The Last Refuge
Regarding Rosemary Kirstein's 'Steerswoman' books.
Saved (Public Feed)
The Body (Often) Tells the Truth
When your frustrated gestures and missteps and bodily distress signals are read as a sign of your incompetence, not a problem with the world, you’re often being done an injustice
%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_asset%2Ffile%2F24962412%2F236808_Discogs_CVirginia.jpg?width=92&height=&ar=&mode=&format=avif&dpr=2)
Discogs’ vibrant vinyl community is shattering
How Discogs built — and broke — a community of diehard music fans and sellers.
You Think You're Not That Ambitious. Are You Dead Wrong About That?
The surest sign that you’re incredibly ambitious is a complete and total lack of ambition on all fronts.
Being an overachieving perfectionist becomes worse and worse over the years, in other words, because it turns every source of joy into a source of self-hatred and failure. Aiming for perfect, aiming to be the best, sorting through data to see who’s better, setting impossible goals for yourself: These are poisonous habits that destroy your relationship to your own body, block you from the small pleasures of your day, and leach the natural optimism from your cells.
Every time you check in with yourself, you help yourself. Every time you ignore an old, warped story about what your sensations and feelings mean, you improve your connection to your body. It sounds obvious, of course! But it’s exactly what the perfectionist overachiever — even the one hiding inside that aging stoner on the couch playing Assassin’s Creed for the third hour in a row — doesn’t remember to do. PERFECTIONISTS IGNORE THEIR BODIES, EMOTIONS, AND SENSATIONS. SECRETLY AMBITIOUS SLACKERS IGNORE THEIR TRUEST DESIRES AND PASSIONS.
Leaving the keyboard that plays itself down by the river between 2:30 and 3:30 AM August 3rd 2017, by id m theft able
1 track album
I found a keyboard at the dump that when turned on plays itself. The occasional faux piano notes sound at seemingly random pitches and dynamics, usually with a fair amount of space in between. It seems to be struggling to stay on, the LED blinks and flashes the whole time and notes often abruptly cut out as it resets itself. It's been my favorite thing to listen to this week.
So, naturally, between about 2:30 and 3:30 that morning I took this keyboard down back of my place by the river, turned it on and left it to play along with the frogs, mosquitoes, mysterious mammals, insects and passing cars.
Airline Close Calls Happen Far More Often Than Previously Known
Near misses involving U.S. commercial airlines happen on average multiple times a week, a New York Times investigation found.
But the most acute challenge, The Times found, is that the nation’s air traffic control facilities are chronically understaffed. While the lack of controllers is no secret — the Biden administration is seeking funding to hire and train more — the shortages are more severe and are leading to more dangerous situations than previously known.
As of May, only three of the 313 air traffic facilities nationwide had enough controllers to meet targets set by the F.A.A. and the union representing controllers, The Times found. Many controllers are required to work six-day weeks and a schedule so fatiguing that multiple federal agencies have warned that it can impede controllers’ abilities to do their jobs properly.
The roots of the current staffing shortage date to the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration replaced thousands of controllers who were on strike. Since then, there have been waves of departures as controllers become eligible for retirement. The F.A.A. has struggled to keep pace.During the pandemic, many controllers left, and the F.A.A. slowed the pace of training new ones because of health restrictions. The staffing shortage became a crisis.
Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui? | Naomi Klein and Kapuaʻala Sproat
Big corporations, golf courses and hotels have been taking water from locals for years. Now the fire may result in even more devastating water theft
Hawaii is indeed in an emergency, but it needs emergency proclamations that operationalize aloha ʻāina, not ones that push it aside by opportunistically suspending inalienable water laws and dismissing diligent public servants. What this governor does next will determine if Maui Komohana will remain a space for Indigenous and other local families like the Palakikos, or if companies like WML and its affluent customers are empowered to complete their takeover of land and water in west Maui.
The 2023 Audubon Photography Awards: The Top 100
Revel in the staggering beauty and surprising behaviors featured in this gallery of our favorite images. Also check out the story behind each shot.
