It was also a work of fiction.

Or propaganda.

A lot of 80s/90s TV was selling a lie because it was primarily written by the upper middle classes portraying the lives of the working class.

They had little idea how things actually worked.

Is this showerthoughts or oldbumperstickers?

"There are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user's VPN runs on Linux or Android."

So there are ways.

"What's you're biggest weakness?"

"I'm going to say my honesty"

"Not sure I think honesty is really a weakness..."

"I don't give fuck what you think.".

Can we swap out the word "hallucinations" for the word "bullshit"?

I think all AI/LLM stuf should be prefaced as "someone down the pub said..."

So, "someone down the pub said you can eat rocks" or, "someone down the pub said you should put glue on your pizza".

Hallucinations are cool, shit like this is worthless.

Wow, he must have really learned his lesson from the last 9 telling offs.

features with a high degree of customizability - you can swap out the back cover, and also attach things like a lanyard.

Ooooh, a lanyard strap... That's the sort of right to repair we've all been after.

/s

Right?! When they could be playing Doom on it.

You can't defund social welfare programmes without defunding the arts first. To defund healthcare you have to defund the arts. To defund schools, you first have to defund the arts.

You know where this is going.

The arts are the canary and it is lying dead at the bottom of the cage.

Massive spud of a human.

I mean, good luck trying to get this working in Northern Ireland too.

This is a classic Tory death rattle. Punish those lazy, entitled young people who, whilst not responsible for the 2008 crash (that was us and our banker mates) or the following years of austerity that ripped the heart out of public services whilst private services prospered (that was also us, but with our banker mates) or Brexit, an enterprise that spit the nation and has left us all worse off (again, us, but this time with our business and banker mates), it is those no good, molly-coddled young people with their funny hair colour and inability to buy houses, or food in some cases, that are the problem with the UK and we need to whip them into shape whilst we (who haven't been whipped into any sort of shape at all) continue to be in charge.

I mean they sent someone called "Eden Golan".

That would be like the English fielding a contestant called, "Paradise Belfast".

What a strange and wonderful beast Vice was.

The very idea of calling a middle class millenial hipster a journalist and sending them off to a war torn country so they could do drugs with a cartel and report back on the underground scene there is pure 2010s.

And when it happened across real journalism, it took it in its stride. This was the competition to main stream media. It was aware and smart.

It was also shockingly platform literate. The video content was just as vital as the written stuff.

The fact it didn't endure is pretty sad. It's fairly indicative of where we are going.

I saw this article the same day that I saw Google announce the removal of the news tab from its search results.

Not good times.

Yup that's a nostalgia.

It's part of growing old, it's part of coming to terms with mortality.

Soon, you'll say the words, "but music really was better back then, it really meant something, now it's just manufactured trash". You'll really mean it too.

You'll convince yourself that the crime rate was lower and that people were friendlier, no matter what statistics you are shown.

"We really respected our elders".

Next up, friend, the mid-life crisis where you think you can get it all back.

If only she was ever in a situation where her voice was professionally recorded.

Cranberries evolved so they wouldn't be eaten.

Most fruits want to be eaten so that birds disperse the seeds.

Their preferred method of dispersal was dropping into flowing water, so that they could find somewhere nice to grow near water.

The astringent taste was to stop birds eating them. They became buoyant in water to help them float down stream.

Humans appeared and loved that dry flavour.

Became one of the most eaten fruits on the planet.

Humans even harvest them by flooding and using their own buoyancy against them.

They will get their revenge.

I think there's this myth of "the neurotypical"... It's a generic point on a scale that represents the most significant overlap, not any specific person. I genuinely believe no one is "neurotypical", rather some tend towards it and others further away. That's the spectrum. Plus some people might be closer to NT with some things but much further away with others.

For example, I have a pretty good degree of focus, I remember things pretty well, but I struggle to organise my thoughts and can't bear to touch other people or certain textures. I'm sure everyone is a bit like this. Some people more so, some people less.

And that isn't to minimise that there are people out there who really struggle to fit into the "best fit" of Neurotypical-aimed social design.

So why the need to create a mythical group of "Neurotypical"? Is it a need to define ourselves in opposition? Is it to make ourselves feel more unique? Is it a perverse form of gatekeeping?

The upshot is, that until we move towards realising that individuals have individual needs and requirements we aren't going to make substantial progress and describing (and prescribing) otherness only seeks to alienate folk that might otherwise help.

People aren't neurotypical... Systems are. I think that's what I meant to say.

Read the headline, thought this was about the lengths people go to to complain to open source coders.

"Disrupter"... Yeah, we need to stop using that word. He's as much part of the establishment as the Tory members he's helped replace.

His party is a corporate entity, and we'll see how he gets on niw that he legally has to file his financial interests.

I love a good protest ... But this isn't a good protest.

What’s the most important thing?” they shouted. “Art, or right to a healthy and sustainable food?”

Yeah, no. I think in a civilised world we should be able to have both and that sort of argument is weak as fuck.

Destroy all art because it is more important that we conduct research into cot death. Oxygen is more important than art and yet look at you, with your galleries.

It's infantile posturing of probably well off middle class kids who want their Rosa Parks moment for Instagram clout.

Further to that, attempting to destroy something that essentially belongs to everyone is just going to bring negative press. How about going after something owned by the head of Nestle? No? Is that too difficult and requires too much work?

So, like none of these folk read The Running Man then?

Or many of the hundred times this idea has been used in Sci-fi.

It's that horrible situation isn't it?

The internet was riddled with adverts everywhere. Intrusive things that ate up our time and our bandwidth.

So we used ad blockers.

It became clear that even the folk that didn't use ad blockers were worthless. That is, the market decided their attention was worthless.

