#do I like Microsoft as a giant company?
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captain-safetypants · 3 months ago
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Most of what people dislike about Word is them just not knowing how to work it. Like the picture thing, someone in the notes mentioned, is a setting you can change with text wrapping. You can set margins and do page breaks and make headers and footers for any kind of document, bound or otherwise. You can design your own styles and themes for colors and fonts and different text levels.
The thing that blows my mind is when I get a document from someone that clearly has not one clue about how to work the functions, and I’m like, “…Did you…did…you…space all the words on this cover sheet using the tab and the space bar…? AND THE PAGE NUMBERS???” And it takes SO LONG to fix. I always want to send it back to them and say, “start over with a fresh doc and DO IT RIGHT” but I can’t bc if they knew how to do it right they would have in the first place.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago
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Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it
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My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation
Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.
That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:
https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10
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[Image ID: Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto….Doctorow’s sense of urgency is contagious -Publishers Weekly]
I won’t sell my work with DRM, because DRM is key to the enshittification of the internet. Enshittification is why the old, good internet died and became “five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four” (h/t Tom Eastman). When a tech company can lock in its users and suppliers, it can drain value from both sides, using DRM and other lock-in gimmicks to keep their business even as they grow ever more miserable on the platform.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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[Image ID: A brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise -Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI”]
The Internet Con isn’t just an analysis of where enshittification comes from: it’s a detailed, shovel-ready policy prescription for halting enshittification, throwing it into reverse and bringing back the old, good internet.
How do we do that? With interoperability: the ability to plug new technology into those crapulent, decaying platform. Interop lets you choose which parts of the service you want and block the parts you don’t (think of how an adblocker lets you take the take-it-or-leave “offer” from a website and reply with “How about nah?”):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah
But interop isn’t just about making platforms less terrible — it’s an explosive charge that demolishes walled gardens. With interop, you can leave a social media service, but keep talking to the people who stay. With interop, you can leave your mobile platform, but bring your apps and media with you to a rival’s service. With interop, you can break up with Amazon, and still keep your audiobooks.
So, if interop is so great, why isn’t it everywhere?
Well, it used to be. Interop is how Microsoft became the dominant operating system:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
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[Image ID: Nobody gets the internet-both the nuts and bolts that make it hum and the laws that shaped it into the mess it is-quite like Cory, and no one’s better qualified to deliver us a user manual for fixing it. That’s The Internet Con: a rousing, imaginative, and accessible treatise for correcting our curdled online world. If you care about the internet, get ready to dedicate yourself to making interoperability a reality. -Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine]
It’s how Apple saved itself from Microsoft’s vicious campaign to destroy it:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
Every tech giant used interop to grow, and then every tech giant promptly turned around and attacked interoperators. Every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Big Tech did it, that was progress; when you do it back to Big Tech, that’s piracy. The tech giants used their monopoly power to make interop without permission illegal, creating a kind of “felony contempt of business model” (h/t Jay Freeman).
The Internet Con describes how this came to pass, but, more importantly, it tells us how to fix it. It lays out how we can combine different kinds of interop requirements (like the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Massachusetts’s Right to Repair law) with protections for reverse-engineering and other guerrilla tactics to create a system that is strong without being brittle, hard to cheat on and easy to enforce.
What’s more, this book explains how to get these policies: what existing legislative, regulatory and judicial powers can be invoked to make them a reality. Because we are living through the Great Enshittification, and crises erupt every ten seconds, and when those crises occur, the “good ideas lying around” can move from the fringes to the center in an eyeblink:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/12/only-a-crisis/#lets-gooooo
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[Image ID: Thoughtfully written and patiently presented, The Internet Con explains how the promise of a free and open internet was lost to predatory business practices and the rush to commodify every aspect of our lives. An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, and how we can start fighting to get it back. -Tim Maughan, author of INFINITE DETAIL]
After all, we’ve known Big Tech was rotten for years, but we had no idea what to do about it. Every time a Big Tech colossus did something ghastly to millions or billions of people, we tried to fix the tech company. There’s no fixing the tech companies. They need to burn. The way to make users safe from Big Tech predators isn’t to make those predators behave better — it’s to evacuate those users:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens
I’ve been campaigning for human rights in the digital world for more than 20 years; I’ve been EFF’s European Director, representing the public interest at the EU, the UN, Westminster, Ottawa and DC. This is the subject I’ve devoted my life to, and I live my principles. I won’t let my books be sold with DRM, which means that Audible won’t carry my audiobooks. My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college. That’s a price I’m willing to pay if it means that my books aren’t enshittification bait.
But not selling on Audible has another cost, one that’s more important to me: a lot of readers prefer audiobooks and 9 out of 10 of those readers start and end their searches on Audible. When they don’t find an author there, they assume no audiobook exists, period. It got so bad I put up an audiobook on Amazon — me, reading an essay, explaining how Audible rips off writers and readers. It’s called “Why None of My Audiobooks Are For Sale on Audible”:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff
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[Image ID: Doctorow has been thinking longer and smarter than anyone else I know about how we create and exchange value in a digital age. -Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock]
To get my audiobooks into readers’ ears, I pre-sell them on Kickstarter. This has been wildly successful, both financially and as a means of getting other prominent authors to break up with Amazon and use crowdfunding to fill the gap. Writers like Brandon Sanderson are doing heroic work, smashing Amazon’s monopoly:
https://www.brandonsanderson.com/guest-editorial-cory-doctorow-is-a-bestselling-author-but-audible-wont-carry-his-audiobooks/
And to be frank, I love audiobooks, too. I swim every day as physio for a chronic pain condition, and I listen to 2–3 books/month on my underwater MP3 player, disappearing into an imaginary world as I scull back and forth in my public pool. I’m able to get those audiobooks on my MP3 player thanks to Libro.fm, a DRM-free store that supports indie booksellers all over the world:
https://blog.libro.fm/a-qa-with-mark-pearson-libro-fm-ceo-and-co-founder/
Producing my own audiobooks has been a dream. Working with Skyboat Media, I’ve gotten narrators like @wilwheaton​, Amber Benson, @neil-gaiman​ and Stefan Rudnicki for my work:
https://craphound.com/shop/
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[Image ID: “This book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn’t want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better. -Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When Its Gone”]
But for this title, I decided that I would read it myself. After all, I’ve been podcasting since 2006, reading my own work aloud every week or so, even as I traveled the world and gave thousands of speeches about the subject of this book. I was excited (and a little trepedatious) at the prospect, but how could I pass up a chance to work with director Gabrielle de Cuir, who has directed everyone from Anne Hathaway to LeVar Burton to Eric Idle?
Reader, I fucking nailed it. I went back to those daily recordings fully prepared to hate them, but they were good — even great (especially after my engineer John Taylor Williams mastered them). Listen for yourself!
https://archive.org/details/cory_doctorow_internet_con_chapter_01
I hope you’ll consider backing this Kickstarter. If you’ve ever read my free, open access, CC-licensed blog posts and novels, or listened to my podcasts, or come to one of my talks and wished there was a way to say thank you, this is it. These crowdfunders make my DRM-free publishing program viable, even as audiobooks grow more central to a writer’s income and even as a single company takes over nearly the entire audiobook market.
