Grumpy Monoceros
@grumpymonoceros.bsky.social
Madisonian, software engineer, progressive, and general nerd. I don't know what I'm doing here
Really demonstrates how fucked the power imbalance is between our schools and the software vendors they buy from. A school that has bought into the Google suite (which is most of them) has basically no good options here, because Google can just change the terms with no warning. (gift article)
Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I. (Gift Article)
Google is making it easier to restrict its A.I. tools for students. But schools that block A.I. entirely will lose student access to Google’s search engine.
nytimes.com
I wrote about all the celebs endorsing prediction markets and the even more cynical modern model of profiting off fame. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Do Celebrities Endorsing Prediction Markets Not Have Enough Money Already?
Athletes and entertainers are leveraging their fan bases for personal gain.
bloomberg.com
Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)
Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social · 3w agoIn the end a vote to recess to a future meeting failed 4-16. Madison Common Council then voted to fire Interim Police Monitor Glass 14-6, as people yelled from the gallery, with Zhang, Glenn, Harrington-McKinney, Matthews, Mayer, Nzegwu voting no.
Bold take but I think there's something to it. There's a strong argument that MBA-brain is a huge chunk of what's wrong with modern capitalism.
Opinion | I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down. (Gift Article)
Students come in with noble intentions and leave with flawed expertise.
nytimes.com
I decompiled Block Blast! myself to check the TikTok claims about rigged games and ad farming. Every major claim held up. Thread with my own video response and a link to the receipts is below. But first, check out the original video to get an idea of what is being discussed.
Morgan Johnson@poormojo.bsky.social · 4w agoNo joke. I think this is the most important video I have ever seen about mobile games. This guy breaks down how this game psychologically profiles you, and makes the game harder or easier in order to show you ads
So I'm a little late here but is there any real evidence for the idea that the Yandex attacks affected far-right activity on social media? It feels plausible, and yet...
LLMs being built at a time of peak scam culture sure is something
Maggie Harrison Dupré@mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 2mo agoNEW: Brown Brothers Media is the most successful media company you've never heard of. For years, its success was fueled by AI, fake writers, and fake reporting. When we started asking questions, BBM started mass-deleting content. Somehow, what came next was even worse. futurism.com/artificial-i...
There's a tendency in tech (and among nontech people talking about tech) to assume that the tech is the only important skillset when often our work touches a huge number of other disciplines we're mostly not experts in. Academia figured this out but SV never did.
Thorne 🌸 needs a job!@ens0.me · 2mo agoPart of the problem with a lot of AI discourse is that a lot of it devolves into a philosophy argument, which neither side is well-equipped to argue. A lot of people have rigid, narrow concepts of terms like "thinking" and "knowing" that would be dispelled by a 100-level class on epistemology.
Welp learned about the TESCREAL bundle for the first time today and now I realize my prior contempt for SV billionaires was somehow insufficient. Thanks @timnitgebru.blacksky.app and @xriskology.bsky.social
View of The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence | First Monday
firstmonday.org
The only thing that will protect you is epistemic hygiene. Sources, reasoning, humility. It is not a luxury. Especially when you're emotionally engaged.
One thing I hope folks recognize is that whatever your issues with the candidate, *any* Democrat has to work with and is subject to pressures from a hypothetical Democrat legislature. The governor alone does not set the agenda.
Ben Wikler@benwikler.bsky.social · 3mo agoAt every step in the WI-Gov primary, my message has been the same: whoever you've been supporting, commit to doing all you can to ensure that the nominee wins in November. It's all on the line.
Right. We don't need to pretend those mistakes or excesses didn't happen, but we also don't need to pretend like a society-wide effort to be more empathetic and right injustices was somehow a bad thing.
jw 🍂@farwent.net · 3mo agoThe most useful way to look at the "excesses of woke" is to imagine society as a massive supraorganism trying, over a period of years, to get the right handle on a complicated problem. Mistakes will be made as we home in on the answer. This is not "bad"; it's just how figuring something out works.
I'll go a little further than this - I think Satya's handling of this situation was very impressive. She was under immense pressure to do something, but taking action too early could have escalated the situation in ways that could caused a ton more damage and gotten people seriously hurt.
Grumpy Monoceros@grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 3mo agoAlso, she publicly empathized with their position, she provided city support (porta potties, road closures, etc) to keep the place safe and sanitary. She offered housing vouchers for the unhoused to give people a place to go. She applied pretty much the lightest possible touch here.
Really feels like Madison could learn something from Minneapolis. They locked arms around their neighbors to the point of buying groceries for people who couldn't leave their house in the face of armed federal government thugs.
Very telling that so many commenters here seem to think the two types of people are "Liberal Bsky politics posters" and "far-right MAGA extremists".
The Verge@theverge.com · 3mo agoBluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."
Hope you like malicious compliance! COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/prompt-2 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com
ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity! OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission. ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evil
My biggest pet peeve with Madison protest culture is that it often feels aimless, like people are just shouting into the void rather than organizing with a specific achievable goal in mind. This article is a really really good roadmap for doing more than just causing a lot of noise.
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway@satyaformadison.bsky.social · 3mo ago"We are grieving without a map." - Alan Robinson
Gonna go with...C&C, Warcraft, pretty much every big RTS franchise. AOE is perhaps the only one that really survived.
headfallsoff@headfallsoff.com · 3mo agowhat's everyone else's fab examples of once massively popular and influential landmark titles in especially western games from back in the day that have just been forgotten and abandoned completely now. mine is black and white
you're not immune to propaganda and the more you think you are the bigger of a sucker you are
So many of the problems of AI are just our collective brain rot. We've convinced a lot of people that only things that are easy/convenient are worth doing and so obviously the potential they see in LLMs is making a few bucks by flooding Amazon with slop.
Grumpy Monoceros@grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 4mo ago[incoherent screaming]
Non voters, rising from their cyclical slumber to look around blearily, ask “did the party in power build me a personal utopia?” and then vote accordingly.
One thing I think some folks are missing is that even if a doctor takes the issue seriously they're still human beings who are not capable of keeping the sum of all human medical knowledge indexed in their brain for quick retrieval, particularly for rare conditions.
Computational Cosmetologist@dferrer.bsky.social · 5mo agoI had strong priors against LLMs for medicine. There are a lot of doctors in my family and I grew up viewing doctors as careful, skilled professionals. I had plenty of bad medical experiences, but I thought it would be hard to do better. Then an LLM found a cure for my 2 decade chronic condition...
Generalizing this even more - if a good or service you consume required a single human do real work to make it possible, then it must either be very expensive, or subsidized by the labor of impoverished people. Even if you're not hiring literal servants, this dynamic is why you can buy $10 t-shirts
BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 5mo agoOne of the things living abroad taught me is that a) it’s very nice to have servants and b) a society which makes it possible for an upper-middle-class person to have servants is deeply unjust and inequitable.
from the annals of getting high on your own supply (gift link) www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/...
Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want
Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?
theverge.com
I hope Bsky manages to do something about the platform's harassment/bullying problem, but moderation at scale is a hard problem to solve.
Really truly believe that if you want to help the world, the best thing you can do is constantly practice being friendly, thoughtful, and kind to everyone you meet, offline and on. (I'm still practicing, but I'm way better than I used to be.)
Mike Boylan-Kolchin@mbkplus.bsky.social · 8mo agoI continue to be baffled by the idea, apparently held by a lot of folks on here, that it’s OK to be a huge asshole if you think your cause is just.