@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es
@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es avatar

PaulGrahamRaven

@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es

Science fiction writer turned tech critic turned STS/critical futures academic turned consulting critical foresight practitioner and worldbuilder-for-hire. Resident in (and aspiring citizen of) Malmรถ, Sweden.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ahmetasabanci, to random
@ahmetasabanci@mastodon.social avatar

Not sure whether to take this AI description of me as a compliment or an insult. https://search.arc.net/iFhlmAiQqVNgcJ9x76g1

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@ahmetasabanci Does have faint "cover story for a spy" vibes... though that may not be the sort of thing you're after when it comes to, say, trying to arrange a visa

jamesreeves, to random
@jamesreeves@mastodon.world avatar

Q: What is your favorite music when the weather turns warm?

(If Gas, William Basinski, and Bohren & Der Club of Gore are for autumn, then _______ is for the spring.)

PaulGrahamRaven,
@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es avatar

@jamesreeves Explosions in the Sky.

GuerillaOntologist, to random
@GuerillaOntologist@social.coop avatar

This little guy is the epitome goaty-ness: non-chalantly standing on some unlikely perch and chewing on something that is definitely not food. ๐Ÿ˜ ๐Ÿ

PaulGrahamRaven,
@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es avatar

@GuerillaOntologist Capricorn life-goals, right here

KDZU, to random
@KDZU@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Mobile pergola containing Jeep.

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@KDZU It's adorable to see them carrying their young this way in the wild

jasonpettus, to random
@jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud avatar

One of the things I love the most about the UK:

"Do you want to see the stone slab where William the Conqueror ate his first meal after the Norman invasion of England a thousand years ago?"

"Sure! Is it in a museum?"

"Nah, it's just a bench in a park now that everyone ignores."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/william-the-conquerors-dining-stone

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@jasonpettus Eh, when you've got that much history underfoot, you learn to tune it out by necessity, or you'd never get anything done. I remember staying with some USian friends in an old cottage in the Lake District, and one of them had a full on Keanu Reeves moment: "whoa, this house is older than my country". But we've lived among the ruins since the Romans left, if not before...

jonty, to random
@jonty@chaos.social avatar

Tiny bird season is great, but this year we have TINY HERONS

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@jonty Oh wow! Surprisingly floofy... unsurprisingly dorky.

jasonpettus, to random
@jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud avatar

If the Suez Canal crisis marked the official end of the British Empire (that is, when Britain invaded Egypt in 1956 in order to gain back control over an illegally seized Suez Canal, then suffered a humiliating defeat when 50 years previously they wouldn't have even broken a sweat, showing the world they were no longer a superpower), I have to wonder if this coming ban of TikTok is going to be America's version of this. Will be fascinating to see how this plays out.

PaulGrahamRaven,
@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es avatar

@jasonpettus Definitely one to file under "first as tragedy, then as farce"

guncelawits, to random
@guncelawits@mastodon.social avatar

The business case is, โ€œInstead of having employees, you can have golems made from random parts of random cadavers. They are guaranteed not to listen to feedback from management. If you fire one, you get an identical replacement.โ€
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/technology/ai-startups-financial-reality.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@guncelawits Given the number of refusals-to-comment in that piece, I think they all know the game's up, or that it will be soon.

PaulGrahamRaven, to general
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29APR24 / first third

https://www.velcro-city.co.uk/29apr24-first-third/

jonty, to random
@jonty@chaos.social avatar

2012 Olympics: our mascots are cyclopean nightmare fuel

Expo 2025: what if ๊™ฎ could chase you

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@jonty What the actual fuck

claytoncubitt, to random
@claytoncubitt@mstdn.social avatar

Everything seems pretty new until your late 20s, when you start getting enough experience to notice the reruns and remixes everywhere. By your 40s you can immediately dissect anything into its constituent mood board elements. By your 50s you've seen every trend come and go 3x.

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@claytoncubitt Hitting my late forties has really explained why I'd always felt that people in their late forties were so angry and jaundiced about everything

PaulGrahamRaven, to random
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Reading that Yancey Strickler thing that people have been linking, and realising that I simply no longer care what "the internet" was, is, could be or might once have been, and that my main wish --- extremely unlikely to be fulfilled, admittedly -- is that we stop reifying this increasingly monstrous and all-consuming noun.

