Objekt-fantom

Erik, 30s, they/them. Sincere apologies to those who followed me for anything in particular. Header/avatar by Toyen.

[fipindustries]

ok this looks ultra mega based, are you kidding me? can you imagine the bullshit i could get up to with this bad boy? fuck yes i want ten

[steve-likes-robots]

This would be the absolute coolest phone

[mytearsrricochet]

[katco-cereal]

Thank you, /r/ProgrammerHumor, I love you endlessly.

Redditors competing to make the worst volume sliders possible...

[katco-cereal]

special delivery for @soffies!!!

[razeeswillowtree]

This is horrific, thank you!!!

[weirdtranssexual]

i mean this in the nicest way possible but some of you need to learn how to be annoyed

[weirdtranssexual]

people are going to annoy you and that’s not a reason to burn bridges or blow up relationships

some people will even annoy you often! some people aren’t good at social cues and will therefore be frequently annoying! still not a reason to blow everything up!

[max-e-doodle]

[bigdummydaddy51]

🤣🤣👍🥯

[psychofuturist]

many eternities in a day

[helenvaughans]

one thing that i think mussolini: son of the century gets right about fascism that a lot of other media about fascism fails to is that, underneath all the pomp and circumstance and "intellectual" justification, fascism is a movement purely of violence for violence's sake. the fascist may hem and haw and try to equivocate and claim that they stand for some other ideal like national pride or ethnic "purity" or whatever, but at the end of the day, all of that comes second to pure sadistic pleasure in violence.

in episode 3 of the series, mussolini is trying to refashion himself as a "respectable" politician after overseeing the brutal gang violence of his blackshirts, and as such, he tries to bring them to heel. they respond with utter fury that he wants to curtail their orgies of violence, and the only way he is able to prevent them from turning on him and to maintain their support is by declaring that the violence will not end but will instead be focused, organized, and militarized. the series goes to great pains to show that practically none of the young men who follow mussolini (and they are basically all young men) have any serious interest in big ideas or politics, and that goes for even the more intelligent ones. their interests begin and end with finding more and more cruel and baroque ways to torture and kill the socialists who they get into street fights with. the violence is the beginning and the end for them, and "fascism" is pretty much just a framework to justify this violence.

i think it's important to remember this as we contend with modern fascism. "the cruelty is the point" has become a bit of a truism, but it really is that simple tbh.

[sodomyaspraxis]

From this piece on e-flux, talking about Alberto Toscano's Late Fascism:

As [Toscano] argues, fascism has to be understood as kind of license, a justification for violence and anger, and a pleasure in that justification. We have to give up the cartoon image of fascism as centralized and universal domination and see it as not only incomplete persecution, unevenly applied, but persecution of some coupled with the license to persecute for others. Fascism is liberation for the racist, sexist, and homophobe, who finally gets to say and act on their desires.

From The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (forgive the length and Freudian references):

For example, Freud found that the leader allows us to express forbidden impulses and secret wishes. Redl saw that in some groups there is indeed what he perfectly calls the "infectiousness of the unconflicted person." There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation. Freud saw that the leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent. Redl refined this somewhat by showing how important the leader often was by the simple fact that it was he who performed the "initiatory act" when no one else had the daring to do it. Redl calls this beautifully the "magic of the initiatory act." This initiatory act can be anything from swearing to sex or murder. As Redl points out, according to its logic only the one who first commits murder is the murderer: all others are followers. Freud has said in Totem and Taboo that acts that are illegal for the individual can be justified if the whole group shares responsibility for them. But they can be justified in another way: the one who initiates the act takes upon himself both the risk and the guilt. The result is truly magic: each member of the group can repeat the act without guilt. They are not responsible, only the leader is. Redl calls this, aptly, "priority magic." But it does something even more than relieve guilt: it actually transforms the fact of murder. This crucial point initiates us directly into the phenomenology of group transformation of the everyday world. If one murders without guilt, and in imitation of the hero who runs the risk, why then it is no longer murder: it is "holy aggression. For the first one it was not." In other words, participation in the group redistills every day reality and give it the aura of the sacred—just as, in childhood, play created a heightened reality.

[probablyasocialecologist]

It’s the Great Fear of Our Time. I’m Mathematically Sure It Won’t Happen.

Let the movies explain.

