Paul Franz

I don't believe in Hell but there are days when I wish I did.

YouTube video by The Bad Plus - Topic Cheney Piñata

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNee...

YouTube video by LeftistMetalFan Chumbawamba - So Long, So Long

youtu.be/jhBCiEEMkrc?...

If you've stopped masking in public for whatever reason, now is a really good time to start again

The sheer amount of AI slop in the replies to basically every viral or semi-viral post these days is not encouraging!

Baseball the cruelest game by far, nothing else within miles of it

Racist Influencers Using OpenAI's Sora to Make it Look Like Poor People Are Selling Food Stamps for Cash Folks looking for evidence of SNAP recipients as welfare queens have no shortage of AI generated schlock to use as justification.

Again, this precise use case is why these systems exist-to proliferate people’s racist (transphobic, misogynistic…) imaginary at scale. This should not be seen as a “misuse” but rather the product being used exactly as intended.

Reducing ableist language use is, by the way, fundamental to the fight against fascism. The core ideological underpinning of fascism is eugenics. Ableist language is a reflection of eugenic attitudes. Be less ableist = be less eugenicist = fight fascism. It's not the whole game but it's essential.

Skeet from Jocelyn Shaw (@missphosphorus.bsky.social): "America is less safe now under that fat demented, cruel idiot."

PFP of a person surrounded by a bunch of different animals - duck, cat, chicken, goldfish, pig, seal, dog, and cows - with the text "Be kind to every kind" written around the edges.

Once again confronting the apparent impossibility of calling fascists evil without using ableist language. "Cruel" is good, but the other three are a gut punch. The thing that sucks about (insert person here) is not fatness or stupidity or dementia. The PFP is quite the kicker.

Weird because I could have sworn the NYT told us we shouldn't worry about these viruses and should just get back to brunch

youtube decided they're gonna ai upscale sd content by default and if you have a youtube channel you should turn that shit off

Especially amazing because can't they see what has happened to the British Labor Party in the last year?

"OK so the web browser requires 10 GB of harddrive space and a 64-bit processor to even run at all."

My two-part reaction to the pervasive idea there is a meaningful thing called "intelligence" which is separate from ethics and compassion is 1) can you really separate them? and 2) why would you want to?

In our house we call it "The pan flute of problematic tokenism"

At a certain point one must conclude that every time they concede they're really just doing what they wanted to do all along.

Yep. I distinctly recall tear gas at many of the circa-2003 Denver anti-war protests I participated in. The Mayor at the time was John Hickenlooper.

His stuff for Spellforce Conquest of Eo (which one or two of your examples might be?) is also incredible.

Lucy the elderly beagle sitting contentedly in front of a fireplace with a small fire in it. She's wearing a turquoise harness and her collar with a big blue tag that says "Lucy." Her face is mostly white these days, but she's still got a smidge of brown on top of her head and her big floppy ears remain brown as well. Although she is sitting (not lying down), she is closing her eyes and looks like she might be falling asleep.

Obligatory recent picture from in front of my partner's mom's fireplace.

Our beagle Lucy generally doesn't like being picked up and carried, but as she's gotten older she sometimes struggles to make it up the stairs. Last night for the first time she actually waited in front of the staircase up to the bedroom so I could carry her. It was very sweet and a little sad.

So that's why they call it a pleonasm

To use it like this is to teach children that a statistical composite is better than their own imagination.

It is morally wrong on that basis alone, before you even get to all the harm required to produce it

I told them I would always rather see what they had drawn themselves.

"But I can't draw it as pretty"

I hate this fucking technology and it should not be anywhere near a classroom

As a former middle school teacher, this is pedagogical malpractice.

This was a great episode and a wonderful salve if you're feeling run down by certain aspects of the recent discourse. Very happy to see it in the main feed so I can recommend it to folks.

As a neutral fan this series, the Mariners are the ethically, spiritually, and aesthetically correct bandwagon to hop onto.

Frankly embarrassing that you're so breathlessly excited about this dark, dystopian nonsense.

Yep. The most recent @citationspod.bsky.social news brief talks about the quite intentional (and well-funded) effort by several different new ostensibly center-left organizations to push this exact thing. Worth a listen imo: citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-t...

But now neither will be able to take an action.

The thing that really annoys me about this stuff is, like, you won. Very few people wear masks! Congratulations! The world is largely what you want it to be! The price is merely widespread long COVID and the exclusion of high risk and immunocompromised folks forever. So enjoy your win.