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The Black Panthers were revolutionary, but not because they had Black leather jackets and berets and shotguns. They were revolutionary because they were armed with breakfast, and vaccines, and the truth.

They weren't revolutionary because they wanted to "kill white people." They didn't want to kill white people, not even the racist ones. They wanted white people, even the racist ones, to see that racism is a tool used to oppress all people.

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@mekkaokereke The reality is nearly ALL American music is black music. Country, bluegrass, punk, garage, psychedelic, experimental/avant garde, all have deep roots in black culture. Too many people fail to realize this and have this ridiculous narrow idea of what black music is and it all comes down to the racism that continually co-opts and then erases the black element at the origin.

Behold "Glaze", a software tool that subtly alters the pixels in a piece of art online ๐ŸŽจ ...

... in a way that isn't detectable by the human eye ๐Ÿ‘€ ...

... but renders the image useless for training a visual AI. The AI can't detect the artists' style, and thus can't mimic it and copy it. ๐Ÿค– โœ–๏ธ

It's item #1 in my weekly "Linkfest" newsletter here ๐Ÿ“ซ : buttondown.email/clivethompson

(Subscribe here! buttondown.email/clivethompson)

TIL that macOS ships with a default CLI command called "sips", for "scriptable image processing system" - and it can convert webp images to PNG, but it can also generate entirely new images from scratch using an almost entirely undocumented canvas-based JavaScript API! til.simonwillison.net/macos/si

"When we say 'crime is a social construct', what we mean is that you, as an individual, can go to jail for littering, but a corporation can poison the air, the soil, and the water of an entire town, and no one will go to jail."

On maps of Ikea, slime mould โ€˜found the exit, more efficiently than the scientists who set the taskโ€™

#LRB

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n10/fr

โ€œDisabling SMS based 2FA unless youโ€™re paying for Twitter Blueโ€ makes sense when viewed through a lens of โ€œThe Worldโ€™s Smartest Manยฎ just got the Twilio bill and blew a blood vessel.โ€

Carolyn Bryant lied about Emmett Till, escalated up the chain of violence to her husband, sat in the car with him as they drove around looking for Emmett, allowed that child to be kidnapped, tortured and murdered, and then lied about it in court.

She hasn't even been charged with a crime.

The other murderers were also acquitted.

The authorities know where she lives. There's no statute of limitations on her crime. We just don't want to prosecute her. We like the chain, just not where it leads.

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Warren: "If they couldn't use crypto, would ransomware gangs even exist?"
Reiners: "No."

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NASA is hiring a Chief Data Officer. I'll bet a few of you know someone who absolutely needs to know about this opportunity: usajobs.gov/job/700799600

One massive blind spot in calling large language models โ€œ โ€, is that they are trained on *behavioral* models.

At best, these systems imitate responses realistically enough to trick us into anthropomorphizing those responses as thought.

And as we folk know, behavioral models of intelligence are inherently flawed.

Navigating emotions can be a source of enormous trauma and difficulty for Autistic people. Emotions don't have to be scary - but nobody is born understanding how to process them. It's a skill that most people learn in childhood.

But if you're Autistic then your relationship to your emotions is different than an allistic person's, and you're going to be confused when attempting to learn these things.

As a result many of us grow up with challenges stemming from never having learned how to process emotions in a healthy way.

The good news is? It's never too late to learn. Start here!

coda.io/@mykola-bilokonsky/pub

The intersection of Autism and Complex Trauma is a space where more and more people are realizing that things may not be what they seem.

A large number of so-called "Autistic traits" are also CPTSD traits. Is this because the conditions overlap? Or is this because so many Autistic people develop CPTSD?

It's increasingly looking like the latter. The good news here is that you can heal your Complex PTSD - it's not a set of Autistic traits, but it is the result of growing up with needs that nobody could understand.

coda.io/@mykola-bilokonsky/pub

Q: Why do Black folk disrespect the military by kneeling during the anthem?

A: But... most active duty military fully support the kneeling protests? ๐Ÿ™‚๐Ÿ™ƒ

You'll understand why that support exists, once you understand the military's true demographics. About 47% of the military is non-white.

There's a stark contrast between most "honor our veterans" PR montages and a non-staged photo of a large group of service personnel. You can't "honor vets" or "support troops" by ignoring half of them.

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I frequently have to remind my friends in Silicon Valley, that the military is not "more right wing" than Silicon Valley. The military is more inclusive.

There are way more Black employees in the military than in Silicon Valley. Military demographics look closer to real US society, but with Black people being *over* represented.

If you're standing in a room of 100 VCs in Atherton, vs a room of 100 active duty marines in Camp Pendleton, there are more Trump voters in the Atherton room. ๐Ÿ™‚๐Ÿ™ƒ

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All these coffee table books about visual thinking and people still go around talking themselves into tangles and keeping a confusing ecosystem in their head like itโ€™s going to help ๐Ÿ™ƒ

Draw it out, comrade. It actually works wonders I promise.

โ€œIt takes an ocean not to break,
It takes an ocean not to break,
It takes an ocean not to breakโ€ฆโ€

โ€” Terrible Love, The National

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