Also, Darwin wrote a lot more about cooperation than competition. Competition is kinda the simplest aspect of evolution, but if you wanna understand (literally) the birds and the bees, you gotta talk about the development of mutually-beneficial systems.

So scylly

So [does Trump want to] discourage purchasing foreign goods or not?

#4 went into some weird welfare-queen, kids-these-days, get-off-my-lawn territory.

The rest is solid.

But just saying “which he named” would be less characters and make more sense

“Which himself named it”

Words good authoring there

Capitalist dystopia got us comparing ingested calories per unit of art

Join, pay, request chargeback from your card company.

When they dispute it: “The position clearly says unpaid. So I won’t pay.”

Use AI to expand this argument to 10 pages. Bonus points for citing nonexistent court decisions.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

Except gen AI didn’t exist when those people decided on their license. And besides which, it’s very difficult to specify “free to use, except in ways that undermine free access” in a license.

ITT: People who didn’t check the community name

Oh the other hand, we’ve seen what happens when regimes get “professional” about sending undesirables to death camps.

Yeah no shit. Dude is not subtle.

I dig it. And I was planning on replying to that post – really just to say “become indigestible; grow spikes”.

The "inspiration is just like an algorithm” comparison always reminds me of this meme:

I think the people glossing over the details of what it means to manually crib someone’s style are missing something really important, too, which Cory Doctorow covers well in his post and podcast episode “Why I don’t like AI art”:

Now, I’m not much of a visual artist. I can’t draw, though I really enjoy creating collages

I can tell you that every time I move a layer, change the color balance, or use the lasso tool to nip a few pixels out of a 19th century editorial cartoon that I’m matting into a modern backdrop, I’m making a communicative decision. The goal isn’t “perfection” or “photorealism.” I’m not trying to spin around really quick in order to get a look at the stuff behind me in Plato’s cave. I am making communicative choices.

What’s more: working with that lasso tool on a 10,000 pixel-wide Library of Congress scan of a painting from the cover of Puck magazine or a 15,000 pixel wide scan of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights means that I’m touching the smallest individual contours of each brushstroke. This is quite a meditative experience — but it’s also quite a communicative one. Tracing the smallest irregularities in a brushstroke definitely materializes a theory of mind for me, in which I can feel the artist reaching out across time to convey something to me via the tiny microdecisions I’m going over with my cursor.

Even if your goal is explicitly to copy a style, you can’t help but infuse your copy with some of your own essence. You’re looking at the original material through your own subjective lens, and that means there are things you’ll focus on and amplify, and other things you’ll soften and downplay.

Site literally has a popup saying “outrage is not enough — we need to fight back”

I look forward to the documentary.

“Mastodon: Victory Through Technical Superiority”, available soon on Laserdisc and Betamax

It’s cuz they work as a team. An IT team. Team, team, team. Team players, each and every one.

The extra time is spent mining $TRUMP

Underappreciated fact.

I was listening to conservative AM radio (combo of morbid curiosity and masochism), and they talked about a social security warehouse full of documents and how inefficient that is in 2025, and we should get rid of it.

I’m just like:

First of all, there’s no way that’s their primary data source. So if you’re crying for modernization, that already happened a long time ago.

But if you’re saying we shouldn’t preserve paper copies, then you’re opening the door to all sorts of terrible things.

Like, saying we should just trust whatever the government says and not have to prove it in a court of law, or making our systems vulnerable to hackers, or making it so certain government actions can never be undone.

But uh… I guess all three of those things have become hallmarks of this administration anyway, huh?

“I ain’t sayin SHIT until this plane lands.”