Gilly & Billy Enamel Pin — MULE BOOKS 2″ of mighty soft enamel for your jacket, backpack, whatevs. Show your support for wealth distribution with this delightful pin designed by Adam Koford. Less talkin’, more loppin’!

An AI agent won't tell you to buy this:

www.mulebooks.com/store/gilly-...

Critical humanities discourse on AI will be doomed if it does not come up with better metaphors. Corporate AI is not a «cognitive entity» or some «other intelligence». It's a political project and a system of surveillance, extraction & exploitation
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The «intelligence» that manifests itself in AI, i.e. large-scale data analysis & computational statistics, has nothing to do with how living beings experience the world. If anything, it can be compared to large socio-technical systems of domination such as bureaucracies & corporations
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Spoken Mandarin Chinese doesn’t have gendered pronouns. The word tā can mean ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’.

However, *written* Chinese does distinguish gender: 他 ‘he’, 她 ‘she’, 它 ‘it’. 1/7

OVERHEARD: “Does Pavlov, when he hears the bell, think about feeding the dogs?”

O El País de domingo perguntou ao Mujica se ele encontrou o sentido da vida. Ele:

"Me dediqué a cambiar el mundo y no cambié un carajo, pero estuve entretenido. Y he generado muchos amigos y muchos aliados en esa locura de cambiar el mundo para mejorarlo. Y le di un sentido a mi vida."

“The punch card was invented at the end of the 19th century for the US Census Bureau, from which IBM stole the technology. The card was a people tracker from its inception.”

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"WE'VE ARRANGED A society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

Four images to illustrate some prominent single-gene myths. Top left shows a photograph of a person deftly rolling their tongue into a U-shape. Top right shows a photograph of a person’s ear, highlighting the shape and features of the earlobe and cartilage. Bottom left shows a close-up photograph of a person’s eye, with a vivid blue colouration. Bottom right shows a photograph of a person poised to write with their left hand on the blank white page of a spiral-bound notebook.

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

Couverture du livre "Paris-Babel"

En français, certaines variations de prononciation peuvent être sévèrement jugées (prononcer "domPter" est jugé plouc selon certains!)
Mais ce n'est pas nouveau. Fil sur cinq querelles de prononciation dans l'histoire du français, grâce au livre "Paris-Babel" de Siouffi (actes Sud)
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Just discovered the parallel world of punctuations.

👍 @ellecordova.bsky.social

Image of a man hammering nails into the surf at a beach. Man labeled "humanity," nails labeled "language", the sea labeled: "the inherently indescribable nature of the universe".

Perspective changes everything.
[Ars Mathermatica]

I wrote about this a bit in my last book but it really shakes me that a defining feature of this catastrophic era is that we just keep going to work. We work through pandemics, we work through natural disasters, we work through economic calamity, we work through coups, we work, we work, we work.

Tariffs xkcd.com/3073

This is really unfair to everyone who just voted for him for the racism.

📌 📰 News feeds • PINNED POST
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I was thinking that none of those numbers made sense, but holy fuck this is insane

yeah i'm into OPSEC. Only Posting Super Excellent Content

Raymond Chandler started writing at 51. Laura Ingalls Wilder started at 70. Frank McCourt was 66 when first published. John LeCarre finished his last spy novel at 85. Age is trap, don't fall for it, the spirit is the engine of the arts.

them: but how can you be sure it's a midlife crisis

me:

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist”

James Baldwin

Could someone out there write a definitive guide on convenient alternatives to using Amazon.com for goods and books and whatnot?

Asking for some folks who don’t want to see democracy die in darkness.

Groundbreaking BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants Conducted over a month, the study saw the BBC test four prominent, publicly available AI assistants

It’s almost like we should use human writers, huh www.bbc.com/mediacentre/...

Ok sociology, what do you think are genuine breakthroughs that our field has made. Contributions that might convince skeptical but sympathetic *academics* (not the public) of the value of our field? I'll brainstorm some of mine in the thread - I treat sociology very broadly

looking back, AOL had it right. 30 hours of internet per month was the right amount.

It's tempting to think that simpler letterforms = more legibility. But in my experience, that's not true. Typefaces are design systems too, and they need a certain level of complexity to work well. Here's why:

(thread) 🧵

Drawing of Mosso’s ‘human circulation balance’, used to measure cerebral activity during resting and cognitive states

This is cool.

What do you picture when you think of the first brain imaging experiment? An fMRI machine? A PET scanner?

How about a wooden seesaw with a person lying on it? ...In 1884.

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#NeuroSkyence #PsychSciSky