SuperSeriousBusiness GoToSocial

How to fly:

Step one: Stand up straight, arms relaxed at your side, hands empty.
Step two: Lift one foot off the ground. You're halfway there!
Step three: Lift your other foot off the ground. You are now flying.

(Yes, this post is about "ai" enthusiasts thinking large language models will somehow turn into AGI.)

if you want better social media you must begin by building communism

by which I mean: it's not enough to make [xyz corpo platform but it's foss]; capitalism must be destroyed utterly at the root -- then "good" social media might begin to become a possibility

death death to the IDF!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NGVe62pT1uU

many cases of "hackers" having atrocious politics aren't there?? it feels like it's becoming a cliche at this point. "Oooh I'm a hacker, hack the planet!" says the flag-toting nationalist / capitalism apologist / spineless liberal 🤡 Feels to me that adopting the "hacker" aesthetic and vobaculary is little more than a shortcut for social cachet #OnHere, and not a marker of anything like true radical politics

it's funny to me that someone talking about "bloat" is such a reliable red flag that their opinions probably aren't worth taking very seriously, because on a surface level i agree that many applications are prone to feature creep and heavier than they need to be, but there's a whole gulf between that and calling things "bloated" because they have a gui, or they use javascript in places, or they vendor their dependencies, or they have a config file, or they use a database, or they have "too many lines of code", or whatever bugbear of the week those weird "suckless" fascists are going on about at any given moment

[I]f we want to talk about ['ai'] being 'here to stay', I think we need to be more specific about what we mean by it, and what aspect of it is significant to us. If you tell me that we need to incorporate AI into our university policy because it is 'here to stay', does that mean we should uncritically invite it in to every aspect of our education and operation? Does 'here to stay' mean that a new technology gets a free pass and full capitulation? If you tell me that the next generation needs training in AI (whatever that means) because it is 'here to stay', does that mean we are not planning for any other eventuality? Does 'here to stay' mean we bet our future society on a technology that is 99% owned by a handful of private corporations? 'Here to stay' can't be a gloss for giving up. Criticising technology doesn't begin and end at abolition - it is an ongoing process of analysis, reflection and dialogue.

https://www.possibilityspace.org/blog/posts/here-to-stay/

"ai"-generated image captions are fucking shit

https://masto.ai/@HourlyPornhubbedHeathcliff/114760293518560025

this one hallucinates a cat, says the dog is standing, mistakes the pink blobs for balloons and hallucinates a yellow balloon, makes up trees that aren't there, and doesn't mention the main focus of the comic, which is the two animals flying through the air thanks to the bubble gum bubbles they're making!

but yeah no cool, really really great technology for disabled people: just lie to blind folks about what's in a picture! what could go wrong!

if half the effort that went into developing these shit machines went into advocating for and implementing accessibility measures then this crap wouldn't get a second look, and it makes me so fucking angry that this is the best that blind comrades have access to -- machines that lie to them -- because other people refuse to do the work

I don't think any ground should ever be ceded to the notion that so-called "ai" makes people "more productive" without a thorough questioning of a) what "productivity" means and b) what is being "produced". If I'm "more productive" at churning out garbage that nobody needs or wants, then what's the fucking point. You might as well argue that laxatives make me "more productive" at blasting turds down the shitter. Fuck off.

I’m a queer Palestinian. Stop using my identity as cover for the destruction of Gaza

[T]here have been those who have sneered at the idea that queer people can find common cause with Palestine and advocate for liberation. The most popular example of this came last year when US pop star Chappell Roan criticised the Biden administration for its arming of the Israeli military. On stage at the Governor’s Ball festival in New York, the singer, who is a lesbian with a drag persona, turned down an offer from the White House to perform for Pride month, saying: “We want liberty, justice and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come.”

Roan’s show of solidarity drew the ire of talkshow host Bill Maher, who suggested the singer would be “thrown off a roof in Gaza”, invoking an oft-used cliche based on a video that has been debunked by Reuters and AFP, among others.

He went on to make punchlines about Roan’s career “blowing up” like pagers in Lebanon, referring to Israeli attacks that killed 12 people and wounded thousands. Hundreds of children were killed in the following months in Lebanon, thousands in Gaza. Maher postured as the liberal hero of queer people, but it seemed easier for him, like many in the west, to point fingers at Palestinian society than to confront the systems his own countries support – systems that bomb, displace and isolate queer Palestinians in Gaza.

[...]

[The] attempt to sever solidarity between queer people and Palestine has been deadly. A year earlier, an Israeli soldier held up a Pride flag in Gaza, with “in the name of love” scrawled on it in English, Hebrew and Arabic. The state of Israel’s official X account boasted of this achievement, “the first ever pride flag raised in Gaza”. As a queer Palestinian, it is enraging to see my identity used as an instrument of war, but what I find most strange is the cognitive dissonance: for the “love” of whom is this flag raised? Certainly not of the queer Palestinians living in Gaza, who have faced 19 months of terror, and a lifetime of occupation.

[...]

You can’t see rainbows from underneath the rubble. Equally, you cannot in good conscience celebrate Pride in the west while knowing that many of our countries are supplying the arms and funds that are killing queer Palestinians, along with their families. Despite attempts to position the struggles of queer rights as in opposition to Palestinian liberation, I have been moved to see queer people not fall for the trap. This Pride month, we will march again, surrounded by confetti and keffiyehs.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/25/queer-palestinian-identity-gaza-rights

god i love rejecting replies that don't add anything or are just doomer nonsense; pew pew goodbye

if you know you know, but if you don't know? well, you might also know, it's hard to say

what they say: no politics in foss

what they mean: I'm a little pee pee baby with no idea what labor means or where foss came from or under what socio-economic conditions technology gets (re-)produced and deployed; please change my diapy, i did a little wee wee because it upsets me when people aren't talking exclusively about 1s and 0s in the platonic realm of pure computing

have The Talk with your friends:

• no, artificial intelligence isn't real now, nor is it just around the corner
• we need laws to prevent capitalists using LLMs to try to circumvent labor laws; we don't need laws to stop "rogue AI" because that's sci-fi bullshit with absolutely no bearing on reality
• no, "ai" is not "inevitable" -- the bullshit word extruders that are being positioned as the next big thing right now are snake oil garbage, and not even profitable snake oil garbage, and there's no path to develop them into anything else because that's just how they work
• if you hear someone talking about how "ai" is going to change everything, treat them the same way you'd treat a scientologist talking about whatever the fuck scientologists believe in: it is bullshit cult nonsense for marks and rubes
• remind them to ponder the question of "cui bono" -- who benefits from the narrative that "ai" is the "next big thing"? the answer: mostly filthy rich american fascists, filthy rich chip manufacturers, filthy rich data center operators, and filthy rich silicon valley entrepreneurs

do your part to counter bullshit fucking propaganda from capitalist scumbags 👍

Edit: this seems to have resonated with a lot of people and I've rejected a lot of nonsense replies or people being contrarian and annoying I don't care if you disagree! Write your own post about it! :')

perhaps Shodan would have benefited from an agile development process with kanban boards and shit

rather than teasing announcements of something that may happen at some point in the future I've decided to start teasing teasers of announcements: I may at some point say something that hints that I may tease a thing that may or may not happen eventually! eat it up!

gaping source

*clears throat, looks down at notes, takes a sip of water* Penis

hey json-ld knowers, is it possible to add comments/descriptions of properties in a @context document?

this is the laptop I write the bugs from