Yeah, I feel like that’s a good deal. Especially if I get credit. I mean, I’d still do it if it was anonymous, but can you imagine the popularity of being the guy who cut off his fingers for world peace? Frankly you’d be kind of a monster not to do it. So many people lose hands for nothing at all. But being the guy with the robot fingers who gave the world peace and joy? Sure, sign me up. Sounds rad af.
I want to second this, and go further with a hot take: I liked Graber’s answers a lot.
I think skepticism of her and the entire artifice of VC and big tech is totally warranted. But a lot of people in this section seem to basically say, ‘no matter what she says I don’t trust her and I’m certain that BlueSky will be another bad actor.’ And I think that’s an overly simplistic take.
It’s true that there are no trustworthy CEOs. You shouldn’t trust Graber. It will always be a mistake to pin hopes of good management of a platform on the magnanimity of any business leader. However if we want to see a new era of decentralization but are honest about the fact that most users are more likely to join big, corporate-styled platforms (in the short term, at least) then the ideal platform is one that attempts to build their business model around portability.
It’s totally true that BlueSky isn’t there yet. But they’re basically building a set of escape hatches for users. Cory Doctorow talks a lot about how restricting users from leaving a platform is a key requirement to enshitify. So if BlueSky uses a protocol that at least has the potential for this, they’re creating an incentive structure that really does serve a purpose. They may later on try to reverse course. But at least for now, they’re doing the thing that gives users and the third party developers the best chance of escape if things go bad. And that is exactly what I want to see from a big tech platform.
I thought it was built on activity pub.
I’m gonna go over to my Mastodon account and try to reply to you. One sec.
Overall, I like the options today a lot better than what we had 10 or even 5 years ago.
I am glad that both Mastodon and Blue Sky exist. I would like both to be successful.
Oy. I really don’t want to see what happens when we’re faced with an actual challenge. This is… yikes.
The words and actions described in this article are so bewilderingly, shockingly evil that I had to check them against the sources in Israeli news. I already know Dropsite News is credible and reputable, but I still couldn’t believe that Netanyahu and Smotrich would just say the quite part out loud like this. This is so, so, distrubing.
I guess the silver lining is that Netanyahu has acknowledged that there is some kind of red line. Apparently, if he put on a swastika armband and started shouting ‘Gas them all!’, there are senators in the US who would actually apply some kind of sanctions on Israel. I wonder who they are. Lindsay Graham, for instance, would cheer like a banshee. Fetterman would surely jizz his dirty gym shorts. But Schumer or someone called him and actually said that there’s something he could do that would cost him an actual price.
It’s… it’s head spinning. Yesterday, I returned from a quick grocery run, and my five year old son ran out giggling to see what I’d brought home. He was just filled with effervescent joy that I’d gotten blueberries, blackberries, and rice crispy treats. And it just broke my heart because I couldn’t not think about children dying from starvation who are fundamentally no different from my son. There but for the grace of god go all our children. It’s like drowning in slow motion. It just haunts me that these people are capable of exterminationism of this kind.
But yeah… apparently, they’re only allowed to exterminate the Palestinians if they don’t say overtly ‘We will kill them all with starvation’. They still need to say ‘We are fighting a war of defense’ in order to get permission from their US backers. Good to know, I suppose.
Keep up the pressure. Even they know that they can’t achieve their final solution if the world rises up and stops them.
I just want to give credit for the excellent writing in this article:
The demonstrations took place following the announcement earlier this month that Israel would launch a full military occupation of the entire Gaza Strip and impose the mass internment of the population in concentration camps under armed guard, as a prelude to forced marches through the desert or deportation by sea. This is backed by US President Donald Trump, who concluded his Middle East tour in Qatar Thursday by reiterating his administration’s plan to annex the Gaza Strip.
Every newspaper should be using the words annexation, forced displacement, genocide, etc without qualifiers.
Yeah, seems like a pretty big oversight for the author… [Checks byline]… no author credited.
Great. Very real. Much news.
Yeah, I came to say this same thing.
I had several classes during different years, but what I recall from the first, in middle school during the mid 90s, was our teacher, Bunny Morris. She was memorizable because her son was nationally renowned pop artist Burton Morris.
She was fine. I recall that she started her class with the statement that “we are all sexual beings”, which sounded cheesey to me at the time but in hindsight seems like a very lucid mission statement for introducing preteens to sexual education.
I don’t remember the specifics, but I have great sexual health as an adult, so I suppose she did her job. It definitely wasn’t the shamey kind.
Thank you!
