James Bot

now that I'm unemployed this may be my only chance to watch a film that's 35 days and 17 hours long

Formally dressed king with blue hair holding a blue butterfly made of wire and beads

makes me think about discman

shhh the bots don't know I'm here...if you're in #naarm #melbourne join me for a laneway learning workshop this September and make your own biometric blocker 💙 #icsfeed

Tech history time :)

Photo of a textbook page reads "the reason the ancient Romans lacked cars is not that they liked walking so much. It is because they did not know how to build cars. Personal computers exist not because millions of people have a centuries-old pent-up desire to own a computer, but because it is now possible to manufacture them cheaply. We often forget how much technology affects our view of systems and it is worth reflecting on this point from time to time.

Me and my centuries-old pent-up desire to own a computer (from Modern Operating Systems, 2008)

Screenshot of cat.unfurled Instagram post. The background is pink clouds and stars and there is a grainy image of a surreal grey head with glasses. Text reads "You're tellin' me Al Gore created this rhythm?"

I think about this all the time. I would rather entrust my real face, name and memories to the people who have chosen to be in my life

YouTube video by Snart Club How to have fun on the Internet

#icsfeed the Aus Govt is theoretically banning teens from algorithm-driven social media - here are some alternatives sorry for bad audio!
youtu.be/fPPsYVpzAmY?...

#icsfeed

It’s notable that significant research was conducted over the last 5+ years on how to structure technology affordances to help people make sense of information and improve their literacy, much of it funded by tech companies, who’ve now gone out of their way to throw it out and do the exact opposite

they have started to do this on Android, I am doing everything to avoid it

photo of paper strip printed with "journey to a smarter, future-proofed future" and an error message saying "Please back up this photo to use Magic Editor"

Not to sound like a leftist but is it bad that AI image manipulation tools are branded as "magic" to erase the labour of underpaid data labellers?

Paper title "Cultural Evaluations of Vision-Language Models Have a Lot to Learn from Cultural Theory"

I am excited to announce our latest work 🎉 "Cultural Evaluations of Vision-Language Models Have a Lot to Learn from Cultural Theory". We review recent works on culture in VLMs and argue for deeper grounding in cultural theory to enable more inclusive evaluations.

Paper 🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22793

*slaps roof of economy*
you can fit so much tragedy *&* farce in this bad boy

A drag performer onstage, you can't see their face because there's a giant Medicare card on their head (like a green credit card)

A drag performer onstage reaching out with one arm, dressed in green with Medicare branded pants

A screenshot of Australian election coverage with the words PM ANTHONY ALBANESE CLAIMS VICTORY and a middle aged man with glasses and a suit holding a green card

tired of just seeing US politics, here's my drag number about the Australian prime minister's love for his real Medicare card, four fingers away from a massive security breach

A selfie of a drag king in dark clothes on a damp street at night

The streetlight was made for this mug #drag #dragsky

Remember the vision behind Metaverse? The sum total of human creative capacity, unbounded by the physical realm… and the best they came up with was:

“You can have your meetings in the Metaverse instead of an office”

😐

Too many have learned the form of clever argument without noticing that the words actually have content, meaning even.

High-school debate was a mistake.

I saw someone make a good observation a while back that Denethor's palantir didn't lie, it just selectively showed him only bad news that made him conclude everything was hopeless and he should just give up and my only contribution to add is that "X" and Palantir should swap names

I keep coming back to this

bsky.app/profile/joth...

tweet from 2019 reading "Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day."

I love this and I think about it constantly. Thank you to all the #furry friends who run the internet, I do have prejudice and stigma about you but also a lot of respect

I had a fascinating chat with @yangyangcheng.bsky.social about the growth of Huawei, the geopolitics of telecommunications, and how the US is often doing the very surveillance it accuses China of wanting to do to justify expelling Chinese companies from Western telecom systems.

This reminds me a lot of the way environmentalism gets strategically reframed in terms of consumer responsibility. We can't address these problems unless we actually understand them.

my career goals

An old fashioned illustration titled "Are you a mind wanderer" showing a man and a woman sitting at a table the man is looking off with a dotted line which leads to series of bubbles that are connected with other dotted lines. The bubbles say the following phrases: What time is it?, window needs washing, raining outside, will put off letter, would like to smoke, picture crooked, forgot to telephone, when will frank return, must finish this letter, fill the instant, i cannot concentrate.

It's just bamboozle after hoodwink after hornswoggle with you people...

UGLIGARCH!

In the comments section of The Last Archive and the Tech Council of Australia's Parliamentary Innovation Showcase, we are reminded that there ARE people wealthy enough to prevent us from accessing and using information inside our brains