Erin Kissane

Extremely specific!

Brief reviews of one of those seasonal instagrammy perfumes trialed despite my better judgement:

Me: Burnt Uncle

@fjord.style: Irish…Old Spice?

12yo: Something Has Gone Wrong in the Fridge

Babel-myth level bad.

Oh no

There are things the team could do to reduce the social pressure for now, but that's…a different conversation.

In my view, what's happening is that we're still in the Under Construction phase across projects, but there's already intense pressure to have the full indie stack running. People are working on it all over the place, including at Bsky, but it takes time to build (in every sense of "build").

I don't *think* deer.social or Blacksky are running their own app views yet.

In my better moments I think there are just so many people visible now that we can’t possibly sort dangerous ones from not—or check our status against them and sort ourselves accordingly—fast enough so treating anyone not in full agreement like things just becomes the norm.

Anyway it seems like I’m going to have to go read The Magic Goddamn Mountain Uggh so I can reread The Empusium and get all the jokes and I‘m so salty about it

(Unless I’m talking about Facebook, which, yeah, fuck that thing in particular)

When I talk about “the internet” people (quite reasonably) assume I mean ~the algorithms~ or whatever but I’m always talking about the human problem of living here together at all

I can apparently hear just the right frequencies to be quite bothered by the electricity in the walls and I have been trying not to write a post about the way these things feel the same

Having had lived as an adult before the internet mattered, I would say that some form of the behavior is present in all intense communities. But I think everyone being in the same place(s) and doing it publicly across community boundaries is a difference in scale that becomes a difference in kind.

I feel like I now have a better understanding of the whole laudanum/Gin Lane response to so many people moving into big industrial cities at once

It feels like the internet‘s cooked us into presenting every position in the strongest moral terms and responding to every disagreement as an all-out attack that must be annihilated before it destroys everything and it seems not great

20+ Chicago cops injured from the feds tossing tear gas around today.

god, people are so broken

ICE unleashed tear gas on the street in Chicago’s Logan Square today and I tried to find meaning among the fog and my own anger about, well, everything. dansinker.com/posts/202…

“Cartography of Generative AI (2024)” shows a sprawling, diagrammatic ecosystem of how generative AI is produced and maintained. The background is light pink with turquoise and yellow highlights. The left side has a turquoise vertical sidebar with labeled sections such as AI imaginaries, Critical expertise, Data sciences, Silicon Valley, and AI harms. The main diagram maps the flow of generative AI development from top to bottom: Top left: A globe icon with arrows represents global energy consumption, linked to servers and calculation power (chips, GPUs, and companies like TSMC). Top center: Rows of red server racks show data centers, connected to big data platforms and pipelines of training data (shown as orange blocks). Top right: Yellow stacks and schematic diagrams depict the supply chain of raw materials (e.g., cobalt, lithium) and scenes of mining. Upper right corner: A vignette labeled digital colonialism shows resource extraction sites and cables crossing oceans. Middle section: Blue isometric office-like spaces labeled AI start-ups and Silicon Valley venture capital, with tiny illustrated workers at desks, computers, and whiteboards. Orange and yellow arrows and blocks represent the movement of datasets, training, and alignment processes. A section labeled human labour shows rows of workers annotating data. Lower section: Gridded platforms in orange and yellow depict data extraction from the internet—social media, images, sound, text—and web scraping from sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr, YouTube. Groups of small figures interact with large wireframe cube models labeled generative AI engines. Other vignettes show AI products (like chatbots), digital gig work, and consumer use. Far right: Layers of stacked chips show advanced chip production and global supply chains. A blue network node diagram illustrates the infrastructure economy behind AI technologies. Boxes at the bottom describe research and governance structures.

Hadn't seen this "Cartography of Generative AI" before. From Estampa, a collective of programmers, filmmakers and researchers working in the fields of audiovisual media and digital environments: cartography-of-generative-ai.net

You’re going to have a wild set of replies.

for those interested, this is where you pay us (Blacksky)

The best time to diversify your personal networking across infra and entities was 15 years ago, the next best time is

The Schrödinger’s Platform (it’s a protocol, it’s an ecosystem) situation + the team’s stated intent to build in ways that make pressure campaigns less load-bearing + a set of clusters that have historically only gained protection via pressure is producing some genuinely strange dynamics here.

There are a few ways this goes and I am not looking forward to any of them.

This is a fantastic thread.

SICKOS YES

This is such bullshit and I am so grateful for you and your work.

Everyone but @fjord.style thinks this is a metaphor, frogbrane knows the truth

To make sure no one reads my take on moderation, I'm surrounding it with the most unbearable neolithic architecture bullshit, like an uncuttable fairytale bramble wall of rhetoric except it's this one real specific kind of mud that doesn't make great bricks, becau—

How To Lie (Down) on Maps