Michael Bacon

RE: @jnl@hcommons.social

Just riffing on this . . .

I have an AI/VR solution that could actually save the world.

Take all the billionaires and invite them to a conference where they're told they're going into augmented reality chambers that allow them to more effectively manage their assets and gain maximal oversight of global trends.

Then we plug them into a basic version of The Sims and tell them it's the new Metaverse, feed them cafeteria food and tell them its nouveau bespoke cuisine, let them fight over major issues in control of an imaginary world, and surround them with highly trained actors breathlessly feeding them updates.

Then we take all their money and feed the world, transition to green energy, and give everyone health care.

RE: @newsguyusa@flipboard.social

This is one of those cases where the best outcome would be both companies burning to the ground.

Y'ALL

I just heard a WHIPPOORWILL.

In DURHAM.

It's been DECADES since I heard a whippoorwill here.

Even with climate change pushing them higher into the mountains, amazing things still happen.

Wait they're putting Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes, what stage of jumping the shark is that?

RE: @adapalmer@wandering.shop

This is such great news. Africa really is the poster child for where solar *should* be breaking through. Most of the continent is tropical, large swaths are desert, and its grid-based power infrastructure still trails far behind most of the rest of the world. With oil's ongoing instability, I had real hope that we'd see an African solar boom.

And lo and behold, we have.

Dr. Tressie is dropping a new documentary short on the W-S Black Panthers.

https://indyweek.com/news/culture/power-to-the-people-yall-winston-salem-black-panthers/

RE: @ravachol@mastoart.social

May or may not be banksy. Whatever it is, it's great.

UNC should never have hired Bill Belichick as he is completely and totally unfit to be a coach of a college sports team.
UNC should have fired Bill Belichick after the rumors came out about him playing favorites and hiring his cronies.
UNC should have fired Bill Belichick after an abysmal and embarrassing season.
UNC never should have let Belichick stuff the Athletics office with his cronies.
UNC should have fired Belichick many times before now, but didn't.

But better late than never.
#FireBelichick #FireBelichickNow #UNC

RE: @smeg@assortedflotsam.com

Something that US-based technological thinking has never in a century come to grips with is that technological developments always, ALWAYS are more effective when they augment human capacity rather than replace it.

There are and will be useful things for language models to do. But the corporate lust for replacing humans with bots is ideological, not grounded in any actual understanding of how technology works.

It's not my realm of technological research but I would love to read something about how US manufacturers tried to "modernize" by automating the shit out of everything to the exclusion of workers and got beat senseless by Asian manufacturers who built factories (including highly exploitative ones) around something that enhanced the productivity of a human laborer rather than replacing them.

Actually useful ML sociotechnical systems will continue be "cyborg" systems, not purely artificial ones.

Getting to the point where I don't want to do any kind of extended writing in anything but Markdown.

I can format it in something else later if I have to. But all the GUI tools just get in the way.

This may or may not have something to do with me cutting my word processing teeth on WordPerfect 3.2 and the "reveal codes" key. Markdown feels pleasantly familiar with that.

I'm not really a big fan of Graham Platner as a person. But Mills quitting is terrible news for Chuck Schumer, and that alone is good for the country.

#uspol

RE: @gutenberg_org@mastodon.social

This is a warm up to recruitment to a Cthulu cult, isn't it?