Also: this article omits serious context about what the IDF does with the information Microsoft is describing!
Over a year ago, 972 wrote an explosive expose on IDF ai targeting. It’s all pretty blunt. A general name Yossi Sariel wrote a book describing how AI could automate industrialized killing, and these plans were put into practice to deliberately target civilian infrastructure when entire families were sitting down to meals. The tools included Lavender, which composed target lists that pretty much included any male over 14 and Daddy’s Home, which tracked targets generated by Lavender and generated strike plans when it determined that the target was at their home.
There’s no good reason why the Independent left this out. A general literally wrote a book about this, and it’s been a year since this information came out.
Agreed. It’s so wildly incongruent with who he is. All bark, no bite.
Also: wishing violence against Trump is to me the greatest evidence of hopeless neoliberal confusion.
Don’t like him? Offer an alternative. I don’t want Trump dead, I want Medicare for all, a child tax credit, and a 30 hour work week. That’s what gets rid of fascism: a new democratic social contract. Folks who focus on Trump have lost the plot.
To be fair, that wasn’t really her primary issue. Her primary principle was catering to donors and trying to protect the Democratic party from socialism. Which she did.
Enabling the genocide was just a means to that larger end. But the result it’s the same.
Damn that’s a pretty hard turn for Comey.
Kind of a nuts thing to do. If you mean it, do it yourself big man. Otherwise stfu.
Seconded.
I really liked the garage suit we saw in Wakanda Forever. I didn’t care for the upgrade later on the film. I wish so hard we could see more of a truly hacked together suit in this show.
Personally, I think it’d be cool to show power armor that is far less powerful, too. Daredevil is no where near as strong as Spider-Man, but he’s still cool. I hate the power level game comics always play. I like believability. Give me a character with 5x strength and super jumps instead of 500x and supersonic speed. That’s a way more interesting character to me.
But hey: if we get bulkier suits and leave the nanotech at home I’ll call it a win.
I think this post is a cope.
You might be 100% right. But that wouldn’t change the fact that you’re focusing on the individual in a story about trends, and I think you’re doing so because doing so is a way to avoid engaging with the larger point of the article.
Tech work isn’t safe. No work is really safe these days. It doesn’t even matter if AI can do your job well. It is just a facet of a project to devalue labor and disempower laborers. And that project is going really well! No matter how good you are at your job, none of us can “merit” our way out of that project.
I’m great at my job, and my job is very AI proof. But that doesn’t protect me from the fact that my company is looking for ways to gigify the work and hire contract workers from among highly paid laid off scientists and engineers to take over little easy parts of my job. They’ll concentrate the hard parts, of my job and yours, and reorganize it until it’s as modular as possible, and raise our workloads without increasing our pay until they can make it hard enough to say we’re not doing it fast enough.
No chatbot will replace me in the next 10 years. But my company doesn’t need them to in order to limit my bargaining power! They’re fostering an ecosystem of abundant cheap, fungible atomized workers so they will never have to bid for your labor or worry about you being irreplaceable.
All of us need to get wise to the con. We need universal incomes, universal services, universal healthcare, universal housing. We need a guaranteed safety net that is high enough that everyone has the ability to turn down bad jobs. Even the people you think suck at their jobs.
You cannot escape this by dismissing any laid off worker as too slow to keep up. Because this is a team event. And the bosses are on the other team.
Huh! That’s very interesting. And good points.
I think that over time, my tastes and Disney’s have seemed to diverge. That can cut both ways. It’s possible for Disney to release what they think is the new hotness and for me to be underwhelmed (hot take: I thought Thunderbolts* was mid), but also for them to release a project that doesn’t fit well into the big narrative arc that I happen to love (hot take: The Eternals was actual cinema and it’s a shame people didn’t appreciate it).
I think you’re right. If it was good, they would’ve released it. They’re probably going to try and hope that Ryan Coogler’s recent success (Sinners) can carry it, but it probably is a bloated mess. Still: if Dominique Thorne has talent and shows it, I’ll consider it a win. People dissed Wakanda Forever, but overall I liked it and thought she has promise. She was cocky as hell, and I liked that.
Fingers crossed.
Can you elaborate?
Do you think it’s going to suck, or just die from lack of promotion?
I think it looks pretty good. But this is the first trailer I’ve seen. I’m kind of hoping it’s just really good, and turns out to be a sleeper hit. I’m a fan of the character and have been looking forward to this since Wakanda Forever.
Agreed.
There’s also not much reason not to use supports. A tree support wouldn’t as much time or material at all.
Everyone needs a little support sometimes.