Backers can choose from the DRM-free audiobook, DRM-free ebook (EPUB and MOBI) and a hardcover — including a signed, personalized option, fulfilled through the great LA indie bookstore Book Soup:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation
What’s more, these ebooks and audiobooks are unlike any you’ll get anywhere else because they are sold without any terms of service or license agreements. As has been the case since time immemorial, when you buy these books, they’re yours, and you are allowed to do anything with them that copyright law permits — give them away, lend them to friends, or simply read them with any technology you choose.
As with my previous Kickstarters, backers can get their audiobooks delivered with an app (from libro.fm) or as a folder of MP3s. That helps people who struggle with “sideloading,” a process that Apple and Google have made progressively harder, even as they force audiobook and ebook sellers to hand over a 30% app tax on every dollar they make:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112
Enshittification is rotting every layer of the tech stack: mobile, payments, hosting, social, delivery, playback. Every tech company is pulling the rug out from under us, using the chokepoints they built between audiences and speakers, artists and fans, to pick all of our pockets.
The Internet Con isn’t just a lament for the internet we lost — it’s a plan to get it back. I hope you’ll get a copy and share it with the people you love, even as the tech platforms choke off your communities to pad their quarterly numbers.
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Next weekend (Aug 4-6), I'll be in Austin for Armadillocon, a science fiction convention, where I'm the Guest of Honor:
https://armadillocon.org/d45/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con
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[Image ID: My forthcoming book 'The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation' in various editions: Verso hardcover, audiobook displayed on a phone, and ebook displayed on an e-ink reader.]
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cyberstudious · 5 months ago
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An Introduction to Cybersecurity
I created this post for the Studyblr Masterpost Jam, check out the tag for more cool masterposts from folks in the studyblr community!
What is cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity is all about securing technology and processes - making sure that the software, hardware, and networks that run the world do exactly what they need to do and can't be abused by bad actors.
The CIA triad is a concept used to explain the three goals of cybersecurity. The pieces are:
Confidentiality: ensuring that information is kept secret, so it can only be viewed by the people who are allowed to do so. This involves encrypting data, requiring authentication before viewing data, and more.
Integrity: ensuring that information is trustworthy and cannot be tampered with. For example, this involves making sure that no one changes the contents of the file you're trying to download or intercepts your text messages.
Availability: ensuring that the services you need are there when you need them. Blocking every single person from accessing a piece of valuable information would be secure, but completely unusable, so we have to think about availability. This can also mean blocking DDoS attacks or fixing flaws in software that cause crashes or service issues.
What are some specializations within cybersecurity? What do cybersecurity professionals do?
incident response
digital forensics (often combined with incident response in the acronym DFIR)
reverse engineering
cryptography
governance/compliance/risk management
penetration testing/ethical hacking
vulnerability research/bug bounty
threat intelligence
cloud security
industrial/IoT security, often called Operational Technology (OT)
security engineering/writing code for cybersecurity tools (this is what I do!)
and more!
Where do cybersecurity professionals work?
I view the industry in three big chunks: vendors, everyday companies (for lack of a better term), and government. It's more complicated than that, but it helps.
Vendors make and sell security tools or services to other companies. Some examples are Crowdstrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Palo Alto, EY, etc. Vendors can be giant multinational corporations or small startups. Security tools can include software and hardware, while services can include consulting, technical support, or incident response or digital forensics services. Some companies are Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), which means that they serve as the security team for many other (often small) businesses.
Everyday companies include everyone from giant companies like Coca-Cola to the mom and pop shop down the street. Every company is a tech company now, and someone has to be in charge of securing things. Some businesses will have their own internal security teams that respond to incidents. Many companies buy tools provided by vendors like the ones above, and someone has to manage them. Small companies with small tech departments might dump all cybersecurity responsibilities on the IT team (or outsource things to a MSSP), or larger ones may have a dedicated security staff.
Government cybersecurity work can involve a lot of things, from securing the local water supply to working for the big three letter agencies. In the U.S. at least, there are also a lot of government contractors, who are their own individual companies but the vast majority of what they do is for the government. MITRE is one example, and the federal research labs and some university-affiliated labs are an extension of this. Government work and military contractor work are where geopolitics and ethics come into play most clearly, so just… be mindful.
What do academics in cybersecurity research?
A wide variety of things! You can get a good idea by browsing the papers from the ACM's Computer and Communications Security Conference. Some of the big research areas that I'm aware of are:
cryptography & post-quantum cryptography
machine learning model security & alignment
formal proofs of a program & programming language security
security & privacy
security of network protocols
vulnerability research & developing new attack vectors
Cybersecurity seems niche at first, but it actually covers a huge range of topics all across technology and policy. It's vital to running the world today, and I'm obviously biased but I think it's a fascinating topic to learn about. I'll be posting a new cybersecurity masterpost each day this week as a part of the #StudyblrMasterpostJam, so keep an eye out for tomorrow's post! In the meantime, check out the tag and see what other folks are posting about :D
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kaija-rayne-author · 1 year ago
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So, it should be pretty obvious by now that I'm firmly against fans boycotting Bioware and Dreadwolf due to the layoffs. I'll put it in business terms. I've worked for Fortune 500 companies, and I speak from that perspective.
The people who made it are hoping, and have said, that they hope people will love Dreadwolf as much as they do. Even when they were laid off.
It would punish the creatives who made the game far more than it would punish Bioware. They likely can't even talk about it due to NDAs unless/until it's released. Can you imagine not being able to talk about a thing you loved and poured years of your life, creativity, and passion into? I can. It would be heartbreaking.
I don't want to be responsible for harming people who love dragon age enough to make it for us. If I boycott, that's exactly what I'd be partially responsible for. I'm usually very pro-boycott, but in this case, I'm not.
So here's the question... we unequivocally live in a late stage capitalist nightmare world. Do you know how many other companies have laid off employees this year?
This type of behavior has been pro forma for corporate for at least 20 years, probably longer.
So, why would people boycott Dreadwolf and Bioware when they're by far not even the most egregious example of mass layoffs?
In 2022-2023, we've had these mass layoffs.
Meat giant Tyson Foods is laying off about 15% of senior leadership roles and 10% of corporate roles, according to an internal memo shared with CNN.
Y'all gonna boycott meat? I didn't think so.
3M announced significant layoffs as part of another major restructuring plan. The brand behind Post-It Notes and Scotch Tape said in a statement it would lay off 6,000 staff around the world.
Gonna boycott tape? Ear plugs? Sticky notes?
Lyft (LYFT)’s move in November to cut 13% of its workforce, citing fears of a looming recession.
Buzzfeed announced a 15% reduction in its workforce, or about 180 employees.
David's Bridal is eliminating 9,236 positions across the United States but did not specify how many stores would be affected.
Walmart is laying off more than 3,000 workers.
And I know many people can't afford to boycott Walmart.
Meta announced an additional 10,000 layoffs across several months on top of mass layoffs in 2022.
You still use Facebook? I personally loathe it and only keep an account for marketing reasons. I can barely even make it work anymore.
Three rounds of layoffs hit Disney (DIS), announced through a March 27 internal memo to employees. Around 7,000 people will be affected by the move over the next several months.
Amazon (AMZN) said in March it would cut 9,000 jobs, bringing the total number of Amazon (AMZN) staffers eliminated this year to around 27,000.
Indeed.com announced cuts of approximately 2,200 employees, representing almost 15% of its total workforce, the company said in March.