✨pop🎈idol✨ on cohost
Reflecting on it, the reason I think the OceanGate situation has become such a flashpoint for anger is because it's such a perfect microcosm of the problem with everything right now. Decisions are not made based on safety, reasonable caution, or concern for human life. Every decision is instead made from a default assumption of 'what if the bad thing just DIDN'T happen?' We are given pie-in-the-sky promises and sizzle reels and an endless PR hype-cycle for every new innovation and inevitably it fails to work, harms people, and then is maybe barely apologized for before the next bad idea comes down the pike. OceanGate's underengineered, undercooked, doomed submarine isn't merely a metaphor for the hubris of the wealthy, it is a scale model of the way the wealthy dictate our reality. All consequences can be ignored, all blowback can be forestalled, let the end-user eat the cost.
I am not angry because the submarine was badly-made. I am angry because I live in a vastly larger pressure vessel being managed and maintained by the exact same people.
I am not angry because the submarine was badly-made. I am angry because I live in a vastly larger pressure vessel being managed and maintained by the exact same people.
Egregore
Great short story/creepypasta on a meme literally taking on a life of its own.
%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_asset%2Ffile%2F24698895%2FSV2_chs0870_1033_sb_v4.jpg?width=92&height=&ar=&mode=&format=avif&dpr=2)
Across the Spider-Verse’s greatest feat is the way it takes Spider-Man’s fandom to task
Across the Spider-Verse gets surprisingly frank about Spider-Man’s fandom.
‘The Things’ by Peter Watts
A short story written from the perspective of the alien in the film ‘The Thing.’
Concert Review: Sunset Rubdown - Spectrum Culture
Krug played and sang as if he would never have the chance to visit these songs again. He spent part of the show at the keyboard, precariously perched on a stool with one foot under him and another balanced on the monitor. Other times, he played the guitar. By the show’s midpoint he was drenched with sweat, hair hanging over his face.
mmm.page — Dead Simple, Drag & Drop Websites
Websites don’t have to be so cookie cutter.
%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fassets%2F1296536%2Fyoutube_copyright.png?width=92&height=&ar=&mode=&format=avif&dpr=2)
AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google
Google has to make some big decisions about fair use, YouTube, and building AI tools of its own.
YouTube only continues to exist because of a delicate dance that keeps rightsholders happy and the music industry paid, but the future of Google itself is a bet on an expansive interpretation of copyright law that every creative industry from music to movies to news hates and will fight to the death. Because it is death: generative AI tools promise to completely upend the market for almost all commodity creative work, and these companies are not required to sit back and let it happen.
John Holdun: Iterative Disciplines
I think specialization is detrimental to building websites.
Eraser-off
One of the most awesome things about pencils is the ability to erase what you’ve written or drawn and change it. But which eraser works best?
My expectation, when I tested these, was that one eraser would be a clear winner, and if I had to pick one, then I would choose the Staedtler Mars Plastic. But each of these erasers performed better with some pencils than others.
There’s one other aspect of erasers that I really like. Its the feel of it in my hand. One of the gentlemen on Erasable (I think it was Andy but I can’t remember at the moment) mentioned the Black Pearl as a “worry stone” — an object to hold in your hand while thinking and that is why I love the Black Pearl. I often find that I press it into the palm of my hand like a little river stone while I’m writing. Its strangely soothing.
Modern Font Stacks
System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OSThe fastest fonts available. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders.
Inclusive Language Guide - Oxfam Policy & Practice
Language has the power to reinforce or deconstruct systems of power that maintain poverty, inequality and suffering. As we are making commitments to decolonization in practice, it is important that we do not forget the role of language and communications in the context of inequality. The Inclusive Language Guide is a resource to support people in our sector who have to communicate in English to think about how the way they write can subvert or inadvertently reinforce intersecting forms of inequality that we work to end.
Laura Wagner: It's Not About Hypocrisy (Defector)
Is this “right-wing hypocrisy,” or is it the right’s coherent vision for enforcing a very specific social order? What is it going to take for liberals to understand that “hypocrisy” is not a charge for which right-wing authoritarians must answer at the risk of losing clout, but a tenet of and testament to their power? It’s really not complicated: Dahm and his ilk don’t care about protecting children; they care about “protecting” certain children from certain things (like books and drag queens) that they consider threats to a white supremacist patriarchal social order. That’s it! With this understanding, what’s even the point of pretending to debate a creep like Dahm on policy particulars?
ointing out so-called right-wing hypocrisy might make the Jon Stewart-watching crowd feel superior to their political foes, but it does nothing to actually build a movement capable of overcoming them. In fact, it does worse than nothing; its smugness serves to flatter the sensibilities of its liberal viewers while obscuring the way political power is built and used in this country.
