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what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?

would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?

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All of my friends that work at wildlife rehab centers have had to untangle animals from this stuff, or had animals brought in that died in it. This is especially nasty for small owl species.

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Not to wade into the discourse but. Reminder that if you're American and not Muslim or Jewish you've been surrounded with both antisemitism and anti-Arab sentiment constantly for your whole life. It's like the air you breathe. Remember to try to unpack that before commenting on certain foreign events

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Ch😵

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weeeeeee

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“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next — if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions — you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.”

— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

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Boop the snoot for 10 years of good luck! 🍀🐾

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Happy Juneteenth Tumblr✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽✊🏼

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When I talk about capitalism, one of the things I hear the most is “capitalism breeds innovation” and that’s true. In order to be competitive, companies have to innovate. The problem is that what they’re competing for is the biggest profit margin. Which means they’re not incentivized to make innovative products, they’re incentivized to come up with innovative ways of manipulating consumers and exploiting workers. Think about it this way: addictive social media algorithms are a capitalist innovation. Exploiting undocumented immigrants is a capitalist innovation. Fast fashion is a capitalist innovation. All of these companies that exploit workers and consumers aren’t cruel for the sake of cruelty, they’re just doing exactly what they’re expected to do under a system of capitalism: finding innovative ways to expand their profit margin, no matter the consequence.

So yes, capitalism breeds innovation, but it’s not the kind of innovation we should be proud of.

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"Science rewards people who disprove it. Religion calls them heretics and, some times kills them. This is why science is better."

Only religious ideas need to be protected with threats. Which is a reliable indicator of truth.

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Freedom is beautiful

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ELIZA was a simple program, launched in 1966, that looked for keywords like “mother” and echoed back “How do you feel about your mother?” If it didn’t find the keywords, it echoed back bland phrases like “Tell me more.”

Ironically, though [MIT computer scientist Joseph] Weizenbaum had designed ELIZA to demonstrate how superficial the state of human-to-machine conversation was, it had the opposite effect. People were entranced, engaging in long, deep, and private conversations with a program that was only capable of reflecting users’ words back to them. Weizenbaum was so disturbed by the public response that he spent the rest of his life warning against the perils of letting computers — and, by extension, the field of AI he helped launch — play too large a role in society.

Chatbots today operate on the same principles as ELIZA, but are far more sophisticated, making it more likely that users will trick themselves into believing chatbots are people. And Americans today are in the midsts of an epidemic of loneliness.

To Michael Sacasas, an independent scholar of technology and author of The Convivial Society newsletter, this is cause for concern above and beyond Weizenbaum’s warnings. “We anthropomorphize because we do not want to be alone,” Sacasas recently wrote. “Now we have powerful technologies, which appear to be finely calibrated to exploit this core human desire.”

The lonelier we get, the more exploitable by these technologies we become. “When these convincing chatbots become as commonplace as the search bar on a browser,” Sacases continues, “we will have launched a social-psychological experiment on a grand scale which will yield unpredictable and possibly tragic results.”

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