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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • I don’t normally get mad at genAI art. This one makes me mad. A huge part of Bosch is the tiny detail. There’s scholarly debate about how we interpret the detail; it’s incredibly wrong to say something is in the style of Hieronymus Bosch without clever little details. This AI garbage just has a bunch of repeated lens flares, age marks, and blobs. Also in the style of Bosch implies something we can interpret, be it a dark take on office work or capitalists teaching us lessons. I don’t know what the fuck we can take away from this.

    This is more “someone with the title ‘prompt engineer’ spent three minutes hunt-and-pecking the name ‘Hieronymus Bosch’ into midjourney and grabbed the first image that was sort of muted earth tones” than “remotely in the vicinity of the style of Hieronymus Bosch.”




  • And as long as you don’t need simple access to most features such as volumes. The podman implementation on not Linux leaves quite a bit to be desired for anyone trying to do more than just run a binary wrapped in a container. I’m not throwing shade because it’s FOSS and anything is better than Docker. Only Docker will work for a production-capable dev environment on not Linux unless podman’s development has exponentially increased in the last year since I tried to move a shop to podman on not Linux.



  • What the actual fuck? Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are mass social media platforms. Bluesky is as well because it’s sure as fuck not federated. There has always been a crew of people that only use one platform vs another going all the way back to BBSs. The headline isn’t supported because we’re not going back to the forum days, leaving mass social media behind, and the article just describes the MySpace vs Facebook vs Friendster conflict oh wait the Facebook vs Instagram vs Twitter conflict oh wait the Instagram vs Snapchat vs Vine conflict oh wait the Reddit vs Facebook vs X conflict oh wait… As someone that was never much on Twitter and who yelled at lots of people who kept supporting fascism during the X transition, I feel like journalists really overindex on people that use Twitter.




  • Atwood refused to accept the science fiction label for a very long time. Le Guin is much kinder to her friend than Atwood was in person to many folks about this (this is harder to cite because older convention and genre drama doesn’t really show up online, unlike modern). In recent years, Atwood has accepted speculative fiction (the umbrella term for lots of stuff including SF) because it’s convenient for her and helps sales. She was and imo still is a huge genre snob. Don’t get me wrong, Atwood writes great stuff. She just hates a lot of her audience.

    Why do I care? Compare and contrast her to Vonnegut, whose agent wouldn’t let him use the science fiction label but actively attended conventions, telling fans he wanted to be SF but the money folks wouldn’t let him. Octavia Butler is equally fantastic as is Atwood’s dear friend Le Guin. Both love SF and are happy with the label.


  • What are some examples of things you don’t like? That’s really necessary to give examples. Science fiction usually has technology in some form or another. Sometimes it’s the focus of the story (eg The Last Question or Permutation City). Sometimes it’s a tool for the story (eg The Expanse or Neuromancer_). Other times it’s set dressing like magic in fantasy (eg Dune or Book of the New Sun). Outside of hard SF and beyond Golden Age SF you run into more “tech as device or background.”



  • This is why you can’t use The Independent for shit especially during election season.

    “I haven’t seen the joke. Maybe it’s a stupid racist joke, maybe it’s not,” Vance said.

    “I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke, but I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m just I’m so over it.”

    If you send this article to someone who wants to vote for Trump, they are going to correctly excoriate you. I know this because the last time I used The Independent this was was 2016 when Trump first and The Independent couldn’t back up its headlines then. In the last eight years it still can’t. If we take Vance at face value, which we know we can’t but we have to since that’s the quote The Independent chose to use to create their headline, it’s fake news.

    In general, The Independent generates clickbait headlines that pull in a specific group of people that want to agree with the article and won’t verify who then send it to another group of people who will engage with the content to try and verify. This increases their engagement while spreading a mix of blatant lies and loose misinformation. Your life will be better if you filter out The Independent (something I haven’t yet bothered to do on Lemmy but did immediately on a new Reddit account; election season might finally change this) especially if you’re the audience for the headlines.




  • If someone doesn’t understand the difference between swearing at and swearing around, that’s a shitty environment. If I say, “that was a shitty fucking outage” I am using some filler for emphasis so my mouth can catch up to my brain. If I say “you’re a fucking asshole” or “don’t be such a bitch” or “that’s fucking sexy” I am not being professional and I deserve some training on how to not be an ignorant walnut. Even with swearing around, I do think it’s smart to limit yourself to damnation, defecation, and simple fornication rather than gendered swears. There are also some places it’s not wise to swear around, such as client-facing roles because many of the people you will see don’t understand that swearing around is not swearing at.

    I once lost a job after the onsite interview. I wait to swear until I I hear them swear. Apparently my use of “fuck” meant I was going to blow up and be a terrible person to my peers. Two years later I started running a department doing the thing I was interviewing for and my staff tends to be fiercely loyal. I’d argue my swearing speaks for itself and have shaped my professional attitude toward swearing around around this experience.

    I work in tech and I’m quick to police my language if necessary. I’m also concerned about relative comfort (eg I try really hard not to blaspheme around some Christian peers). I do not swear at people. I do not work in a super corporate environment. YMMV.

    I like study (you can find the full article online) and I think there’s been more research down this path in the years since.