The ideas of an twenty-something computer scientist.
Queer, not quite a dude (mostly). Autistic enough to not feel quite human.
Aspirant HAM operator. Amateur astronomer.
Major fandoms: Die wilden Kerle, Danny Phantom, Star Wars/Trek/Gate, Assassins Creed, Ben 10, HTTYD
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So. This is either GenAI, or someone has found the worst photography lighting + angle combo I've ever seen. Because distinguishing shapes apart form the snowman is nearly impossible.
it's very clearly a small snowman on a table with a bench next to the table. the face and arms are made of twigs, the leaf is a violin. the now texture is all correct, the perspective is probably the only thing throwing people off because they can't distinguish the division between the table in the foreground and the bench in the background.
people. please re-learn visual literacy. do not let your anti-ai feelings trick you into seeing ai in every little thing.
it's a cute little snowman on a table. nothing is weird or bad about this photo.
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i love you practical effects i love you corn syrup blood i love you set designers i love you creature artists i love you makeup and prosthetics i love you costumers i love you actors who sit in the makeup chair for 5 hours i love you makeup artists i love you practical sets i love you puppetry i love you miniatures and bigatures
I want you to know this made me smile and tear up a little.
When you work on the production part of a film a lot of it goes unnoticed. Hours of backbreaking cutting and sewing become a bunch of background pillows. Days of carefully using the best technique you know to get a design onto velvet becomes banners hanging on a wall while the action is the actors. A lot of what we do is almost meant not to be noticed just seen as there, as atmosphere.
And no one will hang around to watch your name come up in the credits. No one will know but you and your team and your portfolio and all the memories. And maybe the suit of armor you and Dad built standing currently in your dads home office.
So this post with its love of MY career that I adored
Ooops All Trans A-Z Booktitle Challenge. Wohoo! I'm really happy that I managed to finish this challenge this year especially since I decided to only count trans books for it.
List of books under the cut:
A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton - trans woman MC
Blutbuch by Kim De L'Horizon - nonbinary MC
Chasers by Mariah Darling and Eve Harms - trans woman MC
Demon Engine by Marten Norr - trans man MC, trans woman MC
Even the Worm Will Turn by Hailey Piper - trans woman author, trans woman SC
Failure to Comply by cavar - nonbinary MC, nonbinary LI
Gender/Fucking by Florence Ashley - trans woman memoir
Human Scars on Planet Skin by Effie Joe Stock and Nathaniel Luscombe - nonbinary MC
Inara: Light of Utopia edited by Yaffa As - short story collection with trans rep
Just Another Dead Black Girl by Michelle Evans - poetry by a trans woman about trans womanhood
(kimmy) by Alyson Greaves - trans woman MC
Lupus in Fabila by Briar Ripley Page - short story collection with transmasc rep
Magica Riot by Kara Buchanan - trans woman MC
The Neon Revelation by TT Madden - trans woman MC
One of the Boys by Victoria Zeller - trans woman MC
Passage durch den reißenden Strom by Myriam Sauer - trans woman MC
Queer Ukraine edited by The DVIJKA collective - short story collection with trans rep
Rain Corbyn's Body of Work by Rain Corbyn - nonbinary MC
Slime Time by MacKenzie D Rice - trans woman MC
Trans Rites edited by The Dionysian Public Library - short story collection with trans rep
Unsex Me Here by Aurora Mattia - short story collection with trans rep
Valid by Chris Bergeron - trans woman MC
Woodworking by Emily St. James - trans woman MC
Xeima by Andromeda Ruins - trans man MC
You Weren't Meant to be Human by Andrew Joseph White - trans man MC
The Zeus Constant by Callisto Khan - trans woman author, trans woman SC
i think we all need to get really annoying about being anti-binarism going forward. we have got to pry binarist thinking out of people's hands by any means necessary. we will never progress passed oppositional bickering until we eliminate this-or-that constrained frameworks. we have got to be more annoying about reminding people that there's so much more to life that just gets thrown to the wayside by just focusing on the in vs out group bullshit.
