@rgs@metasocial.com
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

rgs

@rgs@metasocial.com

Internet plumber | Languages (humans and computers) | Thinks in (distributed) systems | Nocoiner | Ineffective altruist | Claude Lévi-Strauss | Thelonious Monk | Barbie | he/him

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cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Deeply telling about how far the Overton Window has shifted in 40 years that Ronald Reagan took a harder line with Israel than Joe Biden, never mind Mitt Romney.

(But then, per wikipedia Romney was best buds with Benjamin Netanyahu at university. So this tracks.)

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@cstross “Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said Sunday President Reagan 'hurt me very deeply' when he described a massive Israeli airstrike on Beirut as a 'holocaust' during an angry phone call.” — https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/29/Begin-says-Reagan-used-word-holocaust/3133399441600/

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

I am currently in the odd position of trying to decide if the utility of yet another French grammar book is worth the extra weight in my luggage for the flight home.

And yes, you can assume I have bought enough physical books that the question's not a silly one. :)

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Achète-la, achète-la! 📚

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper "que je passe le bac" I suppose

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Getting tired of Anglocentrism everywhere and especially in tech – the belief that particular features of the English language are somehow applicable all other languages. One most egregious example is text search and indexing. In English it's easy; in languages where words change depending on case or noun category, it's not so straightforward. Incidentally this makes English especially well-suited to train LLMs.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Did they actually remove Lower Decks from Amazon Prime

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

So iOS 17 adds a new feature to make a pic show up on another person's iPhone when you call them ("contact posters"), and no way to disable this on the receiving end? What were they thinking?

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

“The issue isn’t that Americans weigh things differently. It’s that most of them don’t weigh things at all.” https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/apr/02/cups-v-grams-why-cant-american-and-british-cooks-agree-on-food-measurements

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

French ADHD is like buying another baguette at noon because you forgot you bought one already 🥖

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

"OpenAI’s AGI bait-and-switch wipes anything that does not count as economically valuable work from the definition of intelligence. That’s a massive erasure of our human capacity and a reduction of ourselves that we should resist." – https://www.noemamag.com/the-danger-of-superhuman-ai-is-not-what-you-think/

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Tasks that require expertise cannot be replaced by AI. Expertise needs to be built. A society that has lost its experts will collapse: they're necessary to maintain the systems that maintain the society. This was true even for hunters-gatherers (building bows and arrows from scratch is hard). Of course, random canned responses asserted with confidence can pass too easily for expertise, especially to people who have been trained to disregard expertise. That's a real danger in the long term.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Well, even "economically valuable work" cannot be replaced by AGI when it comes to craftsmanship. This is a human activity deeply embedded in our bodies and brains. The book "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett explains this very well. For example, how can you design, let's say, a better keyboard, like @jesse does, without fingers, and the knowledge of what typing is? An octopus would be better at it than ChatGPT.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

When investigating a new bookshop I usually go looking for Ayn Rand, Charles Maurras and Jordan Peterson. If they are all in stock I move my business elsewhere.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

There’s a lot of things going wrong at once in these few sentences from a recipe in the NYT

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

I assume when Mekka hears about how awesomely innovative the US VC industry is he doesn’t actually laugh. Much. https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112423073679596246

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper I work in payments. The US payment rails are old, cumbersome, insecure, difficult to use, full of corner cases (health care for example), and prone to fraud. Nobody wants to work with them. Especially the parts that involve EBCDIC (hi, Visa!). A lot of these things have been solved in Europe, Asia and Africa by actual innovation. In the US, the VC industry delivered blockchains.

ainmosni, to Netherlands
@ainmosni@berlin.social avatar

I'm honestly still in shock from just how horrible the new coalition in the #Netherlands is. I mean, I knew it was going to happen for over a decade, but now that it actually happened... fuck.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@ainmosni Next one coming up: France

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

I should know it by now, but the extremely strange, sudden bug I had to deal with today, and that couldn't be possibly caused by DNS, was caused by DNS.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Looks like there’s a new TV series on Kubernetes?

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Seriously, English would be much easier to learn for foreigners if it had rules by which one could derive the pronunciation of a word from its spelling. You know, like most other languages do. But NO, you have to learn every word one by one. (And I'm not even mentioning words that have one spelling and two pronunciations depending on meaning, like lead or read. You're supposed to derive meaning from pronunciation, not the other way around!)

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Today’s a good day to listen to Alabama, in memoriam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_(John_Coltrane_song)

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

It's halloween, so here's a pic of a beheaded medieval dude, holding his head in his arms.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@deepak Look at this gorgeous floor in a building entrance in Paris! (I miss flickr mostly for the niche groups where people would post pics on ultra-specialized topics like this one)

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

TIL paper money (printed with woodblock type) predates Gutenberg. It was a Mongol innovation.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

When the AI is in charge of the post-mortems https://botsin.space/@2001faster/112436354724392199

rgs, to photography
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

The overfishing metaphor will definitively be useful. Thanks, Bruce. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/online-privacy-and-overfishing.html

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