@SteveAmes

13 Followers
31 Following
222 Posts
Elmore, Vermont
@9to5Mac AI is such a dumpster fire. I’m so glad Apple has a considered approach.
@priscillaharing I liked the two Tour de France seasons. Got me watching this year’s
@ElleGray this is a great Tour de France!! I love how it goes on for six hours a day. The commentators are wonderful and the helicopter shots are spectacular.
Biniam Girmay becoming the first Black cyclist (he's from Eritrea, Africa) and also the first Black African to win a Tour de France stage. Absolutely incredible performance

It DOES suck. Democrats ARE ineffective and DO fail to undo most of the GOP’s damage. Even when Dems have full power, they somehow never have any power. That's all correct, and it's frustrating as hell.

That's a stand to take in the primaries.

And then in November, vote like hell for Biden.

Not voting, voting third-party, or voting Republican isn't sending a message to the Democrats. It's literally just voting for a FAR worse, FAR more evil, anti-American dictatorship.
https://mastodon.social/@dxpack/112717826273844095

Historian Heather Cox Richardson: “Today the United States Supreme Court overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.” Historian David Blight: “Today six people on the Supreme Court amended the Constitution.” https://kottke.org/24/07/supreme-court-zero-days-since-last-incident
Supreme Court: Zero Days Since Last Incident

Heather Cox Richardson writing last night for her Letters from an American newsletter: Today the United States Supreme Court over

kottke.org
My fellow Americans, I have voted for many Democrats, along with Green Party, Independent, Libertarian, non-partisan, and even Republican candidates (ok, one Republican candidate) over the years. This year, it is of paramount importance that you vote for Democrats in every race, especially the Presidential contest. Please, I beg of you: Do not anoint a king. Do not allow the planet to burn. Do not permit the repudiation of inalienable rights for ALL of us.
Let's try this again:

All y'all are going to have to vote like you will never be allowed to (meaningfully) vote for a president again, because now the path has absolutely been laid for that to happen. That means voting against the GOP this election, at every level. And then every single election after that too, because all the GOP's cards are on the table now, and what they say is "fuck democracy, and fuck you too."

I just recently realized that what I truly hate about LLMs is that it devalues language. I love language, I love using it very intentionally, I love how different people wield and work language differently. A well forged phrase can cut right to the soul. Language is literally magic. It can do things where man and machine all fail.

But now with the press of a button you can get sugary pink language goo in any shape you like. And this is sold as an equal replacement to real human language. The insult! The depravity!

I think it might say something about how far language is already devalued. We live in a morass of content marketing and business process documentation and terms and conditions and propaganda and spam. All soulless language that nobody asks for but that people are compelled to create. We can't imagine not creating such language goo. And so we're grateful for the pink goo machine.

You know those stories about how there was once magic in the world but it was lost? This is it. This is how it happens.

I was discussing average #wages in the US and our declining living standards yesterday with my mother and just saw this cute meme that makes the point well. Take these figures, then look at https://livingwage.mit.edu/
Living Wage Calculator