I’m on board with Eno here. There are issues with the current wave of generative AI, but the main reason they are such huge problems is the people who are pushing these technologies have zero concern for the potential social harms they could cause or exacerbate.

or not enough of a gamer

Yeah, Discord’s easy/free voice chat was the reason it got so popular. It was so much easier to use than any of the alternatives, and in-game VC was a mixture of piss-poor quality and full of toxic 14 year olds.

Women murdering their husbands is a really common trope in country music.

The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm. I know this sentiment gets repeated a lot, but I’m not sure it’s universally true. I know back in 2012/2012 my wife was very invested in a bunch of bloggers along the lines of Pioneer Woman. A lot of the posts on those blogs were a mixture of personal anecdotes and recipes and I know my wife was there for both. It’s frustrating when you’re ready to cook and just want the recipe, but that’s not the only (or maybe even the primary) way that a lot of these cooking/homemaking blogs were made to be consumed, I don’t think.

Proponents say that that it should be a relatively humane method of execution: Nitrogen is inert and the body doesn’t react to breathing pure Nitrogen with a feeling of suffocation the way that it does with CO₂, and suddenly replacing the air a person is breathing with pure inert gas can lead to unconsciousness within just one or two breaths. In practice, though, the first Nitrogen Gas execution that was carried out in Alabama last year did not go that smoothly. I’m not sure about subsequent executions, there have been a handful.

Is this what you were looking for? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdIQVOGMgY0

It’s not exactly what you described but it’s pretty close.

I assumed that was probably the case, but Poe’s Law and all.

/s <– I hope you dropped this…

If you can’t tell the difference between being upset that a game was made badly and being cruel to the developers, you may need to take a step back.

Sorry, I just realized that you might take that as directed at you. I realize that sometimes the NYT is the best or only source for news, I’ve just been very frustrated with the NYT, especially when it comes to stuff like this.

This is a bad headline and it lends credence to the GOP framing that Trump and Elon are “cutting waste” and “saving money”. Musk didn’t “save” 8 billion OR 8 million dollars, he illegally halted payment for 8 million dollars worth of government services. Whether those services were wasteful or not has not been examined at all, as evidenced by these absolute clowns accidentally firing critical government workers who oversee things like nuclear arms and monitoring avian influenza. Multiple times these people have admitted to accidentally firing people when they had no idea what those people were doing and how the firings would affect citizens. We can not roll over and allow them to frame this the way they want to.

Yeah, a good bit of the article is dedicated to pointing out that there are a whole swathe of public “intellectuals” who describe themselves as Liberals but are shallow and regressive in their actual ideas.

Did you read the article? I think it does a pretty good job of explaining what the author means by that phrase. The author articulates her concept of a “far center” (as opposed to far right and far left), which she describes as people who take liberal values to reactionary extremes, valuing civility over justice, etc.

The far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions; it is against cancel culture, student protests, and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals — concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the far center is liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but it is also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice.

I hope I’m not jinxing myself, but I don’t ever mess with my Ublock Origin settings and I’ve never once had it break or gotten the threatening messages about adblockers on YT. I’m not sure why, but I’m not going to change anything while I’ve got a good thing going.

No

My wife and I joined an Episcopal church a few years ago after a fairly painful falling out with the church we had been part of for ~15 years. It has wound up being such a blessing for us in so many ways, one of which is not feeling like we have to cringe whenever a leader in our church speaks out in public. Bishop Budde is a perfect example of the kind of rhetoric that attracted us to the Episcopal church - gentle, kind, but firm on matters of love and care for others.