Uair

@poloniousmonk
199 Followers
399 Following
2K Posts
I'm the inverse of bill cosby. I talk like an asshole, but my actions are always honorable.
pronounsshim, hir
religionjedi
purposehelplessly destroying the matrix
goaldeath
UairJan 17, 2024
SwiftOnSecurityJan 17, 2024

Imagine being in NATO Command controlling all your drones with AI and a random input makes it generate a catgirl on the big main screen and crash all the bombs on friendly territory and generals are angrily demanding you explain how AI works and why this happened but you can’t.

You look through the input and it’s like “CATEGORY: GROUND RAPID RESPONSE” which some coder last month had shortened to “CAT:GRR” and passed the user interface element to the AI instead of the full text.

And years later they recover a full corpus of the lost AI training material and there was a blog in 2003 that posted a new catgirl going rawr every day for like 11 years all tagged with “cat” and “grr!”

Welcome to the future of war.

Show threadUairJan 17, 2024

@SusanJenner

I put inkwand to dead tree on occasion.

I'm also a capable editor: your its needs no apostrophe.

Come meet me:

https://open.substack.com/pub/poloniousmonk/p/im-tired-of-being-quarantined?r=1xr9v7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I'm tired of being quarantined

Dear World, I got my first "real" job, as opposed to what would today be called the gig economy, when I was fifteen. My mother was a high school guidance counselor and one of the English teacher’s husband half-owned a comic book store and needed help. She asked my mother to hang a sign in the guidance office and moms grabbed it for me. It's always who, not what you know. The year was 1990. Don't be fooled by the numerics, it was still fully the Reagan 80's. Cultural decades used to overlap numeric by a few years. I imagine the whole mindset of cultural decades has run its course, but I'm not connected with youth culture any more. There's nothing like spending your adolescence drowning in cartoons to encourage adult thinking.

slipstick
Show threadUairJan 16, 2024

@msbellows

Well put.

I'd like to offer that it's not a mistake.

A) israel is an ally. You don't go criticising an ally at the start of a war provoked by a surprise attack.

And

B) what if he's simply giving bibi enough rope to hang himself? The israelis are mostly furious with him, and it's been building for years. The next leader after they throw him out of office will lead with an insistence on a peaceful solution.

Just my $0.02

UairJan 16, 2024

@todayilearned

My uncle was a self-made decamillionaire. Nothing fancy--he was a white boomer in america and sold car insurance, starting in a kiosk in the mall. White boomers had the softest lives in world history handed to them on a platter to break MLK's coalition.

Anyway, he could afford anything he wanted and bought all his shirts at K Mart. Said they were great shirts.

Show threadUairJan 16, 2024

@tiotasram

RE the attempts to fup King's personal life: it's called zersetzung. The commies had been doing it forever, the US started going after any potential troublemakers as children in the 60s. The stasi wrote the handbook.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

Zersetzung - Wikipedia

Show threadUairJan 16, 2024

@Shanmonster

It's deadly cold here. Even the violent crazies who know to avoid people so they don't get locked up are in the shelter. Lots of fights.

UairJan 15, 2024

@weebdeluxe

Those are my two favorite solo recreational activities as well, and i oscillate between prioritizing each.

Hmmm...have you found Terry Pratchett? There's a reason he's sold Rowling-numbers of books, but the Discworld has no Americas and a lot of people in the US are unaware of him.

UairJan 12, 2024

@ElleGray

"I like a woman in glasses. It shows she's more interested in seeing than being seen."

John Irving, "The World According to Garp"

Show threadUairJan 12, 2024

@kagan

The difference between liberals and conservatives is sharp here.

Liberals spine up at death threats. They piss us off and we double down on our resolve.

Conservatives buckle, like a belt.

UairJan 11, 2024
Electronic Frontier FoundationJan 10, 2024

Announcing: A Field Guide to Police Surveillance!

We've updated and overhauled our Street Level Surveillance hub so it has all the basic facts you need to know about the 16 most common types/categories of surveillance that local PDs use.

https://sls.eff.org/

Street Level Surveillance

EFF Presents: A Field Guide to Police Surveillance