@oregon_slim@c.im

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@zer0billionaires@mastodon.social Should pragmatic utopians advocate eliminating the upper class or the lower class? Are there any terms on which the upper class would allow the rest of us to buy them out? Being so severely outnumbered, they ought to be willing to negotiate. Their frenzy is sustained by their ability to take advantage of the kindness of strangers -- all the reasonable and agreeable people who just want to do their part. Enough already.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@vicfroh@mastodon.social Here's a worse scenario I heard from some people who followed the case of someone I had met a few times: a married guy gets disabled, his wife loses interest, divorces him, can afford a better lawyer than him, and empties his pockets. That's bad. His aged parents don't have much, but they can offer him some care that he needs, so he winds up spending a bunch of time getting cared for at a mom-and-pop retail store doing a very slow business where the parents are still working way past retirement age. The ex-wife, on account of some bad feelings on account of the divorce transaction, tells the government that he is working in the store and not reporting his income, and they believe her, and he goes to jail.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@aral Yes indeed. I worked with several companies over the years that had sunk lots of money into developing lots of software the old-fashioned way -- human time and effort, various levels of quality and results. A considerable fraction of those firms treated their code like the crown jewels and surrounded it with a royal guard of lawyers, contracts, rules and threats. I always found this amusing. Once removed from the environment on which it was so dependent, even if by hook or crook, the code would have been worthless. I don't work with AI, but I suppose that much of the code produced nowadays by AI, or by gig economy, offshore, or otherwise alienated workers, arrives on the scene with shortcomings -- sort of like a teenager from outer space.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@GhostOnTheHalfShell Reuters? During WWI, the British regime asked them to distribute propaganda as news. Reuters replied boldly that they would NEVER do that, unless they were paid to do it. I suppose that worked out well for Reuters. Once they become the dominant vendor of a particular genre of content with the strong concomitants thereof, they will likely bend every effort and story to protect that position. AP is following a different lesson learned from WWI -- if you can see the enemy, the enemy can see you, so you might not want to stay there. AP and AI can both figure out and interpret the truism that discretion is the better part of valor, but they might miss the corollary that valor is the better part of discretion.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

@zkat@toot.cat My recollection is that, in the late 1960's, the consensus amongst software professionals, such as they were, was that the forbidden fruit of software was speech recognition, that no on with two neurons to rub together would ever work on that, because the downside thereof was simply too far beyond what anyone would want. And for a long time, speech recognition apps were so lame, they could only recognize a few words or digits recited into a phone. I didn't have much contact with such developments, but I recall that the guys who did The Last Starfighter movie about a decade later foresaw being able to produce films and videos digitally that would be indistinguishable from the real thing. And so the boundaries have been blurred, and the old ethos is left behind.

Ever read Vonnegut's Player Piano? He saw this coming before computers were made on assembly lines.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@GeePawHill Yeah, you ought to be pissed. What a swindle. Robert E. Lee was leading rebellious troops whilst he was still officially in the US Army. When he departed from his army post, he said he would nevermore fight for any other flag than that of Virginia. But even before some Virginians acted out their illegal secession (thus null and void), Lee had left Virginia and was tromping around in uniform in other states with similar unpatriots from other states. And then, although Virginia had scripted a bunch of votes and plebiscites so that they would secede only if a contrived majority of their voting citizens gave approval, no majority ever approved anything, but since their friends in high places in the Pierce and Buchanan administrations had sold their militias so many nice 'surplus' rifles from US Army arsenals, war being a pathway to fame, fortune, happiness, fantasized greatness ... they were overcome with FOMO and joined up anyway. But that kind of mistake can happen from time to time just about anywhere. In 1914, as WWI was breaking out, just about every major city in Europe had large demonstrations in favor of the war -- that war. IIRC, some countries took longer to decide which side they would be on than they took to decide that they wanted to do their fair share of suffering. What are our the three best non-violent movements this week?

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai What I suspect is that AP is losing interest in the news business because the news business is increasingly constrained by governments that act immorally, retaliate arbitrarily against any news that might substantiate criticism, solicit substantial bribes, persecute, prosecute, sue in courts that are also afraid to offend them, etc. Why Reuters is the last one standing IDK. Do you?

