@WesternInfidels@mefi.social

Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@jplebreton Carmack was a literal juvenile delinquent, id software was birthed from larceny, and what self-awareness Carmack displayed came well into adulthood. Then he married a Randroid. He's long been a poster child for "Engineer's Disease," telling himself "I'm logical about software development, so obviously all my opinions and biases are also based on logic." He may be especially vulnerable to the charms of the hermetically-sealed thought-bubble of TESCREAL, but the real problem is the system that shuttles vulnerable people into that thought-bubble.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@papageier @reading_recluse I've done some weaving with a manual loom, and I think your attempt to draw a parallel between machine weaving and LLMs is absurd, wrong in most of the specifics and missing the point of much LLM criticism.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@corbet It could be one more facet of our looming neo-feudal moment. Bespoke, tested code for the elites, slop-upon-slop code for the peasants. I suppose some people will surely turn to LLMs to help navigate the social "are you serious" gauntlet.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@jaykuo@universeodon.com We need more headlines to lean into right-wing priorities: "Deep State Censors Texas Christian"

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

I heard of many conspiracy theories regarding COVID vaccines and 5G phone signals. People concerned that their very thought processes might be usurped by interlopers.

I haven't heard any such concerns about LLMs. Which are literally here to unburden you from your own thought processes. There's even a name for it: "Cognitive surrender." The LLM companies even embody the apocryphal drug-dealer stereotype: "First taste is free."

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@nixCraft@mastodon.social Maybe I'm an outlier here, but I don't understand how the presence of games is going to "reclaim my focus." Seems like that would do the opposite.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@georgetakei Maybe the VP should just stay in his lane. His soft, curvy, well-upholstered lane.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 31mo ago

Replying to

@jimray@mastodon.social

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Alice Look here, a real curmudgeon doesn't truck with these "may be" and "entering" qualifiers. If you're going to curmudgeon properly you have to OWN it, see?

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@splitbrain@fedi.splitbrain.org Everything you said makes perfect sense to me. That's the way things _should_ work. But it's not how I've seen things work. It's the threads full of clueless guessers and cranky "that's not helpful" comments that (eventually) attract enough attention to produce a good answer. The helpfully-boosted questions just get radiated into the ether and eventually disappear.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Alice Because the hamster bottle wouldn't hold enough ranch, that's the answer

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ldpm @ZachWeinersmith "If you find yourself communicating with your ancestors, that's too much garlic."

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@sonjdol The interview excerpt is borderline incoherent. I can't summarize what he was trying to say. I can't believe he's a CEO. Is it the panopticon his company is building, or the AI they're hoping to plug that in to, that he thinks will impoverish educated women? I can't tell. I'm not CEO brained enough. This is the guy who publicly fantasizes about remote-control spraying fentanyl and piss on journalists who he views as business enemies. https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/02/17/palantir-piss/

thecanary.co

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@roadskater @goatrodeo @BoredomFestival I read a critic's take on one of Gibson's later books, in which the critic asserted that cyberpunk, like newspapers, is writing for the now, with no consideration for how it might age at all. I don't like the idea but I haven't been able to fault it, either.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Alice I'm sorry to inform you that "hot dog years" are a myth perpetuated by Big Hamburger

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Alice Look at it this way: 13 is 68 in dog years.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Retro photography hobbyists will explain why the most outstanding pictures seem to happen on film: Because the use of film affects the process of taking photographs, it slows things down and encourages the photographer to make a larger effort.

Recording engineers will explain why old recordings sound more vital and alive: Because the use of relatively-inflexible old analog tape systems affects the process of recording music, it encourages the in-person collaboration and focus of all involved.

Do you suppose that in the future, software developers will be explaining that old software catered to actual human needs and wants better? Because human authorship affected the software development process, that it required developers to consider their decisions more carefully? That it made fixing things more attractive than throwing things away and starting over wholesale?

#LLM #software #AI

mefi.social

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

A web form I'm confronted with today includes a hint for one of the text boxes: "Enter numbers and letters."

What... what did they think I might do, if I didn't have that hint?

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@rodneylives Yeah, I noticed that. I haven't seen that before. I guess I don't know anything about the underlying protocols. It's cool, I guess, but the website is more carefully formatted and styled, illustrated, etc.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@rodneylives I'm in the middle of reading this essay, which focuses on a further, bigger-picture objection. It's called "AI as a Fascist Artifact." https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/

Smashing Frames

AI as a Fascist Artifact

(Christian Tieber hat eine deutsche Übersetzung des Textes angefertigt: “KI” als faschistisches Artefakt. Vielen Dank Christian!) (This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. […]

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@futurebird@sauropods.win I have come to believe that Orwell was right: The object of power is power. That the point of abusing another person (or another nation) mostly isn't about changing that person's future behavior. Rather, the point is to demonstrate a power differential (to oneself especially) in an un-fakeable way. Beating your child is effective in demonstrating that you're (still) bigger and stronger than the child. Randomly blowing up schoolchildren in Iran is effective in demonstrating that, whatever else might be going on, you're really the one and only Commander In Chief of the US military. It's ego; it's the will to dominate for the sake of that domination. It's proving to oneself that one is the power-haver, the power-expander, and that others are subservient to, victims of, that power.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@patrickworld@mastodon.online Wow there's so many bible stories I slept through in Sunday school

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@alatiera Hey I don't mean to brag but I haven't had a proper night's sleep since Nov. 3rd 2015.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place If all the stuck-on-Windows 10 users *did* suddenly buy new PCs at once, what would happen to the RAM situation, I wonder? Would there be enough at any price?

