What if we had another Civil War, but this time over imaginary things?

And if this is the beginning of a trend, it amounts to collective punishment of a population for harboring dissidents / not getting with the program / having voted against the autocrat / pick what you like. They don't have the manpower to do it at scale yet, but it's a signal of intent.

Distribution is THE under-reported story in book publishing (outside of the trade publications) and losing B&T is going to have untold ripple effects on the industry, small presses, and authors.

all discourse aside, there is one machine with consciousness. it's printers. they are alive and conscious and they hate you and they'd take your arm clean off if you let them. never trust a printer.

The Trump administration’s tariff regime and the elimination of fee exemptions for items under $800 is limiting resource sharing between university libraries, trapping some books in foreign countries, and reversing long-held standards in academic cooperation.

🔗 www.404media.co/libraries-ca...

Reminds me a bit too much of the gun people, in terms of "you can't talk about the societal effects of this technology and possible remedies for them unless you know all the gun nerd lingo and specs first". At least the AI people don't have a constitutional amendment they can point to. Yet.

my hot take is that torrenting is preservation

The political right's greatest project is discrediting experts. Only in a "do your own research" world can their cultural preferences - anti-abortion, anti-gender affirming care - claim equal legitimacy to the left's medically-backed positions on those issues. SCOTUS is a full partner in that effort

Just remember the only thing stopping the Cubs from building a team like the Dodgers is that they don’t want to.

I still can't get over that this is just like, a couple of jumped-up belligerent slobs in jeans. Why should anyone respect or even acknowledge their supposed authority? How do you even know that they are who they say they are? Power is power and violence is violence I guess, but c'mon.

It's wild that these dumdums are realizing how much of a fix they are in in terms of professional autonomy and having to be State Media quicker than mainstream media types. They somehow value their own voice and professional latitude more than veteran political reporters and centrist commentators do

re: this Tilly Norwood nonsense, Hatsune Miku has been a thing for nearly 2 decades at this point, and is a far better-realized and more thought out persona with a real fanbase. The technology may be a bit more seamless-looking now, but hype lets you be so much more sloppy about it & still get press

The admiration, the bat flip, the zoom to Fried 🫡

This is effectively the situation already right now, in terms of the reach and relevance of text-based compared to short-form-video based. We're a little niche subculture, maybe propped up by a disproportionate amount of existing elites still being text-based.

Fix your hearts or die

I'm thriving over here in my lane, refusing to treat any technological product like a person in either a positive or negative sense. I couldn't even get myself to talk at Siri/Alexa in the perfunctory and stilted way that those technologies afforded without feeling weird and cringe about it.

Yeah, I think we've got a problem here where they are both cynically exploiting this and personally freaked out because their friend got capped on live video. So they're frantically creating escalating propaganda against their enemies and also talking/scaring themselves into believing most of it.

Actually mom the Nintendo switch is a sentient being and you telling me to turn it off is eugenics

Watching Jay, I realize I am simply exhausted by folks in positions of leadership who are driven to distraction by critique.

If you can't function with critique and pushback, a leadership position is not for you.

Leadership REQUIRES you to absorb and process the critique of stakeholders.

A Confederacy of Dunces

Also, avoid politics? A trans guest is politics. A guest who has any public political opinions or actions against the administration, even if they don't express them directly on the show, is going to be politics. You won't be able to duck this unless turn yourself into State TV. Which is politics.

the lower bound of harm being “i just don’t believe anything anyone tells me anymore” is recipe for a collapse of our body politic as we know it/what remains of it.

the youtube vs yt-dlp arms race is hilarious, because of how lopsided it is.

on the one hand, you've got a company with the GDP of Denmark who has about a manhattan-project's worth of developers they can assign to this.

but on the other end, you've got every bored or annoyed javascript hacker.