this is mind boggling levels of insane. if you've never done needlefelting you can't quite comprehend how fucking difficult it is to not only make things so precise at such a small scale but like, not get the fibers tangled into literally everything else they interact with. and then ANIMATING it??? bro this is witchcraft
Oh if I'm shit stirring about random bullshit today
Every argument against nuclear power compares it to renewables, and yet every time a nuclear power plant is taken off the grid it is at least partially replaced by fossil fuels
Like, this is how they propagandized environmental circles. Jerry Brown, Newsom's predecessor (and also with an earlier, pre-Arnie term) is the clearest example of this. A governor who ran on an pro-environment platform, who ended up expanding California's fossil fuel use, all because he was anti-nuclear.
Btw I'm using California as an example because it's my lifelong home and I don't want to see any more of those fucking oilfields in the Central Valley or platforms in the Santa Barbara channel or that stupid fucking coal plant at moss landing or the spread out natural gas burners across LA I want them GONE I want them FUCKING GONE this is my HOME get your burning cancer sludges out of my FUCKING HOME
We currently have battery tech that is more than sufficient for grid systems-and it's not fucking lithium.
In fact, it's some of the earliest battery tech ever made, nickel-iron.
Supremely common, materials, cheap, non-hazardous, impossible for a thermal runaway event and they will literally last a century and still maintain over 80% capacity.
Solar cells maintain far more efficiency than fuckheads online claim, for far longer, and are actually way less picky about being perfectly clean than those same shitbags say.
In the decade I've had my panels (used, and dated equipment when I got them), I've cleaned snow off them once. Otherwise, I wait for it to rain. They provide plenty of juice
You are doing the literal exact thing that I am talking about. You are comparing nuclear to renewables. And again. The reality we live in, is that nuclear production when a plant is dismantled has always been replaced with fossil fuels. The reality of our current grid is that nuclear does not compete with renewables.
exactly, with our current system and life, nuclear is the way to go.
our current standards and regulation make it way safer than any fossil fuel on the market
the only main problem regarding nuclear is the fact that it is unable to be quickly started up and shut down to meet varying demands throughout the day
this makes it a wonderful base power system however. and our current base power is FUCKING COAL AND NATURAL GAS
within a few years, nuclear can easily replace most, if not all, fossil fuels baselines within the US. and then stored renewables can make up for the lack of variability in output for nuclear!!
those who claim that renewables are the only future for us, and we shouldn't focus on nuclear at all, have unfortunately fallen prey to the decades of propaganda by the fossil fuel industry
unless some wild new miracle science comes out, and everyone everywhere changes their minds about fossil fuels, nuclear is the current realistic option for long term power
Nuclear for baseline power generation, and then all of the renewable power and the storage for it goes into rapid response shut on and off. That is a MUCH better and achievable infrastructure investment than trying to get the entire grid on renewables overnight. Once that's met, keep expanding renewables to meet new capacity and slowly, over time, chip into nuclear capacity if you want. But even that is a secondary concern. Fissionable material is technically a finite resource, but it's so energy dense that it's a problem for waaaayyy down the line.
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Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help
“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.
“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.
“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.
Prof Clifford Stott, a specialist in the psychology of crowds and group identity at Keele University, agreed. Modern research, he said, showed “bystander apathy” was a myth. Instead, strangers often work together in emergency situations with highly sophisticated unity.”
Bystander apathy is a myth invented by the New York Times to cover up that the police were called by several residents of the building, but the cops refused to act. The cops then told the Times that 38 people just watched her die (a seemingly arbitrary number and a physical impossibility based on where the attacks occurred), and the Times ran with it. In fact, Kitty was alive when the cops got there, and was being held and comforted by one of her friends who lived in the building because one of the people who saw her get attacked from across the street called her friend to go get her. Because people care.
You have just been attacked. How likely is it that someone will come to your help? If you remember the infamous case of Kitty Genovese in 19
I will always re-blog this. The story of Kitty Genovese’s murder has gone down in history as a story about everyone watching it happen and doing nothing and none of the story is true.