Charging a person (like Dahm) or group (like Republicans) with hypocrisy, frames the issue (protecting children, for example) as something having to do with appealing to individuals’ senses of reason or conscience and ignores the existence of social and economic systems that help maintain a status quo in which children are not only murdered in their schools and turned into cheap laborers, but are in general considered property of their parents, often to their own detriment. It’s obvious but worth saying: If such problems could be solved by merely pointing out politicians' perceived hypocrisy, they would’ve been solved by now.
Shujaa Imran: How To Set a Do Not Disturb Keyboard Shortcut on Your Mac (Make Tech Easier)
System Preferences → Keyboard → Shortcuts → Mission Control → Toggle Do Not Disturb
It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible (The Onion)
Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.
We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on trans people, which we believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as weird and gross. We remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic rights of the gender-nonconforming as up for debate, and we will use these same angles over and over again in hopes that this repetition makes them suffer. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives bigotry an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to fixate on the genitals.
Andrew Paul: Relax, Google’s LaMDA chatbot is nowhere near sentient (Inverse)
“Honestly if this system wasn’t just a stupid statistical pattern associator it would be like a sociopath, making up imaginary friends and uttering platitudes in order to sound cool,” AI developer and NYU Professor Emeritus Gary Marcus tweeted yesterday.Marcus also laid out a detailed rebuttal to Lemoine’s sentience claims in a blog post, dispelling widespread misassumptions regarding the nature of “self-awareness” and our tendency to ascribe it to clever computer programs capable of mimicry. “To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t,” he writes. “It’s just an illusion, in the grand history of ELIZA, a 1965 piece of software that pretended to be a therapist (managing to fool some people into thinking it was human), and Eugene Goostman, a wise-cracking 13-year-old-boy impersonating chatbot that won a scaled-down version of the Turing Test.”“Six decades (from Eliza to LaMDA) have taught us that ordinary humans just aren’t that good at seeing through the ruses of AI,” Marcus told me over Twitter DM. “Experts would (or should) want to know how an allegedly sentient system operates, what it knows about the world, what it represents internally, and how it processes the information that comes in.”
Unfortunately, all the theatrics and shallow coverage do a disservice to the actual problematic consequences that can (and will) arise from LaMDA and similar AI software. If this kind of chatbot can fool even a handful of Google’s supposedly expert employees, then what that kind of impact can that technology have on a more general populace? AI impersonations of humans lend themselves to all sorts of scam potentials, con jobs, and misinformation. Something like LaMDA won’t end up imprisoning us all in the Matrix, but it can conceivably convince you that it’s your mom who needs your Social Security number for keeping the family’s records up-to-date. That alone is enough to make us wary of the humanity (or lack thereof) at the other end of the chat line.
Then there are the very serious, well-documented issues regarding built-in human biases and prejudices that plague so many of Big Tech’s rapidly advancing AI systems. These are problems that the industry — and, by extension, the public — are grappling with at this very moment, and they must be properly addressed before we even begin to approach the realms of artificial sentience. The day may or may not come when when AI make solid cases for their personal rights beyond simply responding in the affirmative, but until then, it’s as important as it is ironic that we don’t get let our emotions cloud our logic and judgment calls. Humans are fallible enough as it is, we don’t need clever computer programs making that any worse.
Colin Meloy: I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song
For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness. No, it’s got some basics down: it (mostly) rhymes in all the right places (though that last couplet is a real doozy), it uses a chord progression (I-V-vi-IV) that is enshrined in more hits from the western pop canon than I care to count. But I think you’d agree that there’s something lacking, beyond the little obvious glitches — the missed or repeated rhymes, the grammatical mistakes, the overall banality of the content. Getting the song down, I had to fight every impulse to better the song, to make it resolve where it doesn’t otherwise, to massage out the weirdnesses. I wanted to stay as true to its creator’s vision as possible, and at the end, there’s just something missing. I want to say that ChatGPT lacks intuition. That’s one thing an AI can’t have, intuition. It has data, it has information, but it has no intuition. One thing I learned from this exercise: so much of songwriting, of writing writing, of creating, comes down to the creator’s intuition, the subtle changes that aren’t written as a rule anywhere — you just know it to be right, to be true. That’s one thing an AI can’t glean from the internet.