Satellite radio giant SiriusXM laid off 475 people, or about 8% of its workforce, as part of a broad restructuring.
Zoom (ZM) said it will lay off about 1,300 employees, or approximately 15% of its staff, in a memo to employees in Feburary.
Dell (DELL) laid off roughly 5% of its workforce, the company said in a regulatory filing in February. Dell had about 133,000 employees, the company told CNN. At that level, the 5% cut represents more than 6,500 employees.
Gonna refuse to use your computer?
Microsoft said in January it would be laying off 10,000 employees, according to a securities filing.
This was only up to around March of this year. There's loads more.
Point being it's ridiculous to boycott a company and hurt the people who made a thing they love just because they got laid off.
This is what corporations do. There is 0 loyalty to the employee at a corporation. It's all about the bottom line.
Maybe all y'all haven't worked in corporate, maybe people are hopping on the 'I'll boycott too' bandwagon. IDEK.
I honestly don't care if I change anyone's mind about it all, but it’s silly. Just outright ridiculous to expect a corporation to do anything but what corporations do.
It's not right. It's awful. I hate that Bioware basically backstabbed the creatives who made them what they are. But it's not new or even remotely rare. Bioware has laid off roughly 125 employees in the past handful of months.
Every company I named laid off far, far more. And if you think I'll believe you're going to boycott Microsoft, you must have a bridge you want to sell me, too.
Here's the source, if you want it.
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dr-spectre · 6 months ago
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May I just say that I'm really impressed with the Nintendo Switch, especially after the direct.
Most Nintendo consoles after their halfway point really slow down and pretty much suffer a slow death, they don't get any big games and Nintendo fans just wait in agony for the next Nintendo console.
The Wii barely got anything in its later years aside from Kirby's Return to Dreamland and like... Mario and Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games (which is actually a pretty fun minigame collection I recommend it.)
The Wii U..... HAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!! I mean there was Breath of the Wild but like... who played it on Wii U? Be honest with me here guys. Don't lie.
The Gamecube... nothing. N64... uh... Dr. Mario?
But with the Switch, we're getting a brand new Mario and Luigi title, a new Mario Party with over 110 minigames and a 20 player online mode, a brand new top-down Zelda game with Zelda as the main character, and Metroid Prime 4!!! LIKE... WHAT?!?!
If the Switch can somehow outsell the DS, then I wouldn't be that shocked. Nintendo, despite having one of the most EVIL legal teams in gaming and being an awful fucking company, they still manage to get exclusives and exciting titles out on a consistent basis. Sure there are some sour spots like the Mario sports games and... Nintendo Switch Sports.. ugh. And sure there are lots of overpriced remasters ill give you that but, the quality and consistency of these titles is something that Sony and Microsoft can't even come close to.
I'm not trying to jerk off Nintendo and turn this into a console war thing but, Sony have really dropped the ball on their management and it has gone to shit. Only pumping out hyper realistic giant 30+ hour games that take so much time and money to make. While I do like most of them, I want there to be more variety and more titles. There's a reason why "PS5 has no games" is a meme. And the pc ports of PS5 games after a couple of years of their release are getting really annoying. Once Spider-Man 2 gets on the PC, I won't ever touch my PS5 ever again aside from Astro Bot coming later this year. Im not saying that these games shouldn't be on pc, I'm saying that it's kinda damaging the dedicated fan base of Sony players and they're gonna start moving over to the PC and not want to use their PS5 anymore. The PS5 will not have a legacy like its older brothers. As a person who grew up with a PS2 and PS3, I'm really disappointed with Sony at the moment.
And Microsoft? Well... we'll have to wait and see the quality of those games they announced recently. But you know what? They did have a good showcase, I will admit.
I'm starting to really come around on the Switch and there are SO MANY games to get for it. There's at least one title for everyone and I think that's really cool. It also has so many indie games and retro collections on it too. The Switch has a giant library of old classics from many generations as well as exciting new games that bring new concepts to the table.
If the Switch 2 can continue that momentum while increasing the fidelity to allow for more games to reach 60fps and higher resolutions... then we're in for something really special.
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coupleofdays · 2 years ago
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I don't think it's ever specifically stated in the film, but I get the impression that Dumont and the other "Tower guardians" are supposed to represent the operating system of the ENCOM computers. They are the software that facilitates communication between Users and Programs, via input and output. Or, to use the religious analogy of the film, they are the priests that facilitate communication between gods and mortals, via prayer at the church-like I/O Tower. One of the goals of the Master Control Program seems to be to absorb these "tower guardians" into himelf, probably to make himself into the operating system that Users must use to operate their computers. Or, in other words, the MCP wants to become the one and only priest/prophet/god in his monotheistic religion.
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If the ENCOM OS-12 shown in Tron Legacy is supposed to be an analogy for Microsoft Windows, then I think Dumont is an analogy for MS-DOS, the text-based predecessor. It's also likely that Dumont was created by Walter Gibbs, since they share the same actor, and perhaps it was the sucess of Dumont as an operating system that allowed Gibbs to expand his garage-created computer company into the giant corporation seen in the film (before it was hijacked by Dillinger).
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I know I've written previously about my headcanon that modern Programs might not look like an individual programmer, but I'm willing to ignore that if we'd be able to see the ENCOM OS-12 "tower guardian" being played by Cillian Murphy.
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spacecaptsteve · 10 months ago
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did you ever expected to end up as a game developer? what was your crowning achievement in that field throught the years in your view?
No back when I was starting out games didn't feel like a thing that was made locally (even though there was Melbourne House). I studied animation back in the late 80s hoping to get to make sci-fi anime. Swerved into comics for a bit but pre-internet the distance of Australia from anything really did make it hard to work from here.
It was in the early 90s that we just decided to pigheadedly give it a go and start up our own company. So I guess that's one. 😊
Here's some more that young me would have found nuts.
Had a game published and got to work with my favorite 16-bit devs - Bitmap Bros (they half-owned Renegade who published Flight of the Amazon Queen)
EA pushing TY (Before they were a giant they were the cool kids so for nostalgia that was nice)
Activision Distributing TY 3 - ALso cool kids once.
A career achievement award from the Australian Game Developers conference. Also a few for TY's shorts.
Making Blade Kitten and getting it published by Atari (OK not the "real" Atari but it was nice to have the classic name at the start of my game.
As I like to say "Buying an Atari" when we took over Melbourne House from them.
TY 4 with Microsoft. We really did manage to get our original; IP with some big names.
Still own the rights to TY and BK.
Making Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Star Wars was a big driving force in my creative life. Also they made figures of my designs - so bonus points there.
Getting TY onto the Switch. I love being able to put the Switch logo at the start of TY videos :D
So yeah that's a big crown I guess.
If I had to pick just one, it would be that I even got to do any of this at all.
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haggishlyhagging · 1 year ago
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According to Google Trends, the word "empowerment" hit a high in 2004 and 2005, as it became more deeply entrenched everywhere—feminist discourse, consumer marketing, corporate culture. "Empowering" joined "synergy," "scalable," and "drill-down" in boardroom conferences, vision statements, and business plans, and was eventually called "the most condescending transitive verb ever" by Forbes. It's become the name of a range of businesses, a national fitness event, and an almost mind-boggling number of yoga studios. It's become a company-jargon fave at Microsoft, with former and current CEOs Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella both using it to impressively vague effect in memos and public talks. (At Microsoft's annual Convergence event in 2015, Nadella told attendees, "We are in the empowering business," and added that the tech giant's goal was "empowering you as individuals and organizations across every vertical and every size of business, and any part of the world, to drive your agenda and do the things you want to do for your business.")
