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AOC's Speech at NY Rally with Federal Workers - "Make them assert their authority. Ask them: Who are you? Who are you. Because at the end of the day, they're no one. They're just like you, and they're just like me, and he's running around cuz he thinks he's got a bank account with a lot of zeros in it that it makes him some kind of supercitizen. I don't think so. This is America."
posted by kliuless to MetaFilter on Feb 22 at 6:09 AM
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To counteract the daily litany of shock and awe and in anticipation of the People’s Union Economic Blackout next Friday, Feb. 28th (also in response to this Meta suggestion)… here’s information that you can use to participate in the process, protest or find other ways to make a difference. This is primarily for US Progressives who are feeling helpless, depressed and angry right now.
posted by jabo to MetaFilter on Feb 22 at 10:22 AM
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One of the ways people are resisting is through their wallets: under the fold, over 100 small press books by people in groups targeted by the Trump administration, or which provide insight and guidance on what to do next. Small press books previously.
posted by joannemerriam to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 3:56 AM
59 users marked this as a favorite

An Unexpected Writer Shows Us One Way Out of Our Current Hellscape - "Before the travel guides or the long-running PBS show or his ascendance as an American folk hero, Rick Steves was once a broke 23-year-old piano teacher lighting up a hunk of hashish somewhere in the Afghan highlands. It was the first time Steves had gotten high in his life, and he unwinds the story early on in his new memoir, On the Hippie Trail. Steves, and his enduring travel partner Gene Openshaw, loaded the hash in an old wooden pipe and lit it up on their modest hotel bed. At first he didn't sense much of a change, but then Steves felt everything at once."
posted by kliuless to MetaFilter on Feb 23 at 11:26 PM
49 users marked this as a favorite

Wanted to share some Woody Guthrie Covers for several different songs: Starting with"Fascists Bound to Lose" by Billy Bragg and Wilco.
posted by Chrysopoeia to MetaFilter on Feb 21 at 8:20 PM
47 users marked this as a favorite

Want to iteratively unpack a series of cryptic clues to collapse a horrifying nest of brackets to resolve down to a heavily obscured headline? Want to do it once a day? Good news: Bracket City is here to make you feel alternately like an entire idiot and then kind of a genius.
posted by cortex to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 9:46 PM
44 users marked this as a favorite

"The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales, which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for understanding authoritarians in public and political life. Because no matter what abusers take from their victims, they don't want to take the blame. And one of the prerogatives of power is to be in charge of blame, and abusers routinely exercise that power to make their own acts someone else's fault."
posted by Leeway to MetaFilter on Feb 27 at 9:50 AM
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Tinned Fish Recipes What it says on the tin. It seems appropriate to say
posted by ashbury to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 7:04 PM
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Bernard Palissy (1510 – c. 1589) was a Renaissance man in more ways than one; over the course of his life, he did work as a potter and ceramicist, garden designer, glassblower, hydraulics engineer, painter, surveyor, and naturalist. He is probably best known for his ceramics - dishes and platters decorated with hyper-realistic shells, snails, ferns, fish, frogs, seaweed, and other aquatic life, all cast from specimens Palissy collected and meticulous observations he'd made from specimens he'd collected.
posted by EmpressCallipygos to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 7:04 AM
37 users marked this as a favorite

Fiona Apple in the recording studio, stealing The Waterboys' "The Whole of the Moon" like a master thief.
posted by Lemkin to MetaFilter on Feb 22 at 7:24 AM
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The lost map of Al-idrisi The 12th-century Islamic cartographer al-Idrisi for created this world map in 1154 for Roger II of Sicily. It was a masterpiece of mapping which remained the most technically sophisticated world-map for three centuries after its production. Drawing on several centuries of Islamic cartographic research, al-Idrisi produced both a single, round map engraved onto a silver disk and set into a wooden table, with Mecca at its centre and a detailed book titled the Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi'khtirāq al-āfāq, or the Entertainment for those wanting to discover the world. Factum Foundation has re-created al-Idrisi’s fabled map. Neither facsimile nor copy, this re-creation combines detailed historical research and advanced digital techniques with the highest levels of craftsmanship.
posted by dhruva to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 7:27 PM
34 users marked this as a favorite

