Ebike rider and avid walker. Parent of 2 young kids. Software developer in Ruby on Rails and #11ty.
Make this year your #YearOfTheBlog.
To exist online in 10 years, you're going to have to give a random company a face scan and photo ID and they're going to give that and everything you post to the government to spy on you for being queer, left-wing, "a criminal," or whatever. None of your data or communications will be private. The government and corporations will go through all of it.
If you don't want that to happen, you should raise a stink about "age verification" right now because that's what they're actually building.
Experiment: Do a picture web search for “earth and moon”.
Those images have shaped our collective impression of the distance between moon and earth.
But: The Moon is an average of about 30 Earth diameters away from Earth.
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/moon-distance/en/
"There's consumer demand for AI now!"
Is there? How do you know? Wouldn't any statistics be massively thrown off by the injection of AI into everywhere? Google put the AI box in without asking anyone if they wanted it, and now they count every use of it as proof that people want AI.
This is the same industry that fabricated evidence that people wanted a "pivot to video." I think the tech industry is more interested in manipulating consumer demand than responding to it.
“We're not here for toys, come on kiddo,” I say, tugging them along to the cactus and succulent potting mix that’s the only item on our list for this stop.
Things you like to see
The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars
securing my potatoes by hashing and salting them
And you can build and use language models without turning them into the synthetic text extruding machines that are despoiling our information ecosystem.
And even if those are easily accessible, because OpenAI et al want to burn through cash with their demos, we can still refute and refuse the narrative that synthetic text is somehow a panacea to be used across social services (medicine, education) and in science, etc.
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It seems a bit mad that we Canadians are carefully not buying US product at the store while our $777.5 billion pension fund is sinking our money into the new US gold dust twins - oil&gas and AI.
It reminds me when corporate responsibility for climate change reduction got green-shifted onto citizens as individually responsible for recycling.
Heads Up: A Queer Community Telethon for the Ottawa Trans Library (OTL).
April 19 at 11:00 am. Non-stop Live-streaming to the Ottawa Trans Library Instagram, Facebook and Youtube pages.
Web: ottawatranslibrary.ca/
Featuring local Trans & Queer Artists: Afraid of Jazz, Xavior Kayvon, Omari B. Johnson, Hanna Vig, Nibi Hiltz, Elaine Kicknosway, MOZ, Jaxon Fenris, Pom Pon Minoune, Ego Stoker, Maggie May Harder, Paula Darling, Kuhu & Sami, Girlboythingband, The Disablings, Francis Coe, August Chun, RIP EM, Helen Robertson, Zelda, Edith Puthie, Gaygothvibes, Matty Grace, Michelle Zackrison, Partygirl 11am to 3pm Supporters who e-transfer donations during the telethon will see their name and donation scroll across the screen during the live streamed program.
It is a vile scandal that 2 of the biggest AI companies in the world attack children by inciting them to self-harm, and by generating sexually exploitative imagery of kids for profit. I wanted to document this so that people in tech will stop saying they don't know: https://www.anildash.com/2026/02/18/threatening-kids-with-ai/
I would much, much, much rather read someone's prompt for an LLM than the email it generates. I don't care if it has typos and I have to ask the person for clarification. The words came from their brain and are connected to what they're trying to tell me, even if they are imperfect. They haven't been combined in a blender with millions of stolen words to make a slurry that looks like an email but has no direct meaning.
Speaking as a parent my current opinion on internet age verification laws is that after the state starts putting the Epstein class in prison en masse then maybe we can start taking anything else they say about protecting children seriously.
Another random image from the folder of good stuff:
Huge congrats to Microsoft for finally, at long last, making Cortana relevant to the world this year as the home of the winter Olympics
What the reviews don’t tell you about the powerful European canister vacuums: the controls on the canister that follows behind you on the ground may mean your vacuum-obsessed baby will also be following you around, whacking the button that turns the whole thing off or turning the suction down to low while you’re trying to do the rug.
@deafferret I am just really bad at distinguishing faces including among white people. I spend movies asking my lovely patient wife over and over “which one is that? Have we seen this person before?”
We watched Casablanca last night and outside the main character, and eventually realizing Victor Lazslo had a distinctive eyebrow scar, all the men and all the young women looked basically the same to me.
@dairpo it was at a Unitarian Universalist service in Ottawa but the other demographics fit, so I think more a compliment! :D
Was also getting lots of other more straightforward compliments at least so I know I didn’t just have it on inside out
@nirak it depends! Sometimes it is not/is genuine and sometimes it is more of a “bless your heart” kind of deal. Very contextual!
