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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

the LLM is in orbit now, full parallel reality. the crime is that our benches were taken from us and i think i'm pulitzer bound with "They were always hostile. That was the point. We simply used to build them anyway"

So when we ask what happened to the elders’ bench, the answer is not that it decayed, or that we became less hospitable, or any of the usual humanist lamentation. The answer is that we Kept the passage and demolished the plaza, because the lot was thirty feet wide and the ‘mortgage had to close. The violence is not in the shotgun at the end of the drive. It is in the fact that the concrete had already decided, and that we experience this as convenience.
me: great, that was good for flavor, raw building material. expand more on how our benches were taken from us, that seems to be the emerging central thesis that may even eclipse your tripartite hypothesis LLM: Thought for 13s Agreed — and I think it does eclipse it, but not by replacing it. Before I expand, let me get real material on the two ends of the lineage, because right now the bench thesis rests on one site and one secondhand source.
A punchier alternative, if you want the opening line to do more work: There is no reverse gear. Removing a public bench is maintenance; installing one is a right-of-way infraction. In Wilmington, activists built bus benches and state crews tore them out. In Cincinnati, nobody ever voted to remove a bench — they voted about advertising, and fifty-five vanished. The Hard Chair is a history of the seat we keep for people who have arrived but not been let in: the elders' bench at the Iron Age gate, the porter's hooded chair, the mahogany hall seat built to be uncomfortable, the front porch, and then nothing. Part architectural history, part paper trail, it names who took them — and then delivers the twist that makes the loss so hard to mourn. They were always hostile. That was the point. We simply used to build them anyway.

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jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

“The plan was for General Donahue’s paratroopers to take control of Abbey Gate from the Marines on Aug. 27 and shut it down. But General Donahue thought it was too risky to wait. He met with the senior U.S. commander at the airport and recommended shutting the gate immediately.

British forces, which were using the entryway to evacuate their citizens and allies, asked the Americans to keep it open. Pentagon leaders “grudgingly” agreed, a senior U.S. official recalled.

The Marines were still in control of Abbey Gate at 5:48 p.m. on Aug. 26 when the suicide bomber struck. Eleven Marines, one Navy medic and one Army soldier, along with scores of Afghans, were killed.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/us/politics/hegseth-army-general-donahue.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

every line of code you pull in from a package repository is a liability and a risk of someone else ruining your day.

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

every line of code you do understand is also a liability, but less of a liability.

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jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

“… would apply only to married couples and tap a fund intended to provide federal child care subsidies to working parents.”

screw the working class, give the money to couples who are rich enough to live on one salary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/us/politics/stay-at-home-parents-subsidies.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
coreyspowell ("Corey S Powell") wrote:

The BepiColombo spacecraft just broke in two. In December, the remainder will split in two again.

It's all part of the elaborate preparations for making the best-ever observations of the enigmatic planet Mercury.

https://www.esa.int/Science%5FExploration/Space%5FScience/BepiColombo/Latest%5Fupdates%5FBepiColombo%5Fs%5Farrival%5Fat%5FMercury #space #science #tech

Artist’s impression showing the Mercury Transfer Module separate from the BepiColombo Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) composite spacecraft. The transfer module is only needed for the journey to Mercury. The two science orbiters will be captured into Mercury orbit, and the small thrusters on MPO will be used to deliver MMO into its orbit. There, MMO will be ejected from MPO and spun up. MPO will then discard the sunshield, and continue into its own orbit around Mercury.
Artist’s impression showing the Mercury Transfer Module separate from the BepiColombo Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) composite spacecraft. The transfer module is only needed for the journey to Mercury. The two science orbiters will be captured into Mercury orbit, and the small thrusters on MPO will be used to deliver MMO into its orbit. There, MMO will be ejected from MPO and spun up. MPO will then discard the sunshield, and continue into its own orbit around Mercury.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
brook@sunny.garden ("Brook Miles") wrote:

Went for a walk along the canal yesterday, now that the summer heat is waning, and saw a surprising number of creatures.

This grumpy little soft shell turtle was doing it's best impression of a rock in the middle of the footpath along the top of the canal. I relocated them off the path, down next to the water.

