Just finished Slow Gods by Claire North; it deserves the positive chatter it's getting. The Shine and the binary suns are Star Trek-level blunt analogies for current affairs (but well rendered regardless), the focus on one central/peripheral character lets the plot arc while maintaining a realistically ambiguous closure, and I personally found the protagonist's musing on identity as socially constructed versus intrinsic relatable in this time of transition.
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Aeryn is sort of a Fern
@aerynv2@tenforward.social
mastodon 4.7.3… only took me three years on fedi to figure out I should be wearing programmer socks 🏳️⚧️
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Replying to
@renardboy I think of it as "Boeing syndrome": you outsource your core competency to something that'll do it cheaper but sloppier, you make money in the short term, long term your business falls out of the sky (literally in Boeing's case).
Replying to
@mhoye@cosocial.ca @Unlikelylass@mspsocial.net @mcc@mastodon.social even putting aside the AI bits (and I keep waiting for the day when Gemini goes the way of Google+), two interesting questions to me about the longevity of this project:
1) has Google fixed Android's historically poor support for large screens and keyboard & mouse input?
2) Has Google fixed Android's historically poor support for Docs, given that the education sector is one of the main customers for Chromebooks?
Replying to
@what my favourite pair of jeans in first grade was purple, and in hindsight I think Mom might have found it in the girls section of the department store.
In high school I was utterly fascinated with the way one of my classmates would use pencil crayons to put her hair in a bun.
[saw the pink and purple lawnmower toy outside kiddo's daycare]
First thought: Ugh, do they have to gender segment everything in kids toys? It's not like real lawnmowers come in pink…
Second thought: I would totally have bought a pink lawnmower instead of orange given the choice 🩷
Replying to
@wilbowma fascinating read; I'm curious if your university ever assigns you to teach the accreditation-required tech ethics course, I think the students could benefit from your perspective.
Do you think your framework applies differently to building the tools than using them? On the one hand, the "reasonable expectation based on reasonable knowledge" test is another level abstracted when the question is "will the likely users of the tool I'm building use it to cause harm?" (or, perhaps more in your framework, "is the availability of this tool likely to cause harm?"). As an example, I think it's morally wrong to build missiles for Northrup, even if you're not the one firing them, because "people die" is the whole point of the tool; I'm not sure how to define the category, but I think the devs at xAI building the Grok porn machine are arguably working in the same ethical category. It's maybe clearer in the AI industry power argument -- it's still human labour and expertise building these tools, and if it's *your* labour and expertise than you're part of the AI industry power machine. (Full disclosure, I spent two years working on an AI code-generation tool; I'm not proud of the work, and eventually "I am personally contributing to the devaluation of labour in my own industry" was a prominent part of why I quit.)
Just finished The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale by C.M. Waggoner -- delightful little fantasy comedy, strong Terry Pratchett vibes.
Watched the trailer for Toy Story 5 (shame on Disney+ for ranking a trailer for an unreleased movie in the search results), and there's a whole platoon of the space toy acting together. The question raised though, is "what is the proper plural?"
Neat episode, the technobabble solution was even more technobabble than usual, but it was nice to see Chapel have the key insight. "The inertial dampeners & grav plating are acting up" might even be a novel plot obstacle in Star Trek's long history
"Absurdity is baked into the premise" -- silly fun (which I really needed today), and they managed to work in some character development.
Replying to
@ddrake@mathstodon.xyz "what are the society-level negative externalities of this?" / "why shouldn't we build this at all?" / "what marginalized group will this tech make life harder for and how?" -- all questions that don't typically get asked in the tech ethics course and should (I mean, it's been 20 years for me, but we mostly got "here's Kant and Bentham, with a side of Therac and other cautionary tales")