#interfac

[prokopetz]

Okay, so: there's a local restaurant whose online ordering process involves various selecting various sauces to be included with one's order – so many units of teriyaki sauce, so many units of hot sauce, so may units of peanut sauce, and so forth.

The idea is supposed to be that you can select any combination of sauces you want, as long as it adds up to no more than four units. However, what the app actually required is that you select exactly four units of sauces; it wouldn't let you submit the ordering form if the total wasn't exactly four.

Just today I discovered that they seem to have fixed it... not by correcting the errant validation rule, but by adding a "no sauce" option, which counts toward the required total of four.

Thus, it's now possible to place an order with, say, two units of teriyaki sauce rather than four by entering 2x "teriyaki sauce" and 2x "no sauce". Similarly, an order with no sauce at all is 4x "no sauce".

This is quite possibly the least intuitive ordering process I've ever encountered, and I've literally worked in e-commerce.

[unbossed]

My favorite new feature on the app is the one that pops one of these notifications up whenever I reblog something with an image in it. I find it especially charming that they stack up and don't go away on their own.

[stitchposts]

BOOP

[scipunk]

Alien (1979)

[blorbocollection]

one of the best kim moments in disco elysium tbh

[patricia-huchot-boissier]

AG INTER-FAC A L UNIVERSITE JEAN JAURES LE MIRAIL AG Inter-Fac a l’ Université Jean Jaurès le Mirail de Toulouse, Etudiant.es et Personnels. Pour la mobilisation contre la reforme des retraites, et la grève reconductible à partir du 7 mars 2023. France, Toulouse le 23 février 2023. @lepoingleve_tlse ➡️ #AbacaPress #Abaca #Photographie #presse ➡️#AG #Interfac #Mirail #Université #Retraite # #photographie #femmephotographe #photodocumentaire #press #photographie #leicawomenfotoproject #leicawomen #myleicaphoto #femmes #photojournalisme #Autoroute #castres #toulouse #redRebels 📸 photo Patricia huchot-boissier / Abacapress / Série disponible sur #PixPalace & #Reuters https://linktr.ee/p.huchotboissier 📸 3 : Prise de parole de Jade, Représentante syndicale CGT, Beaux Art de Toulouse. 📸 5 : Prise de parole de @francoispiquemal, a coté Leila Chaibi, Euro députée. 📸 7 : Prise de parole d’un représentant du personnel Inter-Université. 📸 8 : Vote https://www.instagram.com/p/CpBEjAGjPTw/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[stemgirlchic]

why neuroscience is cool

space & the brain are like the two final frontiers

we know just enough to know we know nothing

there are radically new theories all. the. time. and even just in my research assistant work i've been able to meet with, talk to, and work with the people making them

it's such a philosophical science

potential to do a lot of good in fighting neurological diseases

things like BCI (brain computer interface) and OI (organoid intelligence) are soooooo new and anyone's game - motivation to study hard and be successful so i can take back my field from elon musk

machine learning is going to rapidly increase neuroscience progress i promise you. we get so caught up in AI stealing jobs but yes please steal my job of manually analyzing fMRI scans please i would much prefer to work on the science PLUS computational simulations will soon >>> animal testing to make all drug testing safer and more ethical !! we love ethical AI <3

collab with...everyone under the sun - psychologists, philosophers, ethicists, physicists, molecular biologists, chemists, drug development, machine learning, traditional computing, business, history, education, literally try to name a field we don't work with

it's the brain eeeeee

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[cf-12]

Panasonic SC-PM50MD (1999)

[warakami-vaporwave]

Cyberspace Telephone

[prokopetz]

Honestly, the idea of implementing Discord-style reactions on Tumblr isn’t a completely terrible one.

Tumblr likes are functionally meaningless save as a mechanism for popular blogs to keep score anyway, so letting folks effectively colour-code their likes for individual posts by choosing a symbol to associate with them wouldn’t do any particular violence to the site’s functioning – it’d just get subsumed into the post’s overall note count.

However, I suspect that suddenly having dozens of icons to choose from when liking a post would be an intimidating adjustment for the site’s established userbase; it might be best to start gradually, with a smaller set of options – perhaps just three or four.

And you know, since we already have hearts

[galaxysgal]

𝐢 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 || 𝐥𝐢𝐩 𝐠𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐫

pairing: lip gallagher x fem!reader

summary: just lip being a cute bf + debbie and ian being little shits

warnings: lowercase on purpose. poorly written tbh. swearing but y’all know how it is. heavily unedited. gen said yolo so i’m posting

A/N: i’ve been on hiatus for god knows how long but my roommate and i started watching shameless and i can’t get this mfer out of my head. things w school and life are hard rn so i just wrote this comfy cozy little thing in my notes app. yolo asf.

wordcount: probably like 500 or less idk i wrote it in my notes app at 1am

— — — — — — — — — — —

you’re nestled in lip’s arms, high up on his rickety top bunk. somewhere between finishing your nails and kissing until you could barely breathe, you had fallen asleep right against his chest.

you stirred now, your cozy world interrupted a squeaky little voice. “are you in love with her?” debbie questions.

lip shushes his sister, “be quiet, she’s sleeping.”

you were wide awake now, but much too comfortable to move and make that little fact known. plus, you wanted to hear his answer.

