@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-09-21 13:04:37
Google unveils Googlebook hardware, with flagship devices built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, offering deep Android and AI integration, starting at $899 (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2026/09/21/googlebook-launch/
@fanf@mendeddrum.org2026-09-16 14:42:04
from my link log —
A design space exploration of async/await.
https://cel.cs.brown.edu/blog/design-space-async-await/
saved 2026-09-15 https:/…
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-06-22 04:44:36
The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.
@mxp@mastodon.acm.org2026-07-18 19:02:36
I agree that it’s important that publications “remain visible, discoverable, attributable, and connected to the version of record,” but no details are given on how a deal with Google or whatever corporation would actually ensure this—and given how LLMs work, there’s actually no guarantee whatsoever—so this remains very vague.
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@mxp@mastodon.acm.org2026-07-18 19:02:36
I agree that it’s important that publications “remain visible, discoverable, attributable, and connected to the version of record,” but no details are given on how a deal with Google or whatever corporation would actually ensure this—and given how LLMs work, there’s actually no guarantee whatsoever—so this remains very vague.
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@wydamn@social.linux.pizza2026-09-14 18:11:01
Welcome to the mid-2020's. Yet again, parody news site describes current events more accurately than mainstream media.
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2026/09/tech-oligarchs-agree-calling-ai-too-dangerous-way-…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-08-11 16:22:46
Random thought that goes interesting places:
There are a lot of cheap ways to spend money to drastically improve the quality of life for lots of people (UBI, mosquito nets, digging wells, etc.). Those people almost invariably become way more economically productive in aggregate when this happens, far above the costs involved, if you measure from the perspective of the affected group. So for billionaires looking for outsized returns on investments, why not simply spend on some of these programs, then invest in a broad index of socks that are going to go up as a result?
The answer could be "billionaires by their nature are too evil to think of this," which, could be true....
But I think there's a deeper answer, which is that there *is no* bundle of stocks that goes up as humans flourish. This is directly contrary to neoliberal economic doctrine/propaganda, but it also has an explanation that's obvious from the neoliberal doctrine itself: the stock market is a gambling arena for bets on corporate profits. Corporate profits are money taken in in excess of costs. But the value of a corporation is not produced abstractly by the mere existence of the organization; it's produced by the labor of humans working for the organization, with raw materials that the organization purchases. So to make a profit, an organization has to do some combination of paying its workers less than the value the create, and/or paying less for it's raw materials than they are really worth. The more it does these two things, the more profit it can generate.
Notice that these two profit-generating activities directly and indirectly immiserate humans, *and* that reducing human misery by means other than reducing these activities makes them harder. People who have other means of income won't sell their labor for less than it's worth, nor will they sell their resources below their fair value. Only desperate people will agree to terms that corporations require to be profitable.
This is not a "Marxist analysis" by the way; it's the direct application of the basic principles taught in any neoliberal introductory macroeconomics class.
In any case, once we understand that the stock market is "gambling on how much corporations can exploit their employees/suppliers/customers", it's clear why you can't make money from stock investments in companies that profit from flourishing humans: profit is by construction made of human misery.
It also explains a lot of other things, like why private US employers who pay huge amounts of payroll towards health insurance for their employees would be *against* public health insurance that would offload those costs onto all taxpayers: the amount they're able to lower wages as a result of desperation for access to health care is more than worth the direct costs.
This is the central reason why capitalism (defined as: a system where money equals power) is inimical to human happiness: it allows profits built on suffering to be converted into the power to maintain the system of suffering and even extend and intensify it, creating a feedback loop of extractive domination.
Now I'm sure some people might read this and think: what about the good companies? The ones that pay their workers and suppliers a fair wage, and sell their products at fair prices? Even putting aside the fact that such a thing seems less believable than a unicorn these days, such a company by definition does not make a profit. The fair wage for its workers is the value they add to the raw materials it buys, and the fair price for those is the selling price of the finished product minus the value the company adds. The balance sheet will read exactly zero at the end of the day if compensation is actually fair. You can still run a company like this in theory, and even grow it, but of course under capitalism it will just get bought out by an unethical company that is profitable. Could you in some kind of utopian dream world run a tightly regulated series of markets where you have most of what people think capitalism is, without the bad parts? Maybe, but it definitely wouldn't involve actual capitalism, and it wouldn't have a stock market.
#anarchy #capitalism #econimics
@cdarwin@c.im2026-08-01 16:16:34
The US government released its anxiously awaited plan for how to manage the Colorado River crisis on Friday,
which includes the potential for harsh cuts in water supplied to California, Arizona and Nevada.
Under the proposal, the so-called lower basin states stand to lose up to 3m acre-feet (3.7bn kiloliters) a year
– enough water annually to serve more than 25 million people and roughly 40% of their collective total.
The so-called upper basin states
– Colorado…
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net2026-09-15 02:57:33
Hyperbolic Geometry Part 2:
How to get seriously lost.
Topics:
How to fit an infinitely long stick between a pair of nearly-closed crocodile jaws.
How "directions" get messed up. Why it is that even if you can get everybody to agree on where "North" is, that won't tell you **anything** about "South"
(i.e., **every** non-North direction will be "South" — as in 180° away from North — for **somebody**).
What you need…
Hyperbolic Geometry 2 — How to Get Seriously Lost
Hyperbolic Geometry, continued from part 1,
in which we learned about critical distances and critical angles.
@fanf@mendeddrum.org2026-09-05 14:42:04
from my link log —
Microsoft Pluton: a security chip designed for the future of Windows PCs.
https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/11/17/meet-the-microsoft-pluton-processor-the-secur…
