@nemobis@mamot.frI randomly bought this book in a quirky bookshop in Copenhagen for the sole reason that it said all the wrong things right on the cover.
(Sales: the single most important profession. NLP™: not natural language processing but neuro-linguistic programming. Meta: the Meta Model™ and Meta Publications™.)
I just started reading it and boy oh boy, I was not disappointed. It's outrageously hilarious.
"Persuasion engineering".
@Techmeme@techhub.socialGoogle Cloud says it now works with nine of the 10 leading AI labs, including OpenAI, and with 60% of the world's generative AI startups, fueling its growth (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/18/how-ai-startups-are-fueli…
@hex@kolektiva.socialI just woke up from a dream. For every parent there is a time when, with shame, we have to explain how the world actually works... when they become a little too old to keep saying, "I'll explain it when you're older."
Amsterdam is full of reminders of the occupation, of the Holocaust. It's impossible to pretend there hasn't been a great evil here... One that's not in the past, but still very alive in the present.
At some point things will have to change because fascism can't last forever. It is a thing which necessarily contains its own downfall. We will, at that point, have an opportunity to make the world one that we can be proud to tell our children we created. We can stop short and reestablish the status quo that got us here, or we can build a world that we will no longer have to explain to each new generation in shame.
What would it look like?
(Shout out to the comrade who prompted me to be thinking about this.)
There was also a sign in my dream that said, "we created the bike, therefore we can do anything." This may or may not be related.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialTL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?
@muz4now@mastodon.world#Food #FoodampDining Stop Guessing How Much Coffee to Use. The 'Golden Ratio' Is the Answer
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizzaThree people have changed the way I see the world in ways I can never undo: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Rudolf Rocker.
Each of them, through their own political and philosophical struggles, stripped away the false comforts I once clung to. They exposed the machinery of power, the illusions of morality, and the myths of authority, leaving me face to face with the bare truth of how the world works.
Coming to that realization, one that cannot be undone, life appears more viv…
@paulwermer@sfba.socialI wonder how this will play out in the world of San Francisco & parking concerns:
BOS FIle # 250893 [Public Works Code - Elimination of Contractor Parking Plan Requirements and Fees]
Sponsors: Mayor; Mahmood
Ordinance amending the Public Works Code to eliminate the requirement for a contractor
parking plan as a condition precedent for approval of excavation permits for major work that
is 30 consecutive calendar days or longer and as a condition precedent of speci…
@PaulWermer@sfba.socialI wonder how this will play out in the world of San Francisco & parking concerns:
BOS FIle # 250893 [Public Works Code - Elimination of Contractor Parking Plan Requirements and Fees]
Sponsors: Mayor; Mahmood
Ordinance amending the Public Works Code to eliminate the requirement for a contractor
parking plan as a condition precedent for approval of excavation permits for major work that
is 30 consecutive calendar days or longer and as a condition precedent of speci…
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyzGood points well made by @…:
"It's well past time for a post-American internet. Every device and every service should be designed so that the people who use them have the final say over how they work. Manufacturers' back doors and digital locks that prevent us from updating our devices with software of our choosing were never a good idea. Today, they're a catastrophe. ...
"For the rest of the world to escape dictators' demands, they will have to accelerate their independence from American tech – not just Russian gas. A post-American internet starts with abandoning the laws that give US companies – and therefore Trump – a veto over how your technology works."
#tech #privacy #law #USPol #Apple #Google
@muz4now@mastodon.worldEver wondered how a microphone really works?
https://flip.it/yoZ-8b
@tante@tldr.nettime.orgSo I think I'll need to read up on it a bit. I understand that "Passkeys" try to do something similar as SSH pubkeys.
But do you know a good technical explainer of what's going on and how it works?
(Yes, I could search myself but I am looking for recommendations of articles you have read that you found helpful and clear.)
EDIT: https://
@Techmeme@techhub.socialHow Google's Jigsaw and longtime pollster Scott Rasmussen plan to use AI to survey Americans to find common ground ahead of the US' 250th anniversary (Richard Nieva/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialIsn't this great from a surveillance perspective...? 😆
#wifi
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialDay 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen
@muz4now@mastodon.worldHow to keep moving even when it hurts #webstories https://muz4now.com/web-stories/whats-in-the-works-the-muse-never-rests
@arXiv_csHC_bot@mastoxiv.pageQuantifying the Effect of Thermal Illusions in Virtual Reality
Yannick Weiss, Marlene Eder, Oguzhan Cesur, Steeven Villa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01609 https://
@muz4now@mastodon.worldHow to keep moving even when it hurts #webstories https://muz4now.com/web-stories/whats-in-the-works-the-muse-never-rests
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialShould we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
2/2
To address the bigger question I started with ("should we teach AI-"assisted" coding?"), my answer is: "No, except enough to show students directly what its pitfalls are." We have little enough time as it is to cover the core knowledge that they'll need, which has become more urgent now that they're going to be expected to clean up AI bugs and they'll have less time to develop an understanding of the problems they're supposed to be solving. The skill of prompt engineering & other skills of working with AI are relatively easy to pick up on your own, given a decent not-even-mathematical understanding of how a neutral network works, which is something we should be giving to all students, not just our majors.
Reasonable learning objectives for CS majors might include explaining what types of bugs an AI "assistant" is most likely to introduce, explaining the difference between software engineering and writing code, explaining why using an AI "assistant" is likely to violate open-source licenses, listing at lest three independent ethical objections to contemporary LLMs and explaining the evidence for/reasoning behind them, explaining why we should expect AI "assistants" to be better at generating code from scratch than at fixing bugs in existing code (and why they'll confidently "claim" to have fixed problems they haven't), and even fixing bugs in AI generated code (without AI "assistance").
If we lived in a world where the underlying environmental, labor, and data commons issues with AI weren't as bad, or if we could find and use systems that effectively mitigate these issues (there's lots of piecemeal progress on several of these) then we should probably start teaching an elective on coding with an assistant to students who have mastered programming basics, but such a class should probably spend a good chunk of time on non-assisted debugging.
#AI #LLMs #VibeCoding
@arXiv_csNI_bot@mastoxiv.page2SYN: Congestion-Aware Multihoming
Kfir Toledo, Isaac Keslassy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20044 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20044
@muz4now@mastodon.worldWhat’s in the works? How to keep moving even when it hurts #brokenankle #creativeprocess #inspiration #muse
