Yes, I know that's not what Shakespeare meant. Not like that's ever stopped anybody in marketing or people with too much money and hungry for more.
Okay. You've been inundated in what the industry is calling AI technology for months on end. I don't need to introduce it because the only way you could have avoided it is to have been in the middle of nowhere for the last year 1 or so. I would ordinarily have said "in a coma" but the way word gets around it would surprise me not a bit if folks would be talking about …
From time to time lately I've been thinking about what Cory Doctorow called the enshittification of just about everything and peoples' reactions to it. Sometimes there are less shitty alternatives which present themselves with a little looking, sometimes there aren't. Most interestingly, and this is a bit more common than I find comfortable, other solutions or alternatives to those things that are suddenly now user hostile are just... well... the reaction to them is like somebody just told the other person to shove a pair of daisies up their nostrils and hum Yankee Doodle. I've started filing this under the …
"Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."
--Mal Reynolds, Firefly
I've been relying heavily upon timed posts these last few weeks because my mental health has been forcing me to choose between being able to get essential stuff done (read: work) and, well, anything else. Come the end of the (work) day, all I have the compute cycles to do is goof off with a side of doomscrolling (because when I don't I get blindsided by The Next Damned Thing). Mostly, seeing the world operate on Covid Standard Time is disheartening and the …
For reasons I don't quite understand I always equated growing up with situations where you can walk into someplace to do something, talk to someone, and immediately have a real conversation about life where you live. I was struck by this when I went to the car dealership to sell my mom's car the other day. While at the dealership talking to the salesman we chatted about where we were from (the yinzer shibboleth of "I'm from Pittsburgh," "Oh - where at in Pittsburgh?" "I'm from X." "I'm from Y, great to meet you!"), which lead to who we knew, when …
reality segmentation violation - noun phrase - A syndrome in which someone is so deep inside their own little world that any utterly mundane activity can provoke a combination of emotional upset, anger, confusion because they simply never think about it. In children this phenomenon also typically includes running to authority figures to inform on someone in the most agitated way possible. This is bewildering to just about anyone nearby who is not focused solely on their own little worlds.
A sample stack trace of a reality segmentation violation:
whistle-drowning - "Whistle-drowning is designed to flood the public (with) a flurry of allegations that make it very difficult to concentrate on the important questions." The antonym of whistle-blowing.
Lizardman's Constant - A rough heuristic of the population of people who troll data collection polls. Comes from asking the question "Do you believe that the President is a shape-shifting lizard person?" and consistently getting a roughly 4.5% "yes" response.
quantum veracity - When you're not sure if somebody's full of shit or not, so you act polite until you can find out one way or the other, while simultaneously leaving yourself an escape route.
