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This is an EPIC rant and EVERY WORD OF IT IS TRUE. Seriously, set aside half an hour to read it! (Caution: contains expletives and LLMs.)

https://mastodon.sprawl.club/@ludicity/112641685611188242

Noam Chomsky RIP. Sleep furiously and colourlessly, ideas dude.

"Skeletons aren't just coat racks for flesh suits."

#amwriting

Picturing a Dalek at home, wearing fleece-lined slippers, sacked out in front of daytime television, periodically grating "PRO-CRASTINATE, PROCRASTINATE—"

Signs of the coming Tory apocalypse:

If you graph voting intentions against age, Labour support is high among the young but declines along the old, while Tory voting intent rises with age. The lines cross …

In 2016, the crossover age was roughly 48.

As of the beginning of this year, it had risen to 68— that is, on average only over-68s vote Tory.

This week the crossover had risen to 72.

And life expectancy in the UK is roughly 80 …

Note that a simple (and obviously simplistic) extrapolation of deaths per capita from the US confirmed death toll to the global population would give 28 million dead, so far.

More than 36 million people have died of HIV/AIDS since the start of the epidemic in the 1970s: COVID19 appears to be killing us more than ten times as fast.

https://forall.social/@themaskerscomic/112621695875463970

I suspect the long 20th century (from 1917 to some time in the 21st) is going to be remembered by historians as an ideological shit sandwich: Leninism as the first slice of bread baked with excrement, Nazism as the pure shit filling, then Neoliberalism as the second slice of shit bread. An era after the old certainties of monarchy imploded, dominated by unreasonable advocacy of pure theory in economics and governance until people starved, punctuated by outbreaks of mass murder.

Here's the author discussing the point of her book, and explaining why recent British governments are recapitulating the internal decline and collapse of the USSR (TLDR seems to be that neoliberalism shares the same epistemological errors as Soviet communism and is now ideologically unmoored from reality and running on fumes):

https://hcommons.social/@pepe/112625201882698418

Reminder that if you see Nigel Farage being pushed via social media in the UK it's probably being funded by Putin's "Internet Research Agency", i.e. a Russian propaganda campaign aimed at weakening European cohesion (and damaging NATO in general and the UK in particular).

Farage is a neo-nazi Quisling.

Rishi Sunak went without ‘lots of things’ including Sky TV as a child | Rishi Sunak

… Sky TV started in 1990, when Sunak was already a tweenager. See, even his lies are stupid!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/12/rishi-sunak-went-without-lots-of-things-including-sky-tv-as-a-child

This, incidentally, is why I'm staying home this weekend and most of the coming week—three Taylor Swift gigs in front of audiences of 70,000 singing, dancing fans in a bowl-shaped stadium. Her previous concerts in Spain and France have all been superspreader events, and I'm not enthusiastic to join in.

https://mastodon.social/@jmcrookston/112586109084123492

Welp, that misfeature didn't last long before they began walking it back!

https://mastodon.social/@br00t4c/112576388963417270

OMNOMNOM!!!

We are going to end up with half a million low-orbit comsats turning the night sky into a streaky blur because everyone uses Starlink or similar for broadband because the telcos have allowed their terrestrial cable infrastructure to decay, in the interests of maximizing profit. And of course the satellite broadband will be slow and buggy because overloaded.

https://mastodon.social/@verge/112565885370238705

New blog entry: Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide? https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/06/is-microsoft-trying-to-commit-.html

Welp, I knew Microsoft's CoPilot+ Recall was going to be a privacy disaster but I didn't expect it to turn into an enterprise computing catastrophe for Microsoft quite this fast!

But this can't be a one-off. Any large enterprise that has to comply with a regulated privacy environment—HIPAA in the USA, GDPR in the EU, banking/insurance/finance globally—must be considering a ban on Microsoft installations on laptop/desktop computers right now or be breaking the law.

https://infosec.exchange/@SecurityWriter/112558224281615019

Business meetings exist to share information and coordinate activity: this shit enables you to be apparently present in all but actually not engaged with any. If your calendar is triple-booked then your organization is under-resourced and needs more people, not more AI. Or it's holding unnecessary meetings to make management feel better about being surrounded by minions, in which case it needs to fire the executives responsible.

https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/112553850995965423

Currently glad I use Macs/iOS instead of Windows; but side-eyeing a return to Linux—or maybe BSD—just in case Apple think copying Microsoft is a Good Idea. (Hopefully they're not that stupid.)

https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/112537206611365804

I am drinking VERY LITTLE these days so excuse me while I go back to the freezer for my second double Polish vodka in half an hour (Zubrowka, why do you ask?)

