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Theodora Ward
@theodoraward@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06writer, enthusiast // luddite department, AAUP-NC
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30 Posts
Joined March 01, 2026
website (under construction):
anti-ai propaganda:
Replying to
@davidgerard@circumstances.run is there something going on with adam conover that i didnt know about or is the context of this event something that adam conover didn't know about
Replying to
@zzt@mas.to it's a bummer because "enshittification" really did change my life. i don't really know how he gets from "copyright law is flawed and creators probably shouldn't rely on it to save us from corpohell" to "training LLMs without the consent of those who authored the training data is normal and good." it's a kind of legalistic literalism that outweighs ethical thought? i don't know why people need to redeem this technology. a couple typos aren't worth running public interference for this shit
RE: @stefan@stefanbohacek.online
this is true for me too tbh. i'd say $100 million is a three-year runway. with that much money i could easily afford a two bedroom apartment, giving me an "office room" in addition to a "bedroom"; that + a switch 2 and i think this whole operation (gestures vaguely aroudn the room) woud be essentially self-sustaining
i really do need to finally Switch Instances on here i guess. i hope that goes well. i believe i have a tutorial bookmarked. time to access the bookmark and follow its instructions
ive been saying various things are "none of my business" so much lately. but i tell you what, there's a lot of stuff out there and very, very little of it is my business
Replying to
@davidgerard@circumstances.run (investing substack voice) People love tech that's *small.* Think *iPhone*. The fact it's smaller than old phones was *key* to the marketing. Pocketability. Portability. Ear buds -- thjink Apple Air Buds. Computer chips -- the secret to their success? *Made of small things.* *The smaller the better* for those actually. That's the *More Law.*
And here's the thing about quantum computers:
*It's literally the smallest a computer thing can get.*
Replying to
@stefan_hessbrueggen@fedihum.org @tante@tldr.nettime.org
dropping the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy article link to "moral realism" as a reply guy mic drop is so funny
it's the weekend...you know what that means...time to Noodle Around
Replying to
@davidgerard this literally happened to me. bloated windows 11 sludged up my ancient laptop...now ive got cron jobs automatically running "sudo put-in-pipe weed.tar.gz && sudo smoke tarball" all day
Replying to
@stefan_hessbrueggen@fedihum.org @tante@tldr.nettime.org if you're really curious, here's an incomplete stab at a more rigorously formulated version of what i take to be the most persuasive argument against AI consciousness that i wrote three months ago if you're curious. https://theodoraward.com/reasoning anyway, please address all stanford encyclopedia of philosophy wiki recommendations to my staff, as i am extricating myself from these mentions now. famous last words i know but im very bored
Replying to
@stefan_hessbrueggen@fedihum.org @tante@tldr.nettime.org it's such a minor claim in the arc of that piece that you're really just being a pedant. the specific claim you cite does nothing to weaken the central argument of his piece, which is that the "they're conscious" people are staking an enormously tenuous philosophical position they're not even close to supporting, largely for marketing reasons
Replying to
@parismarx it's almost hard to talk about because the Discouse is so overdetermined about this sort of thing, but the "severe unmedicated ADHD" she acknowledges at the end makes me wish we had a more robust framework for thinking about the distribution of vulnerability to attention extraction. within like two months of getting on prescription stimulants i'd stopped carrying a smartphone and fundamentally restructured my approach to my computer in a way i simply wasn't capable of before
Replying to
@davidgerard After pouring myself a fresh cup of morning coffee, I unfold the morning paper. My eagerness to greet the new spring day slowly fades, replaced by a slowly dawning horror: THE Grok AI crypto wallet? Hacked? With an NFT and a prompt injection, no less? My...my god...what have we done
Replying to
@j_bertolotti i gotta suck it up and paint my little space marine. poor motor skills be damned. ive read like thirty horus heresy novels for some reason, it's the least i can do
Replying to
@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place it's a good call. i was reluctant to do it around a few things i really do care about, but ultimately i just came around to the recognition that spiking my day because i saw a Certain Kind of Post isn't really praxis lol. anyway this thing always reminds me of this burial quote from his interview with mark fisher in 2007 (!)
Replying to
@tarakiyee extremely good post that articulates something i've had trouble formulating throughout like a decade of hearing this quote "rebutted" in probably half a dozen completely distinct institutional/theoretical contexts
for this job im doing ive spent the last week rereading a bunch of papers about the effects of LLM chatbot usage and it really seems like "extremely powerful sycophantic anthropomorphized time-on-device-maximizing predictive text generation software sold to conusmers fully trained to interpret text in the first person on their phones/computers as communication from another human being" is kind of what mkultra was looking for
is this good
not enough hertz. get real. hit me up when you've released the first 2000Hz monitor.
this remains one of the most revealing and also just like breathtakingly stupid things any of these fucking people have ever said. i still think about it all the time. i missed the fact that the interviewer says he's read 410 biographies of entrepreneurs though lmao
i love my stupid little projects. i love hanging out in the morning and working on a bunch of bullshit
saw a job i would actually love to do in the city i'd most like to live in that pays really well and i think i'm actually qualified for it and the feeling of wanting it freaked me out so bad that i wound up spending my saturday night watching pokemon speed runs. i dont even like pokemon that much
my favorite mobile app is the poweramp music player. i think it's so good. just wanted to put that somewhere
RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/116994264323336370
X: The Everything App. Featuring all the software you know and love: Grok, X, and X Money. The future is finally here fellas
forcing the machines of loving grace watching all over me to watch the "jim and derrick" episode of tim and eric awesome show so many times in a row with me that they are reluctantly obliged to roko's basilisk me
RE: @nancycomics@mastodon.social
holy shit lol
when i played drums in high school jazz band the director would always sing the fills he wanted me to play and it was exactly like this. it'd take like a full minute randomly in the middle of class for me to translate half a bar
Replying to
@tante@tldr.nettime.org at points in my life i have done this and i cannot reocmmend it.