From the Small Mercies desk: remember Simone Collins was running for office in Pennsylvania? Well, she lost her campaign. Here's a piece about her from the Inquirer.
TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Some techbro proposes "HumaneRank" as a distribution system in the post-AI era and while HN finds it disturbingly like a global popularity system at least "it's better than Communism":
Competitive college admissions and tech-industry hiring practices really have done permanent damage to these people, haven't they
New superpredictor lore dropped on r/mapporn. If you believe in prediction markets and meet someone from Blaine MT or Essec NY, you have to do whatever they say because they are smarter and better at predicting than you.
big walmart is watching you.
https://old.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/1gqphel/body_cameras_for_front_end/
I made a sneer about moving from Twitter to yet another Jack Dorsey social network, but after looking into it he apparently left Bluesky and joined Musk's team instead, because of moderation options. Geez, maybe I should sign up. But creating and keeping track of new accounts to sites is a pain in the aaaaaaassssss.
Bluesky is backed by a cryptocurrency venture capitalists, which makes me nervous: https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a -- but in the same press release they reassure people that they're not about to go all NFT (Non-Fun Tokens) just because of their backers.
This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).
a lot of projects with crypto ties have been doing this kind of hedge — they now emphasize data sovereignty instead of web3, decentralization, and other poisoned buzzwords, but they never really answer why crypto assholes would invest in a company if not to do crypto asshole shit when the time is right
looks like the autoplag bullshit is causing a "fun" new frontier in the hellscape of youtube copyright fuckery
They made this terrible thing look like a train
There's something sweet in the air what I can't say
Would I like a drink to calm the brain?
Oh, please stay in the chairs
But oh, God
I don't wanna go to Mars
What kind of brainwashed idiot does?
It's all a lab rat life in jars
They branded the dream of ages
I don't wanna go to Mars
Be with me here and return to dust
-- White Lies, I Don't Want To Go To Mars, 2022
I remember really liking it when I heard it around first release. it holds up.
I know we're trying to cut back on the US politics for the sake of everyone's sanity, but Musk getting sneered by his own confabulator is still pretty good.