I have been a published writer since I was 17, and never in all those years have I encountered worse editorial suggestions than the automated ones generated by Microsoft Office365.
US politicians, the courts, the media, and even unions are lining up to knuckle under to another stolen election like 2000. But preparing for a general strike is a way to counteract this seeming near-certainty, to prepare for the worst, and most importantly to change the narrative of helplessness. https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-you-do-if-the-election (via @pluralistic)
@NathanZimriBorgman@pluralistic "forcing me into bankruptcy won’t actually get you the money you need to settle a big claim — it’ll just ruin my life"
This behaviour is intentional and premeditated, and not merely lawyers "eliminating liability": it is engineered to create a hostile environment which instills fear and subservience to make independent contractors afraid to exercise any of their legal rights. It's designed to turn craftspeople into serfs.
Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This is a very possible outcome that the TESCREAL true believers are outraged by but can't refute. (We might get true AI … or we might be chasing an illusion caused by our false intuitions about how minds work.) https://mastodon.social/@Lazarou/112389710943586505
@cstross I'm calling it: TESCREAL will be officially adopted by a group of true believers/trolls as the name of their creed, who will revere Dr. @timnitGebru as their unwilling prophet.
@cstross@timnitGebru I don't find that timeline implausible. I mean, LDS, Christian Science, Scientology, and even the Rosicrucians are still banging about, and they're all relatively sedate (at least in body count) at their most batshit. Imagining the craziness that rapturous Nazi tech monks would spew doesn't take a lot of imagining, given Balaji Srinivasan and Garry Tan's already public comments. Just imagine the muskiness when their lot gets really loaded on Adderall and ketamine.
@DrALJONES "Occupied Territories" is such a weasel phrase. It so conveniently avoids describing exactly which Territories, who Occupies them, under what conditions, and in the interest of whom.
A loose group of teenage hackers who largely grew out of Roblox and Minecraft communities have been kidnapping, robbing, and bricking each other's homes in an increasingly violent internal 'world war'
American Engineer, Statistician and Inventor Herman Hollerith was born #OTD in 1860.
He developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century. via @wikipedia
