Kagan MacTane (he/him)

The Jolly Roger flag

Apparently some folks are playing real dumb about skull symbols so let’s play a little game I like to call “Nazi skull or not a Nazi skull”

First up, the Jolly Roger. This is a pirate skull, not a Nazi skull. It means you might get robbed, but prolly not genocided.

With me so far? 1/x

I feel like today is a good time to remind ourselves that dictators aren't, by and large, genius masterminds. They're thugs who lived lives without consequence and so become convinced that they can't lose, and a certain kind of authoritarian will bow down to them.

What they are not is *smart*.

Even if you don’t live in the US, Block These Accounts. They’re up to no good.

I understand the original Mystic Pizza in Mystic, CT, which inspired the movie _Mystic Pizza_, owns a trademark on it and vigorously enforces it. A place around the corner from where I lived in San Francisco had to change to Mythic Pizza because of that.

The Williamsburg Savings Bank finally got the clock on the north face of their tower (aka "the big clock right out my window") working again! Having it telling the proper time, instead of being stuck forever at 12:00, is a huge improvement in my daily quality of life.😄

#Brooklyn #NewYorkCity #NYC

Also, my usual "I'm not hitting 'Like'/🧡 on your replies because I *don't* like what they're talking about... but I do agree with what you're saying."

Yeah. No lie detected.

And, FTR, I wasn't surprised at the mere fact of them reducing the fines; I was simultaneously trying to call attention to it, and honestly somewhat surprised that they *admitted* it. The blatancy is a little unusual.

Wishing a very Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends on here! 🍁🙏🏻🇨🇦🦃🍂

Just a reminder, for anyone who's interested: #Substack is a business model built on enshittification, and it bans adult content but allows Nazi content.

I won't give them money, and you shouldn't give them your content. IMO.

WTF is with "they do this a whole lot, so _reduce_ the fine"‽ We all know if it were you or me, the DA would be saying, "He does this all the time, so we're seeking the maximum penalty. Also, maybe we can find additional charges to bring..."

"One law for us, another for them" is not justice.

Or, as we call them around these here parts, "fascist scum".

When Charlie Kirk died, his detractors celebrated his death, while his supporters tried to keep people from speaking about his life and work in any but the vaguest terms.

When Jane Goodall died, people mourned her death, and celebrated her life and works.

Don't be like Charlie. Be like Jane.

You know what I'd like to see in a reaction video some time? "A psychologist reacts to _Inception_."

Like, there's a whole lot of stuff in there about working with or against the subject's own psyche, about daddy issues, identity, etc. I'd love to see what a psychologist had to say about it.

OpenAI’s own advanced reasoning models actually hallucinated more frequently than simpler systems. The company’s o1 reasoning model “hallucinated 16 percent of the time” when summarizing public information, while newer models o3 and o4-mini “hallucinated 33 percent and 48 percent of the time, respectively.”

AI Bros: "It's getting better all the time, soon it won't make mistakes, really!"

OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT: We just proved mathematically that "hallucinations" are inevitable.

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

#AI #AICrap #AiResearch #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #ChatGPT

I've made a small list I call "Friends", and it's just the people I actually know*, not my whole follow list, and I check it once a day, and even that is A Lot.

* one can "know" people and call them friends w/o ever having met F2F; e.g., you're on this list of mine

Yam seng, kopeng! 🥂

Thanks, done!

That's wonderful! 😍

"I didn't quote those bits" is not the excuse you seem to think it is. Holy fuck, this is awful.

Seriously, couldn't you find any non-pro-slavery queer poets to quote?

--Sincerely,
A queer guy from Brooklyn (of ample hills)

Carpetbagger - Wikipedia

NB: the term "carpetbagger" refers to people coming from the North to aid in democratizing the South after the US civil war. It's a bit like "Luddite" in that people doing justice work are now used as a pejorative.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetb...

Democrat warns US progressives against moving toward the center: ‘It lost me the election’ India Walton, who defeated incumbent mayor only to lose general election, says ‘moderating is what got us here’

Democrat warns US progressives against moving toward the center: ‘It lost me the election’

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

#USPol #politics #USPolitics #progressive

Quick ❓ for folks following the #NYC mayoral race: When Mamdani calls Cuomo "my friend" and then "habibi", is he just being a wise-ass, or is he responding to something in Cuomo's video? (I didn't bother to watch Cuomo's vid.)

I'm here for it either way! Just curious.

#NewYorkCity #NYCMayoralRace

Increase a band:

Thomas Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound

Glad to hear youse are safe, and I hope it stays that way!

But you don't bother to hire movers, or give them lots of lemonade (or beer, or whatever) when your possessions are just sitting around in your attic.

Deleting your emails will do precisely NOTHING to conserve water.

Just so you know. 5/5

What would make you thirsty is if you had to lift and carry them, like because you were moving.

The "moving everything you own" stuff is like running LLMs. (Think of them as some big, brawny movers who work very hard, and get very thirsty. You want to give these folks lots of refreshment. 💪) 4/5

It's like the difference between storing something, and lifting and carrying it. Your stored emails are like all the stuff you've got boxed up in your attic. They take up a little room, but you don't personally have to do anything about them. 3/5

So what takes water? *Computation.* Water is used to cool down CPUs and GPUs, which are things that *process* data. Like running a program, or playing a video, or (very notoriously) things like *rendering* (i.e., generating or creating) an image or video. Or generating any response from an LLM. 2/5

A quick explainer for people who don't know the ins and outs of computer hardware and cooling: storing emails doesn't take any water.

Storing emails takes a little space on a hard drive, but honestly, not very much. Not compared to lots of other things like images, videos, and programs. 1/5

Anyway, younger guys use "cuck" the same way now, and it's just as divorced from any "technical" or ontological/etymological meaning. And I hate everything about it just as much as I hated "fag" (even before I realized I wasn't straight). 5/5