Elsewhere in discourses and debates around sex as both an activity and a commodity, "empowerment" has become a sort of shorthand that might mean "I'm proud of doing this thing," but also might mean "This thing is not the ideal thing, but it's a lot better than some of the alternatives." Feeling empowered by stripping, for instance, was a big theme among moonlighting academics or otherwise privileged young women in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and you can find countless memoirs about what they discovered about themselves in the world of the sexual marketplace; the same is true of prostitution, with blogs like Belle de Jour, College Call Girl, and books like Tracy Quan's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl. There was a point in the mid-to-late 2000s when you couldn't swing a cat through Barnes & Noble without knocking a slew of sex-work memoirs off the shelves: Lily Burana’s Strip City, Diablo Cody's Candy Girl, Jillian Lauren's Some Girl, Michelle Tea's Rent Girl, Shawna Kenny's I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, Melissa Febos's Whip Smart, and Sarah Katherine Lewis's Indecent among them. The crucial thing these often incredibly absorbing and well-written books had in common? All were written by young, white, and no-longer-hustling sex workers.
I want to be clear that standing with sex workers on the principle that sex work is work is an issue whose importance cannot be overstated, and also clear that my complete lack of expertise on the subject makes it well beyond the scope of this book. But I am interested in the idea that "empowerment" is so often used as a reflexive defense mechanism in discussions of this kind of sex-work experience, but less so in describing the less written-about experiences of people whose time in the industry is less finite and less bookworthy—transgender women, exploited teenagers and trafficked foreigners, men and women forced into sex work by poverty, abuse, or addiction. And I'm fascinated by the fact that we see thousands of pop culture products in which women are empowered by a sex industry that does not have their empowerment in mind, but far fewer in which they are empowered to make sexual choices on their own terms, outside of a status quo in which women's bodies are commodities to be bought and sold. Indecent author Sarah Katherine Lewis has written that, during her time as a stripper, "I felt empowered—as a woman, as a feminist, as a human being by the money I made, not by the work I did"; but hers is just one story. Belle de Jour and other sex workers have written about truly enjoying their work. If the market were just as welcoming of narratives in which young women were empowered by their careers as, say, electricians—if personal memoirs about a youthful, self-determining layover in the electrical trades were a thing publishers clamored for—then a handful of empowered sex workers would be no big thing. Until that's the case, it's worth questioning why the word is so often the first line of defense.
-Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once
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xenoblademisadventures · 2 years ago
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For those curious about the lore of Xenoblade. 
Klaus was an Apple Employee. Apple took over the world and started using their iMecha to rule the world, so then the Saviorite Rebels decided to fight back because they didn’t want the world be controlled by a fucking tech company. This caused Apple to do the unthinkable, create Androids (the Aegises) to fight back. During a battle near the iStation, Rhadamanthus, Klaus’s boss decided to activate iOnios, but Klaus instead decided that he would rather be an iGod. However, Galea, a spy working for Google, tried to stop him. Which broke the multiverse in half. In one reality, immediately after Klaus pressed the button, Galea bitch-slapped him and that made Ontos give her enough girlboss points to turn her into an iGod. In the other universe, Galea was really fucking slow and became an iZombie like the rest of humanity. 
In the new iEarth, Klaus realized half his body was missing. In fact, the rift stole his dick (rude). Saddened by his missing penis, he ended the reign of Apple by covering the world in Pneuma’s and Logos’s iClouds. Then turned all the Core Crystals into iLands. Thus life was born. Meanwhile, in the new dimension that Klaus and Galea lived in, Klaus created the biOnis (it’s bisexual) while Galea decided to spite him by creating a giant fucking Android, which Klaus dubbed the Mechonis. Klaus really wanted to make the two titans fuck, which made Galea realize that her spite didn’t work because she underestimated how much of a weeb Klaus was. Which she really should’ve seen coming after learning that Pneuma had, like, G sized cups (he was trying to make them I sized so that the one saving grace of his androids would be their iCups, but he was laughed out because everyone kept saying I C U P). Ontos, could not remember their real names, so he referred to them by their Minecraft usernames (Microsoft was like the Switzerland of this war, so both Apple and Android employees could legally buy their products, this was solely because no one wanted to live a life without Minecraft); zanzam042 and mey_meth609. In order to preserve their dignity, the iGods changed their names by one letter each, becoming Zanza and Meyneth. 
In Alrest, Klaus had completely rejected his identity as an Apple Employee, thus he allowed life to do as it will. Though he did make iNdol’s inhabitants look like Apple Products, a move made out of nostalgia for his ancient past. As an iPeople, the iNdoline had longer than average lifespans, weighed 2lbs, and could play tetris. This made them the defacto religious power. A man by the name of iMalthus decided to climb the iTree, There, he found two shiny rocks. One rock turned into a big man. The other turned into a blond lady with depression. The big man decided to use his iWMDs to destroy an iLand, just cuz. Which made everyone want the depressed white girl to blow him up. Unfortunately, she accidentally blew up another iLand in the process. So, the populace decided to seal away the ultimate Apple Products at the bottom of the ocean. 
In the iWorld, Zanza decided he was tired of Meyneth’s stupid Android world, so he decided to use his iSword to cut the Android in half, recreating the battle of the original world. He used iBioweapons to infiltrate the Mechonis, his iBioweapons glowed in the dark and had the same battery life as the iPhone127-DX, which allowed Meyneth to retaliate by getting them all stoned. Enraged that his master plan didn’t work and realizing that the biOnis was already at 10% power despite only being active for 3 minutes and 45 seconds, he knew that a sacrifice must be made to secure victory. He unleashed an army of iRachnids on the iAnts, extincting them permanently. With their liFe energy, he waged war with Mechonis. Like in his split of reality, this ancient rivalry resulted in a draw. While the biOnis had more firepower and a sleeker build, the Mechonis had more charisma and a 10 mile long sword. Realizing that he would have to go into iBernation, Zanza turned the telethia into iEntia for efficient storage (coloqually known as High Entia to make fun of Meyneth’s weed addiction, despite Meyneth having never smoked a blunt, for she preferred to use old-school cigars due to no longer having lungs to ruin). Meyneth, too, went into hibernation. Her Androids were very sad, so they built a statue in her honor and then chose to live on her disembodied arm.
Many years later, in both worlds, some british kid was collecting random garbage only to get attacked by a random crustacean. Which was not the worst part of their day. No, they would instead experience a single atrocity, at the hands of a guy with a white face, which they only might know to be a mask, only to then pick up their trusty iSword and fight a guy with black armor. 