I do wonder if this prolix mania for redefinition isn't perhaps a sign of an exhaustion and ennui much broader than merely my own, but that might be too much to hope for.

PaulGrahamRaven,
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(That reference, which I will leave unlinked, comes via the tireless @inevernu and his Sentiers newletter, which has also informs me that someone else has commissioned Anthony Gormley to once again reiterate that one sculptural idea he had that one time. Clearly I am having a very grumpy sort of Sunday.)

danielatafani, to random Italian

"Microsoft and Alphabet enjoy AI-powered gains from cloud divisions": they are not making money from what AI can do; they are making money from the infrastructure needed by those who believe in AI
https://www.ft.com/content/f01c6852-8aa6-4cc0-991d-38f15077ba92

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@danielatafani a.k.a. "selling shovels in a gold rush"

PaulGrahamRaven, (edited ) to random
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Has anyone else noticed this thing where the RSS feeds of WP-dot-com-based blogs are suddenly kicking out messages that inform you to resub to a totally new feed URLfrom a service called follow.it, which is some sort of freemium RSS-as-a-service offer?

In short, I think Automattic's's hunger for enshittificatory moves has finally turned to the legacy of WP.com. If you're still blogging there, you might want to think about changing platforms.

(Edited to frame the correct platform.)

PaulGrahamRaven,
@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es avatar

( @CherylMorgan , your blog was one of these. Have Blogspot actually informed you about this, or have they just kinda sneakily done it on the back-end and hoped your subscribers wouldn't say anything?)

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@CherylMorgan Hmmm. Have you made any changes to the blog(s) you're still running?

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@CherylMorgan Yep, they're shunting you to this follow.it service, it seems. Check the first item in your RSS feed at present: advises to resub to this follow.it service

https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cheryl-morgan.com%2Ffeed%2F

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@CherylMorgan Ah, I see. That's gonna cause all sorts of interesting headaches when it comes to redirecting existing subs...

HadasWeiss, to random
@HadasWeiss@mastodon.social avatar

"the" google - a boomer thing or just my mom?

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@HadasWeiss Yr mom and Dubya

claytoncubitt, to random
@claytoncubitt@mstdn.social avatar

Fish head on sidewalk, Brooklyn

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@claytoncubitt As you do.

emma, to ai
@emma@assemblag.es avatar

Chaoting posting and reposting within the last 90 mins, lol. I am thinking about the role of Silicon Valley proto-fascism in sparking or reinforcing leftist critiques of #AI which (I'll die on this hill) rarely sufficiently address the positive applications (e.g. for medical research)

PaulGrahamRaven,
@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es avatar

@emma The problem here is the conflation and collection of a very diverse and probably incommensurate range of applications of computing under one highly loaded and massively hyped misnomer. Or, more simply: none of this stuff is "AI", really, and labelling medical information technologies with the same term as the generative-model crap serves only to discredit the former when the latter finally, inevitably, falls on its arse and fails.

PaulGrahamRaven,
@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es avatar

@emma Or, to put it another way still: there will still be funding for the medical applications when the AI winter blows in; perhaps slightly less, but not much, and what there is will probably be spent more wisely, because the smokescreen of stupidity will have mostly blown away.

PaulGrahamRaven,
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@emma On the basis of a lot of workshop time in recent months, talking with all sort of non-tech people about this stuff, I think that umbrella term is just "computing". That's what most people mean when they say those two letters; those two letters have basically been a rebrand of computing whose success in the short term is spelled in ballooning stock prices. The longer-term future of computing will have to reckon with the false promises of the present. I think that's probably a good thing.

ingrid, to random

Me in 2020: well, seems like journalism is not panning out for me maybe I'll go lie low in academia for a little while to figure out next moves

Me in 2024: lol, lmao

PaulGrahamRaven,
@PaulGrahamRaven@assemblag.es avatar

@ingrid Ask me about my time in 1) the live music industry, 2) libraries, 3) bespoke web development and 4) freelance writing

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