@acb@mastodon.social avatar

acb

@acb@mastodon.social

Melbourne→London→Stockholm; pronouns: he/they; was andrewcb on birbsite. I also post about music at https://linernotes.club/@acb

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acb, to random
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

So the Tory candidate for Mayor of London (a lacklustre Poundshop Theresa May knockoff, the latest in a line of bellowing ignorami CCHQ had sent for the role) may have won, not on any merit of her own, but because the progressive voters who made up Khan’s 20% margin stayed home due to Gaza/TERFism/Starmer’s rightward tilt? If this turns out to have been the case, one could call this the Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner Election.

timrichards, to random
@timrichards@aus.social avatar

Off on this gorgeous outback train for an excursion today. They don't make them like this anymore.

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@timrichards that’s not the solar-powered one near Byron Bay (I think), is it?

film_girl, to random
@film_girl@mastodon.social avatar

This is fantastic. If you’ve got the Rabbit apk launcher plz share with me christina at christina dot is. This is hilarious. https://www.androidauthority.com/rabbit-r1-is-an-android-app-3438805/

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@film_girl it’s an AI Juicero

Alon, (edited ) to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

What's worse?

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@Alon Noam (Chomsky)

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@Alon also, Kristi Neom would make either a great and/or a terrible drag name

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

I remember when I first saw a CPC464 in a shop I was working in, in 1984.

It was a very neat answer to what the market needed in 1982. But by 1984, cassette storage and Z80s were clearly long in the tooth—it came out the same year as the Macintosh, and 12 months late Atari STs and Amigas were showing up.
https://mastodon.social/@keyboards/112351091848131466

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross IIRC, 16-bit machines were a premium item until the end of the 80s (the high price of RAM was undoubtedly a part of that—the changing economics of RAM explain a lot of changes—though I imagine a 68000 would have gone for a lot more than a Z80 or 6502), so 8-bit machines persisted as a budget option. When the west moved on, the iron curtain fell and western 8-bit machines enjoyed a brief renaissance in the former communist bloc before PC clones conquered everything.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

"On trial alongside T, will be Melanie Ritter, 57, a doctor specialising in the method of predicting the future through eggs and a Covid vaccine sceptic who had expected to become health minister following the coup."

Wow, the Reichsburger coup plotters going on trial sure sound sane and stable to me!

"The prince, the plotters and the would-be putsch: Germany to try far-right coup gang"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/27/the-prince-the-plotters-and-the-would-be-putsch-germany-to-try-far-right-coup-gang

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross given that the original NSDAP included a wide range of crackpots (including believers in Hyperborea, Tibetan-influenced mysticism and the idea that we live inside a hollow earth, as well as the usual racial pseudoscience), that’s hardly unexpected

rysiek, to random
@rysiek@mstdn.social avatar

A few days ago @ward tooted about how it's somehow "AI art", but if it's human-made, inexplicably it's just "content":
https://easymode.im/notes/9s9fhdg8jh3gi3h7

His toot has been living rent-free in my head ever since.

I had ranted a few times before how "content" is a corporate-y way to devalue art. How "user-generated content" is a term designed to make it easier to deny the significance (not just monetary) of the amazing stuff people create online.

Contrasting this with "AI art" is jarring, and spot-on. 👀

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@rysiek It’s essentially the core premise of neoliberalism: that all value that is real is convertible into, and canonically expressed in, hard currencies.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Continuing to poke around with "bluesky". It keeps feeling like openness/federation was something they wanted on paper but never actually had as any kind of core value.

Example: In the protocol, all the resources in the bluesky network have their own URL schema. Several third party tools work with these. For example, at://did:plc:ei24m7la7nsl656y3hmnideo/app.bsky.feed.post/3kr3gjotz2k27 is a post.

You can't get these URLs from official software. bsky.app only gives you URLs within bsky.app.

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc It’s the Potemkin Fediverse

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

THIS IS BREXIT!! SUNLIT UPLANDS!! BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH!!! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿(Rebellious Scots not included)
https://wandering.shop/@feorag/112332304928729661

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross @feorag “Green” tea? Sounds woke to me…

cstross, (edited ) to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Funny how the Americans denouncing Gaza Solidarity demonstrations at American universities are all cops and christo-fascist politicians, while the Jewish academics and students are fine with them …
https://mastodon.social/@DrALJONES/112331038212149373

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross also, German antifascists. A cursory survey of Antifa stickers in Köln and Hamburg this weekend suggests that they’re so stridently pro-Israel as to make Reaganite Evangelicals look like The Squad by comparison.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Looking into how to set up a bluesky server.

Noticed this bit here, in the documentation. That's an interesting way to spell "cannot"

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc or a very smol vampire

mathowie, to random
@mathowie@xoxo.zone avatar

new post: Feeling duped by Amazon's "magical AI" bullshit https://a.wholelottanothing.org/feeling-duped-by-amazon/

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@mathowie Was the guy inside the Mechanical Turk Turkish? I thought that that just referred to the automaton’s orientalised appearance.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

One of the weirdest modern things to me is this obsession with generations. Maybe I haven't read the right stuff, but you pick up a 19th or 18th century book and they talk about the past, or conflict in families between old and young, but never this weird cohort-antagonism thing?

