Andy @ andrewrgross @slrpnk.net

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41

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1,067

Joined

2 yr. ago

I had several classes during different years, but what I recall from the first, in middle school during the mid 90s, was our teacher, Bunny Morris. She was memorizable because her son was nationally renowned pop artist Burton Morris.

She was fine. I recall that she started her class with the statement that "we are all sexual beings", which sounded cheesey to me at the time but in hindsight seems like a very lucid mission statement for introducing preteens to sexual education.

I don't remember the specifics, but I have great sexual health as an adult, so I suppose she did her job. It definitely wasn't the shamey kind.

Also: this article omits serious context about what the IDF does with the information Microsoft is describing!

Over a year ago, 972 wrote an explosive expose on IDF ai targeting. It's all pretty blunt. A general name Yossi Sariel wrote a book describing how AI could automate industrialized killing, and these plans were put into practice to deliberately target civilian infrastructure when entire families were sitting down to meals. The tools included Lavender, which composed target lists that pretty much included any male over 14 and Daddy's Home, which tracked targets generated by Lavender and generated strike plans when it determined that the target was at their home.

There's no good reason why the Independent left this out. A general literally wrote a book about this, and it's been a year since this information came out.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Agreed. It's so wildly incongruent with who he is. All bark, no bite.

Also: wishing violence against Trump is to me the greatest evidence of hopeless neoliberal confusion.

Don't like him? Offer an alternative. I don't want Trump dead, I want Medicare for all, a child tax credit, and a 30 hour work week. That's what gets rid of fascism: a new democratic social contract. Folks who focus on Trump have lost the plot.

To be fair, that wasn't really her primary issue. Her primary principle was catering to donors and trying to protect the Democratic party from socialism. Which she did.

Enabling the genocide was just a means to that larger end. But the result it's the same.

Damn that's a pretty hard turn for Comey.

Kind of a nuts thing to do. If you mean it, do it yourself big man. Otherwise stfu.

Seconded.

I really liked the garage suit we saw in Wakanda Forever. I didn't care for the upgrade later on the film. I wish so hard we could see more of a truly hacked together suit in this show.

Personally, I think it'd be cool to show power armor that is far less powerful, too. Daredevil is no where near as strong as Spider-Man, but he's still cool. I hate the power level game comics always play. I like believability. Give me a character with 5x strength and super jumps instead of 500x and supersonic speed. That's a way more interesting character to me.

But hey: if we get bulkier suits and leave the nanotech at home I'll call it a win.

I think this post is a cope.

You might be 100% right. But that wouldn't change the fact that you're focusing on the individual in a story about trends, and I think you're doing so because doing so is a way to avoid engaging with the larger point of the article.

Tech work isn't safe. No work is really safe these days. It doesn't even matter if AI can do your job well. It is just a facet of a project to devalue labor and disempower laborers. And that project is going really well! No matter how good you are at your job, none of us can "merit" our way out of that project.

I'm great at my job, and my job is very AI proof. But that doesn't protect me from the fact that my company is looking for ways to gigify the work and hire contract workers from among highly paid laid off scientists and engineers to take over little easy parts of my job. They'll concentrate the hard parts, of my job and yours, and reorganize it until it's as modular as possible, and raise our workloads without increasing our pay until they can make it hard enough to say we're not doing it fast enough.

No chatbot will replace me in the next 10 years. But my company doesn't need them to in order to limit my bargaining power! They're fostering an ecosystem of abundant cheap, fungible atomized workers so they will never have to bid for your labor or worry about you being irreplaceable.

All of us need to get wise to the con. We need universal incomes, universal services, universal healthcare, universal housing. We need a guaranteed safety net that is high enough that everyone has the ability to turn down bad jobs. Even the people you think suck at their jobs.

You cannot escape this by dismissing any laid off worker as too slow to keep up. Because this is a team event. And the bosses are on the other team.

Huh! That's very interesting. And good points.

I think that over time, my tastes and Disney's have seemed to diverge. That can cut both ways. It's possible for Disney to release what they think is the new hotness and for me to be underwhelmed (hot take: I thought Thunderbolts* was mid), but also for them to release a project that doesn't fit well into the big narrative arc that I happen to love (hot take: The Eternals was actual cinema and it's a shame people didn't appreciate it).

I think you're right. If it was good, they would've released it. They're probably going to try and hope that Ryan Coogler's recent success (Sinners) can carry it, but it probably is a bloated mess. Still: if Dominique Thorne has talent and shows it, I'll consider it a win. People dissed Wakanda Forever, but overall I liked it and thought she has promise. She was cocky as hell, and I liked that.

Fingers crossed.

Can you elaborate?

Do you think it's going to suck, or just die from lack of promotion?

I think it looks pretty good. But this is the first trailer I've seen. I'm kind of hoping it's just really good, and turns out to be a sleeper hit. I'm a fan of the character and have been looking forward to this since Wakanda Forever.

Yo I self host a Nextcloud server and I don't know what an apk is. Please stop being a gatekeeper. Grandma Ruth deserves alternatives to big tech just like the rest of us.

All freedom to all the people. These tools aren't supposed to be some special privilege for 1337 hackers. They should be ubiquitous.

I don't think that's true.

