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.
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Famous American murderer from the telly, O J Simpson, has been in the news recently for dying. Here are some lesser known facts about him:
O J was known by his fans as "The Juice". This is because his full name was Orangejuice Jorangejuice Simpson.
King Edward VIII of England was forced to resign because he wanted to marry him.
In addition to being good at rugby and murder, O J was also the first man on mars.
He was acquitted after his lawyer, who was one of the Cardasians from Star Trek, convinced the jury that there were five lights.
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Also instructor: “I’ll be five minutes”
"If you're under 25 your brain isn't fully developed, so you can't be trusted to make informed decisions"
I'm seeing this a LOT lately, especially today with the Cass Review fallout. And it's utter guff, based on hearsay, misunderstandings of neuroscience, or wilful ignorance.
Why? I'll tell you why
/1
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Once you're over 45 your brain's completely calcified.
It's basically just a lump of granite that replays songs from your teenage years while you still think of technology in terms of the poorly-scripted Sci-Fi TV you still own on DVD.
Definitely can't be trusted to vote on any new issues (i.e. 'any issues at all') once you lose all ability to develop beyond the thinking of the previous century.
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People seem to think that hormones fundamentally don’t really feel like anything, that they just change your body and nothing else. Nothing is further from the truth.
Getting on HRT when you’re trans feels like you’ve been wearing shoes two sizes too small for your entire life and you’ve just got a pair that fits. Getting on HRT when you’re not has the opposite effect: instead you’re taking a drug that will cause crushing depression. It’s even on the side effects list!
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I kind of forgot while saying this that in their mythology we’re embarked upon a sinister project to propel cis kids through transition.
Obviously fucking not, dickheads. We recoil at the idea of someone being pushed to transition as hard as we recoil at the idea of them being pushed not to. It’s always self-led. How dare you accuse us of the same monstrosity that you are so determinedly perpetrating yourselves.
Wouldn't it be easier to just refer to HRT as 'meds'? Like if you take epilepsy meds, you will have a bad time.
It seems easier to explain 'trans men do not produce the right hormones for men, so they need these meds'.
Dear UK residents. I’m sorry to be tedious, but I’m going to do the trans Cassandra thing again.
The government is now moving towards regarding trans people as effective children until the age of 25.
This will be established as precedent and then used to screw over any and all young adults who can’t escape from abusive parents, especially young women.
If you want to do anything about this, you need to fight for trans people. Yes, you. Now.
We all know that isn’t going to happen to any significant extent though.
As you were.
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@crocket2001
I think it's easy to underestimate how far most people have moved on this already. (Not that *most* makes it safe). There seem to be two groups pushing this:
1. boring folk who moan about the metric system, car parks, youth of today, ULEZ, "they're all as bad as each other", immigrants, etc.
2. Westminster-y policy type people, both left and right, professional dinner-party attenders, columnists, writers, wonks, essayists, student union types.
The (dangerous) difference now is that these groups -- our society's loudest, most boring, dull, dim, and reactionary, who only differ in social class -- are united on one subject.
The public don''t need to "come round".
People think Guardianista idealists lay out liberation's groundwork -- surveyors going ahead. But they're just apologists hanging on the coat-tails of emperors, minting excuses for comfortable lives at court. The powerful, their "clients", are moving right, so they're representing them, coining theories and writing reports.
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After about the first night or so it’s amazing how you get used to sleeping on a boat. The rocking motion and creaking sounds of the lines just become the comforting background rather than the thing that keeps waking you up.
Reminds me of a holiday where the B&B was right above the platforms of Lancaster station. The noise of trains quickly became the background. So much so that when there was engineering works in the last night it was eerily quiet and hard to sleep.
I just made a command-line typo: 'locat' in place of 'locate'.
Ubuntu's command-not-found package offered me 'lolcat' as a higher-ranked preference than what I actually intended.
The Internet has won.
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I don’t have an ubuntu machine at the moment, but I’m guessing it’s this ?
Probably not useful ever, but it’s good to see people having fun from time to time XD
GitHub - busyloop/lolcat: Rainbows and unicorns!