At my local airfield when I worked at my flight school, it was one of our instructors giving a brand new student VERY spirited encouragement and instruction all the way from takeoff roll to climbing out of the pattern with a stuck mic. Here we had a pretty small and intimate community so of course Mike up in the tower knew Bill the instructor’s voice, and all too gleefully declared, “that was beautiful, Bill” once the comms cleared.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic." I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be, but I wasn't writing Boing Boing anymore, and I knew I wanted to keep writing the web in some fashion.
Six years and more than 1,500 posts later, I am so satisfied with how Pluralistic is going. I spent a couple of decades processing everything that seemed interesting or significant through a blog, which created a massive database (and mnemonically available collection of partially developed thoughts) that I'm now reprocessing as a series of essays that make sense of today in light of everything that I've thought about for my whole adult life, which are, in turn, fodder for books, both fiction and nonfiction. I call this "The Memex Method":
"The Memex Method" is also the title of a collection of essays (from this blog) that I've sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but that book keeps getting bumped because of other books I end up writing based on the work I do here, starting with last year's Enshittification. I'm now fully two books ahead of myself, with The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI coming in June, and The Post-American Internet in early 2027 (in addition to two graphic novels and a short story collection). Professionally speaking, these are the most successful books I've written, in a long, 30+ book career with many notable successes. Intellectually and artistically speaking, I'm incredibly satisfied with the direction my career has moved in over my six Pluralistic years.
Blogging is – and always has been – a lot of work for me, but it's work that pays off, even if I don't always know what form that payoff will take.
One essential part of this blog is my daily retrospective of posts from this day through my blogging history – 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and last year. I used to call this "This day in history" but now I call it "Object permanence," for the developmental milestone when toddlers gain the ability to remember and reason about things that have recently happened (roughly, it's the point at which "peek-a-boo" stops being fun).
The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it's become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I'm folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention.
Six years ago, I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be. Today, I still don't know. But because this is a labor of love, and a solo project, I get to try anything and either give it up or carry it on based on how it makes me feel and what effect it has on my life. I'm always tinkering with the format: this year, I also added a subhead to the Object Permanence section that tries to call out (in as few characters as possible) the most important elements of the day's list.
I also dropped some things this year, notably, my "linkdump" posts. A couple years ago, at the suggestion of Mitch Wagner, I added a new section called "Hey look at this," which featured three bare links to things I thought were noteworthy but didn't have time or inclination to delve into in depth. Later, I expanded this section to five.
However, even with five bare links per edition, I often found myself with a backlog of noteworthy things. So I started writing the occasional Saturday "linkdump" essay in which I wove together the whole backlog into a giant, meandering essay. These made for interesting rhetorical challenges, as I found elegant ways to bridge completely disparate subjects – a kind of collaging, perhaps akin to how a mashup artist mixes two very different tracks together. Mentally, I thought of this as "ringing the changes," but ultimately, I decided to drop these linkdump posts (for now, at least). They ended up being too much work, and of little value to me, because I found myself unable to remember what I wrote in them and thus to call them up to refer to them for future posts. Here's all 33 linkdumps; they're not gone forever (not so long as the links pile up in my backlog), but when they come back, they'll be in a different form:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
This really is a labor of love, in the sense that I love doing it, and because it's hard work. The fact that it's hard work is a feature, not a bug. Working hard on stuff is really important to me, because when I am working hard, I gain respite from both physical and mental discomfort. As a guy with serious chronic pain living through the Trump years, I've got plenty of both kinds of discomfort. I can't overstate how physically and mentally beneficial it is to me to have an activity that takes me out of the moment. This year, I wrote several editions of Pluralistic from an infusion couch at the Kaiser Sunset hematology center in LA, where I was receiving immunotherapy for a cancer diagnosis that I'm assured is very treatable, but which – to be totally honest – sometimes gets my old worrier running hot:
Making Pluralistic is several kinds of hard work. Over the past six years, I've become an ardent collagist, spending more and more time on the weird, semi-grotesque images that run atop every edition. Anything you devote substantial time to on a near-daily basis is something that gives you insight – into yourself, and into the thing you're doing. I've always had a certain familiarity with computer image editing (I think I got my start writing Apple ][+ BASIC programs that spat out ASCII art, before graduating to making pixel-art for Broderbund's "Print Shop"), but I've never applied myself to any visual field in a serious way, until now.