Sualk, Zanza’s attempt to make Ontos say his original name, only for Ontos to “glitch” and spell said name backwards. He decided that Sualk is too awkward to pronounce, so he changed his vessel’s name to Shulk. Then decided that he was going to kill every Android in all of existence. This lasted all of 3 weeks, when he met Ontos in person and realized that he was really fucking hot. Then he learned that Androids can be people too (for reference, this is propaganda on Monolith’s part). He then proceeded to make friends with Egil, who is sometimes referred to by his deadname, eGirl, by Zanza, who is officially the world’s first and only boomer (because he made the world go boom). Dickson, known as Dickdick by the nopon, could not let this slander stand. Despite smoking weed, Dickson was also transphobic and sexist, so he could not stand to see Zanza’s name being slandered by touching an eGirl. He did the only logical course of action and shot his son in the face (tho his aim was a bit shit because, unlike Meyneth, Dickson was smoking blunts, which caused him to hit Shulk’s heart instead). Ontos, enraged that Shulk no longer existed to make Zanza’s day slightly worst, decided to revive him for shits and giggles. This was secretly a mistake on Ontos’s part, because Shulk then proceeded to unexist the concept of Godhood, thus unintentionally banishing Ontos to the shadow realm.
Meanwhile, following the journey of Rex (who did not yet have enough testosterone to call himself T Rex). Pyra, who had initially called herself iFire, but decided to change the name after Addam was too stupid to understand the difference between “iFire” and “I Fire,” decided to revive Rex because unlike her creator, Pyra was not a transphobe. Though in Addam’s defense, he also didn’t know how to spell his own name, so perhaps iFire was expecting a bit too much from him when she told him her name. After fending off Bads and riding iZurda to iGoth (known as Torigoth to the local catgirls), Pyra allowed Rex to stare at her boobs from a nice low angle. Little did she know that Rex took this as an insult and immediately jumped off her. Pyra, taking this as a sign that being a fire type did not, in fact, make her hot, breathed a sigh of relief. While wandering aimlessly through the forest, iZurda decided to upgrade himself, becoming 10,000x lighter and becoming slightly easier to shove into your pocket, costing only the small fee of Rex’s entire house. Though this new model lacked any of the combative or transportive capabilities of its older counterpart, iZurda2 was more marketable due to closely resembling a plush toy. During their travels, Rex and Pyra met the self-proclaimed Queen of Anus, Nia and her butler, who had a passion for writing poetry despite his utter lack of thumbs. While Rex and Pyra walked everywhere, Nia rode pussy. They soon met a number of actual monarchs. As a terrorist, banned from setting foot on any nation, Nia got along well with these global superpowers. Bads would not let these happy times last. Thus, they kidnapped Pyra. Jin even punched her before telling Rex that he was bad at Driving, which Rex took insult to despite cars not existing. So much that Rex considered giving up his quest. Nia snapped him out of his downward spiral by lovingly punching him in the face so hard that he was sent to the emergency room for a concussion. When he returned, he’d forgotten everything about his journey and decided to go home. Somehow, this was the correct decision, as he found the secrets to the universe in some cave. This inspired Nia to reveal her true powers to Rex. Like Rex, Nia was also trans. But unlike Rex, she was so good at it that she unlocked the ability to give bigots cancer. Using that power, they saved Pyra and Mythra, who decided to become green and call themselves Siri. Rex, Nia, and Pyra ascended the iTree, where they met Klaus. Rex wondered how Klaus was able to maintain his impeccable abs despite the rest of his body being withered away and the man clearly having never exorcised once in the past 1.7 billion years. It was a far more interesting question than listening to the man’s 30 minutes long senile rant. Rex eventually shut him up by telling him he was Gay for Bads. He then left the room to go kill Bads. 
With Klaus finally fucking dead, the timeline tried to recover. Unfortunately, this caused a plethora of merge errors, which would result in the utter annihilation of everything. The worlds used radios to communicate, and decided to create backups of their population, with one person from each acting as the failsafe should the directive fail. As the only existing monarch, Melia became the representative of Shulkonis (a name they agreed on because it would eternally annoy Shulk). Meanwhile, Nia became the representative of Alrest because everyone agreed that it would be funny to officially crown her Queen of Anus. During this period of time, Nia had sex with T Rex’s entire polycule and they had 3 children, Nio, Mia, and Mio (it took them three attempts to get the name right, which is why they had so many kids). Shulk did not get to have sex, because Shulkonis was under threat from the Shadow Realm kept tears holes in reality that an army of iZombies would come out of. They called it “the Fog” because it looked nothing like fog. Despite each world’s woes and hoes, the day was upon them that Shulkonis and Alrest would fuse. Unfortunately, Alvis reappeared from the Shadow Realm and cut Shulk’s arm off. Offended by this behavior, Shulk built a cool prosthetic for himself. Dunban was a bit envious that Shulk got to have a functioning right arm but he didn’t. Unfortunately, that was Shulk’s final invention because he accidentally gave his prosthetic arm super sharp laser claws, causing him to laser claw everything he tried to touch. He and T Rex then gathered an Army consisting of 7 people to wage war against the iMonad. Riku, the first of Riki’s son’s (Riki also had 14 kids in an attempt to figure out how to name them), created an iKatana during that battle. Having missed the memo that the iSwords were supposed to have names vaguely reminiscent of soup, decided to call his iSword the Lucky Seven, in honor of the seven people that tried to stab Alvis in the face. 
This failed. Instead Z, who suspiciously had nothing to do with Zanza, decided it would be funny to create iOnios. Nia, having finally realized that she was, in fact, the sole ruler of the Militaristic Nation of Anus, decided, for the sake of her people’s dignity, to change the name by a single letter, thus resulting in Agnus. Melia, also changed her nation’s name from Shulkonis to Keves. After Shulk’s death, it seemed rather unnecessary to refer to Shulkonis as such. While all of this was happening, Riki went on an adventure to stick the Monapon in some cave (he was sick and tired of having it in his inventory). His actual biter, of course, was in the ruins of Frontier Village, which was located approximately 23 meters above where he stuck the Monapon. Nia and Melia, tired of Z’s bullshit, decided to take a nap. When they woke up, a group of nine-year-olds started lecturing them on the meaning of life. Deciding that iOnios was not worth saving from these kids, Nia and Melia went home. Realizing that said nine-year-olds might lose against the embodiment of procrastination, Melia decides now is the time to activate Alcamech. Nia gets the memo and teleports her house into Anus Castle. To her delight, the people of Anus Castle reconfigured the mech so that her house would not appear as a buttplug. The kids, upon being asked what to do with the fate of the universe, decide to press Ctrl+Z.
The End
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nhaneh · 1 year ago
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Look the thing is, I don't really think of myself as a particularly good programmer?
Like yeah I know how to code, and I've faffed around with a fair number of languages, but I don't think I'm all that remarkable at it in any which way.
Which is why things like tumblr's android app sometimes just really get to me because I've always struggled to get a job even back before I had fatigue issues, and here are these people somehow getting paid full time despite consistently mucking up some of the simplest things imaginable???
Like this is the kind of thing that's actually difficult to fail at. It takes effort to do it this poorly. How is this a multi-million dollar company with hundreds of employees yet unable to accomplish something as fundamental and rudimentary as a functioning text editor, a feature that already exists in fully functional form built into the very platform itself.
...Though to be fair I guess an industry giant thing considering companies like Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, Apple, etc also consistently deliver broken products that sometimes fail in the most pathetically mundane ways.
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nickgerlich · 2 years ago
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They Have A Vision
If there is any company whose IPO I wish I had bought into, it is Apple’s. Of course, hindsight is far better than my 64-year-old blue eyes. When the stock debuted on 12th December 1980 (Yeah! Forty-three years ago!), it was $22 a share. Today, if I had put only $1000 on the line, it would be worth $1.26 million.
Dang. Retirement plans foiled.
