Posts in: Education

What Do They Know

I guess we really shouldn’t be too surprised that main stream journalism kinda got it wrong with the new AI marketing storm. This happens all the time but it is easy to miss.

Whenever some domain of specialized knowledge rises up in the public consciousness, and when it is one you happen to be well acquainted with—not an expert necessarily but certainly more than proficient—when you then read an article or hear a news story on the domain, inevitably you have opportunity to say to yourself “Well, that’s kind of a half-truth, or Hmm, seems an over-simplification…”

That isn’t just you. We all do that all the time. I wouldn’t call that a carburetor. You shouldn’t add salt after it cools. IP addresses can’t work that way. M1 isn’t M2. And so on.

I’m confident in my opinions because I didn’t pick them up at the lifestyle store—instead I crafted them over time for internal coherence and reasonable correspondence with our current state of knowledge.

Too damn bad if at the end of the day the only thoughts
In your brain are all the things that they say, what a waste…
Too damn bad if at the end of the line
you got no idea of what’s on your own mind…
You’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

— Henry Rollins, Disconnect from Weight (1994)

So Why the Story

To get at why stories seem to me fundamental building blocks of reality I have to backpedal and talk about pictures for a bit. ❡ Building blocks of reality? Dude, smoke another bowl… ❡ Pictures. We know what those are. Kind of freeze frames of the light available at some particular moment. Pictures of things, pictures of words. We consume and conceptualize them now as pixel collections, sometimes printed, mostly on screen.

Continue reading →

So What's the Story

As I was saying, telling a better story is important for me. I feel somewhat compelled to do it, if only in my head, but preferably also to create artifacts for future data waves. And what do I mean by better? More coherently truth congruent with repeatedly identifiable phenomena; the propositions therein match up with consensus reality; the shit rhymes. ‘But why stories?’, I pretend you ask. Because I’m convinced that in strange ways it is actually ‘stories’❡ that are the building blocks of our reality.

Continue reading →

Smack My Bitch Up

I want to emphasize in this post what I mentioned last time: not censoring myself out of economic, or other, anxieties. Anecdotally, in what were always described to me as “professional settings”, but turned out to just be “people in a room”, when I thought they were serious when they said “we want to hear what you think”, and I start with a phrase like “…well, your software kinda sucks…” I found myself plunged into a situation I thought I left in junior high school.

Continue reading →

Headlines that tell the entire story

Hey, news editors writing headlines that tell the entire story—be praised! The ordered presentation of facts and not the grooming of responses is what citizens want. And despite likely higher click-through rates, the rest of you can fuck off with the coy questions, implied mystery, fortune telling, and all the other horseshit. Oh btw, "facts" are all the things you can know without opening up anybody else's head. Inside the head stuff is called "

Continue reading →

Yes, again it is the promise of apocalyptic judgement that is the core of their manipulative powers.

I needn’t repeat the only apocalypse any of us face is personal and inevitable and natural.

apple.news

Trump Supporters Think They’re in a Fight to the Death - The Atlantic

I run my mouth a lot, so I should make clear...

...because maybe somebody does read this, because maybe ON the OFF chance that somebody does read this, and perhaps thinks if I’m criticizing software in some sort of abstract way it must actually be about the platform I am posting my criticisms on, so perhaps Twitter, or where I secretly really hang out, on micro.blog. Well, it is not. I like twitter for what it is, mostly, and micro.blog is groovy, does just what it does without fuss.

Continue reading →

Hey, #cybersecuritypros the only question you must have a yes answer to: When any of your systems do something you either did not ask for, or are surprised by, can you reach the on/off switch? Astounding how many times * scenarios I hear “I didn’t know you could turn it off.”

Mastodon