Subjecting memes to vigorous peer review

Feel like there's another 5 levels at least beyond, topping out at "I have had a Michelin star". But I very much doubt that anyone with a Michelin star is on Tumblr.

I think there is something wrong with the scale because I can do 2 and 4 but not 3.

people tend to frame the whole yahoo acquisition and later sale of tumblr as 'yahoo destroyed a billion dollars of tumblr value' but i think this doesn't make a lot of sense. sometimes equivocating between price and value can be a reasonable approximation but this is not really one of those cases?

yahoo thought tumblr was worth a billion dollars, presumably in expectation that they could turn it around and make it profitable, and eventually realised they couldn't. you might argue that some value was destroyed by yahoo's management, but mostly it was never there. the difference in price tells you more about yahoo's (later verizon's) state of mind at different times than anything about tumblr itself

I've never seen this interpretation. I always understood it to be Yahoo wildly overestimating the value of Tumblr.

Tucker Carlsen is going to be replaced by some other awful person, just as he replaced Bill O'Reilly, so I don't expect his firing to have a major positive effect on US domestic politics. On the other hand, his exit actually is a huge boon to Ukraine/blow to Russia, because his Russia-apologism was genuinely unusual (aside from Trump) and not widely shared.

Russia's propagandists know it, too, and have been hilariously butthurt about it in the past couple days.

Seen this take elsewhere but I'm not sure who else has both the ability and discount Daily Stormer talking points, they're either gonna be stuck with someone too slimy or some Hannity-equivalent who lacks some of his nastier parts.

I know you like to present yourself as serious, and supposedly this criticism of yours of Tucker is serious, but "discount daily stormer talking points" is a fair criticism of people platformed by essentially every major news organization in the United States.

Tucker is a character a lot of the time in how he talks on the air. He's a bit different in interviews. But the very fact these people think Tucker was like THE MOST awful thing to happen every is actually mind numbing. The man is moderate. It's really not that hard to see that. Hell I'm pretty sure he used to vote democrat.

"Tucker Carlsen is moderate" is an excellent example of the sort of thing I was talking about when I said that I was drastically reducing my threshold for blocking people for stupidity and/or bad faith.

Absolutely insane that people put smartphones as their preferred method for doing *anything*. It's a device for using when you aren't at home and don't have access to bigger screens and keyboards. It took me 3 times as long to type this post out here on my phone than it would have if I were home now with computer or tablet.

If you murder a mentally ill person in public, the National Police Association will promote a fundraiser for you

The National Police Association is just so big into murdering Black people in public that they will go on the line for you even if you're not a cop.

His father *is* a retired police captain.

Civilization was not developed to produce food for people. It is specifically the organizational processes of limiting access to abundance as a means of social and ecological hegemonic dominance. Hope this helps :)

This serves fairly well as an example with the errors common in discussion of more modern technology, by showing them at their root, where they are the most clearly wrong. It is an idealist error, one which almost directly reverses cause and effect.

In reality, of course, the development of agriculture *did* facilitate social control - precisely *because* it produced food for people better than the previous mode of production did. The specific fact that agriculture produced food more reliably than hunter-gathering is why it afforded a measure of social control. If it did not, then it would not afford any social control, as it could simply be ignored - if there really *was* abundant food, then a new method of producing food would not be socially relevant. Social power does not spring out of thin air, it is not simply the result of Greedy People. It can only be brought about by material imbalance. New modes of production, new technologies, can create social power - but only insofar as they are materially useful enough to grant those who control them social power.

This is the key point that been a consistent issue with opponents of historical materialism - the material basis of specific social systems is in the fact that, despite resigning their oppressed classes to worse *relative* lives, they do improve their *objective* lives. The conflation of relative social standing with objective prosperity leads to absurd positions, like the idea that hunter-gatherer production was relaxed and abundant, or that subsistence farming was some cottagecore fantasy, or a hundred misunderstandings of what 'progressive' implies in a historical sense. It also leads to luddism; to attempts to fight against new technologies themselves due to their facilitation of deepening exploitation, while ignoring the ways they objectively improve standards of living. Fundamentally: any political program that *explicitly aims to reduce the objective standards of living of the people* is working against the people's interests, and will not receive their support. This is as true of luddism as it is primitivism, accelerationism, or any other 'some of you may die, but that's a risk that I am willing to take' tendency.