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.
posted by subdee to MetaFilter on Feb 27 at 12:58 PM
32 users marked this as a favorite

Jeff Bezos bans Washington Post opinion writers from opposing ‘free speech and free markets’ "In a move promoted as supporting freedom of speech, The Washington Post will no longer publish opinion columns that oppose the core views of Post owner and Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos, Bezos has reportedly told staff. " (The Verge link, does not appear to be paywalled.) Opinions editor David Shipley, who is not "hell yes" over this, has now left (NYT).
posted by jenfullmoon to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 9:58 AM
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There Is No AI Revolution.
posted by signal to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 7:00 PM
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Silicon Valley's Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions [ungated] - "The tech 'canon' of books and ideas over-indexes on great men and celebrates small teams that changed the world."
posted by kliuless to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 11:59 PM
28 users marked this as a favorite

Emotional labour is revisited by the You're Wrong About podcast - and MetaFilter gets some of the credit? blame? for the scope creep of the phrase due to the apparently still almost famous enough Emotional Labour Thread (around minute 31).
posted by warriorqueen to MetaFilter on Feb 22 at 11:35 AM
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Abbott & Costello perform their greatest routine one last time for a mass audience on The Steve Allen Show, October 7, 1956, to commemorate the induction of "Who's On First" into The Baseball Hall of Fame.
posted by Lemkin to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 4:28 PM
27 users marked this as a favorite

Sty Scraper is a simple game. Stack the random farmyard junk as high as possible on the platform. If anything falls, you lose. It looks fantastic, the physics are great, and it's fun to play. Enjoy!
posted by ambrosen to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 1:04 PM
26 users marked this as a favorite

Oak trees are some of the most important trees in the world. Watch as Dr. Andrew Hipp discusses his Oak research. Besides being the backbone of many of our forests, they also support as stunning array of insect life, animal and fungal life, and have also been key to humans since time began. There are a lot of oak species in North America. Some of them are among the oldest living things on the planet.
posted by stilgar to MetaFilter on Feb 23 at 1:58 PM
25 users marked this as a favorite

"Helen Nearing felt that she should be the last person on earth to write a cookbook, but she also felt intrigued. 'I am a library inebriate,' she said. 'I began spending long hours in the rare book room of the New York Public Library every time Scott and I were in New York. I made my way through the introductions of 14,000 old cookbooks to discover if I had anything new to say.' (Since she was strictly a salad and potatoes woman, few of the recipes interested her.) She decided that she did, and the goal of Simple Food for the Good Life became 'to simplify cooking to such a point that it would take less time to prepare a meal than to eat it'."
posted by Lemkin to MetaFilter on Feb 23 at 6:42 AM
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[more posts]

I still kind of find myself occasionally wondering what LLMs are actually supposed to be good for. Well, I was at a Joann's recently (RIP eventually) and their entire jigsaw puzzle section was AI generated. Every single last bloody puzzle. Like, obviously AI generated too, with the too-smooth gradients and nonsensical background elements... [more]
posted by fnerg to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 10:48 PM
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God I can’t stand Zitron, and the entire reason can be summed up in this one line: Because generative AI is OpenAI. Ed Zitron desperately needs this patently false statement to be true, and he will use all of the words and all of the anger to try and force it to be true - and he will feed your anger and your frustration with Microsoft,... [more]
posted by Ryvar to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 1:22 AM
56 users marked this as a favorite

This is all starting to seem like the collapse of the free press in Russia, with all the major media outlets under the ownership of pro-regime oligarchs. [view]
posted by Mr. Excellent to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 10:22 AM
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Precisely none of the money spent, gained, lost, or otherwise has been delivered to the pockets of the writers, artists, musicians, designers, academics, or even to the copyright holders, of the works that AI developers and their boosters have used to generate the corpus on which their code has been trained. The AI developers then expect... [more]
posted by prismatic7 to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 2:40 AM
56 users marked this as a favorite

I didn't cancel my subscription when that thing happened, or when that other thing happened, but I cancelled it today. [view]
posted by box to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 10:03 AM
55 users marked this as a favorite