#turtle

A tiny mud coloured soft shell turtle a bit larger than a quarter being held gently between thumb and forefinger, it's neck and legs partially tucked in defensively.
A tiny soft shell turtle being held up to show its belly which is a dull orange with dark spots, in contrast to the mud colour of it's head. Out of focus in the background is a shallow stretch of water lined with grasses and weeds, and some stairs leading down.

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

every line of code you don't understand is a liability.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party ("'(vidak) _(:3」∠)_") wrote:

please boost.

https://solarpunk.au/

been running this 45 TB disk array for some time now.

the intention behind it was to provide services to the community.

i was thinking, what sort of services do you want to see or use?

some ideas:

- IRC
- gemini/gopher, there are some forum softwares
- neocities instance

i'd like there to be some way to share this disk space in a useful way.

#selfhosting #permacomputing #solarpunk

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Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
nova@lunar.place ("Nova :neocat_floof_cute:") wrote:

Nova is flopped on the floor, yawning but because it's freeze frame she looks scrungy

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Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
inarticulatequilter@mastodon.art ("InarticulateQuilter") wrote:

I am so glad I made this quilt. Everything about it pleases me - the theme, the design, the colors and the quilting. It's as close to hitting on all creative cylinders as I will probably ever get

I am also glad I found someone who will give it a good home

ACTIVISM ABECEDARY
2026
Pattern: Crazy Old Ladies Quilts Counting on Christmas (modified)
Quilting: E2E Chevron
64” x 77.5”

#Quilt #InarticulateAbecedary

An abecedary quilt in neutral fabrics, like ecru, grey, black and white, shown in full. Each letter block (they are all different sizes and fonts) has a word associated with activism embroidered on it. List follows: A for anti-fascist, B for boycott, C for community, D for diversity, E for empathy, F for feminism, G for grassroots, H for humanity, I for intersectionality, J for justice, K for kindness, L for LGBTQIA+, M for mutual aid, N for non-violence, O for organize, P for protest, Q for quilt craftivism, R for reparations, S for solidarity, T for trans rights, U for unionize, V for vote, W for world peace, X for Extinction Rebellion, Y for youth and Z for zine.

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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net ("Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:") wrote:

This is now a very normal headline. A president trying to limit the right to vote in a democracy. I still can't get over things like this. And I am not alone, I guess!

The Washington Post Democracy Dies in Darkness Trump is running out of time as he tries to restrict mail voting Two swing states are sending ballots, and other states plan to send theirs soon. Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

"it is worth knowing what we gave up, and where it went, and that it was once a room with a bench in it where you could sit down and get a thing settled in front of witnesses."

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

i am being killed by this. this is killing me. my first draft of my first chapter is going great. i told it to imitate the style of "the domestication of the garage" and this is so fucking funny but also has already doomed our species to extinction

This is the whole of my argument in miniature, and the reader may as well have it now, in the first chapter, so that he can watch it come apart and be reassembled for the next three thousand years. An entrance has two incompatible jobs. It must handle the machinery of arrival, which is a problem of width and turning and where to put the vehicle and its driver, and it must stage the reception, which is a problem of dignity, sequence, and being seen. Give them separate rooms and both go well. Squeeze them into one and something has to give. The Iron Age town, with plenty of ground and no shortage of labor, built both rooms. The Renaissance palace built both rooms. The English country seat built both rooms, and a mile of drive to lengthen the second one. The American suburban lot, thirty feet of frontage and a mortgage, could afford neither, and so it kept the machinery and abandoned the reception, which is why the front door of the average house in this country is now a vestigial organ, opened for strangers and Halloween. We did not decide this. Nobody proposed it, and if it had been proposed, we would have objected. It happened the way the garage door became the family entrance, which is to say by accretion, out of the daily preference for the shorter walk. But it is worth knowing what we gave up, and where it went, and that it was once a room with a bench in it where you could sit down and get a thing settled in front of witnesses.

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Boosted by krig@goto.liten.app:
G3rt@mastodon.uno ("Gert :debian: :gnu: :linux:") wrote:

@ambiente
#ClimateChange #climateDisaster

Attachments:

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

(no, none of that makes sense in context, i refuse to print the whole context because i have a limit with the amount of informational chaff i can inflict on someone at a time)

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

i go and read something beautiful and i come back to this and fuck we are so fucked this is so fucking funny civilization is cooked information is over. word salad for dinner.

