収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Honest to shit the rate at which writing written as warning is turning into writing-as-instruction manual is really starting to fuck with my head right here:

Anthropic shredded millions of physical books to train its Claude AI model — and new documents suggest that it was well aware of just how bad it would look if anyone found out.

I literally read this short story in… I think it was Asimov’s? Could’ve been Analog but I think it was Asimov’s. Circa 1992 or something. Don’t remember much of anything about it other than they were training an AI by shredding and destroying library after library and it was a huge deal.

That was it, though. That was the entire plot.

Kinda wish these fuckers would, idk, watch The Black Hole and ride a giant spaceship into an event horizon right about now, don’t you?

i mean

that’d be good

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

…until I realised today was going to be April 1st, a.k.a. April Fool’s, so some people won’t read anything, and some people might read it but discard it, thinking it to be some sort of April Fools nonsense.

It is not.

So. Not today, then.

Come back tomorrow.

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The Google app for iOS now adds THEIR links to YOUR posts from YOUR website unless you opt-out.

Their links lead people away from your site and back to Google. Because that’s definitely what you want, right? That’s why you have a blog or portal or web site or whatever. You want people to leave your site and go back to Google.

Oh, it’s not?

If you don’t like it, you can “Opt out.” Opting out is a pain in the ass. Here’s where you go to do it. You have to enter every variation of each of your domains or it won’t work. It will take up to 30 days, during which time Google will continue to pollute your work and your writing and your website with their modifications and their added links to take people away from your site and back to themselves.

For example, here’s the list of what I need to opt-out just for this one blog:

solarbird.net
http://solarbird.net
https://solarbird.net
www.solarbird.net
http://www.solarbird.net
https://www.solarbird.net
web.solarbird.net
http://web.solarbird.net
https://web.solarbird.net

Yes, you explicitly have to file no prefix, http:, and https: variants separately. They say so.

Making it difficult like this is 100% intentional and entirely designed to make it as annoying as possible, and also, to make sure you slip up if at all possible and forget one or more combinations.

(Tho’ I am just going to depreciate web. as a prefix right now, to bring down the load a little. Still gonna list ’em, though, because spite is why.)

Right now it’s only in the Google app for iOS and it’s probably a test to see whether they can get away with it without complaint, and how much revenue it generates. Let’s make that a combination of no and as close to zero as possible. Because otherwise they’ll roll it out everywhere, and probably derank you if you don’t go along.

Fucking hell, Google. Fuck you. Just… fuck you.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Should I keep posting excerpts over for Federation, or would it be better if I just federated entire posts?

This isn’t Patreon I’m not getting paid and there isn’t any exclusive content. (Tho’ I do maintain a Patreon, sorta, if anyone wants to throw me money, and a few people do and I very much appreciate that, thank you!)

Mastodon automatically cuts very long posts, adding with a clickthrough if you want to see the whole thing, so if you’re on there, it wouldn’t crush your feeds. kbin doesn’t, but that’s fine, it’s mostly an issue on microblogging platforms.

I don’t know what the Misskey variants do.

Anyway, do you have opinions?

(Including Dreamwidth on this post even though they don’t federate. You’re gonna keep getting the whole posts regardless. ^_^ )

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Naturally we skipped ahead to the Lower Decks crossover episode last week when it dropped early, so this week we watched “Lost in Translation” (2×06) and the main thing I want to say about this one is…

…a little complicated.

Straight up question: is there even a point to maintaining a line between the Fascism Watch and the Cultural Warfare Updates in this environment?

I honestly don’t know. The old dividing line was pretty clear – you had authoritarians doing authoritarian things, and you had the fundamentalist movement doing its things, and while there was overlap, and while the fundamentalists were very authoritarian, it was in a different style, and the relationship often didn’t go the other way. They were still distinguishable, overall, and didn’t necessarily buy into each other’s bullshit – the authoritarians often held the fundamentalists in varying degrees of open contempt, and the fundamentalists would go at the authoritarians as inadequately godly and all that kind of bullshit.

And that’s basically over.

They aren’t yet all the same impulses. You’ve got the Republicans whose main focus, still, is turning their states and the entire country into single-party Orban-like mini-dictatorships. First and foremost of these is Florida, where Republicans are literally introducing bills banning the Democratic Party, and other bills requiring people who write about the government to register with the state. Those aren’t historically Cultural Warfare issues – they really aren’t. Particularly not the latter. As much as I loathe and despise them, they weren’t those kinds of authoritarians.

At the same time, you’ve got – more broadly – Republicans trying to legislate LGBT people out of existence, mostly starting with trans people. But not always; see again Florida expanding its “Don’t Say Gay” bills and other Republican states queuing up to implement their own versions. And while the non-fundamentalist authoritarians would’ve been genuinely okay with that, it was distinct and frankly less of interest to their general hatred for and despising of all women.

And while they didn’t actually believe it, despite – or more likely, because of – their segregationist origins, the fundamentalist right leadership spent a lot of time pretending they weren’t about racism. I mean, they were, but they tried real hard to pretend they weren’t. The fash, by contrast, revel in it.

But that line is getting harder and harder to find – much less navigate – as the fundamentalists have become more overt in their racism over the last few years, and I’m wondering if there’s anything really separating it anymore other than how big the posts get and the tradition I’ve maintained of having both, one usually more active than the other at any given time.

Hence some items appearing in both updates – they can’t be separated out.

And I’m presuming that – as I’ve been saying for some years now – it’ll get worse until it can’t.

I don’t expect to have a good answer, and for the moment, I’m keeping separate categories. But if it gets too much more difficult to figure out… I’m afraid it’ll end up all rolled into one.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

[This line of text is hidden in the image]

Is there ANY way to get rid of this stupid fucking floaty thing that covers up my previous paragraph? I mean honestly. I move my mouse and it shows up and I NEED TO SEE that previous paragraph!

It shows up other times too. Can I pin it somewhere?

eta: there is and mdlbear knew how!

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}.

Steve Silberman - @stevesilberman · 7h
Mind-blowing phrase from a right-wing doctor in my inbox this morning pushing ivermectin for what he calls the Wuhan virus: "The tyranny of evidence-based medicine." #medtwitter #COVID19