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 11mo ago

Replying to

@altomare@oldbytes.space The outer rim of a modern 3.5" 7200RPM disk travels at about 75 MPH relative to the heads. A fancy 10,000 RPM data-center drive would be about 104 MPH.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 13mo ago

Replying to

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 28mo ago

Replying to

@AmishSuperModel@mastodon.social "Well at least my anxiety is helping me get some cardio in" would tend to dissipate the anxiety, whereas "...and it's not even good for me!" would tend to ramp it up. In conclusion, we are so screwed in a land of contrasts.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 40mo ago

Replying to

@jessamyn@glammr.us I very much enjoy Flickr and they're lucky to have you, congrats and good luck!

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@jonny@neuromatch.social Those times aren't as rare as they should be, aren't as rare as a reasonable person would think, at first blush.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@carnage4life@mas.to These things are always setups, and _this_ is what they chose to set up.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@muratk5n @codinghorror They force-fed Copilot into Notepad: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-added-ai-notepad-security-flaw When people didn’t like that, they addressed the matter... with branding: https://www.analyticsinsight.net/tech-news/microsoft-replaces-copilot-in-windows-11-notepad-with-writing-tools-update

Microsoft Added AI to Notepad and It Created a Security Failure Because the AI Was Stupidly Easy for Hackers to Trick

Futurism

Microsoft Added AI to Notepad and It Created a Security Failure Because the AI Was Stupidly Easy for Hackers to Trick

Malware researchers found a serious security vulnerability plaguing Microsoft's latest AI-enhanced version of its plain-text editor, Notepad.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Fantasy headline:

"Unpopular, Criminal President's Unwelcome Dinner Appearance Exposes Journalists, Innocents to Violence"

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@georgetakei I thought the Vanity Fair / Christopher Anderson photos were way worse. I think MAGA (and a lot of regressive right-wing culture) has a different sense of aesthetics than the rest of us do. Signs and signifiers are much more central to their sense of beauty. The president illuminates this particularly well; he just replaces everything with a gilded version, says that looks better. So: Photo shows obvious scars from plastic surgery on your lips? A status symbol. Sign of wealth, time, and access. Good aesthetics. Photo shows you _haven't_ surgically altered your neck to look more like a starving fashion model? Anti-status. Just an un-adorned human vulnerable to unflattering camera angles. Ordinary. Like the rest of us. Boo. Bad aesthetics.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@davidnjoku The broadcasts that I've seen related to Artemis II have been embarrassingly jingoistic, indeed. So many flags waving. So many talking heads saying the word "America" until semantic satiation sets in. The Apollo program (which I wasn't around to watch firsthand) had geopolitical motives, sure, but I'm under the impression that JFK and his successors were far better at highlighting the nobler aspects of the challenge itself.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

🎵 Have you spotted a FNORD ... lately?🎵

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@Daojoan@mastodon.social They suddenly remembered they had no interest in curing _your_ cancer.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jalefkowit First you have to set the house on fire

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@MarkHoltom "In addition to the trespass and animal abuse, her outfit was a fashion crime"

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@len@nyan.network @literalgrill@sakurajima.moe Searching through DuckDuckGo, I can find Neocities pages with their own domains (like https://palmistshouse.net/) But I can't get DuckDuckGo to show me Neocities pages, even much more popular pages, with the neocities.org domain (like https://uncannyvalley.neocities.org/)

palmistshouse.net

Palmist's House

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ZachWeinersmith I've noticed only some of the Jacks in fiction have a beanstalk gig lined up.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to on mastodon.social

@kottke@mastodon.social They're not newcomers. They're not panicky newbies. They've been with CBP for 8 years and 12 years, respectively.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@petergleick This president is the first one to tell me that America doesn't have victories anymore, that America is full of carnage, and now, that America is stupid. Gosh, if I didn't know better, what with him groping the flag and all, I'd almost think he doesn't like the country very much.

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Western Infidels @WesternInfidels@mefi.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

I wonder if floating weightless while hurtling through space at the speed of a rifle bullet on your return from a moon orbit makes you more or less anxious about the prospect of a potentially-nuclear conflict starting on Earth just because Fox News Grandpa had a temper tantrum.

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