from my link log —
U 237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW is a symbol for azimuth.
https://ionathan.ch/2022/04/09/angzarr.html
saved 2026-03-11 …
Some thoughts from Claude about military use of AI in targeting.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYIHIM6ihVJ/?igsh=cmM1ZmdjaDl3bzJ5
Tubi becomes the first streamer to launch a native app within ChatGPT, allowing viewers to find movies or shows to watch by using conversational phrases (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/08/tubi-is-the-first-strea…
Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon
Hello, reply guys!
“Fascism” is not a generic catch-all for everything awful. It is a word with a meaning. My definition of the word is a form of supremacist ethnonationalism that:
(1) demands the eradication of democracy and the installation of a dictator with total power over both government and industry, forcing all individuals to function first and foremost to advance the power of the state,
(2) designates some particular group(s) of people as naturally inferior Others whose presence contaminates society and is an existential threat to it,
(3) blames these Others for society’s problems and calls for their complete subordination, expulsion, or extermination, a project which demands the total militarization of society.
One can quibble over details there, but’s the rough shape of it. As angry as I am over the militarism and imperialism and environmental ruin and oligarchism that’s marbled throughout US politics — and as long as I’ve been putting my boots on the ground against it! — the definition above does •not• apply to every elected official or political party in US politics. But it •does• apply to the Republican Party in its current form.
https://kolektiva.social/@UsagiTsukino/116726601082092572
Acabaram de me chamar atenção aqui de que argentino tem como anagramas "ignorante"e "antinegro". 😮
Eu fiquei chocado com isso e achei interessante o suficiente para postar aqui. Mas, por favor, não usem esse fato para apoiar xenofobia não, pois xenofobia é uma das coisas mais escrotas que existem.
I’m not sure what sets us up to have better LMSes, but I don’t think institutions building them in-house is a viable answer.
One long-successful direction I like that has been gaining ground of late is course-specific web sites. I’m cheering the rise of static site generators, and hoping they continue to creep outside the confines of the techiest among us. A course site is not an LMS, but moving course •content• mostly out of the LMS simplifies the problem considerably!
/end