Rainbows and unicorns! Contribute to busyloop/lolcat development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
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A few years ago I was on Scarlet (the yacht of @Sarah Brown and @Zoë O'Connell ) and noticed mid morning that I didn't have the bloating sensation I was used to having some time after breakfast. The reason for this, of course, is that Scarlet runs on lactose-free milk. Evidently I was slightly lactose intolerant, started buying lactose-free milk at home, and everything was better.
It shouldn't have been only today that I extrapolated this experience to cover a large takeaway banana milkshake.
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Observant viewers will note the presence of hydrofoils. Each one of those is an INTERPLANETARY SEAPLANE!
Also, not a single expendable launch in this game.
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I guess the takeaway from the xz backdoor situation is:
If you’re an open-source project maintainer, and somebody starts getting on your case for not doing enough free work for them, you reply “big Jia Tan energy there” and then block them forever.
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A new post on misleading Covid charts & why Covid really is low right now, and why we should be glad of it.
christinapagel.substack.com/p/hospitals-...
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Given the news of the xz backdoor, may I recommend this seminal paper from Ken Thompson's 1984 Turing Award lecture showing how a compiler with no backdoors in the source code can nevertheless propagate a backdoor.
Reflections on trusting trust | the morning paper
blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/09/re…
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on this Trans Day of Visibilty, remember that you are valid, you matter, and you’re trans if you say you are
if you’re not cis, this day is for you
and remember that on this, the most holiest of trans days, TDoV and The Matrix’s 25th anniversary…
she is risen 😉
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Is anyone on Mastodon knowledgeable about Tironian notes? I've got tentative readings of two headings in a 9th c. Text from the Loire Valley, which mix Tironian notes and Latin charaters. But there are 13,000 T. Notes in Schmitz, many of which look very similar. Thanks!!
@histodons @litteracarolina @medievodons @chaprot #bookhistodons @mssprovenance
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@matz
Sure! Be forewarned, the MS is very hard to read (which is why it remained for us to decipher.)
Line 1: the start seems to be "Versus in baptisterio" but after that -- "Petri" something maybe. Extremely hard to read. The last character that looks like some Carolingian miniscule A's -- "abstergentis"? "delati"?
Line 14: we read "De petra manante"
We = me + Mike Fontaine (Cornell) + Rachel Fickes (Middlebury library.)
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Christians: This Friday we celebrate!
Non Christians: Cool! What’s the occasion?
Christians: Our god died. Tortured to death quite horribly, in fact.
Non Christians: You celebrate that?
Christians: There are sound theological reasons.
Non Christians: Bit weird, but ok.
Christians: We call it “Good Friday”
Non Christians: …
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In fact the word good stood for "holy", not the modern meaning:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Fri…
And of course christians don't celebrate good friday, but commemorate it. It's like say that jews people celebrate Holocaust_memorial_days.
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Completely agree!
The use of eth in Anglian and Brythonic names seems to imply a soft 'th' sound, whereas the use of thorn seems to imply a harder one; and my understanding is that the same is true in modern Icelandic (Seyðisfjörður, Egilsstaðir vs Þórsmörk, for example).
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Grimblob
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Not with a bang but with the delivery of an item we don't recall ordering or ever even seeing because our AI ad-sistant decided that people who liked buying things also bought this.
What is the item? It's a faster server for our ad-sistant.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Grimblob • • •Grimblob
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •OnePlanet 💖🇺🇸 🌎
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •bytebro
Unknown parent • • •AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈♾️
Unknown parent • • •Tom Ritchford
Unknown parent • • •@ianturton
I assure you, it is.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merc…
In one of the earliest scenes, Tennison Tarb gets hit by the most advanced form of advertising and becomes hooked on Moka-Colas. He gets more and more hooked - there's a nasty scene where he tried to deny that he ordered some large number of these drinks, and is shown his signature on each purchase.
Later he goes through a horrifying detox, phase one of which is described in great detail, and he is repeatedly told...
1/
book by Frederik Pohl
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Charlie Stross
in reply to Tom Ritchford • • •@TomSwirly @ianturton Ahem: I too have written a book that Tor, for inexplicable reasons, mispunctuated the title of so it came out as THE MERCHANTS’ WAR. And it does not have a sequel titled THE SPACE MERCHANTS.
Also, I am totally not Frederick Pohl.
amazon.com/Merchants-War-Book-…
Amazon.com
www.amazon.comVulcanTourist [MOVED]
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •syerra75
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •