Tootfinder

"Intensive indigenous farming in #Michigan ’s Upper Peninsula, USA" #archaeology #lidar

In one case, it turns out that an all-male client group was giving vicious beratings (undeserved!) to a female project manager when they had her cornered alone. I had no idea.
In the moment, I found those men kind of obnoxiously self-confident in their ignorance, but nothing worse. Later they want on a Trumpian scorched earth campaign trying not to pay everyone for work already done and threatening lawsuits willy nilly. They turned out to be horrible people. Missing that early red flag of misogyny cost us all — but especially that manager.
2/

60 years ago tonight, the big beat acid test, on the grateful dead’s home turf in palo alto, at a soon-to-open go-go club on the outskirts of town. full chaos, with the dead & prankster band playing at the same time. local historian @… on the big beat:

A look at the risks of BNPL apps like Klarna on users' financial health, as credit cards adopt BNPL features and regulators struggle to categorize BNPL services (Amy X. Wang/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.co…

Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay: How ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ Built a New Culture of Consumption
‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ has built a delirious new culture of consumption — and trapped users in a vortex of debt.

This is amazing. As a kid when we would do the summer pilgrimage from Chicago and later St. Louis to Onekama and Empire, the piece of the trip around the southeast side of Lake Muskegon was always a disturbing one. Smelly, swampy, and chronically brown.
I still would not swim in it, but the fact that it has come off the list of polluted waters is fabulous.
#Michigan

If you are up this late, maybe you want to stay up later. Go ahead, read my latest essay, What Did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons?
https://varnelis.net/works_and_projects/what-did-vibe-coding-just-do-to-the-commons/

What did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons? - varnelis.net
I write a lot about art and architecture, landscape, and the impact of technology on culture, but I haven’t written about coding since the 1980s, when I sold my first article to Creative Computing magazine. Back then I was a high school kid, spending hours working in both BASIC and 6502 assembler on the VIC-20. I ...

"Actions speak louder than words."
Boy, is that an understatement... as #TaylorSwift hands out $100,000 bonuses totalling $197 million to everyone that worked on her tour, including production assts, merch salespeople, security, tech staff, truck drivers, dancers & musicians.

we drove to negaunee ("iron city") and shopped a little. (i bought a 1963 henry mancini record and a 1930 pamphlet, "how to throw a party.")
negaunee has some cool old buildings.

I think the root of the “AI” evil is when AI researchers in the 1960s recognized that they outrageously underestimated the complexity of the human mind.
They became humiliated by their promises that AGI was just a few years away—and then went full goblin mode that’s lasting to this day.
Some of the OG researchers took it quite badly that they stalled and weren’t in the limelight anymore.
‣ Marvin Minsky (co-founder of MIT AI lab and arguably the most important early AI bro) went on to visit Epstein’s island multiple times.
‣ Karl Steinbuch, who came up with the German term for computer science ("Informatik")—who also was a literal Nazi (and likely war criminal) in World War II—later wrote articles in ultra-right magazines about things like “equal rights rob women of their children”.
‣ John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, co-authored document that coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”) was a staunch Republican who years later claimed (in a serious article) that “thermostats have beliefs”.
[one moment, I am receiving more information]
‣ There’s a second Epstein Island AI pioneer? Who also was Chief Learning Officer at… Trump University? That would be Roger Schank (founded one of the first AI companies in the 1980s AI boom, it even had an IPO. Of course the 1980s AI bubble burst).
Obviously all of the above received all the awards in computer science and are very revered people.