Mastodawn

One time my brother’s best friend left his oven open to let a pizza cool and this guy’s cat climbed into a 400 degree oven and ate a single, cat-mouth-width strip of piping hot cheese right down the center of the pizza and then climbed out completely unscathed

Freezerburn Feb 22

mathew Feb 21

The orphan-crushing machine is just a tool. You can also use it to mulch puppies and purée kittens.

Why are you angry? You can use it for harmless tasks like making mashed potatoes. You eat mashed potatoes don't you? Yes, admittedly it leaks machine oil into the potatoes, but they're working on that. It leaks so much less oil than it did when you tried it three months ago. In a year from now it's going to be a Michelin-starred chef.

Well, that’s typical, gatekeeping by telling people they should have to learn to cook. You don’t think people who can’t cook deserve good food?

So what if the machine is powered by slave labor? That's innovation. You're just scared you're going to be one of them. Besides, it's inevitable. Nobody is going to crush orphans by hand any more. You're going to get left behind.

Oh, well there you go with your ridiculous purity culture again.

Freezerburn Feb 21

Flipboard Culture Desk Feb 20

Disney asked "Andor" creator Tony Gilroy not to use the word "fascism" when he was promoting its second season. Now, he's saying it — and talking about how the show's storylines connect to current U.S. politics. "So you get out your 'Fascism for Dummies' book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible," he told @THR. "How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper."

https://flip.it/1M7e-U

#Andor #Television #StarWars #TonyGilroy #TrumpAdministration

‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Gives the Interview He Couldn’t During Its Release

While promoting his cautionary tale about fascism, Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from using the word. Nine months after it aired its finale, the 'Star Wars' series feels scarily prescient.

The Hollywood Reporter

Freezerburn Feb 20

Lars Wirzenius Feb 20

Hot take, so controversial it counts as trolling: all notifications should default "off". Anything that can interrupt or distract the person using a computer or other device should be explicitly turned on by that person.

There are exceptions for things that can cause serious harm if ignored. "You've got mail" is not an exception. Neither is "someone liked your social media post".

Freezerburn Feb 20

Show thread

Alexander The 1st Feb 19

@republik_magazin Surveillance company dislikes being surveilled? But surely, if they are doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide.

Show thread

Freezerburn Feb 20

@grahamperrin @evan Unfortunately, you are extremely optimistic about how often people actually read stuff like this. Or maybe see it but forget about it while working on the text. etc.

I sent a private mention a bit ago, and I remember spending a bunch of time being *100% absolutely sure* it was actually going to be a "DM". And I'm one of the rare people that actually reads instructions in general, or pays close attention to UI elements. Having public/private mentions be in the same UI element with a toggle is going to trip up the average person constantly.

Freezerburn Feb 20

🔮 oracle of dylphi :crumb_dancing: 🇬🇾Feb 20

icymi, local net person Cory Doctorow has decided to give up his unofficial role as the fediverse's Emotional Support Celebrity in bombastic style by coming to the defence of "open source" LLM's https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/ (not tagging him to avoid a pile on)

Tante has a good write up about the strangeness of his argument here https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/ (again, don't want to pile on).

I also wanted to add that Cory deploy's all this rhetorical barrage in service of... having a robot proofreader. His use case is not restoring justice and dignity to the underpaid, traumatised transnational workers who built the models he uses (https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artificial-intelligence/), it is not helping the people of Southern Memphis escape smog and pollution, it is not protecting the mostly female victims of NCII generation (indeed, millions of private unmanaged generative machines might make that problem even harder to fight against). It is not a meaningful argument about leaving space for "good" or ethical generation - it is sophistry in service of avoiding the inconvenience of actually assessing if he's acting ethically. Tante is right to expect more from him.