I could trivially create an entire libguide dedicated to peer reviewed publications about how washing machines completely, fundamentally reshaped society. They (when combined with other electrified household labor saving devices) possibly caused more social change than computers. Non-automated laundry is so labor intensive that in pre-industrial societies, even the very poor often paid to send their laundry out, like baking bread only more so.

Like you said, dudes rock.

I mean, sure,

Liches have trouble thinking clearly about paths through probability space that conflict with their phylactery, and the more conjunctive a mission it is to make true their phylactery, the more bits of epistemics will be corrupted by their refusal to look into that abyss.

could “could read like the work of an intelligent but unhinged mind”, if you also think Gene Ray was “intelligent but unhinged”, they both use big words in wrong ways.

Where the 2 major Time forces join, synergy creates 2 new minor Time points we recognize as Sunup and Sundown. The 4-equidistant time points can be considered as Time Square imprinted upon the circle of Earth […] equated to a Higher Order of Life Time Cube.

It’s even worse when you add the next few words:

I’ve learned today that you are sensitive to ensuring human readability over any concerns in regard to AI consumption

The machine readable docs is the docstrings (or XML Documentation Comments or whatev), and the code itself. LLMs have completely melted these people’s brains.

hi hi and also yesterday I read their complete contributions to the iNat forums and apparently they turned up a few weeks ago out of nowhere and started demanding iNat change their entire UI in order to uprank ficus. Also to make it easier to downvote incorrectly identified ficus. Also change the forum policy to allow them to link to specific bad identications of ficus so they can mock bad ficus-identifiers.

But even though a few weeks is being left to drown:

“d” asked me to send him pics and i was like “nope”. when he finally sees the tree in person it’s going to blow his scholarly socks off. he’s gonna really regret not seeing it sooner. and i’d be surprised if he didn’t write an article about it

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love me a single-minded gardener, but even when I am obsessively uploading pictures of the lifecycle of the swallowtail caterpillar eating my parsley, I’m not trying to turn a citizen science site into Polymarket.

oof.

yeah, I knew about kurzweil reading machines for years before I connected them with ray kurzweil, and I don’t know how much of his tech ended up in speech rec during the scansoft / dragon systems / nuance / lernout and hauspie katamari years, but that tech has enabled me to be an independent working adult for more than 20 years. So I owe him a debt of gratitude, but also, he needs to not be on his bullshit.

Here’s the “what did you like least” survey entries the organizers say they classified as “edgy people”:

“all the racism stuff” = “edgy people”. Yup.

The more I look, the more I’m sure it’s just bad GenAI art. I mean, look at the random Big Ben with newspaper art extending into the ether behind it, the off-center knight-in-orb, the decomposed microscope thing, the physically impossible structural shadow on the disproportionate globe that simultaneously shows from Panama east to Borneo but somehow lacks India…

Is the header image on that page an intentional joke at the expense of GenAI, or did someone seriously make that and add it to the page? Do they autogenerate their pics?

The prose on that The Spruce link makes me hate the concepts of design, aesthetics, and houses.

It’s weird, but it’s normal weird. It’s the kind of thing you see in design magazines and pinterest and the spruce. I don’t know if actual rich people do it but it’s definitely fairly normal middlebrow home decor.

(A lot of fireplaces in older US buildings are vestigial, often blocked up, and are inefficient at heating.)

There’s no reason to believe they live this way in reality. None of these profiles do any actual journalism. None of them investigate whether their claims about their childhood are true. This one doesn’t even talk to the neighbors who theoretically live next door for free (and do the unpaid childcare). This is stenography of neo-fash influencers self-described life and there’s no reason to believe any of it.

Yes and that’s obviously lies, as anyone who has grown up with limited income in a cold area can tell them. Cheap, warm clothing is not bought online (in the US) from Russia, and never from Etsy. In the US it’s bought — if you’re buying new at all! — from Target or Kohl’s or some other big chain. You get layers, you get things used when you can, and the cheapest way to dress warmly is the most normie, uninteresting clothes that are mass produced and sold in low end department stores.

Nothing they describe is practical or cheap. It’s cosplay Kinder, Küche, Kirche, and the journalist repeated it verbatim because she’s a chump.

Gee, I wonder what about the time period from 2015 to 2020 would have prompted the transformation from “occasional youtuber who goofily wears fascinators and cute nerdy graphic tees” to “hugo boss chic”. Must have just been her own changing tastes, couldn’t possibly be related to anything else.

This is part of a whole thing where the journalist keeps presenting their framing without question. Is it “allow their neighbours to live in the second house rent free, in exchange for childcare” or is it “they have unpaid live-in nannies in a staff apartment”? Do they “give everything they can spare to charity” or are they landlords who own property they don’t live in? Is she wearing a corset and chemise from etsy because it’s practical, or because these weirdos have put on staged cosplay performances for every journalist who’s ever interviewed them, and you’re no exception?