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@Daojoan@mastodon.social Write On! To read something that explains the complexities of the formation of an environment that favors both discussion and creativity, this one is very nice: The Algonquin Round Table: 25 Years with the Legends Who Lunch" by Konrad Bercovici.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

@anneapplebaum@journa.host I feel for you, and wish you good fortune after this devastation. For many years I had two good friends (a married couple) who were attached to the the newspaper business lifelong, one as a writer, the other as an editor. I vicariously shared their thrills when they were working on good stories and their disappointments as the stinking tides of change washed away their opportunities to flourish. Just thinking of them and back beyond to 1962 when I was 12 years old and enthralled by reading the NY Times, which was delivered to me, an 8th grader in elementary school, 5 days each week for a dime-a-week subscription, makes me mournful for the valuable institutions lost, fearful of a future that we deserve because we did not prevent it, and desperate for a last chance to redeem myself.

May you find a new path and flourish along it,

Al

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

Interesting question just came into my life on account of I have a nephew whose offspring is graduating from a state U soon and is evidently heading to grad school. As I have met the child only once, I would like send a modest gift that might inspire good work, positive thoughts, confidence or virtuous conduct with making myself look like a supercilious has-been. TIA.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

@computer@facts.computer
do yourself a favor. (i don't practice all caps often, but i felt inclined to here) never let anyone know that you can code.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

I feel like the universe is a pinball machine, I'm bouncing around inside it, the pinball machine is in the rec room of a reform school for adolescent boys, and the inmates have taken the place over. Maybe I should write a book about that, elaborate it into a religion, and become a little more bespectacled and respectable.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 2mo ago

The conundrum of the century: Which is worse: X) An authoritarian world in which people are forced to act like machines Y) A permissive world in which machines are allowed to act like they are people ???

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 3w ago

NY Times is reporting that T. Rex had a body temperature or 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Is that because: a. It was an American dinosaur b. Centigrade hadn't been invented yet c. Everyone but Americans are more multilingual, NY Times figures they are also more multi-temporal or d. T. Rex had a cold?

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@samjeans@c.im If you never knew and had no way to find out if you were talking to a machine and or to a person, Y might be worse. Get a listed landline phone in the US for a while and answer it when it rings, you will understand.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@samjeans@c.im How about if machines are allowed to attain power over people and communicate in secret and conspire against us? That's just stuff that people do?

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@FluentInFinance@mastodon.social Andrew, I saw that you followed me after my rant about where creative personal vehicle marketing might go. After some further thought about that, it dawned on me, that although some of the machinations I conceived might be tried by the most aggressive go-getters, the obvious green pasture for the ascending dealer conglomerates is subscription model marketing. They will be selling you the kitchen sink of all your ground transportation needs for a single periodic payment each week, month or payday. The package may include car, car insurance, maintenance contracts, in-car entertainment, tolls, its own credit card, towing, unlicensed cab services when you are out of town, electric vehicle charging, etc, with the payment amount varying depending on how much you use. And because they want to have lifelong customers, scheduled replacement of the vehicle at reasonable intervals will be a standard part of it. The focus on free markets and competition is quite likely to opportunities for megascale enterprises to join in the fun. How about national chains of parking garages and privately owned roads to be thrown into the subscription package? And the profit margins on these deals will be as thin as those on popcorn at the movies and those liquor lockers in hotel rooms.

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@gwynnion@mastodon.social That's why the most violent societies identify themselves as products of civilization, the others as 'cultures.'

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Oregon Slim @oregon_slim@c.im

· 2d ago

Replying to

@lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social Pizza would have been a near-optimal meal for our ancestors of 100,000 or so years ago. That's why we like it, why we invented fire, etc. Problem is our DNA changes so slowly and our brains make mistakes too fast. A nutritious slice of pizza piled high with vegetables is an acceptable fast-food meal today. The small problem is that the vast majority of us would eat too much, and the profitability of pizza is so high that the pizza has also evolved, but into a dominant species of food that thrives on its thralls by raising both their voracity and their BMI beyond reasonable limits. And it's great that we live in an era of pin diversity, so that each of us can identify with and be proud of our respective chosen thralldom(s).

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