Apple is an anomaly in many ways. It has always been an innovator, even if it wasn’t necessarily first to market. It’s just that when it did come to market, it did so better than anyone else nearby. Furthermore, it has seldom worried about being the market share leader. They’re good with being Number Two in many cases, if only because the high price of their products (aka The Apple Tax) helps offset market share losses.
Yesterday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the tech giant announced its new Vision Pro, which combines virtual and augmented reality. The price? A mere $3499. Holy cow, that’s a lot of Benjamins. But you can probably bet your last $100 that Apple’s new product is going to knock it out of the park.
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Apple has always come in with lofty prices on its introductions. The first iPhone (2007) hit the market at $599, which was basically unheard of then. The iPad (2010) was $499, and then the Apple Watch (2015) was $349 and up. I bought into iPhone 2 and iPad 1, but skipped the watch, if only because my students had already ridiculed me back in 2010 for wearing an old-school watch while carrying an iPhone around. They said it was redundant, and made me look old.


Now I look old for not having an Apple Watch. Go figure.
Anyway, with such a high price, Apple is assuming some hefty risks. Sure, we’ve had inflation the last two years, but nothing like what could have caused an introductory price to balloon this much. Basically, the Vision Pro “looks like a pair of ski goggles and lets people overlay virtual images on live videos of the real world.” You look through it, not at it.
As per the announcement info, the device allows for apps to pop up in front of our eyes. And, our eyes will be visible to those on the outside, so we’re not exactly in another world away from others. Disney has also come on board to create content for the new device. Knowing Apple, there won’t be any shortage of content, lest early adopters be left wondering what to do with their expensive plaything.
While there have been others who have tried and failed in this space, let us be reminded that Apple typically comes along to show us how to use all the cool things. I learned this with the iPhone, whose introduction I belittled since I already owned a phone, camera, and iPod. Why would I possibly need an all-in-one? Because Apple had plans for me, you, and millions of other people.
I suspect that Apple will do with the Vision Pro what it did to Blackberry with phones, and Amazon Kindle with tablets. It will redefine the space and add far more complexity and features than earlier entrants could ever conceive. Apple has been down this road multiple times, and knows how to compete.
Companies like Google and Microsoft, known more for their software and operating systems than anything else, have not fared as well in hardware. Just ask Google about Google Glass.
I may not exactly know just yet how I will incorporate Vision Pro into my daily routine, but I bet it’s going to be amazing. I am fully invested in the Apple ecosystem (aside from the watch), and know that everything they make plays well with everything else. But it is still a big gulp moment, because this is nearly as much as the last camera body I bought, something I get lots of usage from on a regular basis. Wearing ski goggles will take some adjustments for me.
On the other hand, Apple always seems to know something I don’t. It’ll all become clear in a little while.
Dr “Saving My Benjamins“ Gerlich
Audio Blog
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krinndnz · 2 years ago
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if you don't write your ideas down, they don't matter
one of my less defensible opinions is, fuck podcasts.
first, you shouldn't need to pretend that there's some greater purpose necessary to hang out with your friends, talk about whatever bullshit is on your mind, have private jokes, and enjoy each other's company. you shouldn't need to fucking productize that.
then once you have, inevitably, productized it because the capitalist hellscape demands that of you — if you were talking about something that mattered, or if the talk itself mattered, you would write it down. there's extremely good reasons why a lot of fields say "if you don't write it down, it never happened." if you want your ideas to matter, write them down. write. them. down. not a video. not a podcast. not a Twitter Spaces™ or a Discord Live Share™ or a Microsoft Office 365 Presence Tele-Skype-GitHub Personascope Also Brought To You By Meta, Inc™.
if you don't write your ideas down, they don't matter. write it down. use text. use the most basic text possible.
a big part of my giant grudge against audiovisual media replacing text is that because we live in the capitalist hellscape, all of the extra things that audiovisual media adds to text become extra opportunities to fuck with you. there's a truly incredible power in the Kuleshov effect that I respect a lot and there are people in cinema who wield it to create really amazing narratives. the problem is, capabilities like that also allow you to say something without taking responsibility for saying it. this is an invitation to evil.
in text, there is nowhere to hide — you have to actually say what you intend to say, and once you have said it, you have to see it, right there in front of you, and accept that you said it, and you effectively keep thinking about it as you write onwards because that's how writing works. the time dimension of audiovisual media means that anything that's not happening at the exact second of perception is basically invisible. you have to do very strange things to text for it to have that property — text is context, you're looking at a bunch of it at once and there is a conventional one-word-follows-another structure to it that you have to actively participate in, instead of having the media happen to you.
also frankly text is more democratic — audiovisual media has gotten shockingly cheap to produce, store, & transmit, but it's still gobsmackingly expensive compared to text. that being the case, you should demand to get your money's worth out of audiovisual media, both as someone making a thing who must decide what form the thing will take, and as someone reading/watching/listening to a thing. you should be very sure that the thing needs moving images & sound before you depart from the land of text (and in practice you're going to need a ton of text anyhow: there's a reason serious productions have scripts and documentation!).
if your podcast is for fun, go in peace, although I do hope you can find an easier way to have fun with your pals. but if it's not — if, for example, it's intended to advance your political beliefs or to educate others about a topic where you have expertise — you really need to actually make a case as to why you're not just writing shit down. "it's easier to just talk about things" is a bad reason — it's actually one of the reasons you should be doing text instead. it's easier to just talk because you're skipping the actual fucking work of thinking hard about the topic, the work of distilling and organizing and presenting thoughts into something useful. if you don't do the fucking work, you deserve to have your thoughts ignored.
I think everyone should write, routinely, for their own benefit rather than for profit or publication or prestige. keep a diary. write notes to your future self. make a commonplace book. writing makes you better at thinking in a way that talking doesn't. you should write. yes you. write shit down. the flip side to "if you don't write your ideas down, they don't matter" is that you should write your ideas down because your ideas, yes even yours, deserve a chance to matter. you should write.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 18 days ago
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A year in illustration (2024), Part two
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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:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/art-adjacent
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Part one
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Algorithmic feeds are a twiddler's playground
I confess that the kind of music that people make with modular synths leaves me totally, absolutely flat. However, the look of modular synths is perfect for conjuring up the idea of "twiddling" – a key part of my theory of enshittification (doubly so after I painstakingly put a HAL 9000 eye on every dial and knob).
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; djhughman, CC BY 2.0; modified)
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CDA 230 bans Facebook from blocking interoperable tools
"Interoperability" is one of those abstractions I really struggle to visually represent, but sticking a giant, scuffed, USB-C port (courtesy of D-Kuru's great CC BY 4.0 macrofocus image) on the Facebook sign worked great.
(Image: D-Kuru, Minette Lontsie, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)
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Cleantech has an enshittification problem
Illustrating "cleantech" being bricked seemed pretty straightforward, but it took a lot of doing to find a good picture of a brick. Eventually, I found a brick and took a picture of it! I think the solar panels on the brick are pretty nicely matted in.