Wrt. Trump, all I can say is:

FOUR MORE YEARS! (In Prison!)

Modern social media is like, "hey, now we got rid of the lead in petrol, how are we going to fuck up everybody's head and make them angry and irritable and stupid ALL THE TIME?"

Here's that final zinger, in case you get blocked by The Atlantic's paywall (see alt text for content): https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112520503403754782

If you live in the UK or USA, you need to understand one thing about the coming election:

You need to vote defensively.

Neither of the main parties are appealing. But if you don't vote for the lesser evil you may end up helping a totalitarian horror get elected.

Hold your nose and goddamn vote, dammit. THEN go on protests. Because if you don't vote for the lesser evil, the victor will welcome your protests with bullets.

The prize for political purity this time round is a shallow grave.

Not enough people realize that the "Turing Test" as originally presented was "can a gay English man in 1945 tell the difference between a chatbot and a femme-coded woman" over a teletype connection.

(Turing was very gay and had a sex-segregated education and then work life: he basically didn't know women and his alienation is palpable. But today's techbros don't have any such excuse, and the emphasis on femme-coded AI is ... telling.)

https://mastodon.xyz/@pmorinerie/112506480363973206

Study Finds That 52 Percent of ChatGPT Answers to Programming Questions Are Wrong

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-chatgpt-answers-wrong

So doge, very meme, I old; go bye now

"Visionaries at NASA identified a futuristic new energy source (space billionaire egos) and found a way to tap it on a fixed-cost basis"— ouch!

The Lunacy of Artemis (Idle Words), or why the Artemis moon program is incoherent, badly designed bollocks that will probably kill astronauts.

https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

Two bits of news: (a) Iran's president and foreign minister found dead at helicopter crash site (https://apnews.com/article/iran-president-ebrahim-raisi-426c6f4ae2dd1f0801c73875bb696f48) and (b) Saudi Arabia's King Salman, 88, has pneumonia (https://www.jewishpress.com/news/middle-east/saudi-arabia/saudi-arabias-king-salman-88-has-pneumonia/2024/05/19/) (His successor is Prince Bonesaw, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman).

If King Salman doesn't make it, middle eastern politics could get very unpredictable. Never mind if (c) Benny Gantz pulls down Netanyahu's coalition the same time … (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-killed-wounded-israeli-forces-thrust-deeper-gazas-jabalia-rafah-2024-05-18/)

I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that the extremist settler movement in Israel is rooted in the USA and culturally has a lot in common with US white supremacist/settler ideology—there's a reason Netanyahu is so comfortable with Republicans who dine at the Christian Nationalist table.

https://mastodon.social/@cmonagle/112462865808610948

UK government planning nuclear site in Scotland

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9eze1dzy5no

This is pointless: Scotland is already self-sufficient on renewables. What we need is a new grid interconnect between Scotland and England so we can export our surplus energy to the south!

It's all about the lobbyists, of course:

"Its ambitions for up to a quarter of all electricity to come from nuclear power by 2050 are being led by government-backed body Great British Nuclear." (Who?)

TFW your spouse's iMac has 20Mb(!) free out of 2Tb because they tried to use Adobe Cloud for something and now all attempts to reboot keep hanging (filesystem is okay, though) so the next step is to try for Target Disk mode and a cable to a laptop in order to delete cached junk and logfiles until it will boot enough for them to clean up properly …

UNIXen have never been great about coping with full disks/SSDs, but this is a new nadir, and fuck you very much, Adobe Creative Suite.

Deeply telling about how far the Overton Window has shifted in 40 years that Ronald Reagan took a harder line with Israel than Joe Biden, never mind Mitt Romney.

(But then, per wikipedia Romney was best buds with Benjamin Netanyahu at university. So this tracks.)

Prediction: this is going to go down like a head shot in a neonatal ward.

Reminder that the baby boom started in 1945 and a leading-edge boomer today would be 79 years old.

This is the Generation X professoriat, not boomers.

https://mastodon.social/@jeffjarvis/112388634422382597