I have to confess “your web browser’s assistive AI can be instructed to steal your online banking password via prompt injection because it operates with full privileges and treats all text it ingests as equally authoritative sources of user instructions, including the text of web pages it’s summarising” is more surprising to me than it should have been. There really is no one involved at any point in the development of these tools who actually understands what they’re doing, huh?
“Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism, and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Proctor and Gamble, US Steel, and Monsanto. The center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programs the King Center runs have been projects that “work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others.” It cosponsored the Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Series called “The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Nonviolent Social Change.”
— Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy (via rikodeine)
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
— The State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“It’s photoshopped” honestly in the age of AI that has a homey sort of nostalgia to it. Remember when people used to put effort into faking things?
oh gurl, you don’t know the half of it. I remember 90s tabloid with headline my new neighbour is from Chernobyl and her baby has a tail! It was a poorly assembled collage of a baby’s body with an ape’s face and a lemur’s tail all xeroxed into -100 contrast, people put effort of cutting clippings (granted with a rusty pair of scissors) but it counts
I know the bubonic plague comment was in jest (as sarcasm) but the Black Death has never actually been eradicated and that is actually a very distinct (albeit potentially distant) possibility.
I can clearly remember the moment I first realised my mother and I were living on completely different planes of existence. I was 7 years old and I came home from my school’s first track and field day having placed second or third in every event. the teachers had been making jokes all afternoon about how many times they had to call my name. my friends thought I was cool as shit. my enemies thought I was cool as shit too, come to think of it. I was proud as hell. so I get home with the entire front of my shirt covered in ribbons like I was a military dictator who’d awarded himself every medal, I walk into the kitchen and tell my mum all about my day, and she goes “oh, that must be disappointing not getting any firsts.” and I’m like no?? first of all the first place ribbons are red and I don’t like red. second of all look at me. there’s literally nowhere left on my body for accolades. I am fucking Jacked of All Trades. how could this possibly be a disappointment.
Elephants eat 300+ pounds of foliage a day so they’re almost always moving and grazing in their waking hours but they will stop if another elephant cannot walk. They’re known to try to pick up the fallen elephant and stand and wait for them to remain enough strength to rise and walk if the elephant is injured or ill. Some Asian elephants reportedly guide injured wild elephants back to humans for help. I can’t help but think about adage attributed to Margaret Mead, first sign of civilization is a healed human femur. We know Neanderthals cared for the individuals in their community because there are archeological finds of Neanderthals with disabilities and healed major injuries that would have required the group assisting the individual to eat and drink during their recovery, instead of seeing the injured or disabled Neanderthal as a waste of resources, they valued them as an individual and were willing to put work into their recovery and survival. Elephants seem to view members of their species in the same way but due to their anatomy and cognition, they have a harder time rendering medical aid themselves, though they want to help.
