The headline on @404mediaco 's podcast about how Google just got worse again with AI (which I didn't listen to because I almost never listen to podcasts but anyway) just made me hit upon a question:
Is Google the new GM?
This would have seemed ridiculous just a few years ago, but the combination of rent seeking, incompetence, and chimera-chasing is starting to seem, well, familiar.
A periodic boost to Anera, an organization that does an immense amount of aid in the occupied Palestine territories and has been confirmed by my friends who used to live in the West Bank as a very effective organization.
Oh, man, it's happening. There was an #STS@sts article (or book?) that I really thought was Maria Kaika but very apparently isn't about three phases of modernist water management—something like ascendant, triumphant, and chastened, or some such.
I went to look it up tonight in the old references and I cannot find it.
@MichaelTBacon@sts Citation for above link Reza Balali, M., Keulartz, J., & Korthals, M. (2009). Reflexive water management in arid regions: The case of Iran. Environmental Values, 18(1), 91-112.
I realize that the Fedi at this point, at least my network, skews pretty anti-religious, and fine. But please realize how much this means to so many people and how much it will mean to people in the future. You don't have to agree with an institution's theology to celebrate people no longer feeling hurt and hated and excluded.
“This is a day of rejoicing. But, my God, this is a day of lament,” Ryde told the circle. “There are so many who weren’t here for this moment because they had to go somewhere else to care for themselves. … I am so grateful right now. But I can’t rejoice without naming that.”
Parker stood beside Ryde and, for the first time during the conference, he let himself cry happy tears. “This is a space of trauma and pain,” he later told me. “This moment was the first time I could let that go.”
Side rant: You know what's really stupid about "microblogging" the way it evolved under the bird site and continues under many Fedi instances, including @social.coop? I can only post 500 characters of text, which is literally smaller than the minimum file size on most operating systems. But I can post a damn screenshot and put 1500 characters in the alt-text, which even with low res and grayscale is probably 100k.
Someone saying what's been slowly but increasingly apparent to me for a few years now: recycling plastic is just greenwashing. It's time to quit wasting our time doing it.
I'm seeing a thing on my feed about the GOP now turning against polio vaccines, and look, please at some point start listening to #STS folks when we say that scientific facts not only require work in order to be made, but require work in order to keep extant.
The point of this isn't to undermine science, it's to save it. At some point after you've watched enough "indisputable facts" get pulled into dispute, maybe stop writing us off as the problem?
To whatever reactionary shithead called in a bomb threat to the main Durham County Library today, both interrupting planned LGBTQ+ events and keeping my kids from going to their favorite library: Eat shit.
For all sysadmins and security types out there, if you haven't seen this, you'll want to. I haven't groked the exploit enough to know exactly what the vulnerability is, but "looks bad" seems like a pretty big understatement here.
In re LRTs, if your response to empowering rurality is that this automatically means empowering white, conservative, reactionary voices, I want you to stop for a moment and rethink that.
Speaking of Dune (LRT), saw the second installment yesterday, and yeah, I think it's safe to say that Villeneuve has done for Dune what Peter Jackson did for LotR. there will be room for re-envisioning in the future if someone wants to take it a new direction (which I'm 100% in favor of). But like Charlton Heston's Ben Hur, THE definitive version has now been made and folks can stop dreaming of being the one to do it.
Not the perfect movie. But very well worth the price of the popcorn bucket.