“i asked you a question dummy. are you in love with her?”

lip stutters, “i-i dunno. i really like her, okay?”

you’re satisfied with that answer. “in love” was a little too much too quick. but “really like” was something that made you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

“what d’ya like about her?” ian presses.

you can practically hear the gears turning in lip’s head as his siblings impatiently await a response.

“she’s- i dunno, she’s pretty?” lip replies. you hold back a scowl, annoyed at him for not having a better answer.

“yeah, great rack,” debbie comments.

“jesus, deb!” lip’s head falls back in frustration, one hand coming to cradle your head as not to wake you with the sudden motion.

“cut the shit lip,” ian interrupts. “tell us what you really think.”

you hold your breath as you wait for his response. his lips brush your hairline before he sighs. “she’s sweet, yeah? real kind.”

“a real woman of the people,” ian snorts, “princess diana type.” then “ow!” as you hear debbie shove him.

“and- and she’s real smart, too,” lip continues. “really, really fuckin’ smart. an’ she works hard. she just tires herself out sometimes.”

he strokes your hair gently, pressing a few more fleeting kisses to your forehead.

“you’re so whipped.”

you hear debbie shove her brother again, and this time ian fights back, the two making a ruckus as they push each other back and forth.

“come on guys, out. now.” lip orders his siblings around with that same stern voice you’ve heard plenty of times before.

debbie pouts. “but-“

“no buts. go on, she’s fuckin’ sleepin’ in here an’ you’re gonna wake her up. fuck off.”

“we were just-“

“fuck. off.”

“jesus,” you can practically hear ian roll his eyes. “alright, alright. we’re going.”

debbie yells for fiona as the two shuffle out of the room, not bothering to close the door behind them.

you smirk to yourself as lip groans above you, showing your cards. “you’re awake?”

you peer up at him through your lashes, a smirk planted on your lips that he’s just dying to kiss off. “can’t believe your little sister said i have a great rack,” you whisper.

lip laughs, loud and genuine. “yeah, she’s been stuffing fi’s old training bras. growin’ up an’ shit. i don’t like it.”

you’re quiet for a moment, admiring him. you know how important those kids are to him. he’d do just about anything for them, including the minor crimes you find him tangled up in on a weekly basis. he loves them like they’re his own kids, which honestly they kind of are. they may shove each other around, curse each other out, yell and scream at the top of their lungs, but at the end of the day lip has been more of a father to his siblings than frank ever was.

“you really meant all that?” you ask.

lip looks down at you, his blue eyes soft in the dim light. “yeah. yeah, i did. meant every word.”

you smile, leaning up to place a solid kiss on his lips. “for what it’s worth,” you murmur, “i really like you too.”

[sukinapan]

(^ω^)ノﾞ

[scipunk]

Avalon (2001)

[kingtheghast]

woah crazy story

(text version below)

AITA for killing my boss even though he asked (before anyone comes for me he’s fine now)

so i (33M, green) got hired by this guy (45M, green now red) running an enchanting business because i accidentally used his things when i saw his stuff laying around as he was still working on his shop. i was just in it to sort of repay the service i used but then we became friends. thing is he also had these really sketchy guys from the desert that wanted to undercut him hard by taking over the business and all his enchants, and they would keep perstering him about it, breaking and entering, etc etc (my boss wasn't the type of guy to stick up for himself very much so it kind of happened a lot).

but the big thing was when they planted a bomb at the entrance to the building where the shop was. this pissed my boss off a lot because they made him go from green to yellow, and he said he had a plan, but he wouldn't tell me what it was.

and then one day he comes out with a really nice axe that he gifts me (i thought it was cool) but then it turns out he'd basically built a sacrificial altar in the patio outside the shop (not cool). then he turns to me, and asks me to kill him. i didn't want to do it because i'm green and he's yellow but he's also my boss and im supposed to listen, and then he's also my friend so i decided to trust him on this and so i just went along and cut off his head.

and now EVERY friend of my boss is blowing up my messages asking why i did that. i tried to say that i had no choice because he literally told me to do it and he's just on red now, not permadead, but nobody wants to believe me and i think there's someone already coming over. they're my boss' friends but also if they try to get at me i will fight back. but also it would make my boss upset and he trusts me a lot. i feel bad for killing my boss but he told me to do it so i don't think it's wrong?

aita?

[bluastro-yellow]

Kurvitz stresses that Kim doesn't actually have a character sheet hidden in Disco Elysium's code. Imagining that Lieutenant Kitsuragi has only one natural attribute point in Motorics helps the ZA/UM team to understand the depth of his character beyond what's referenced in the game's dialogue. "We just came up with this stuff for coherency," says Kurvitz. "And because we're nerds."

"I like to think Kim has a Thought Cabinet project called Revolutionary Aerostatic Brigades that he's worked on since he was a teenager," Kurvitz says. "This raises the learning caps for his Reaction Speed and Interfacing."

Kim's high Volition skill makes him impervious to prying, Kurvitz says, as the detective can find out on occasions being met with Kim's brick-wall resolve. Kim often chastises these whims of the detective's, but will occasionally play along. The Lieutenant finds his new partner funny, says Kurvitz.

Kim is naturally shit at Motorics and thinks Harry is funny source