New HHS guidance recommends against the term “sepsis”. We’re goin full humors now, boiiiiiii

ideological*

Tim “Cook of” Apple

So if library users stop communicating with each other and with the library authors, how are library authors gonna know what to do next? Unless you want them to talk to AIs instead of people, too.

At some point, when we’ve disconnected every human from each other, will we wonder why? Or will we be content with the answer “efficiency”?

I’ve never understood the argument that you shouldn’t complain about the environment you interact with because other people interact with worse environments.

Like, okay, that’s good to keep in mind with respect to privilege and assumptions and such, but like…

I can’t deliver a first-hand account of someone else’s life, and I can’t identify the possible solutions to their problems as well as I can for my own — let alone access their world as well as my own, to try to fix some of the problems.

I think on some level the people who say “focus on those other people’s problems” know that those other problems are less accessible.

It’s not that they want you to do better activism. It’s that they want you to do none.

Witcher 4 devs adjusting to Unreal Engine after years of REDengine:

So what counts as dictating my life?

The government prohibiting me from firing my gun in the air, or my neighbor’s falling bullets prohibiting me from leaving my porch?

I’m always suspect of those who assume there is only “freedom to do” and not also “freedom from being done-to”.

They tend to think they will never be on the receiving end of someone else’s “freedom”.

Pretty much, yeah.

Taking over the Democratic Party vs starting a new party is kinda like addressing climate change on Earth vs terraforming Mars.

The former sounds painful and bureaucratic while the latter sounds exciting and innovative.

But if you can’t fix the party or planet you’ve got, which has like 80% of the hard work done already, what hope do you have of doing a new thing from scratch?

Crispy can also mean you’re contemplating the nature of Mario’s 8-bit existence

And CRISPR

Recently had a password that was acceptable for the account creation page on the website but too long for the login screen in the mobile app.

Took me a while to figure out that pasting into that field was just quietly dropping characters.

First thought: Damn, that’s crazy they went ahead and did it to get the footage even though they knew how bad it was.

Then: Well, I guess the fishermen were gonna do it no matter what, huh?

Wait, aren’t the fishermen worried that this footage could ruin their livelihood?

Wait… Maybe they believe that the legality of this practice already has ruined their livelihood, and they want it to stop but can’t compete unless regulation forces everyone to stop…

We need a dewey decimal system for clothing in order to clarify this taxonomy

Also the people who do the tagging and feedback for training tend to be underpaid third-world workers.

At first, I thought “remove this imposter” was a quote from ACB and I was like “Damn, she really woke up to this whole thing, huh?”

I think this would be an example of metonymy.

500 games on 10 CD-ROMs 👌

(485 of them are shareware demos you can only play for 15 minutes at a time, but still)

Another day, another speculative execution vulnerability.

I don’t believe the common refrain that AI is only a problem because of capitalism. People already disinform, make mistakes, take irresponsible shortcuts, and spam even when there is no monetary incentive to do so.

I also don’t believe that AI is “just a tool”, fundamentally neutral and void of any political predisposition. This has been discussed at length academically. But it’s also something we know well in our idiom: “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you have AI, genuine communication looks like raw material. And the ability to place generated output alongside the original… looks like a goal.

Culture — the ability to have a very long-term ongoing conversation that continues across many generations, about how we ought to live — is by far the defining feature of our species. It’s not only the source of our abilities, but also the source of our morality.

Despite a very long series of authors warning us, we have allowed a pocket of our society to adopt the belief that ability is morality. “The fact that we can, means we should.”

We’re witnessing the early stages of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome. It’s not that some bad actors who were always present will be using a new tool. It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.

The worst part is that this will be (or is) largely invisible. We won’t know that we’re wasting hours of our lives reading and replying to bots, tugging on a steering wheel, trying to guide humanity’s future, not realizing the autopilot is discarding our inputs. It’s not a dead internet that worries me, but an undead internet. A shambling corpse that moves in vain, unaware of its own demise.

As they say, you could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.