Fullerton Beardt

When AOL and Prodigy started taking off in the early 90s, our neighbor bought a bunch of cement slab and busted it up and sold it online as "Real Pieces of the Berlin Wall" and "Real Pieces of the Great Wall of China" and that guy realized what the internet was gonna be before everyone else

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Fullerton Beardt

I can't remember a tech campaign this relentless.

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Fullerton Beardt

The Federal Trade Commission, of all entities, is out here writing absolute bangers about AI snake oil. www.ftc.gov/business-gui...

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Fullerton Beardt

one thing i feel the need to add about the llm/ai hype from vcs and ceos, outside of the usual cash grab notices is that you need to understand that execs already engage with creative work by sending prompts and issuing corrections, to them, ai is not having to wait for the humans they already use

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Fullerton Beardt

i just want zoomers to know that computers were actually useful once. before the iphone/ipad/android/chromebook, computers ran software that was just like a program that did what it was supposed to do. also the internet used to have a lot of cool stuff on it that didn't give you an anxiety disorder

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Fullerton Beardt

the CDC is again trying to limit the 2024-25 booster availability to provably immunocompromised and elderly people. they’re taking written comments through the 17th. please take a minute to let them know boosters should be available to all who want them: www.regulations.gov/commenton/CD...

Regulations.govwww.regulations.gov

Make a milder Ferris Bueller's Afternoon Quiet Quitting

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Fullerton Beardt

"Bullshit" is an actual technical term in philosophy. We have papers on it. You have my permission to start using "bullshit" for the garbage generative algorithms produce. I'm partial to "Epistemic Fuckery," myself.

"Calling their mistakes 'hallucinations' isn’t harmless: it lends itself to the confusion that the machines are in some way misperceiving but are nonetheless trying to convey something that they believe or have perceived."

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Fullerton Beardt

Every time I see "AI" being crammed into another consumer product I think of how in the 50s we put radium in suppositories because "the atom" was the snakeoil hype of the moment

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Fullerton Beardt

I always win this because it was a cd of NIN's Downward Spiral.

Do you remember the first music album you bought with your own money?

I think this is it. Much like postal mail, it's just ads and little books of ads, postcards and letters "dear sir/madam you are entitled to..." Junk mail.

They made websites unusable so they could cram in more ads. Then they laid off the writers who made the content you would endure the ads to read. So now websites are just a dead mall serving ads to nobody, if I am understanding this correctly.

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Fullerton Beardt

It’s not just that the jurors have to fear Trump’s deranged followers. They also just convicted someone who may have the full resources of the US national security state at his disposal in less than a year. Real bravery.

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Fullerton Beardt

they should make a summer that isn't hotter than the one before

Tiny desk is MTV unplugged but like more fun.

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Fullerton Beardt

Google, 1998: Don't be evil. Google 2024: Clean your toilet with chlorine gas, I don't give a shit

Google, 1998: We're going to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Imagine the whole world's knowledge in your pocket! Google 2024: Drink your own piss. Now eat glue.

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Fullerton Beardt

The phrase, “if multiple fucksmiths work together we can salt the fucking Earth for AI” is going to be lingering in my head for the foreseeable future.

I guess after a while they’ll be able to detect that “glue” is an outlier in conversations about cheese source and fix this instance, but if multiple fucksmiths work together we can salt the fucking Earth for AI

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Fullerton Beardt

“Don’t trust everything you read on the internet.” AI search results: what if I did tho

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Fullerton Beardt

Anecdotally, on many of the short (~1 to 2 hour) flights I've taken recently, flight attendants have suspended, or foregone beverage service altogether, due to turbulence. The seatbelt sign is on for most of the flight; not even enough time to use the lavatory.

Between airports on coastal plains being flooded, increased clear-air turbulence, and the doubling of hurricanes, the world that jets made smaller is well on its way to growing large again.

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Fullerton Beardt

Reply to

Michael Tae Sweeney

learning buffet restaurants apparently mastered safe ventilation practices makes me feel like when we all learned the texas grocery chain HEB had a more detailed pandemic supply chain plan than the feds bsky.app/profile/publ...

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Fullerton Beardt

It's OK to be against AI. You are not going against the inevitable march of progress. What technologies get adopted is up to us. Think of renewables. If progress and profit were sole drivers, then we'd have long switched to them. But fossil fuel lobbyists prevent this. There is no inevitability.

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Fullerton Beardt

back in my day we called this spyware

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Fullerton Beardt

Johns Hopkins is doing a long-COVID survey and apparently is having trouble finding controls -- people who haven't had COVID. If this is you, consider giving them some clicks. @violetblue.bsky.social thought you may want to boost. covid-long.com

Johns Hopkins COVID Long Studycovid-long.com The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is conducting research about the COVID-19 pandemic. Participate in this one-time, 10-15 minute survey.

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Fullerton Beardt

Yike.

UNC Chapel Hill bureaucrats secretly record professors' classes, without notice or consent, "using the existing Panopto camera in the classroom" to investigate "reports concerning class content and conduct"

Letter says UNC Chapel Hill secretly records professorswww.insidehighered.com A business school professor was startled to learn that the university had recorded his classes as part of a ‘review’ he didn’t know about. The university says it has no formal policy on filming classe...

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Fullerton Beardt

New report from Pew finds 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. This research underscores how critical web archiving efforts are. www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

When Online Content Disappearswww.pewresearch.org A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.

Watching x files. Not sure I could resist Scully's intense questioning. Just great stuff.

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Fullerton Beardt

#NEVERFORGET

All this talk of debates has reminded me that Trump knowingly tried to kill Biden with Covid at their 2020 debate. www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

Trump tested positive for Covid three days before debating Biden, subsequently tested negativewww.nbcnews.com Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed the pre-debate positive test in a new book, which Trump said was “fake news.”

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Fullerton Beardt

It's a bit like the "multiculturalism" panic of the late ’80s and early ’90s. when reactionaries pushed back by insisting that the American melting pot required assimilation — which any ackowledgelent of diversity compromised. Except this time, at gunpoint.

More unity via funding the police instead of inclusion programs lays bare exactly what “togetherness” means and how it is to be achieved.