I felt like I was cornered at a party by a guy who would not... stop... ranting about his pet peeve. I mean, this is Ed Zitron's regular beat. It does seem a little silly to complain about a guy who's widely-read, widely-published, and in general kind of an expert on the social and especially financial complexities of AI... [more]
posted by adrienneleigh to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 7:23 PM
52 users marked this as a favorite

Why would I want to change the ad algorithm to show me things that are LESS relevant to my life? Because privacy? Because the information they collect about you isn't just used for advertisements? Because the same people that collect this information are using it to destroy democracy by controlling what we see? Because Musk,... [more]
posted by RonButNotStupid to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 5:27 AM
50 users marked this as a favorite

Speaking as someone trying to do a bit of work since I'm forced into the office, and in possession of a manager who a) uses a clicky keyboard, and b) has never heard of the indoor voice, I think that XKCD 1601 remains relevant and correct. I'm actually somewhat sorry for the extroverts who can't imagine how anyone could ever possibly want a few... [more]
posted by sotonohito to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 8:31 AM
49 users marked this as a favorite

I know this almost sounds petty, but I swear there's something deeper here: his gaming setup is total shit. The dude is the single richest person on Earth. He claims to like gaming, and he might even be telling the truth since most nerdy people our age do. But he hasn't spent even a few thousand dollars on a decent gaming setup. Heck, he... [more]
posted by sotonohito to MetaFilter on Feb 22 at 12:35 PM
46 users marked this as a favorite

It's giving big all-speech-is-free-but-some-speech-is-more-free-than-others energy. [view]
posted by phunniemee to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 10:06 AM
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Why would I want to change the ad algorithm to show me things that are LESS relevant to my life? The way I see it, ads aren't just placed to sell you things, but to manipulate you in many ways, including politically. People in different demographics will have statistical vulnerabilities to specific manipulation strategies. Cutting off... [more]
posted by JHarris to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 5:24 AM
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Because we want this tactic TO MAKE THE FASH LESS MONEY [view]
posted by lalochezia to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 5:29 AM
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The article is optimistic. LLMs have a very important use. LLMs' primary innovation is to provide a thin justification for cutting wages and circumventing regulation. It's a political tool. Cutting wages: You fire writers and rehire them at lower salaries as editors of LLM slop. Nevermind that writing is editing and should be paid... [more]
posted by ftrtts to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 4:06 AM
39 users marked this as a favorite

People not understanding the significance of the LLM jazz simply do not understand how crappy application programming still is. My god is it a crock of shit, and has gotten worse and worse as the decades go by. Thank god LLMs haven't been trained on freely available crappy programming code. [view]
posted by Ickster to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 9:21 PM
37 users marked this as a favorite

There is an almost flippant reference to "Gender Trouble" in this episode, suggesting that it hit similar problems as the book that included the original "emotional labour" footnote. I suspect that this is specifically referring to the phrase "gender is performative", which can come across as saying "it's just... [more]
posted by rum-soaked space hobo to MetaFilter on Feb 22 at 4:08 PM
35 users marked this as a favorite

We bought a Nissan Leaf last year. Second-hand, but it was new to us, so our new Leaf. We call it Turnover. [view]
posted by Major Clanger to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 12:46 PM
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I forget, is this the paper that used to have the slogan "democracy dies in darkness"? Not so much a slogan as a mission statement. [view]
posted by Grangousier to MetaFilter on Feb 26 at 10:59 AM
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Ryvar, my reading of Zitron is more charitable than yours. Generative AI is OpenAI in the same sense that desktop computing is Microsoft. The open source community will indeed continue to be where the good stuff is at, and once again you have my heartfelt thanks for another valuable overview of what can be done now and... [more]
posted by flabdablet to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 4:34 AM
33 users marked this as a favorite

Seems kinda perverse to frame your AI model around an artist who is famously scrupulous about getting permission from the original creators whose work he interprets and builds on. Just saying. [view]
posted by saturday_morning to MetaFilter on Feb 25 at 11:52 AM
33 users marked this as a favorite

I don't trust financial analysis that includes the phrase "piss poor" not just once, but twice. Fine, "urine suboptimal," are you happy now? [view]
posted by axiom to MetaFilter on Feb 24 at 7:57 PM
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[more comments]