I was a little disappointed that she tried to find some kind of synthesis between her own fawning opinion and Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical view of Always Coming Home.

Ursula’s concern with erasure due to sexism is warranted, but everyone’s star must fade. No one is completely correct, and while Le Guin was ahead of her time, no one has a perfect vision of the future or even a clear vision of their own present. Sincere criticism is a form of flattery, and many authors long gone continue to be referenced not just because they had a prescient view, but because their critics keep them alive. Tolstoy was the most famous author in the Soviet Union because despite being banned to print, the publishing of rebuttals and counter-apologetics were subsidized by the central soviet, so that everyone knew his name and anarchist views.

In this cast, DeFreitas celebrates Le Guin in a way that is effusive but neither hot nor cold. It’s exactly this kind of inoffensive praise that reduces the great to symbols of greatness, and from there to cliché, mediocrity, and obscurity. Good authors deserve trenchant praise, or at least honest criticism.

‘AI’ in the sense of machine learning algorithms is very old technology, and has seen revolutionary applications at every step of its development. Eliza was created in the 1960s and demonstrated that if the test of a computer’s artificial intelligence was whether it could fool a human that it was sentient, the value of that test depended very heavily on how willing the human correspondent was to ‘fill in the blanks.’ The results of those experiments show that the average person is extremely willing to fill in the blanks even when the technology is full of gaping holes.

In the podcast, they’re talking specifically about ChatGPT-style technology, its flaws, and the willingness of people to ‘fill in the blanks’ in a new dimension – to assume LLM technology is a truckload more graphics cards or a nuclear reactor away from what sci-fi writers mean when they say ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – and that is evidently false.

The 8-track version hits harder.

Trump Rally Gunman Was ‘Definitely Conservative,’ Classmate Recalls

@disguy_ovahea has no idea what he’s talking about. He apparently attended a couple of protests and thinks he’s now an expert on social change.

A horse race has about as much to do with women’s right to vote as Stonehenge does with climate change, but that didn’t stop Emily Davison’s direct action at the 1913 Epsom Derby from being a watershed moment in the struggle for women’s suffrage.

There was a free speech fight in the courts about the right for women two wear swimsuits, many of them bikinis, while serving coffee in the Seattle area. Since then the popularized alliterative term ‘bikini barista’ has stuck to refer to all servers that sell hot drinks while in swimwear.

The biodigester is really cool. Helping neighbors pick grapes is praxis.

All Copcars Are Ballotboxes!

I clearly did not say no repercussions. I agree we should be intolerant of intolerance, but Popper’s dictum implies a de-escalation; calls for genocide should be responded to with censorship, perhaps violence, but not murder. Capital punishment has a finality that requires perfection of clearly imperfect human justice. Corpses don’t reflect, regret, or reparate.

I’m merely asserting a position. I’m not that invested in the fate of a Nazi when people who have done less have received worse, nothing I say will have any effect on the outcome, and the source of your wrath is just.

Something along the lines of truth and reconciliation for me, I’m not a fan of the carceral state (!abolition@slrpnk.net), and hanging octogenarians isn’t a good look. You might be happy to know that Poland has requested extradition from Canada for the blighted heart that appeared in parliament, so his life is going to get a lot more complicated.

Whatever you call it, it’s an improvement.

Relevant due to the Canadian monument that was recently defaced.

“Against imperialism and fascism” - Graffiti from inside Russia

Anarchists and Communists are fighting against fascism and imperialism, and are calling for solidarity.