A.I. chatbots provide a convincing illusion of consciousness, but we know they are just a sequence of lifeless math calculations. They are no more conscious than the horse in Muybridge’s animation is alive. The main difference is that people could easily look inside Muybridge’s machine to see the photographs underlying his movie. Most people don’t look inside A.I. chatbots. But if they did, they would see that it’s essentially the same story—an A.I. chatbot is just a mathematical flip-book. All A.I. systems today are built around neural networks, which, despite their fanciful name, are just math formulas. That’s right: At the heart of Claude, ChatGPT, and the rest is a math formula like f(x) = ax2 + bx + c, except much, much bigger. Instead of having just three parameters—a, b, and c in this quadratic—the latest A.I. chatbots are estimated to have trillions of parameters. But the size doesn’t change the fact that they are mere formulas: You plug in a value for x, and out comes the value f(x). I think it’s safe to say that a math formula written on a sheet of paper is not a conscious entity—just as a croissant recipe is not an edible pastry. Perhaps plugging numbers into this formula brings it to life, just as the baker brings a recipe to life by mixing ingredients in a bowl and baking them in the oven? No, the analogy can’t take us that far; there are no ingredients here, just a calculation you could, in principle, do by hand. If you think writing out a math calculation with pen and paper is enough to create consciousness, you have far more faith in mathematics than I do. And writing the formula in computer code doesn’t breathe life into it; it just uses a different set of symbols to describe it. There is no consciousness to discover here when you break down what is inside the machine that is A.I.—just formulas. When a chatbot isn’t actively responding to your prompt, it sits around waiting, doing absolutely nothing. Not thinking, feeling, experiencing self-awareness or consciousness or anything else. Until your prompt comes in, the chatbot is just a big fancy recipe, vacantly waiting for someone to do something with it. When your prompt does arrive, the chatbot merely translates it to a number, pipes this number through a giant formula, then translates the resulting number back to text. That’s all.

25 May 2025

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

my notifications are once again devolving into a spirited debate about the ethics of actions that could potentially make someone uncomfortable, and at risk of sounding like someone about to get a lot of irate anons I think we're frankly giving way too to much moral weight to hypothetical discomfort

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the thing about discomfort is that it's an extremely nebulous category that can be triggered by virtually anything and that's far too broad a category to have any inherent moral quality to it. like. my mom was mad uncomfortable when I stopped shaving. that didn't mean I was doing violence against my mom it just meant she needed to get over herself. many such cases it must be said.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

there's not a single example I could give that's better than this

[bedupolker]

It feels cool to be "in" on celebrity gossip before anyone else. I ran into Californian Condor V9 and looked her up on the condor lookup website. It says her current mate is dead and she has no kids but I saw her with a new man AND a juvenile.

[taciturn-nerd]

OP I hope you don't mind but I made a tabloid cover out of this

I used two more condor photos by Andrew Orr and Alam Clampitt from peregrinefund.org

Gotta use the skills I learned from making tabloids out of the Jane Austen novels somewhere right?

Great, now I feel like I'm bird shaming. Congrats V9 on your new family!

[animals-with-fan-art]

This is art to me

[segamascott]

[maureen2musings]

The Sonoran desert, Arizona

austinpedersen__

[captainsblogsupplemental]

[obi-waankenobi]

#i like to think data took him all the way to the brig tossed him in and left#and then came back 60 seconds later and was like ‘i believe i have successfully played a ‘practical joke’ on you :)’#riker loses it & claps him on the back like ‘wow. good job u rly had me going. dont ever fucking do that again’ Perfect.

[ingridverse]

Actually it’s 73 seconds. Data, knowing something of how human minds work, estimates that Riker will give him 60 seconds to come back (because humans prefer “round numbers”, however arbitrary the units). After 60 seconds it will take 4 seconds for Riker to fully process the conclusion that Data is, in fact, not coming back after all, and an additional 9 seconds to build to the optimum level of anxiety. 

After all, comedy is timing.

[sniperct]

[jungwildeandfree]

and while we’re at it, fuck this idea that ONE ACCOUNT has to belong uniquely to ONE PERSON. This is the same thing these silicon valley fucks want; their vision of the future where everyone has a unique biometric ID code implanted in their body is the ultimate extension of Netflix’s “no password sharing” policy. You want to use your friend’s car? Sorry, you can’t, you need to be an authorized user. Your mother wants to let you look something up on her OED account? Too bad! That’s only for her! The concept of perfect market efficiency gives them greedy little money bag eyes.

If I pay money to have a newspaper sent to my house, they don’t charge me extra when I show it to my dad. This password sharing thing isn’t just a Netflix problem; don’t be surprised if it shows up elsewhere in other forms. Stamp this idea out now or we’ll be stuck with it.

[jungwildeandfree]

This is by far the most popular post I have and I have to say: good, I’m right. Password sharing and ID verification are going to kill the internet. not oooh in 50 years. in like 5 more.

[theconcealedweapon]

[yourordinarycat]

if you are in the united states you cannot choose to stand at a location

[depsidase]

[unalivejournal]