrunners, Street Samurai, Console Cowboys, and Cyborg Mercenaries are all vocations of desperation, not pure choice. If you need to be those things, it's because the world has foreclosed itself to you and disenfranchised you in a crucial, fundamental way.

This is also why analyses of cyberpunk as a genre and aesthetic which don't include race, gender, and disability are inherently facile, to me.

Cyberpunk asks, "What if we take all the social structures of the 1970s and '80s, all the burgeoning technologies, and like… hyperrealized them?" And the answer is something that is dazzling, awe-inducing, brutal, heartbreaking, and even potentially a little comforting in its reappropriation of agency from the jaws of alienation.

It is also increasingly, starkly familiar to anyone looking outside their window, or existing aware in the world, right this moment, today.

But you already knew that; I'm just talking it out.

(Also, as a sidebar: the idea that millennials aren't familiar with Neuromancer is Weird™, to me, to say the least.)

This story is incredible.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/24/space-echo-mystery-behind-cosmic-sound-cabo-verde

This is Buckler's Hard, in Hampshire. It's hard to believe it now, but this was once the setting for a key shipyard for the Royal Navy.
Set on the banks of the Beaulieu River, with easy access to The Solent and the open sea, and a plentiful supply of wood from the nearby New Forest, it was an ideal location for the construction of large sailing ships. Three of the ships which took part in the Battle of Trafalgar were built here.

#MeerMittwoch #Photography #Boats #History #View

I'm seeing a lot of proclamations that there should be no exceptions to describing your images or that there's no reason to interact with any that aren't described.

I know these mean well, but they are themselves ableist.

Disabled people know that access needs can clash. I benefit from described images, but I know some people struggle to write them because of their own disabilities.

And that's okay! The culture of image descriptions is great here but it should never be absolutist.

OK listen up you venomous fucking lumpsuckers: those configuration files you've all become so fond of? They don't come with a debugger, do they? Do they? No, they don't, which means that for every minute I spent actually writing code I'm now spending a solid fucking hour playing whoopsy-doodle guessing games trying to get this [waves hand] to play nicely with that [prods with toe] by trial and fucking error. Honestly, I feel like I'm waving dead chickens around trying to make it fucking rain.

@tante @danmcquillan Out of curiosity, have you asked any blind people about this? I'd like to share my opinion as someone who can only detect light and shadows, and see nothing else.

One of the models that can provide detailed, useful visual descriptions at the moment is GPT4. For me, it has quickly gained a place as one of the most liberating, empowering technological inventions of my lifetime. Never before have I been able to gain an understanding of what an image shows, and ask targeted questions to independently expand that understanding.

I've used it to identify products, in a fraction of the time it would've taken to locate and scan barcodes or labels. It's taught me things about my environment that would be unlikely to come up in conversation, helped me learn about the appearance of friends and family as we share time together, provided guidance about devices and software that I would've otherwise needed help with, and the list goes on. Yes, I've used it to fill in the gaps when people don't write sufficient alt text too.

Putting specific examples aside, there are now fewer occasions on which I need to rely on someone else for their input. You may not think I should feel like a burden in the first place, and that's fine. I have many people in my life who are happy to facilitate support, but focusing on my relationships (or lac thereof) would be missing the point. I now have a choice. If waiting four hours for a friend to finish work is inconvenient for me, if it's the middle of the night, or if I'm just not in the mood for social interaction, I have options. Options that have never existed to this degree in the multiple decades that I've been unable to see.

Sometimes it's wrong. I am always aware of the need to fact check, and not make critical decisions based on, what is conveyed. But here's the thing: part of my professional life involves teaching people to write alt text. It is too hard, and takes too long, to do it right. It represents a dead end to the person reading it, because that's all they get. Frankly, the descriptions people are getting back from these tools blow the majority of alt text written by humans out of the water.

So, by all means use it as a starting point, to create descriptions that can be massaged and improved. Question and ridicule all claims of a completely hands-off, human-free pipeline, which are ableist and unrealistic. Castigate those tools and models which provide useless descriptions, as well as the people who rely on them. But please don't outright dismiss something which is giving some human beings such a sense of joy and freedom as they've never experienced before. And if/when you receive responses from other blind people saying they don't care about these tools for whatever reason, please try to remember that everybody is unique in their circumstances, and that one set doesn't invalidate another. CC @weirdwriter

Rachel #maddow explains how her research into disinformation & propaganda informs understanding of the rise of hate in recent times.

It’s not just an effort to make us dislike a certain group. It’s an effort to undermine our democracy by making us believe a certain group is dangerous, can’t be trusted, shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

What's has happened since 2016 now w tfg isn't just demonizing ethnic minorities. He, fox & other disinformation outlets have fueled lies & disinformation into a violent domestic terrorist movement and #maga criminal group, Repuublican fascist are here, folks.

-
#hate #disinformation #maga #violence

They should let the person who invented naps invent more stuff.

I thought it'd be fun to go to karaoke with a bunch of famous philosophers but Zeno's just been singing the "whoa, we're halfway there" line from Living On A Prayer for the past eight hours

The wise teenage son of a friend recently quipped: ‘you all find it somehow easier to imagine the end of the world and nature than the end of capitalism’.

Minimalism is a scam invented by big small to sell more less