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The core query softness continues without mitigation
Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.
Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019 [more inside]
Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019 [more inside]
"Not-pleasant! I am causing you not-pleasant!"
The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:
I express greetings and most joyful salutations!
I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!
That vast, astonishing, multiplicity of vision
“So when I started working on the story that turned into All Systems Red, I realized right away I wanted to write an AI that didn't want to be human…I was thinking a lot about what an AI would actually want, as opposed to what a human might think an AI would want…. I think it would want that connection to other systems, that vast, astonishing, multiplicity of vision.”—Martha Wells, from her keynote speech at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico.
☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡 It was like fireworks. ☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡
It is the late 1800s. You are an innovative fireworks manufacturer in Yokohama, Japan, with an increasingly international audience (including, on at least one occasion, Ulysses S. Grant). But how to demonstrate to your worldwide customers what, exactly, you have on offer? Introducing the beautifully minimalist Hirayama Fireworks' Illustrated Catalog of Night Bomb Shells. [more inside]
Simply put, there is a *ton* of fascist-chic cosplay involved
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” [...] “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said [last October], after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts.TNR: The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco: "If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay." [more inside]
By Amun, it's full of stars
Enclosed within its rugged mud brick walls the temple precincts at Dendera seem to be an island left untouched by time. Particularly in the early hours of the morning, when foxes roam around the ruins of the birth house or venture down the steep stairs leading to the Sacred Lake. Stepping into the actual temple is like entering an ancient time machine, especially if you look up to the recently cleaned astronomical ceiling. This is a vast cosmos filled with stars, hour-goddesses and zodiac signs, many of which are personified by weird creatures like snakes walking on long legs and birds with human arms and jackal heads. On the columns just below the ceiling you encounter the mysterious gaze of the patron deity of the temple: Hathor.It might not have the iconic status of Giza or the Valley of the Kings, but the Dendera temple complex north of Luxor boasts some of the most superbly-preserved ancient Egyptian art known, ranging from early Roman times back to the Middle Kingdom period over 4,000 years ago. Most breathtaking is the ceiling of the temple's grand pronaos, which is richly decorated with intricate astrological iconography. But you don't have to travel to Egypt to see it -- thanks to photographer and programmer José María Barrera [site], you can now peruse an ultra-HD scan of the fully-restored masterpiece in a slick zoomable scroller. Overwhelmed? See the captions in this gallery for a deep-dive into the symbolism, or click inside for even more. [more inside]
Twilight of the phenomenally talented assholes
Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement. “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company.Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane [The American Prospect] [more inside]
“members of the Voyager flight team celebrate”
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth reports NASA. After pinpointing the issue with the space probe, the mission team have devised a workaround. Previously, previouslier, many more previouslies.
A Free Download Now and Forever
“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is now available as a free download! Written by Christopher Schwarz and first published in June 2011, “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is revered by many as a philosophical tome as well as a how-to book. The book includes instructions for building your own tool chest, as demonstrated here by MetaFilter's Own™ and JimCoin™ creator bondcliff!
The Scientist of the Soul
The materialist world view is often associated with despair. In “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the novel’s hero, stares into the night sky, reflects upon his brief, bubblelike existence in an infinite and indifferent universe, and contemplates suicide. For Dennett, however, materialism is spiritually satisfying. [...] “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” Dennett writes, is that Bach’s music, Christianity, human culture, the human mind, and Homo sapiens “all exist as fruits of a single tree, the Tree of Life,” which “created itself, not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly.” He asks, “Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not.” But, he says, it is “greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. . . . I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.”Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82 [more inside]
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
You could call them “sky flowers,” but that doesn’t really make sense either—after all, the faded blue behind each squiggle is water, not sky, and the squiggles themselves don’t represent solid objects in any tangible, meaningful way. But they look right. The reds and greens and yellows add life and color in a way that a flat blue might not. Those odd shapes, suspended motionless with no clear reason or value, establish a tone. There are a lot of things that don’t make sense on SpongeBob SquarePants. But there’s a clear and coherent vision that runs through the entire show, from the design of SpongeBob’s kitchen-sponge body down to the squeaky-balloon sound of his footsteps. It’s a perspective, and a warm, specific, crazy little world. Of course it has sky flowers in it. What else would be up there?Today marks 25 years since the original broadcast of "Help Wanted" -- the pilot episode of marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg's educational comic that became a delightful romp of "relentless optimism and fundamental sweetness", a hothouse flower of inventive and absurdist imagination, a cultural touchstone for multiple generations, and one of the most iconic and beloved animated franchises of the 21st century. Are you ready, kids? [more inside]
Slowly, inch by inch, choice by choice, our stuff gets cheapened
The Problem with Adam Savage's Favorite Pencil: Former Mythbuster and MeFi's Own asavage goes on a surprisingly emotional tear about tool acquisition in the maker space, Blackwing 602s, Jeff Tweedy's pencil nerdery (🔔), and the "encheapening the product to increasening the profit" that has befallen his beloved PaperMate Sharpwriter #2. (It's not really about pencils.) [more inside]
Restoring an ugly hill into an ecosystem
They pooled their money to buy an ugly hill. Twenty years later, they're calling it paradise. A group of friends, dismayed about climate change, bought the most degraded piece of farmland they could find. Not to live on, or to make money from, but to transform into the bushland it once was. [more inside]
Mary Poppins had more magic than you know
The folks at Corridor Crew recently reached back sixty years to recreate a truly wonderous piece of special effects technology that was thought to be long lost.
The Black Sun of Democracy
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is arguably one of the oldest continuously functioning democracies in the world, and greatly influenced the thinking of the founders of the United States. This post is about the argument over just how old it is, why that matters, and what eclipses have to do with it. [more inside]
Revolution in Tennessee
The NLRB announced tonight that UAW won a historic union election at Volkswagen in Chattanooga Tennessee. The union won by a margin of more than 70% as votes [continued] to be counted. With labor shortages throughout the manufacturing sector, many of the workers hired by Volkswagen were much younger and more diverse. Some had even moved from more pro-union parts of the country to work there.
“It’s a totally different ball game,” [Renee Berry] said. “The atmosphere is different. You see more pro-union than anti-union [workers]. A whole lot of people who were anti-union in the past have switched.”
“Anything about us, without us, is against us.”
There are clear continuities between the two German genocides. Many of the key elements of the Nazi system – the systematic extermination of peoples seen as racially inferior, racial laws, the concept of Lebensraum, the transportation of people in cattle trucks for forced labour in concentration camps – had been employed half a century earlier in South-West Africa. Heinrich Göring, the colonial governor of South-West Africa who tried to negotiate with Hendrik Witbooi, was Hermann Göring’s father.–From the essay Three Genocides by forensic architect Eyal Weizman.
The Cloud Under The Sea: the ships that repair undersea cables
The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. [more inside]
“I still wanted to help. But I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
The Deaths of Effective Altruism [archive] by Leif Wenar is a critical assessment of the effective altruism movement, taking in Sam Bankman-Fried and billionaires, Peter Singer and other philosophers, and GiveWell and the wider network of charities working off effective altruistic ideas.