1. The Gate Was a Room. Iron Age Levant. When everyone in a settlement is known by face, exclusion is trivial and the gate gets repurposed — for law, market, gossip, execution. Claim to test: the pier-and-chamber plan is oversized for defense and correctly sized for assembly. Your biblical intuition, made architectural. (Frese; excavated gates at Dan, Gezer, Lachish, Megiddo, with attention to the bench installations.)
me: what are you referring to with the megiddo benches - in this chat, always include links to primary sources for any information Thought for 5s Fair challenge, and I owe you a correction before I answer it. Searched the web I overstated it, and in one case I made it up. Let me separate what's actually attested from what I asserted. The correction I said "the chambers were fitted with benches" and named Megiddo. I have no source for benches in the Megiddo gate chambers, and I shouldn't have implied one. That was me pattern-matching from the general "elders at the gate" picture onto a specific site. Discard it. I also wrote "with attention to the bench installations" into your chapter-one research note two turns ago. Strike that phrasing too — it presents a settled evidence base that isn't there.
What this does to your argument My "nobody installs seating in a killing box" line was rhetorically satisfying and evidentially unearned. The seating is one space over. But that's not fatal — it's more interesting. If the benches, the canopy and the king's seat are consistently in the forecourt while the chambers hold doors, guards, or horses, then Iron Age gate complexes were already doing functional zoning: a plaza for the civic and ceremonial business, a corrugated passage for traffic control and defence. That's a cleaner finding than a single multipurpose gate, and it maps onto your nine-slot schema much better — slot 5 (where the conveyance waits) and slot 8 (audience for display) get separate rooms from the start. The revised empirical question, which you can now actually test from published plans: do bench and canopy installations cluster in forecourts and plazas rather than in pier-and-chamber recesses? If yes, the zoning claim holds. Get Frese's Levant article first — he has assembled the excavated corpus you'd need, and he may well have answered it already.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
amoroso@oldbytes.space ("Paolo Amoroso") wrote:

A 1990 videotape on these newfangled windows and widgets of GUIs. Lots of demonstrations of early window systems, including Smalltalk and interlisp-D, and a brilliant prop to explain scrolling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw

#gui #retrocomputing #interlisp #smalltalk #xerox

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brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Capitalism requires speed and speed is deadly to the climate. One of the solutions is less speed.

This will also help disabled people who are often left in precarious positions due to not being able to keep up with this speed (and I notice this because I know a lot of disabled people who can do things that produce value but can't keep traditional work due to employer requirements).

The reason why LLMs are so popular amongst the capitalist class is due to the speed and cheapness of outputs. No need to get an artist or software dev to produce something, wait several days, and actually pay them, instead get a robot to do things so much faster. But then you're consuming so much more energy and resources than if you had taken it slow! So LLMs are largely incompatible with any serious climate project (not to mention the raw numbers when it comes to LLM energy consumption).

(And that's not to say efficiency is bad! But efficiency doesn't help when efficiency savings are plowed into producing more than producing the same. Capitalism encourages More which means that efficiency doesn't translate into climate gains in practice)

(Okay, I'm getting on a tangent, time to workshop this into an actual blogpost)

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

In short, it had become thoroughly domesticated, an integral part of home life and the routine of work and play. On its wide concrete apron — often occupying a third of the frontage — the family car was washed and polished every Sunday, and on weekday afternoons the young of the family shot basketballs. What the stork’s nest on the chimney of the northern European home traditionally signified, the basketball backstop over the garage door signified for the American home: a child-oriented domesticity.

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brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

I mention the wealth tax because wealth is highly correlated with ecologically unfriendly consumption patterns, and because IMO the inequality of wealth is a huge driver of ecologically unfriendly production patterns as workers are exploited into producing more than the planet can sustain and the value they produce is sucked up by the rich, a wealth tax + redistribution scheme will break this cycle and encourage lifestyles that are less "productive" but more ecologically sustainable. For example if people can afford high-quality clothing, or if I can make a living making high-quality clothing, then that's going to be far more sustainable than relying on fast fashion

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baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

“Bad Vibes Coding – Spectre Collie”

https://spectrecollie.com/2026/09/05/bad-vibes-coding/

> My take on generative AI has pretty rapidly gone from a tentative, “it sucks and I hate it, but after the bubble pops, there might be a few very specific use cases for it, like with programming,” to a vehemently zero-tolerance stance. It’s all garbage, burn it down.