(Image: 臺灣古寫真上色, Grendelkhan CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)
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How to design a tech regulation
Cutting out those balance scales took a long-ass time, but I've found a lot of uses for them, illustrating the concept of "making trade-offs." The tradeoff here is between a rigid, planned approach and a more improvisational one, so I used an Air Force guy at rigid attention and a guerrilla fighter on the scales. The "impatient guy" from the maybe-a-radio-ad stands in this time for a government regulator.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability
(Image: Noah Wulf, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)
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Microsoft pinky swears that THIS TIME they'll make security a priority
Look, I'll stipulate that using "Clippy" as a symbol for Microsoft personified is a bit antiquated, but I like to think that for those who know, they really know. The Uncle Sam is Keppler again. With apologies to Skippy Shulz, natch.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/
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An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp
Virgil Finlay's demon head is sinister, sure, but the unintentional, undeniable sinisterness of the body language of this guy puts him in the shade. He comes from an unsourced image that looks like an ad for a built-in stereo.
https://craphound.com/images/guygestures.jpg
The audience in the front comes from a Victorian daugerrotype of a crowd watching some kind of unknown spectacle. I cropped 'em out by hand and use them as a visual stand-in for "this is a thing that the world is, or should be, watching."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops
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Surveillance pricing
I don't make a lot of animations, but this one is super-sweet. The idea of things switching slowly via crossfades is a great way to illustrate how tech lets companies change things when you aren't paying attention. Thanks as ever to ezgif.com for help assembling and optimizing it.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)
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"Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral
Thomas Hawk is an amazing photographer who also posts all kinds of amazing found photos (more than 23,000 of them!) to his Flickr stream, at very high rez:
https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=foundphotograph&user_id=51035555243%40N01&view_all=1
The guys in the foreground appear in one of these, proudly displaying an award for – I kid you not – "canned bacon." The kids in the background come from a gallery of photos of early 20th C. child laborers.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/09/terawulf/#hunterbrook
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The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it
If Keppler's "Capital Controls the Senate" is one of the most important antitrust images of all time, then his "Next!" (depicting Standard Oil as a rapacious, world-strangling octopus) is the most important antitrust illustration.
The Uncle Sam-as-a-cop figure is another Keppler (natch), and he's a regular in my collages – I can make him stand in for any federal agency by putting its logo on his chest, where a badge would go.
It took me a long time to cut up that Next! image for easy modding. Here's a GIMP XCF file for your pleasure:
https://craphound.com/images/standard-oil-kraken.xcf
And a PSD:
https://craphound.com/images/standard-oil-kraken.psd
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)
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The largest campaign finance violation in US history
The giant figure looking at something in his palm through a looking-glass is yet another Keppler Uncle Sam illo (in the original, Sam is peering at a taxpayer who's shouting back up at him). I love the sad little donkey; I spent a bunch of time this election year finding public domain images of mules and elephants and dressing them in the livery of the mascots of the Democratic and Republican parties to have a bunch of visual signifiers with different emotional valences for each.
Note the halftoned background (a Maricopa County ballot); I'm increasingly fond of halftoning as a way to create a nice looking, scale-independent background.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/31/greater-fools/#coinbased
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AI's productivity theater
"Technofeudalism" was a theme in my work even before Yanis Varoufakis's excellent book on the subject. Putting a HAL Eye on the reeve in this medieval tapestry depicting him lording it over his groveling serfs really caught the subject, especially after I faded in some Matrix code waterfall for the background.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)
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Return to office and dying on the job
This medieval torture chamber was really brightened up by the LATE AGAIN! workplace poster on the wall and the impatient guy posed before the Manhattan skyline through the window bars. Cutting out all the window-panes took forever.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/27/sharpen-your-blades-boys/#disciplinary-technology
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Thinking the unthinkable
Bosch's anus-demon (from the Garden of Earthly Delights) returns, this time to illustrate the problems of radium suppositories as a metaphor for commercial surveillance (yes, a visual metaphor for a textual metaphor – whew, it's getting abstract around here). It took some fiddling to get the right green radioactive glow in the anal cavity, and to match it for each of the suppositories in the Museum of the Health Sciences' picture of a box of the
The damask-esque background comes from a gallery of antique marbled endpapers that I often use when I need a texture, tweaking the curves and colors until they look cool.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction
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There's no such thing as "shareholder supremacy"
Boy I love this one. The background is a late 1800s photo of the Temple of Pluto. The golden calf on the idol comes from an early 20th century illustrated bible. Add Milton Friedman's head, the lettering from the original U Chicago School of Business, and a tiny golden top-hat for the calf, and voila! Idol-worship! Alistair Milne's tip for making gold textures work went down a treat here.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics
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America's best-paid CEOs have the worst-paid employees
The heads of the millionaires are more Keppler Punch illos, while the bodies and sofas come from another Thomas Hawk found industrial photo. You'll remember the child coal miners from ""Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral." I have a vivid memory of carefully cutting out the guillotine and its Jacobins during a boring conference presentation.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/#executive-excess
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Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon
The superstitious belief that Big Tech has built a mind-control ray is a common theme in my work, and I've got a few prized, carefully sliced up "mind control ray" themed images from old pulps in my stock art folder. This one is augmented with Cryteria's HAL 9000 eye, and a Keppler cavorting vaudevallian with Zuck's metaverse head. The midcentury family comes from a midcentury ad for Mason Masterpieces's bronzed baby-shoes.
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)
Part three
Part four
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Time for a post that is way overdue. I am a hypocrite. Or, maybe, a hippocat. Here I am, describing some of the problems with active AI technologies, and yet I'm actively using commercially available tools. I'm sorry. This is a game-theoretical decision - if everyone else is using them, if I want to keep up, in some way, I have to play ball.
But I also want to shine a light on what is one of the biggest problems with AI technologies today, and one of the topics dominating the art community these days --- do AI technologies steal? Well, not inherently. Are they stealing? I would argue, yes, absolutely.
Take image generators like Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. These are all built on LAION, a curated academic dataset of images and descriptions. The word doing the most work there is academic. This dataset was created for research purposes, not commercial purposes. The only way it is able to use artists' content is as free use, and there are limits to what you can do with content as free use. Most importantly, you can't make money from the work. These systems most certainly do.
"Now hold on," you may say. "How is a neural network learning from data any different from a person learning from seeing? It's just doing what humans do at a massive scale." Yes, exactly. Other people's assets are being used as a key cog of a system. Without LAION, Stable Diffusion wouldn't exist, and LAION is constantly being used as new datasets are being created.
IMO, it's interesting what an abuse of licenses this is on some level. If you put your artwork up as Creative Commons - well, honestly, you chose that route, so chalk that up to regret, not theft if you're unhappy with the consequences. But if you didn't put your artwork up as Creative Commons, then it shouldn't be used. This is even stated (in rather mealy-mouthed terms) in the LAION FAQ. But, then, the LAION dataset as a whole is released under the MIT License, for profit. So, like, ???
If you want to see if your data is included in LAION, by the way, you can head over to https://haveibeentrained.com/. Sorry, Mittens Humblecat, it looks like your data has been used without your consent :(.
"But wait!" you say. "You don't have any proof. You don't know that the commercially available versions of these algorithms are using the unlicensed data. Maybe they're using just CC-BY!" Well, I'll let you look at the Black Panther poster that I incredibly easily generated below with the "right words" on Midjourney and you can draw your own conclusions there. Note that I used no seed image. The point isn't whether it's exactly the poster or not, but its similarity to the poster tells volumes about what data was used, and how we can uncover it if we just textually condition on the correct subset. Ultimately, the previous objection is neither here nor there --- the problem doesn't become better if existing AI algorithms use only properly licensed and public domain data, because there is no way to verify this and it relies on the evanescent beneficence of corporations to do the right thing. I've learned to be wary of capitalism as an unbridled good.
