I am begging people (and now, apparently, the NYT) to understand how chatbots actually work. They are not alive, they are word prediction machines. If they weren't sold to us as "AI" you wouldn't be so dang credulous

https://twitter.com/linwood_barclay/status/1626194755297153025

This one is especially annoying because the article isn't ACTUALLY saying that, it's just saying "oh hey, here's a transcript! It claims its alive and loves me! Well, let's all draw our own conclusions, please enjoy!"

If you're wondering what's going on in Toronto politics, our Mayor came out on Friday and resigned in disgrace, but he only SAID "I resign" at the press conference and didn't actually WRITE "I resign" down on paper and now he wants to stick around for a few days and maybe forever The reason this probably strikes you as annoying is that saying something like "I resign" is generally considered to be what's called a "speech act" - something that does what it's saying as you say it. The president saying "I declare war" is another.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act

In the 90s, AOL tried to build their own walled garden, where everything worth seeing was inside AOL and the rest of the internet was as an afterthought, something less than the wonders only AOL itself offered. Even then, you could still email non-AOL addresses. Anyway, it failed The value of social networks, as @doctorow says, is people you like are here. If they leave, you're going to leave too - so social networks try to make it as costly as possible to leave. Now Twitter's trying to make it so leaving means you disappear, with no forwarding address

Sad that Squirrel Girl has ended? Don't worry, #dalle has your back with these AI generated covers for Squirrel Girl #376!

ALL HAIL GARRIL SUARREL #Dalle also generated the previous issue of Squirrel Girl, #374, which had a whole bunch of Edward Gorey variant covers :0

ALL HAIL SQLLEY GUEREY, the Glareal of Slath

People in MLMs are all, "It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a reverse funnel system!"

"It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a chain referral plan!"

"It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a scheme inspired by a platonic solid that was once covered in a white limestone casing circa 2600 BCE!" I may have told this story before, but we banned advertising any pyramid schemes or MLMs on Project Wonderful, which led to tons of people explaining to us why THEIR scheme was different. The most memorable was one poor lady who started CCing the person above her in the scheme

A TWITTER THREAD ON DELETING YOUR TWEETS, INCLUDING MOTIVATIONS FOR DOING SO AND BEST PRACTICES

by me

Ryan

A Guy Who Just Deleted Some But Not All Of His Tweets So why would you want to do this? There's the practical reason (people dig up old tweets, sometimes taking them out of context, sometimes not, and use them to destroy your life) and the more societal one (do we really need dashed-off thoughts from more than a decade ago around?)

I saw this on tumblr and declare it canon. The comment is speculation but the post is canon Please enjoy this image of a Facebook post taken from tumblr and now posted to Twitter, oddly with privacy maintained, without jpg artifacting, and no minion gifs added. I'll try harder next time

I'm not a fan of the "if we flatten the curve on COVID-19 and stop catastrophe, then our efforts will seem like an overreaction, just like y2k" thing, because y2k predictions in the media WERE an overreaction with planes falling from the skies and ATMs spitting out money, etc. That was never going to happen, and journalists then simply didn't understand the nuance of how code fails. But the bad stuff predictions *now* are just what's already happening in Iran and China! So y2k, media-wise, feels like a misleading comparison. This threat is real.

A thread rating every dog emoji 🐕 APPLE:
- paw raised and alert ears suggest a dog of action
- hint of a smile on the dog's face is too subtle. am i imagining it? possessed eyes may be throwing me
WHICH REMINDS ME:
- white specular highlight in eye is right in the middle which makes this dog look PoSsEsSeD

Here's the story of how I almost died when I was 24. It was 2004, and I was living alone. I'd had bought a lava lamp years ago, moving it from place to place but never really plugging it in. This morning, I finally decided to plug it in... only to discover that the bulb had burned out.