Amazingly, after 50 years of thinking of myself as someone who is "bad at visual art," I find myself identifying as a visual artist. I find myself pondering visual works the same way I think about prose – mentally tearing it apart to unpick how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I'm also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It's got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I'll probably do it again next year:
There's also a ton of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I'm still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder's python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:
This means that after I write the day's post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a ton of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I'm always wrestling with them. This year, all of them got worse (incredibly).
Medium – where I used to have a paid column – has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn't come up often, but when I do schedule a post, it's generally because I'm going to be on a plane or a stage and won't be able to do it manually. There's no way I'm going to pay for this feature: I'm happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.
Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that completely broke it and I've given up on fixing it. I can't even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, then start typing. It's ghastly. So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the "visual" editor to see the parts that went wrong. Here's how busted that visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and then you can select the word.
Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter's content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just sucks. If I make a post with an image and alt text in anticipation of later using it to start a thread, it often goes "stale" and will not publish until I delete the image and re-attach it and re-paste the alt text. Meanwhile, the thread editor is also decaying into uselessness. Fill in a 25-post thread and hit publish and, the majority of times, the thread publication will die midway through, displaying lots of weird failure modes (phantom empty posts at the end of the thread that need to be individually selected and deleted are a common one, but not the only one). The old Twitter's ability to add a new thread to an existing one has been dead for at least a year, so every post after the 25th stanza has to be manually tacked on to the previous one, which is made far harder by the fact that Twitter no longer reliably shows you the post you just made after it publishes.
Mastodon still lacks a decent thread editor, one that has even the minimal functionality of Twitter circa 2020. Meanwhile, the Fediverse HOA continues to surface from time to time, with someone who's had a Masto account for ten seconds scolding me for posting threads – from my account whose bio starts "I post long threads." It's genuinely tedious to be shouted at for "using Mastodon wrong" by someone who started using Mastodon yesterday (I opened my first Mastodon account in 2018!), and even worse when they double down after I point them to the essay I've written to explain why I post the way I do, and what to do if you want to read my work somewhere that's not your Mastodon timeline ("Can you believe this asshole wrote a whole essay to explain why he posts his stupid Mastodon threads?"):
Then there's email: I continue to love email, but email doesn't love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket – but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he's got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he's nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He's also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter. I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:
What's the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you permanently surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.
There is one technology that has made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama – an open-source LLM – on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren's python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is "find typos"). Ollama always spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words ("the the next thing") or typos that are still valid words ("of top of everything else").
The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand. Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on – once I've closed all the relevant tabs and editors – take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can't be fixed at all.
So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver. I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader's gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there's still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.
Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker. As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I'm used to overriding my text-editor. I wouldn't simply trust an LLM's edits any more than I would accept every suggestion from a spell-checker. Hell, yesterday I sent back a professionally copyedited manuscript (the intro for the paperback of Enshittification) and marked "STET" on about a third of the queries.
Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.
Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked. I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:
Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:
That's how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:
I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein's work because it was "Jewish science," but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because Einstein was right:
Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don't like Sam Altman is as foolish as refusing to get monoclonal antibodies because James Watson was a racist nutjob:
Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:
There's plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There's plenty of useful things people will do with AI. AI is bad because it's an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we've created a bunch of utilities that would – under normal circumstances – be called "plug-ins":
I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped. That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn't deserve it, including the normie investors who'd been suckered into blowing their life's savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.
In the six years I've been doing this, I've seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse. Now it's AI. But those bubbles were like Enron, frauds that left nothing good behind. AI is like the dotcom bubble, awash in sin and inflicting untold misery, but it will leave something useful behind:
Extremely funny phenomena I’ve seen is trans bigots on this site doing their equivalent of the conservative bit of “well I’m going to start wearing a dress and going in women’s restrooms and see how YOU like it!” And having no response when the people they’re trying to get a rise out of are like “okay that’s awesome I hope you have fun”
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