Could be it's random culture shit, but maybe it's because people have fewer kids, so they don't span generations? Or maybe tech acceleration means cohorts have more differences that are real?

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith My theory is that it originated with the coincidence of the post-WW2 baby boom (providing a generation that conspicuously stood out, at least in magnitude) and the rise of mass media and mass middle-class prosperity (setting the norm for the youth to be differentiable by mass consumption of pop culture and recreational media). Once that happened, the idea of an entire age cohort having solidarity in blue jeans and rock’n’roll (or whatever) was self-reinforcing.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

WHERE THE WEB IS GOING: The convergence of LLMs and web advertising will lead to "ads" consisting of several hundred gigabytes of javascript containing a (weighted) neural network designed to generate unique per-user video advertisements—generated on your computer at your expense to ensure the imagery is unique and evades AI-based ad-blockers.

"AI spam" is an entire AI, squatting on your CPU and making it glow dull red as it works out how to capture your attention.

Welcome to the spamularity.

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross One optimistic note; all those terabytes of capacity devoted to video ads and automated longitudinal phenology will have enough gaps to squeeze through. There will be undergrounds of freaks running very thrifty services (think Gemini) on solarpunk decks made from junkbox 6502s and upcycled toys. This will be ignored and/or regarded as a breeding ground for piracy if not paedoterrorism.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

The Iranian regime may consider that they've defended their honour adequately, but does Bibi Netanyahu consider that he no longer needs an Iranian threat to justify his death-grip on power in Israel? That's the real question.
https://press.coop/@WSJ/112266615051931134

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross An all-out war with Iran would transform him from soon-to-be-indicted crook to Churchillian commander-in-chief of the Free World, directing millions of troops from a multinational alliance to reshape the Middle East. If it doesn’t happen on its own, he’ll do his best to make it happen.

acb, to animals
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

Happy !

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

People trying to train AIs are now complaining that all of the AI data on the internet are making it hard for them to get quality training sets of natural language and images.

bitter snickering

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird The Habsburg Singularity is nigh

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Germany is finally voting on self-ID in two days. It's been in development hell since 2022, to the point that I'm mildly surprised it's happening before both an Israel-Gaza hostage deal and a Dutch cabinet formation. https://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=49084

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@Alon do they have TERFs in Germany, or just Reichsbürger and Putinists?

jon, to random
@jon@gruene.social avatar

OK, this was too niche, even for Mastodon

Here are the answers
Number 1 - Ukraine 🇺🇦 - 109 , 36.7m people, 2.97 per million inhabitants
2 - Estonia 🇪🇪 - 2 Towers, 1.3m people, 1.54 per million
3 - Lithuania 🇱🇹 - 4 Towers, 2.7m people, 1.48 per million
4 - Macau 🇲🇴 - 1 Tower, 0.7m people, 1.43 per million
5 - Armenia 🇦🇲 - 3 Towers, 2.8m people, 1.07 per million

France 🇫🇷 has a paltry 39 towers, so just 0.6 per million
https://gruene.social/@jon/112240887202694502

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@timrichards @jon Or alternatively, a way of saying that there is no need to go to the decadent West, as socialism can provide everything including its iconic monuments. Or perhaps they were commissioned to set the mood for driving the Soviet people’s champagne that Stalin ordered the development of.

camaradabakunin, to random Spanish
@camaradabakunin@paquita.masto.host avatar

✊

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@camaradabakunin @cstross In the last days of capitalism, many companies adopted a curious ancient custom. A janitor or similarly lowly worker would be promoted to CEO, serving as such for a quarter, enjoying the luxurious office and executive jets (any decisions they made affecting the business would, of course, be overridden). At the end of the quarter, they would be put to death as a human sacrifice to ensure the Invisible Hand’s continuing beneficence.

simonbs, (edited ) to random
@simonbs@mastodon.social avatar

Working on a poster for the upcoming coffee corner in our kitchen. The poster is heavily inspired by one I found online, but I decided to make my own because the original didn't have all the drinks I wanted, it didn't show measurements, and finally, it's an opportunity to exercise my drawing skills 😄

acb,
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

@simonbs The difference between an americano and a long black is entirely down to the direction of the coriolis force

acb, to random
@acb@mastodon.social avatar

IMHO, English should bring back the reflexive pronoun (modernised as “sy”, and used much as “sein” in German) for purposes of disambiguation.
https://toot.community/@yvanspijk/112236896263033684

AlSweigart, to random
@AlSweigart@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    acb,
    @acb@mastodon.social avatar

    @AlSweigart @glyph also, David Bowie trained in mime before taking up music

    acb, to random
    @acb@mastodon.social avatar

    New headcanon just dropped:

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