For today especially, but as always

Go to Preferences > Filters

To add terms that you don't want to see today to filter from your timelines

Also, if you're posting about the thing that's happening today, add a content warning to your post by clicking the button that looks like a warning triangle with an exclamation mark

Counterintuitively, adding an accurate and descriptive CW on Fedi tends to INCREASE the possible reach of your post, because some won't boost un-CW'd politics

Musk: If you don't elect Trump, they'll make too much regulations and then I'll never invent Starfleet

Me: You take the word "Starfleet" out of your eugenicist mouth

Me: If Musk ever said anything I agreed with, I would seriously reevaluate my life

Musk: Lol I should probably be in prison

Me: Well fuck

Between Front Burner and Tech Won't Save Us and CBC Ideas

We're all worried about how fashy Musk is these days huh

(Calvin playing Calvinball voice)

New rule! New rule!

Any billionaire who builds a nuclear power plant must personally live within the meltdown blast radius of that power plant and only drink the ground water from the area where the waste is stored

Imagine wanting to do something as permanent as literal nuclear waste production in the service of something as fleeting as chasing this year's tech bubble

In order to fuel the spambots who are filling the internet with needless bullshit Microsoft has opted to poison the earth permanently with nuclear waste rather than simply, not

I keep trying to dissect the state of mind you'd have to be in to write this episode and the mind absolutely boggles

And yes "don't make assumptions about people" or "communicate with each other" is a good message as far as it goes

But much like everything in recent Star Trek

They got the power dynamics in their allegory exactly backward and so they're sending a message that they haven't thought through and probably don't mean to send

Btw I'm also disappointed in this episode because they had a setup here to model what to do as someone who benefits from oppression but wasn't directly responsible for it

And they threw that away, opting for the much weirder message to send

Namely: "actually, maybe the oppressed person is the real racist here, because *they* assumed that the person who is from the class who benefits from oppression isn't actually the child of a super-ally, so there"

I remember proposing using GIMP to do a task it would have actually been well-suited for to my high school teacher like a million years ago

She told me flat out that there was no way that it would get on the school computers with that name

And I'm sure that there's a million situations like this where the unprofessional shit that FOSS bros do prevents the uptake and success of FOSS

Ah here's the problem right here

You're trying to build your AI with *electronics* and that's why it's coming out all evil

Electrons have a negative charge, silly!

If you want a good AI, it has to be positronic

Hope this helps

@kestral i_guess_ill_die.gif

So uh what's the plan for end-of-life for all those gigantic and extremely explosive lithium ion batteries we're mass producing now?

We have one right?

RIGHT?

Reminder that electric cars also have wheels, and this is a major source of the microplastics that are poisoning us all

Transitioning to electric cars won't be enough

"But the AI will tell us how to fix climate change," they said, as if knowing what to do is the problem

New rule!

If your television network cancels a show before it gets a proper finale, the show goes into the Public Domain and your competitors can pick it up where you left off

Saw an ad with a Black person in it that was AI generated

Now I'm thinking about the "digital blackface" aspects of AI image generation

You can have them in an ad to hawk your products, make them participate in your sexual fantasies, make them endorse your post

You don't have to hire a Black person, no one has to even look them in the eye to ask them to pose

You can still have bespoke photorealistic video of them doing your bidding and it costs pennies if anything at all

Looking forward to people scraping my (formerly) Unlisted posts and telling me I was wrong to expect anything else because they're "quiet public" now

Genre of episode that has kind of disappeared in modern Star Trek:

It's like a premise that could be a Twilight Zone episode, but it's just set in the 24th century

E.g. TNG's Cause and Effect could have been a Twilight Zone episode ("What if your déjà vu was real?"; it was arguably an homage to Twilight Zone's "Twenty two")