Alex

used to be like "ha ha how could people fall for snake oil" and now it's like "oh everyone falls for every kind of snake oil possible all the time including billionaires and politicians, just guzzling up snake oil at a horrifically alarming rate and vomiting out onto the rest of us" 🫠🙃

Dunno how this hasn't been picked up by the media yet but #BillC15 would remove the provision allowing libraries to send books to and fro by Canada Post at a cheaper rate. In Newfoundland about a quarter of the physical items signed out of libraries use this service! librarianship.ca/news/bill-c1...

Check those factory settings, folks.

Close enough

Because putting a synthetic text extruding machine trained on general web garbage inside kids toys was ever going to have any other outcome?

Better to stick with extruding play-doh through plastic shapes.

I’M LOSING MY SHIT THIS IS SO FUNNY

screenshot of a text exchange featuring a screenshot of black and pink text on a white background, taken from the today in tabs newsletter. screenshotted text reads: “Is Saturated Fat Actually Good For You?" No. "Oprah Pursues Dr. Phil On Ship Through Arctic." Charles Pulliam-Moore: "We talked to the guy running the Mad Men puke hose." Frogposting in Hazlitt. Outgoing NY Mayor and deranged person Eric Adams warned Zohran Mamdani about "the ghost." ????. below that screenshot you can make out a text saying “you're in Today in Tabs”

the good folks at today in tabs have seen fit to include frogposting in their latest missive. click the link above to see why 🐸

rip gainax, you ended in a weird convoluted way that pissed a lot of people off

generational discourse can be solved once and for all by distinguishing between "remembers no computers", "remembers no personal computers", and "remembers no cell phones". everything before that fought in wars. everything after that is, best case scenario, inventing the borg

it’s happening in public libraries too: people are walking up to reference desks with lists of fake articles and books. 📚

This is the sort of advertising I love. - It's not very well targeted, because it doesn't need to be. - It's not got a link to buy, or "find out more" or use promo code 10 , in order to merely be able to prove it's success - It's not pretentious or ambitious or demanding or "smart" , it's just based in the reality of the world. - It's calm, confident, noticeable, bold. - It's what it needs to be. I do wonder why we make everything so complicated. Simple isn't easy, but it's essential.

Onion ad for the National Pear Council: Just curious, when was the last time you had a pear? That long? How come?

Welp, looks like we're teaching the LinkedIn grindset people what The Onion is the hard way.

I'm going to float this nuclear take: maybe students are increasingly turning to ShitGPT and other deskilling devices because the structure of the modern university has made it impossible for them to acquire skill in a deep way.

Let me paint a picture for you.

Amazon Is the World's Biggest Online Book Marketplace. It's Filled With AI Knockoffs Authors say Amazon's knockoff book problem is leaving them frustrated — and making the internet worse in the process.

Amazon is making money off AI copies of books - and putting the onus on authors to prove they’ve been plagiarised.

Honestly, just stop buying books from Amazon. Get them from an actual bookshop or order them from a reputable book supplier like bookshop.org

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Campus radio stations are the lifeblood of underground music in Canada and elsewhere. The conservative scourge on culture continues apace.

takes like those that make it especially funny that "meme" as originally coined by Dawkins in 1976 meant "shareable unit of culture/information" in the most generic, non-internet sense possible. high fives are a meme. saying "hello" when you pick up the phone is a meme. it's memes all the way down!

Grieving loss is one of the things that is fundamental to the human condition and a necessary activity to process and accept loss; creating opportunities and technologies to delay or deny experiencing grief (or loss itself) is deeply anti-human and anti-reality.

It's pretty fun when you figure out what your place is when it becomes being the cultural backdrop that helps younger people establish their own sense of the times and belonging.

"I was initially surprised by how often I ran into the attitude from students in these programs that they don't actually need to be well-versed in anything besides the exact information they need to know to conduct research in their field."
We no longer train scholars, we train specialists

We asked activists from authoritarian regimes what they wish they’d known sooner. Here’s what they said Activists from Hungary, El Salvador and Turkey offer advice to the US about what they’ve learned about authoritarians

“When they come to power for the second time, they feel more ruthless, and they behave as if there are no boundaries any more. I think especially in the leader’s head, that association of ‘me and the country’ [being] the same thing becomes very prominent.”

Taylor Swift's Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack Data analysis from startup GUDEA reveals inauthentic social media network that pushed false narrative about her ties to MAGA world and white supremacy

Remember the burst of posts in October claiming Taylor Swift was a Nazi/trade wife/selling SS merch? It was a bot farm.

AND: Researchers "discovered 'a significant user overlap between accounts pushing the Swift Nazi narrative & those active in a separate astroturf campaign attacking Blake Lively."

Gotta admit "the font is DEI" is a stage of absurdity I could not have predicted

The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy, by Michael Geoffrey Asia. Imagine confiding your most private fantasies to what you believe is an unfeeling algorithm that cannot judge or remember. Now imagine that on the other side of that conversation is a man sitting in a...

Now imagine sharing your private fantasies with what you believe is a bot that cannot judge or remember. Just that, on the other side, is a man in a one-room home in Nairobi, pretending to be an AI companion.

That man is Michael, and this is his story: data-workers.org/michael/

So similarly, when we see people who prefer ChatGPT or a similar synthetic text extruding machine as a source of medical information, that means those are people who are under-served in the current system.

Students, staff, faculty turning to ChatGPT? That means they are being asked to do things they don't have the time, resources, support, etc to do.

"'The larger implications are terrible—search results could show inaccurate results that are reputationally damaging or promulgating a falsehood that actively harms someone who doesn't drill down,' VanderMeer said."

companies: “maybe THIS AI ad won’t end in a deluge of mockery”

#medlibs

never miss an opportunity to tell someone who thinks they're being clever quoting "voltaire" that actually, voltaire never said it. it's from a 1993 episode of a nazi radio show & the guy who did say it is quite famously a pedophile who was so weird even the other nazis thought he was creepy.

the mcdonald's AI ad was so telling, because the team admitted it took weeks of work to get even a few clips that looked like a commercial, and still you could see without looking closely that legs were bending the wrong way and stuff was levitating. garbage. complete scam.

insane that no reporter ever followed up asking trump about the video he posted where an AI version of himself promised cure-all medbeds to the entire population