gwynnion

gwynnion, 1 month ago to random

NASA recovered a space probe's 47-year-old computer with about as much memory as my old Commodore 64 over a distance of 15 billion miles so it can (hopefully) continue to do science work, and it reminds me of how much ingenuity used to go into computers back when the assumption was you couldn't consume the water and electricity of a small nation just to power Ask Jeeves.

gwynnion, 6 months ago to random

"The use case for LLMs is spam." Spam email, spam websites, spam news stories, spam books. Nothing anybody wants to read. Software that costs a million dollars a day to produce shit.

gwynnion, 5 months ago to random

The big threat of "AI" isn't it taking over the world, it's it wasting enormous amounts of water and electricity to make a handful of people rich because they cashed out before the suckers.

You know, like crypto.

gwynnion, 7 months ago to random

It should be obvious by now that privatization and "running government like a business" are nothing more than dog whistles for the looting and authoritarian control of public goods.

gwynnion, 4 months ago to random

A lot of guys suddenly pretending to care about "academic plagiarism" like they cared about "ethics in gaming journalism."

gwynnion, 24 days ago to random

Are these protesters "antisemitic," too? 🤔

https://apnews.com/video/israel-government-israel-hamas-war-israel-protests-and-demonstrations-benjamin-netanyahu-80fa94064ad4429ebb52531ad3ca12dc

gwynnion, 5 months ago to random

"Free speech requires platforming Nazis but banning sex workers" is a pretty common Nazi belief because they're misogynist, puritanical freaks who want to control people, especially women.

gwynnion, 7 months ago to random

Tech companies greatly underestimate my willingness to not use their services at all.

gwynnion, 26 days ago to random

Upon finding out 99% of NYU protesters were indeed students, Republican Councilwoman Vickie Paladino decided they all have to die.

It feels like Democrats should stop helping these people in their war on students and higher education?

gwynnion, 8 months ago to random

“'Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states.' Over and over again, the worst states for children are clustered around the 'pro-life' Bible Belt, and the map of the states that are the worst for children looks a lot like a map of red-state America."

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/09/human-rights-watch-usa-child-abuse-labor-report.html

gwynnion, 1 month ago to random

The US government's entire beef with TikTok is they believe it's spying on Americans for the sake of the Chinese government, as opposed to American social media companies who spy on Americans for the sake of local, state, and federal law enforcement and various intelligence agencies and literally anyone else who is willing to pay for that data.

Which is why they want TikTok sold to an American company willing to hand that data over to them instead of instituting actual privacy regulations.

gwynnion, 7 months ago to random

As fascists and fascism have proliferated and started creeping into the mainstream, there has come this strange idea that hating fascists is some kind of performative virtue signaling and not a logical response to genocidal sociopaths who want to torture and kill many of us.

I don't wanna punch fascists because I think it's cute. I want them dead. Because the only good fascist is a dead fascist. It's literally us or them.

gwynnion, 8 months ago to random

The US media help the fascists because it wants the fascists to win because it's owned by the fascists.

People need to stop acting surprised and confused about this.

The media isn't an inherently democratic or democratizing institution and never has been and doesn't deserve your unconditional support because of principles they don't share.

The Fourth Estate works for fascists right now and should be treated as such.

gwynnion, 7 months ago to random

People on Bluesky have been bulk posting invite codes on "X," apparently trying to boost their follower numbers to more Twitter-like levels, but the codes have been snatched up by bots and now there's an influx of trolls and Neo-Nazi accounts. 🙄

gwynnion, 1 year ago to random

There isn't a "crisis in masculinity."

There are just guys who can't cope with there being any standards or expectations for their behavior at all after being told they could literally do whatever they wanted and treat people like property.

There's a reason every proposed "solution" is misogynist as hell and involves forcing women into a social position where their lives, bodies, and livelihoods are entirely controlled by men.

Because these men are pigs and want to live life on easy mode.

gwynnion, 6 months ago to random

Occasionally, I think about the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist bombing, which was shocking and horrific in itself, and how no countries were bombed in retaliation. The conspirators were arrested, tried, and sent to prison.

That's what I expected to happen after 9/11. Instead, Bush, Cheney, and the New American Century people encouraged Americans to be their worst selves for the sake of their own political, financial, and imperial ambitions.

gwynnion, 3 months ago to random

People react with horror to the thought of women being forced to seek "back alley" abortions but not to trans people being forced to seek black market hormones and surgery even though the risks and the principle of bodily autonomy are the same in each case.

We're talking about scientifically and medically sound and even routine healthcare in both cases, but there's this underlying feeling among a lot of cis people that trans people could just stop if we really had to.

gwynnion, 2 months ago to random

People rightfully scoff at America being described as the richest country in the world when it's really a poor country with a shocking number of millionaires and billionaires who got rich by exploiting everyone else and the loopholes built into the system for them.

But it's also a fairly liberal country crushed under the weight of a white wealthy ruling class, who not surprisingly are mostly those same millionaires and billionaires or their hatchet men.

gwynnion, 6 months ago to random

People don't really care if "the economy" is healthy if they personally can't afford rent and groceries, and telling them to feel otherwise is just a way of reminding them they don't matter to the people in charge.

gwynnion, 11 months ago to random

So Oceangate and the US Navy both recorded the sound of the Titan sub imploding on Sunday.

The company was also aware all electronics on the sub failed simultaneously. James Cameron of all people stated the obvious: that means the vehicle was destroyed instantly.

Hmm.

The media, of course, has been spinning this incident as a race against time when everybody involved knew they were dead from the start.

gwynnion, 7 months ago to random

The enshittification of the Internet coincides with the economic shift to mandatory infinite growth so shareholders and CEOs can receive ever more absurd payouts at the expense of sustainable business. This led to increasing commoditization of our time, our data, and our attention. We're not the customers, we're the product.

Which also coincides with the democratic breakdown of treating voters not as decision makers but as a captive audience for whatever the political-moneyed class wants to do.

gwynnion, 6 months ago to random

76% of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign and most blame him for the 10/7 attacks but you wouldn't know that from Biden and western media rushing to cover him in glory over his war in Gaza.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/protesters-outside-israeli-pm-netanyahus-house-anger-grows-2023-11-04/

gwynnion, 3 months ago to random

"OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said an energy breakthrough is necessary for future artificial intelligence, which will consume vastly more power than people have expected."

My mind runs on coffee, cheese crackers, and an occasional slice of pizza. Why is theirs so inefficient?

And wasn't AI supposed to solve the energy crisis itself?

gwynnion, 7 months ago to random

A lot of people who were righteously angry at Hamas are looking the other way as the Israeli government indiscriminately bombs Gaza and cuts off food, water, and electricity to everyone there.

The Israeli government isn't fighting Hamas, really. It doesn't want to. Hamas is very useful to it as a pretext for these massive bombing and terror campaigns against Palestinian civilians.

The Western press blithely calls it "fighting terrorism" and nobody thinks twice about it.

gwynnion, 9 months ago to random

Whatever comes next after crypto and LLMs will probably also require massive amounts of wasted electricity to power these big data centers these guys already bought.