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Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

26 Mar

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Dreaming and overfitting; Dirty NYPD cops can't lose; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/ove…

#Pluralistic

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1375460649598287881

Dreaming and overfitting: The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis has a lot of explanatory power.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1375460649598287881

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1375468062191677440

Dirty NYPD cops can't lose: The secret legal defense fund for the indefensible.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1375468062191677440

Read 17 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

26 Mar

The NYPD is a notoriously corrupt institution, whose indiscriminate acts of violence and murder have steadily worsened for decades. A powerful police union and a cowed City Hall ensure that even the worst cops rarely have any kind of reckoning.

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@propublica

After a series of legal wrangles - a New York state law, a lawsuit by the police union, and @propublica's brave decision to publish - we finally got a glimpse at the buried horrors in the NYPD disciplinary files.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/…

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We also learned about the impunity enjoyed by dirty cops, including the cops who were caught on camera breaking the law to brutalize and maim protesters in last summer's #BLM uprising.

pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/new…

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Read 13 tweets

Cory Doctorow

@doctorow

26 Mar

I'm not the first person to note that our understanding of ourselves and our society is heavily influenced by technological change - think of how we analogized biological and social functions to clockwork, then steam engines, then computers.

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I used to think that this was just a way of understanding how we get stuff hilariously wrong - think of Taylor's Scientific Management, how its grounding in mechanical systems inflicted such cruelty on workers whom Taylor demanded ape those mechanisms.

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But just as interesting is how our technological metaphors illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our society: because there ARE ways in which clockwork, steam power and digital computers resemble bodies and social structures.

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Read 22 tweets