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brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

(I guess the one exception is if you use some sort of machine-learning model to improve the way you route public transport or provide information to end-users (no more mystery bus disappearances please!) but even then that's better achieved with "traditional" ML and not some weird GPT)

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

prose i want to melt into a fat and pour down my throat and have it become me and fuel me:

And consequently a very different kind of garage came into existence. The small portable or prefabricated item, scarcely larger than the car itself, was for many working owners the practical answer. In closely built-up neighborhoods in most American cities the service alley, beginning at about the time of World War I, was lined with these boxlike structures. The dimensions of the average American city lot — 25 feet by 100 — precluded the building of any garage next to the dwelling itself; and as a result the home garage for the freestanding dwelling was relegated to the rear of the lot. Two parallel cement pathways provided a lane from garage door to curb. It was an unsightly arrangement, and it had the effect of completing the ruin of the backyard. This small private area had rarely been attractive: surrounded by a high wooden wall, dominated by the revolving clothesline, a convenient place to put the trashcan, the ashes from the furnace, and the doghouse, it had become a source of shame, and the advent of the garage concluded its disgrace.

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brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

None of these solutions require AI (or really anything fancier tech-wise than what we already have) and all of them require political will

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brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

The solution to the climate crisis isn't some sort of fancy AI, the solution is a serious wealth tax, green electricity, investment into climate adaptations (telling the citizens to stock up on water and then commissioning new oil fields isn't climate adaptation Andy Burnham), public transport and bike infrastructure, and less meat and more plant in Western peoples' diets

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brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Any "ethical" AI that doesn't publish on the front page how it was trained, what data was used, and details of the energy usage involved (with verifiable numbers) is, in my view, not ethical and anything that attempts to be ethical shouldn't be touching it.

I am so, so, disappointed.

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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

my god the writing in this piece, "the domestication of the garage." beautiful.

https://placesjournal.org/article/j-b-jackson-the-domestication-of-the-garage/

There are suggestions in the brief literature on garage design of the period that architects enjoyed the challenge of producing strictly utilitarian interiors which would serve as settings for the engineered beauty of the automobile and the spit-and-polish work of the chauffeur; there seems to have flourished (not for very long) a kind of Machine Age esthetic of the garage. But physically as well as psychologically the garage remained isolated from the dwelling: at the end of a long driveway be­hind the house, or hidden by a wall. Only after the chauffeur had cranked the motor into action, tested the sparkplugs and the tension of the leather fan belt, checked the oil and poured in a gallon or two of gasoline did the car, figuratively speaking, join the family. Outside the front door ensued the ritual of pulling on gauntlets, adjusting veils and goggles and lap-robes (while the automobile quivered restlessly), and finally waving goodbye. There was an early tendency — happily long since overcome but natural enough in those adventurous days — to show off while driving. Various periodicals dealing with country or suburban life urged their readers to behave with dignity on the highway. In 1909, House and Garden cautioned: No toes peeping over the body of the tonneau or feet resting on the dashboard or arms or wraps hanging over the sides, smoking limited to one person, preferably not the driver. Whistles, bells, quacking novelties and sirens seem out of place in town although in the country they may be used to advantage. … Among the purely ornamental novelties of motordom the small gilt figure of an eagle has almost entirely monopolized the place on top of the radiator. … This is a very pretty custom if the figure be small, and quite patriotic where the bill holds a narrow ribbon of the national colors.

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
lopalasi@dair-community.social ("Lorena Jaume-Palasí") wrote:

I just had to take a screenshot for the archive and my next talks. Exhibit nr. 1.234.654.245: pathetic white dude with no expertise ad hominating a black woman with a long track record of excelling and setting standards in the field of #AI

One of the clearest cases of flat-out AI denial I've seen yet. X.com Like a Republican carrying a snowball onto the Senate floor to 'prove' climate change isn't real... @timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) ® Human › O •• @timnitGebru Someone asked me if people have taken the time to write something debunking this & I couldn't believe that this fairytale has actually traveled far & wide that people have to debunk THIS? What planet are we living in? I didn't spend decades researching & building to waste my time to talk about the Cookie Monster not being real. ST Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp • Aug 30 Over the course of 3 months at OpenAl, 3 consecutive secret Al civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor's ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAl itself....

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jcoglan wrote:

any other system that displayed the error rate and negative externalities of AI after this much funding would be considered a catastrophic failure