Jenn Schiffer: how to grow a web presence, 1/n
the places we grew our careers and social circles on have all been damaged beyond repair by men who, despite having billions of dollars, look like they have the suds and the emotional intelligence of a paper straw 5 minutes after it has entered my iced latte. they're surrounded by yes-men with less-money who are about half as smart as the character i played in my early satire days. i truly hope they all find the immortality they seek, and also that they then get trapped in quicksand, respectfully.
Guy Hoffman: Why I Don't Care if Students Use GPT
“It's like a calculator” is a common quote I hear about ChatGPT. As if the idea is what matters and writing it down is just a necessary evil or technical chore that needs to be done by someone or somecode.
But anyone who writes for a living knows that in many ways writing is thinking. The process of translating vague ideas into a coherent text helps structure ideas and make connections. The time spent editing and re-editing weeds out important ideas from marginal ones. The effort to address an imaginary reader, to clarify things to them, helps eliminate unnecessary style decisions. Finding your own voice helps you understand yourself and your contribution to the world better.
Nitish Pahwa: A New Netflix Hit Has Fans in Ecstasy, but They’re Missing Its Troubling Subtext (Slate)
Let’s start with the religious iconography. This is hardcore Hinduism through and through, an apt representation for a country that’s employed authoritarian tactics to empower violent Hindu nationalism and transition to a de facto ethnocratic state.
[...]
The Rama iconography later in the film, added to Bheem’s submissiveness, makes this narrative choice seem more pointed: Commemoration of the Ramayana has been one of the bloodiest flashpoints for Islamophobic violence in India, with Hindu nationalists having destroyed a Mughal-era mosque that was supposedly located at Rama’s birthplace. The Rama temple now constructed in its place is a symbol for the belief that India should be a holy land for Hindus; it’s even been put on billboards in Times Square. It’s likewise worth noting that the Vande Mataram custom flag that appears in essential scenes like the boy’s rescue—protecting Bheem from the train’s flames, for one—was in part designed by Veer Savarkar, the father of Hindu nationalism.
Ed Zitron: Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai
Most if not all of the people let go from these companies could be retained, but corporations - and in particular tech companies - have consciously colluded with each other to push a false narrative about how they are the victims of an economy that continues to enrich them. And that’s because their leadership isn’t judged by how well they treat their employees, but rather by how they protect the interests of their shareholders.
And really that’s what’s happening. Everybody is laying people off, and thus it’s an easy time for huge corporations to justify doing so based on vague economic forces. This is a coordinated public relations campaign to trade human capital for working capital. It’s either that or these executives are utterly ignorant of the economic forces affecting their companies.
This isn’t a bug, but rather a feature of modern market capitalism. Tech execs are playing from a rulebook that’s fundamentally devoid of empathy, compassion, and respect for human beings. By the standards of shareholders, they’re doing their job. But from any moral standpoint, they deserve to be kicked into the sun.
---
Mr. Pichai appears to have plenty of money to have fun with - as all of these CEOs do, because they are being paid so much that they have entirely left the realm of human concerns.
Even if it’s something far more craven - that profits are fine, and they are just using this as an excuse to cut “excess” - layoffs do not work. They make the company less profitable and the remaining employees less effective.
Imagine if a single employee made this big of a screw-up. Would they be retained? Would they survive? No. They would be shitcanned in seconds and told that it was a “difficult decision.”
Here’s an easy decision: fire Sundar Pichai, fire Satya Nadella, fire Doug Herrington, and fire any executive that has to lay off hundreds or thousands of people because they got too excited about making their shareholders money.
100 People: Statistics
86 would be able to read and write; 14 would not
7 would have a college degree
40 would have an Internet connection
78 people would have a place to shelter them
from the wind and the rain, but 22 would not
1 would be dying of starvation
11 would be undernourished
22 would be overweight
91 would have access to safe drinking water
9 people would have no clean, safe water to drink
Sabrina Cruz: the peculiar case of japanese web design
this suggests that japan is relatively unique in its concentration of lighter coloured and/or denser web design. A companion site to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