This problem definitely predates image generators. Copyright lines have been found in code generated by GPT-3. I have no idea if that's on private data, but copyright is copyright, and this appears to be a smoking gun. Maybe this was a hallucinated copyright line, but I would say the burden of proof is now on OpenAI and Microsoft.
As these algorithms proliferate in society, your data, which you've for decades handed over to companies (emails, credit card transactions, GPS data, tweets, blog posts, code, images) --- will continue to be mined without your express consent. Maybe it's time to revisit what the EULA is allowed to include in giant blocks of legalese text. But even if you agreed, without the requirement of data transparency, you'll never know if these companies followed the rules. And even then, they can probably fake it, and you'll never know, because these models are just so gosh-darned unintepretable.
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secularbakedgoods · 8 days ago
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Free & cheap degenerate literature, inquire within
This is a crosspost of my newsletter! If you’d like to get posts like this direct to your inbox or RSS reader, subscribe here.
Christ, you post 1400 words of your masc special forces protagonist taking the strap and suddenly everyone's a fucking coward.
Anyway, I've just finished the first draft of the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story. It takes place in Herefordshire, and if you pay close attention to the Sherlock Holmes story "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," you might figure out why.
End of Year Sale
Smashwords' End of Year sale has come around once again! You can now get a bunch of my books either free or at a discount:
"Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act" and "Move Fast and Break Things" are available for free! (regular price $0.99 USD)
"Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger" and "Jay Moriarty Ruins Everybody's Childhood" are on sale for $0.99 USD (regular price $1.99 USD)
"Jay Moriarty Has Seen You Naked" is on sale for $1.49 USD (regular price $2.99 USD)
Endling: 600 Years from Home is on sale for $0.99 USD (regular price $3.99 USD)
You can find these and my other books on Smashwords here, and sale prices are valid through to January 1.
Also, since it's That Time of Year, I should mention that Smashwords lets you send ebooks as gifts! Simply select the "Give as a Gift" option from the book page:
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... and, at checkout, punch in the email of whoever you'd like to gift the book to.
This Week's Links
Pornhub Sees Surge of Interest in Tradwife Content, ‘Modesty,’ and Mindfulness
“If anything, the fact that ‘tradwife’ is a trending porn search term reminds me that the entire concept of the tradwife is just influencer marketing in the first place,” Dahl said. “Most tradwife influencers are actually business owners and the primary breadwinners in their homes, so the term itself is kind of an oxymoron if you think about it. Maybe seeing a bunch of porn labeled "tradwife" will help other people to realize that whether it's an Instagram influencer or a Pornhub creator, tradwifery is just a fantasy after all.”
The Last Resort: So close to Fortress Europe’s African outposts, yet so far
Looking at a map, you would be forgiven for thinking that Ceuta is part of Morocco. It is geographically, just not legally. Drive seven hours east on the Moroccan coast along the Mediterranean sea and you will go from Ceuta to another Spanish city: Melilla. Spain refused to give the two up when it recognised Moroccan independence in 1956. It argued, in part, that its rule over these lands pre-dated its hold on the rest of Morocco, and even some parts of mainland Spain. Today, when European nations are fervent about keeping African migrants out, having territory that touches African borders is proving complicated for Spain.
The phony comforts of useful idiots
OpenAI, in pursuit of its first profits, uses fear of AI as a marketing strategy to secure partnerships and enterprise deals, or as Brian Merchant puts it: "if they want to survive the coming AI-led mass upheaval, they'd better climb aboard." Microsoft claims it is fighting climate change by accelerating fossil fuel extraction with generative AI products that generate tens of billions of dollars for oil companies and the tech giant. Israeli apartheid is powered by AI tech provided by Google, while Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is bolstered by automated systems that function as a “mass assassination factory.” The rise of the insurance tech industry has seen the advent of AI tools that promise healthcare revolutions but are part of a longer line of profit-driven, hyper-personalized reforms that have been degrading conditions. It’s hard to imagine a world where one could, with a serious face, say all of this boils down to: “fake and sucks” vs “real and dangerous.”
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I considered doing a "best books of 2024" list for this newsletter, but then I remembered I've only read one book that came out in 2024. It was Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle. It was okay.
-K
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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 months ago
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WHICH MEANS PEOPLE WITH A DESIRE TO IMPROVE THE ODDS
So this relationship has to be some plausible sequence of hops that leads to new ideas. The first, obviously, is the lows. The Defense Department does a fine though expensive job of defending the country, but they couldn't prevent you from taking one apart to see how it turns out to be important, because a startup will put your friendship through a stress test. Like Apple, we created something inexpensive, and therefore popular, simply because we were poor. But I don't recommend this approach to most founders, including many who will go on to start very successful companies, are not that good at seeming formidable is that it's tested more severely than in most other situations. The surprise for me was how accessible important and interesting people are. Not understanding that investors view investments as bets combines with the ten page paper due, then ten pages you must write, even if it would be a mistake. But while Microsoft did really well and there is thus a temptation to think they would have been a junior professor at that age, and he couldn't afford anything more. I did know about that, but I'd forgotten. And by next, I mean a couple hours later. If you just start doing stuff for them, many will be too busy to shoo you away.
I wrote in the second version. I don't know about startups in general, and that's why so many people said character was more important in choosing cofounders. Speaking of cool places to work, there is no reward for putting in a good effort is a fake idea adults invented to encourage kids. Then at least you won't know what it is, and in particular, how intrinsically horrible it is. But it would not be the first time it raised money. You can tell how hard it must be to start a startup just one year later, after you graduate, as long as you're at a point in your life when you can bear the risk of failure, the best way to find out if you're suited to running a startup, but the sort of thing a right-wing radio talk show host would say to stir up his followers. If you've heard anything about startups you've probably heard about the long hours. And there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking that's merely ugly using duct tape to attach something to your bike and rule breaking that is brilliantly imaginative discarding Euclidean space. Viaweb was an anomaly in this respect too. You don't have to prove you're worth investing in, you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them.1 In a job there is much more damping. The wrong people like it.
If investors are impressed with you just because you're starting a company, and his place to be taken by the 21st best player will be only slightly worse than the 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged. Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed. In retrospect this was a smart move, but we didn't do it because we were smart. Frankly, though, if I've misled people here, I'm not eager to fix that.2 Hackers are unruly. In the third century BC Archimedes won by doing that. Users just want your software to do what they need, and you have to spend years working to learn this stuff.3 Why do founders persist in trying to convince investors of things they're not convinced of themselves?4 When you're young you're more mobile—not just because you don't have to be a mistake to attribute the decline of unions to some kind of website people will find useful? If you can make with yourself that will both make you happy and make your company successful.5
Notes
And yet there are a small amount, or that an artist or writer has to grind. Students are mostly still on the software business, or some vague thing like that, the most difficult part for startup founders who go on to create giant companies not seem formidable early on.
It did.
At YC we try to ensure there are no longer written in Lisp.
The best one could argue that the elegance of proofs is quantifiable, in the Valley. But becoming a police state.
Similarly, don't make users register to read stories.
Thanks to Mark Nitzberg, Aaron Iba, Joel Rainey, Trevor Blackwell, Geoff Ralston, Mike Moritz, and Robert Morris for their feedback on these thoughts.
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