I don't think livestreaming your whole life is healthy or desirable, but I don't see finding friends who are cool with it to be an obstacle. There are plenty of other Twitch streamers at the very least who are down with this stuff. And she lives in Austin. Why not have a couple of buddies to go on jogs with or play basket ball or cook with? I just don't see how that would be hard to do.

I don't feel like this article answered my questions well.

Ditto.

Wtf, man. Hit "Publish" when you're ready to say something.

Also, I think a lot could be done to improve this problem just be recognizing the existing institutions that were serving this role that have been severely hampered.

Trusted local news can do a lot. We should find subsidy models that support those.

(I wonder if that's there brilliant idea. Either that or a superintelligent LLM that magically provides an infallible source of indisputable truth.)

I'm curious if she was interviewed over text or of she streamed it.

Also, why is she so alone? Can't you have any friends over for board games while doing this?

It sounds genuinely fucked up.

Did you find fault with their sourcing after watching, or just dismiss it unseen because of its platform?

For most it's about the money. Biden is a Zionist true-believer, though.

He covered up their crimes because he believes deep in his soul that their conquest of the religion is an unassailable right, no matter how brutal. It's a very fucked up belief system, but that's where he's at.

I don't know what you mean. Can you elaborate?

'Your honor, we urge you to allow this company to continue breaking the law because our business is insolvent without the revenue we earn from crimes.'

I like Firefox, but if enforcing antitrust collapses Mozilla than so be it. How long has this car been going on? Have they not established any plans for what they'd do if this happened? They derive 75% of their whole company revenue from one source that was likely to be found illegal? They really thought that was a good idea? That's a hell of a business model. It's not a judge's job to save them from that.

Yeah, I'm on team "They're no Avengers". I love the fact that it was immediately ridiculed in-world.

Jesus. Is anyone actually supposed to take John "Formally Captain America" Walker seriously as an Avenger? Spider-Man had to hustle for that kind of cred, and he was a well-liked homegrown hero with actual powers. Are we all supposed to start calling these folks that just because he, Congressman Winter Soldier, and an group of unfamiliar but suspiciously darkly-attired supers were labeled as such after they happened to appear during a cataclysm that coincided with a desperate press conference by a disgraced CIA director?

No fucking way. Those are not The New Avengers. Those are "the new Avengers" or the Notvengers or the B-vengers or Bucky's kids or anything other than a straight faced "New Avengers". I expect them to likely stick with Thunderbolts, honestly. It would clearly be better than one of the sarcastic derisive nicknames.

I really liked this movie, but I feel like it had the opportunity to rise closer to the quality of Captain America: Winter Soldier that it missed.

To get this out of the way, it was very good. It did a lot of things well.

That said, I feel that it embraced certain widespread bad habits in superhero movies that it could've overcome, and which would've made this one of the great Marvel movies.

Principally, characters just show up in costumes sometimes for fights that don't make great sense, talk, and then reappear long distances away after an unspecified-but-short amount of time at the next key location.

Sometimes, a bit of effort is made to provide a bit of explanation, as is the case when Alexi overseas Val in his limo. But let's be honest: the director of the CIA riding around in an unfamiliar limo (driven by a former Soviet spy!) having sensitive conversations with one clearly conflicted lackey is more Venture Bros. than All the King's Men.

Does it ruin the movie? Of course not. But it's representative of the tropes. Where did Bucky get those anti-humvee grenades?? And why the hell did he use one on an unarmed civilian vehicle in the middle of the United States?!? How did he even get them to the gas station? Did they walk because he blew up their car against all reason!?!

Bucky just shows up to superhero. He enters the nightmare dimension that brutalizes you with your worst crimes and flippantly jokes that it's unpleasant. It tries to sidestep context that would actually make it richer!

For instance: what if after Bucky blew out the tires on those trucks and flipped one the way he did he was followed up soon after by a convoy of state highway patrolmen to take those soldiers into custody? That would've ruled. It makes the story bigger! What the fuck did Val tell those guys to get them to carry out orders that fucked?? The tension goes up! This isn't happening totally out of sight! People are going to hear about Bucky getting tangled up in this, and hear stories about black ops vans live-firing on domestic soil with unclear authority! What??

And would it have killed the writers to have Bucky enter Bob's attic screaming violent threats in Russian before collapsing to the floor gasping though sobs? To have him just utterly break down and remind us that he was forced to commit atrocities and kill Innocents and people he loved? And then try to compose himself and focus on his mission in the midst of what is clearly a barely managed panic attack?

And then have Yelina point out that it can get better for Bob, because Bucky -- and all of them! -- are proof that Bob IS NOT ALONE IN HIS PAIN???

Aggh! That would've been AMAZING! They could've done more with this if they didn't do the comic-book corner cutting. The corners are where the true greatness often comes!!

Why, because they spoke truth to those who didn't want to hear it?

This article is true and uniquely human in a way that is rare in the ai slop era.

Bob is a super dangerous sadboi puppygod. He's a confused, traumatized sweet-hearted disaster with floppy dark hair, bipolar disorder and abs that can destroy the world if he gets too sad, and no one cares about him... except YOU. The article speaks the truth.

And good for them! Whatever the gen-alpha equivalent of a Tumblr girl is, they need this.