Fundamentally, historical materialism is the analytical framework that corresponds to real-world practice - it is the only one that actually *works*. And historical materialism is clear - it is methods of production that principally lead to the development of social systems, not the reverse. I'd say it's putting the cart before the horse, but maybe that's too high-tech.

A hard zero for me.

One for me. AKA "Old fuck"

Divine voice "I have done everything"

(Also the fact that "owned a dictionary" is on here at all explains a lot I think, plz get a dictionary you need one trust me)

Hello! My name is Francesca Y. Kramer.

You may remember me from my Tumblr blog that, over the course of the past decade, went through names such as @ranma-official, @genderfluid-ranma, @fleshfleshfleshflesh and others.

My previous account was banned due to malicious reports, and it is unlikely that I will ever get it back: hence, this is my new blog.

I will try and recover and repost some of the effortposts I've written there over the years, but the drafts are, unfortunately, lost forever.

In either case, please give me a follow and a signal boost!

(I am also a political refugee that was forced to flee the Russian Federation due to my anti-war activism and queer identity, and so my financial status is dire: if you can offer me any job at all, or can recommend to anyone who does, please contact me!)

Musk mars plans put on hold after discussion with bluecheck flat earth twitter poster, "Very interesting, will look into this" he replies.

But why go for mars when we can colonize the continents beyond the ice wall? Mr Musk have you heard this?

Can we please not portray Elon as stupid in an endearing way on a day when he has been "just asking questions"ing various fascist conspiracy theories?

Not to be anti-union on main but the ai related demands of the writers strike are dumb. Automation will come for us all and this is good actually, like, for society. Obv they're allowed to want to keep their jobs but you can't expect stop progress forever.

The AI demands are dumb but only a small part of WGA's demands. If you see a lot of coverage of them in the media, it's because the AI stuff is new and interesting, whereas the yet another dispute over rates for online streaming is not.

I encourage you, or anyone interested, to check out the general statement of the demands:

Or the detailed proposal:

I don't even think the AI demands are dumb at all. "progress comes for us all" is such a trite line, a thought-stopper that ignores what's actually happening. I'm not saying AI will NEVER replace the human spark, because it doesn't need to in order to be a harm to human labor. Writers get paid less if they're adapting source material, like a novel or a nonfiction book, or working on original material. One demand is to not use AI output as 'source material,' even if the output is so bad (as it often is with AI currently) that the writer pretty much has to chuck it out and start fresh. It's a trick that could be pulled by producers when they want to pay less for the same work. And the producers' counterproposal was "annual meetings to discuss technology" which does... what? "progress comes for us all" gtfo with this shit. I am a tech worker. I am a programmer. I have explained my code (at my boss's request) to my construction-worker coworkers who stared blankly at simple Python. I taught myself to code and have counted my success in number of work-hours replaced with automation. I am not a Luddite. Where AI has promise, I look forward to it helping and adding to our social capacity. But y'all have GOT to recognize when AI, shit crap useless AI, is being used to disadvantage workers who still have to do the same amount of work, for less money, because of a boss's trick. And not sneer at workers who are trying to keep capital from fucking them over. It's not remotely stupid, you're just ignorant and unthinking, exactly what capital would love you to be.

If writers want to get paid fairly for their currently unautomatable work (rewriting ai scripts) then whatever i don't really have a problem with that. But that's not what they're asking for, they're asking for no ai. Like, I am also a programmer but i don't go around being mad about like, compilers, even though they automate a part of my job, because doing so would be dumb. It's dumb to waste human effort on things a machine can do! We as a society should not support and enable this!

