Michael 🏴‍☠️ Fleet @f1337@librem.one

Could we maybe stop shaming people for reading kids’ books? Adult books are full of sad people having affairs while kids’ books have magic wardrobes and worms driving around in apples; you tell me who’s winning.

I work for the government, and every year I have to take an ethics course to remind me not to do the things Clarence Thomas has done.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/clarence-thomas-lavish-gifts-propublica-supreme-court.html

I really want to share that some friends earlier tonight explained to me how and why GPT-like generative text LLMs are fundamentally unethical, so now I finally feel like I get (and share) the animus. I just didn't really put all the facts together before.

Now my point of view is that the models' basis in drawing in the entire content of the internet (more or less) extracts the collective creative labor of billions, which is then blended up and repackaged as a technological innovation, in order to launder the source of this labor and thereby extract its value efficiently.

Even models used by Dolly v2 ultimately derive from earlier GPT models of questionable provenance. The entire field is built on the fruit of the same poisonous tree.

@reedmideke

Modern Parenting Tips:

1) Have your kids’ phones by your bedside at night

2) Explain to your kids that if anybody does something that makes them feel weird, they can tell you and you won’t get mad

3) If a Washington Post reporter asks if he can record your kid, on the record, talking about how your son is planning to lie to the FBI to protect his online friend who turns out to be an adult and also, coincidentally, the most wanted man in America, say no.

You folks were super enthusiastic about my posting more on Mastodon, so let's try this.

RT/boost and let's see if there's interest in a regular #Ukraine thread!

Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.

For the last year, I've been tracking a notorious Russian unit known for its role in killing 100s of civilians.

This past month we published how we found them.

Yes we have had 146 mass shootings this year, but have you considered how bad things would be WITHOUT all the thoughts and prayers? We would have:

-Super cancer.
-Spiders with chainsaw legs.
-Babies being born with full sets of adult teeth.
-Golden Retrievers going extinct.
-The same number of mass shootings but they were all done by Keanu Reeves, the celebrity we love and trust the most.

Every pro-AI example on Twitter is like:

Still not convinced on AI? I spent less than an hour knocking together this rube Goldberg contraption that produces lies and terrible inaccurate results. Jobs that can be replaced by garbage generators are consigned to the dustbin of history!

Iceland goes hard

Reading this sure was a blast from the past. Wild to see people finally learn about places like Hillsdale. As ever I am quite struck by the fact that these wildly impactful Catholic hard-right educational institutions are not even known about by so many. Places like this were all that I thought "college" was when I was a teenager.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/10/the-christian-liberal-arts-school-at-the-heart-of-the-culture-wars

I think it would be pretty healing right now to hear any kind of awareness from the "you're an alarmist/this isn't fascism/trust the institutions/stop your shrieking" dudes & dudettes like Ben Wittes etc. that they were wrong. Instead, they're out there "ringing the warning bell" at least a year behind us, as per usual.

@tubetime the Vacuum Transistor allows fabrication of chip-scale vacuum tubes on normal CMOS process. These devices switch in the terrahertz range and require neither a heated filament nor a vacuum, since the source-to-drain distance is shorter than the mean free path (which means electrons won't hit any other atoms along the way): https://spectrum.ieee.org/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing

Here we have two kinds of Tesla employees: The ones who see nothing wrong with spying on customers without their consent, and the ones who think it's wrong but keep it a secret anyway.

@lowqualityfacts

Every study on the planet: 4 day, 32 hour work weeks prove to be just as productive as 5 day, 40 hour work weeks, and the company gets the benefit of happier, healthier staff.

Every company: What about nah?

Every study ever: Overworked employees are less productive. Employees who work from home are just as productive as employees who work in the office. The evidence is indisputable.

Managers: I see. But I have a hunch that the complete opposite is true.

Columbus Crew 2 player Abdirizak Mohamed, who is Muslim, was once carded by a ref for trying to break his Ramadan fast mid-game.

But this year women's and men's soccer leagues in the US/Canada/Europe (but not France) are adding in-game breaks to allow Muslim players to do just that. https://religionnews.com/2023/04/04/u-s-soccer-leagues-add-game-breaks-for-players-fasting-during-ramadan/

possibly uninformed hot take about corporate security trainings: they too often take a childish, hypothetical approach to security instead of just using stories that have actually happened. Seems a little odd to sugarcoat reality when you're literally trying to teach people best practices to use in the real world.

True crime and documentary is so hot right now, so why not use that same format to keep employees attention and teach them a thing or two?