cerement

Media coverage largely sucked

When I just looked at my phone, the headlines were about an unfolding Microsoft global IT outage. My first thought, ransomware. So I logged in and started looking around at what was happening — I’m a CrowdStrike customer — and quickly realised two different, separate things had happened:

• Microsoft Azure had an outage earlier in the day. This was resolved before I got up. Azure has frequent outages (don’t kill me, Microsoft) — this isn’t abnormal.
• CrowdStrike had made a boo-boo and pushed out a channel update that had borked a decent percentage of customers.

The media connected these two events together and conflated them. They weren’t connected.

“One thing Myspace had going for it: it was exuberantly ugly. The decision to let users with no design training loose on a highly customizable user-interface led to a proliferation of Myspace pages that vibrated with personality.”

“The most febrile, deeply weird and authentic prompts of the most excluded outsiders produce images that feel the same as the corporate AI illustrations that project the illusion of personality from the immortal, transhuman colony organism that is the limited liability corporation.”

https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/112782702007709408

The Trump campaign aims to use today's shooting as a sort of Reichstag fire to incite his supporters to step up street violence while calling for more state repression targeting his enemies of choice.

The Biden campaign has already paused all outbound communications and withdrawn their television advertisements, ceding the entire field of narrative to Donald Trump, who will have no compunction about using his status as a victim to advance his efforts to victimize others.

One of the classic mechanics of totalitarianism is that protecting the safety of the leader becomes a justification for violence against large swathes of the population.

As centrists join the far right in paving the way for totalitarian rule under Trump, we have to organize to defend our communities. If you have been in denial about the challenges ahead of us, this should be a wake-up call to find each other and prepare for them.

Piped / Invidious

originally broadcast in 2009: Bergensbanen – minutt for minutt was a full recording of the 7 hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo and became the showpiece for slow television

Bullshitters, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 1986 essay “On Bullshit,” don’t care whether what they are saying is factually correct or not. Instead, bullshit is characterized by a “lack of connection to a concern with truth [and] indifference to how things really are.” Frankfurt explains that a bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17078489

The Government™ has made an ad about the existential threat that AI poses to humanity, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative

Piped / Invidious