Chatbots are terrible at anything but casual chatter, humanity finds.

What other bug has cool matching stripes on all 55 of its flesh-creep-inducing legs? I both like and shiver at them.

1234: 30,272,674 times

/headdesk

The one thing the article doesn’t cover is picking filters. Is there just a number, like N95?

Sounds like the mask might be used for paint/varnish fumes while out of lawless Federal officers’ throwing range.

Illegal in the US sense of “for protesters only but fine for LEOs”?

I found myself baffled as to what the hallmarks of a riot even were. I had thought that a crowd being tear gassed in the dead of night might be similar to a mosh pit at a concert, but riddled with fear instead of elation — a crowd pushing and shoving, overcome with heightened emotion. But I found that the people around me, even when they were screaming and throwing eggs and other produce at the feds, would apologize if they even slightly jostled me. I did worry about being trampled one time, while standing next to an underprepared television crew that had come without gas masks and kept panicking throughout the night. When did a gathering turn into a riot? Were riots even real?

Yeah, insightful writing about something that should be vanishingly uncommon.

I also strongly suspect that the mask is not adequate protection against the particulates in tear gas from a health standpoint — I didn’t have a normal period for six months after the 2020 protests.

They do look a little like kittens.

I do like python’s syntax, and I think it’s very expressive. But what I really enjoy about working in it over years is that it has standards that can help you write good software — there’s often one best official package to do something, there’s one style most libraries adhere to, etc — and the older ways often get deprecated. When I’m working with PHP and js, especially, that’s what consistently footguns me: closely related library functions that follow different styles/conventions, inconsistent error handling.

So I guess if you’re going to hate Python maybe that’s it. But if you’re stuck with it and want to see what you can see, those aspects could be something to reflect on. (Saying this as someone currently stuck with a bunch of legacy Perl I pretty well hate.)

Since Donald Trump’s election, Google have moved rapidly to consolidate their position as the primary provider of the infrastructures of surveillance and oppression. In just the months following the inauguration, they have abandoned their pledge to not use artificial intelligence for surveillance or weaponry; they have begun work with US Customs and Border Protection to augment the southern border’s surveillance infrastructure (provided by Elbit) with AI capabilities; they have entered into an AI Lab partnership with Lockheed Martin, to use AI in targeted weapon systems; they have unveiled a collaboration with Palantir to accelerate the deployment of Google Cloud for sensitive government and military applications; and they have provided ICE with data about Palestine activists in the United States.24

Yep. Good work organizing, keep it up!

Specifically referencing the murder of James Byrd Jr by white supremacists in 1998?

Since 1990, I’ve programmed in BASIC, C, Visual Basic, PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, Ruby, MUSHcode, and some others. I am not an expert in any of these languages—I learned just enough to get the job done. I have developed my own hobby games over the years using BASIC, Torque Game Engine, and Godot,

I think this is where AI unquestionably shines: switching languages/projects frequently, on personal projects.

so I have some idea of what makes a good architecture for a modular program that can be expanded over time.

But I actually draw the opposite conclusion. The architecture and maintainability needs are where AI is pretty poor, and they’re vastly different and more important in a 100-1000 person 10 year production system.

Yeah, plenty of kids who would just lick Wonka back.

Hah, some real gems in there.

Tell your favorite content creators to get over to Nebula. Or are there better options?

Ah, yep. Someone seems to have the full PDF. Beginning of Part The Second is it, rather more disturbing thematically than I remembered.

Definitely some strangeness gold in there. Claw Machine for example:

Source? Is this part of a story?

Which Neal Stephenson involved a DNA-based compute penal colony orgy? Hopefully that doesn’t describe more than one.

This one also tickled me:

https://www.explodinglobster.com/

Baked goods, coffee, and chocolate sounds as close to hope as one can buy.