The counterproposal is not within the scope of my complaint (though i do agree it is stupid) so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up.

And re thought terminating cliches "exactly what capital would want us to be" is... what exactly? Also, I said automation comes for us all, so idk who is thoughtless here.

I am not talking about things like compilers! My mother wrote compilers, they're a vital part of the job like a paving machine to a road crew. My Python needs to be compiled and interpreted to be run. My POINT is that people with capital, who are hiring labor, have a habit of using excuses and little tricks to get the same labor for less money, and one reason the AI ban is in the WGA demands is that. Same as the end to unlimited 'free changes'. The counterproposal I brought up because it shows that the producers absolutely plan to foist AI-written books, even if they're completely unreadable, off on scriptwriters as 'original material' so the writers are doing an 'adaptation' not original material, so they get paid less. This isn't a new machine that's going to save effort, it's using a facade to get the same work out of the same people and act like it's less work, so less pay.

Like I said, if writers want to be paid fairly for their unautomatable work then fine, sure. You don't have to keep spelling out the examples because I already agree. However, they are not demanding this, they are demanding no ai. If they want to be paid more for their ai interfacing work (again! something i do not really have a problem with!) then they should ask for that specifically instead of writing in a contract that they are irreplaceable when they clearly won't be for long.

And my point is that the WGA, the people who actually have to deal with the producers, see AI as something that is used to reduce the cost of the non-automatable parts of the job, and then lie about it. If the WGA wants a full AI ban, in contract, not in legislation, then that makes a lot of sense right now, while the capabilities and legal implications of AI are still unsure. (For example, what happens if an AI's training data is legally considered a copyright violation? Who gets the liability, the writer or the producer?) They can renegotiate when the next contract comes around, once that's more set. I'm sorry if that's cold water on your techno-fetishism. But if the WGA (and the 90+% of its memberships who voted for the strike!) thinks the producers cannot be trusted to deal fairly with AI yet, that should weigh more than your disappointment.

It's not my disappointment, that's the point. It's a cost to society to not automate things that could be automated. We would all pay for things we don't have to, a waste.

Since i think you missed the point about compilers, like, if the assembly programmers union decided to demand no compilers because, idk, compiler output sucks and they have to rewrite it, something they're for whatever reason they're not paid for, i would say the same thing. You should be paid for your work but fuck off with this no compiler shit. Id say that even if compilers were currently useless because why block off a direction of advance. Even if they could renegotiate it, why create friction in the way of improvement.

Like yes, it is in the writers self interest to want to ban ai, everyone wants their job forever and also a pony. But their interest is not necessarily aligned with that of society as a whole. I don't have to support them just because they all agree amongst themselves.

If the writers don't believe the producers can be trusted to stick to hypothetical ai rules (see, pay them) then idk what the point of the strike is because why trust the producers with anything. If agreement is impossible why not give up.

the purpose of unions is to advocate for the interests of workers in an industry.

they exist within the correct assumption that various other forces exist which have other purposes.

whether it is good or bad or inevitable that AI (present or hypothetical future technologies) be involved in the writing process (of Hollywood movies or anything else) is totally orthogonal here.

Hollywood bosses do not want to use it because they think it would be better or do just as good a job (even if they believe this), they want to use it to reduce personnel costs and maximise profits.

Writers do not want to stop it being used become they think many of the ways it is likely to be used would make art worse (even if they believe this, and even if it is true, which it currently is), they want to not be fired or paid less.

I dont think most workers in their industry receive anything like the share of the profits of the production that they deserve currently, and i don’t want their bosses to capture more of it and increase their wealth inequality, so i support the workers.

I think it is perfectly coherent support the writers on streaming residuals and not support restrictions on AI.

I support people who make artisanal candles being paid a fair wage for the product of their labor; I do not support banning electricity because it would raise the wages of candle-makers.

The questions "what should a WGA lawyer ask for as their reach demands" and "what should I as a member of society support" are different questions.