Real’s Math Ask Meme

Gandalf Big Naturals my beloved

Gentle hazing

This is your reminder that if you are feeling helpless and cannot be on the front lines, there are other ways to help.

People need to be fed. Check to see what your local food pantry situation is. Make hot meals for people you know have been out in the cold for hours on end. Emergency kits for field medics need to be supplied. People need help getting to the pharmacy, the grocery store. Help shovel your neighbor’s sidewalk if you’re able. Find a way to do something.

Build connections. Build community. They want us frightened and isolated. Refuse.

American liberals who consider themselves "socialists" or "leftists" are annoying, but american liberals who actively self-identify as liberals are some of the most ghoulish US empire defenders on the planet.

If someone self-describes as a "leftist" there's like an 85% chance that they're a liberal in denial and you're about to hear some annoying liberal shit. If someone openly self-describes as a liberal you're about to hear some of the most rancid politics a person is able to hold while somehow still considering themself "progressive"

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

[Image ID:

A pair of images of Brian David Gilbert with subtitles of what he is saying. In the first image, he has a guarded expression and is saying “And if you needed me to tell you that..”

In the second image he has a more pleasant expression and is saying “I’m glad I told you that.”

End ID]

look i'm not responding to this in post because it's too confidently stupid to bother changing anyone's mind but this is just. wrong. just some peak dunning kruger right here

Even if you accept an extremely favorable reading of this (statistical correlations are logic!!!) it doesn't change the fact that the poster is essentially declaring the entire field of interpretability a waste of time and effort without actually engaging with it which is (1) extremely uncurious at best, (2) wrong, and (3) pretty dangerous honestly

I think though that op is not talking about like. Experts in the field working on interpretability. They're talking about laypeople. "Everyone who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy nilly like this." I think it's true that there are laypeople who expect AI logic to look like their own logic and are trying to figure out what AI is doing the way you'd interact with another human person trying to understand their thought process. And I think it's reasonable to point out that what those people are looking for isn't going to be found. I don't think that has much to do with predicting where the field is interpretability is going. Mostly it's a comment about the lay person's understanding of AI, using the lay person's understanding of "logic."

Maybe there's something going on in whether that post was replying TO that provides context I'm not seeing for the perspective you have on this. But on its own it doesn't look terrible to me? Besides like, being in the vaguely condescending "I'm gonna learn you a thing" tone that's unfortunately common around here.

[Fictional character who is worse than me in every way] save me

#me with gob #me with shmilk

slogans for the upcoming orc election

viciously and fatally attacked by an unknown animal at Claire’s

that was no animal, that was Claire herself

the claire witch project

A whistleblower at the fascist DHS has released the names of 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol agents, providing an unprecedented means to monitor and counter their local presence

jordanzapatillas

I guess we have to retire the dilbert fucker comic now

Average Scarlet Hollow dev update is like: Hey everyone Tony and Abby here to let you all know that we're still working in the next chapter. The script is currently 280,000 words long (likely going to be at least 50,000 more by the next update) and the grand total is 1,500,000 words long. This is because we have to account for all the branching pathways that consider literally every little choice you make so we gotta consider what it's like for a comp-sci major living in an apartment with a cat (which they can talk to because of weird powers) that's just been cursed to be 10 years older to interact with a band of rats (which gives you a line of dialogue only maybe 0.1% of players will ever see). Abby has been hard at work drawing 86 new backgrounds and new 827 sprites (yes including the stuff for the gilf and various monster romance routes) and Brandon has made 15 new tracks of the most haunting music you've ever heard. We've been having lots of fun and hope you're all doing well with the wait!!

Sorry, eh

I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.

Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for most of this century, I still hew faithfully to our folkways, which is why I'd like to start this essay by apologizing.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry! I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies.

There is no way to operate one of Nvidia's big AI-optimized GPUs without losing money. The owners of these GPUs who have lost the least money are the ones who rushed into buying GPUs without ensuring they'd have electricity to power them, and have been forced to leave their GPUs to age in warehouses. The minute they plug in those GPUs, they'll start losing money, and the more they use them, the more money they'll lose.

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows.

I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

I don't have any advice for how to do that. I'm sorry!

As Canada contemplates our response to the collapse of the American empire and its alliances with the world, the cornerstone of our current strategy is sacrificing our dollars, water and energy in order to become more dependent on America, in a weird and improbable bet that we will figure out how to make millions of Canadians unemployed. I'm sorry, that just doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

If I can beg your indulgence, I'd like to propose an alternative.

Back in 2012, Canada passed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act. It's a law that bans Canadian companies from modifying America's digital tech exports. We passed it because the US threatened us with tariffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't sell jailbreaking kits for phones and consoles, which would let Canadian sellers offer goods and services to Canadian buyers outside of US app stores, sidestepping the 30% app tax that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony and others impose on our digital economy.

it's only when you block tracking cookies that you realise how truly wild the internet is

the internet: I see you have just bought a new phone case. here are 6000 other phone cases you might want.

user: this is creepy, I'm getting a privacy add-on

the internet: since I now have no idea what you like, here's Wreck-It Ralph-themed fetish gear

Recently got an add for a job as a lighthouse keeper on the coasts of Ireland