The bottom fell out of the advertising market, so business moved to a subscription model.

We all supported it initially. Netflix was held up as a brilliant model.

Then the subscription services got greedy and let advertising in anyway. Except that money no longer funds your experience, not does it really fund the creators. It just funds the owner of the streaming service.

Meanwhile, the lack of feedback that advertising gave as a metric means that the services are becoming worse, delivering lower quality product.

And now it's 2023 and I find myself defending advertising.

I once made a music video for Sony Universal.

They paid me £4k.

They liked it a lot and asked if I would do another. I asked if the fee was the same and they said I'd be doing it for exposure.

I told them I'm capable of exposing myself.

I stuck it to them.

I'm still poor, but at least I'm not working for it.

Yeah. We call it the stock market.

OK Loomer.

Good but fake, right?

https://dataconomy.com/2023/12/29/microsoft-edge-deleted-tweet-real-fake/

I got a refund four hours in when I explained that I had spent two of those in a queue waiting to play.

I know they've fixed that now, but the two hours arbitrary limit is a bit... Limiting.

I think he made it everyone's business... I think that he might even enjoy making it everyone's business.

Really wanted to like this game. The hype had me.

I played it, waiting for it to get good. It just never did for me. Maybe I'm missing something, but after 10 hours I felt like I'd seen pretty much everything.

As for the anti-cheat, I understand why they'd have that. I've played so many games where people cheat and it just kills the fun. Even when it is PvE.

I don't really understand the mindset of the cheaters though. Do they think we all talk about how great they are after the game is over? Like, Bobfucker326 sure did shoot more stuff than any random player I've ever seen, he must have a massive wang and be great at maths and stuff.

We will return the bicycle when you hand over the fekkin potatoes.

AI art is, by very definition, average.

It's the best fit line. It's the most common. The mean or the median.

The best art is exceptional.

Absolutely loving the replies to this.

This is how the extended Linux community wins for me.

Sure we talk shit for fun. The Arch BTW stuff, the Gentoo shade and Slackware side-eye. But its all in jest, ultimately.

Well done.

Yeah, no.

This is bullshit.

(Especially the stuff about brain plasticity and learning capacity)

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/review/30/neural-plasticity-dont-fall-for-hype/

You've missed off the sausage roll, you absolute savage.

I had a tweet that went viral.

I had thousands of people calling me all sorts of horrible things, threatening to do horrible things and generally being horrible. Willfull, ignorant people that tried to deliberately take things out of context, push their own agenda and create the most ridiculous straw man arguments.

And then Elon Musk took over so I had to quit.

Universal healthcare and red wine, you savages.

I don't have one at all. Spent ages thinking that it was just a figure of speech, but when I found out I became fascinated by it.

The current theory is that at some early point in our evolution we literally had a voice in our head, not unlike how some forms of schizophrenia present.

It's called the bicameral mind.

https://gizmodo.com/did-everyone-3-000-years-ago-have-a-voice-in-their-head-510063135

In my day to day life it makes little difference however, despite being an avid reader and writer I struggle tremendously to read aloud.

I don't know for sure but I suspect it is connected.

The devil is in the details. Different contracts state different usages.

Often, I'm hired to make things for folk, and they own it entirely. I see these things out in the world, I sometimes see other artists hired to butcher it to fit a new purpose. But that's OK, I account for that, and often I hand over the source files from the things I make... Layered documents etc.

However, there's a really disturbing trend of large companies appropriating fan art and claiming that because they own the IP any derivatives belong to them too. This is far ickier.

The main thing though is credit. You'd think that giving a nod to the original artist would be nice. It costs nothing and can have a massive impact on their business.

No moderation without representation. IOW: mods should be democratically elected.

Yeah, no.

Don't turn this into a popularity contest. One that can be bought and cheesed.

Who has time for oversight on that? Why not voter id too.

Is this first past the post or proportional representation?

Term limits, right? Does that include a hand over? How much of their term will be spent getting up to speed?

Where is the incentive to someone starting their own community if it is going to be taken from them when they've put in hard work for no money. Should they not be rewarded for their labour?

Will the inherent democratisation of communities alter the content posted on them? Should we place bans in meta-political posts that support only the incumbent mod?

What if they choose not to leave? Insurrection? Send in the troops?

My friend, I say this genuinely, you are trying to police the internet. Don't. It's a folly.

You have the power to walk away. You have the power to start your own community.

Do it and run it better.

And back to the democracy thing... Democracy is a wonderful thing in the governance of human civilization... It's not a fix for every situation you encounter that you don't like. It often means instead of having one asshole to deal with you'll get a carousel of different assholes on a regular basis.

I was at one for the end. Here's how we saw it go down.

Hyperbole increased on the upper floor. Lots of "big talk " about the future and less chat about the job at hand.

There was a round of death rattle hiring where a whole bunch of people were added to the team.

Then last in first out.

Some of those new hires were there for less than 3 months before they were let go.

Then bloodletting. One or two redundancies a month. Their work being shared between the remaining staff. Told each round would be the last as the company restructured.

The worst bit, the people being fired knew they were going when they came to work in the morning to find they had been locked out of all the IT systems. They then spent the rest of the day sat around waiting to be summoned to be let go.

Meanwhile, the upper floor seem to be driving new cars and spending a lot of time outside the building. You also notice some new management faces and overhear chat about another business.

This massively increased workload and killed morale. Going to work felt like putting on your dead best buddy's coat and doing an impression of them to yourself in the mirror whilst you had to hold down your own job, which had gone from pressured with purpose to pointless slog.

But in return you are promised a raise in the future.

And then one day... You turn up. Your team are all stood outside. The doors are locked and the paperwork is on the post. Most of us got paid most of our last paycheck.

Updates to Todd Howard when?