ultragauche

Under 500 DNI.

[teclista]

[raylangivins]

has everyone seen the website that gives you a rothko for your local weather?

[psikonauti]

Remedios Varo (Spanish-Mexican, 1908–1963)

Angustia (Pesadilla), 1947

[cansu-m]

[arte-artem-artibus]

Evgeny Kondratiev - Still life at dusk, 1985, oil on canvas, 101 x 50.5 cm

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Marcel Delmotte

Il n'y a pas de vérité (There is no Truth), 1974

Oil on panel.

[ultroid2068]

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years,

Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target. Congress wrote to the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, about the extent of AI use in the strikes. The New Yorker magazine asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s chief concern should be that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.

...

In the days after the strike, the charisma of AI organised the entire political conversation around the technology: whether Claude hallucinated, whether the model was aligned, whether Anthropic bore responsibility for its deployment. The constitutional question of who authorised this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question that is easier to ask and impossible to answer in the terms it set. The Claude debate absorbed the energy. That is what charisma does.

It has also occluded something deeper: the human decisions that led to the killing of between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12. Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an “AI problem” gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide.

[sappho-ilmarinen]

When I say "I'm in the Zone" I mean the Zone from Roadside picnic/the Stalker (1979) movie. There's strange shit and I might die. Zone 👍

[foone]

Saw a post of this shot from Where Is Everybody?, the first episode of The Twilight Zone, but it was split into multiple GIFs, which I think ruined the effect a little

[ot3]

"app" is without a doubt one of the deepest evils of the human race. "hello. would you like to be expected to have a bespoke piece of software for every single Brand you might theoretically interact with in a day" <- statement dreamed up by someone who should be drawn and quartered

[hairtusk]

Threads (dir. Mick Jackson, 1984)

In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.

[jareckiworld]

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) — Dominant Curve [oil on canvas, 1936]

[aletheyass]

“why do you want this job” i literally don’t

[weary-hearted-art]

Louyse Moillon, Still Life with Basket of Plums, 1629. Oil on panel

[ultroid2068]

A hundred applications later and I finally got a nursing job at a dialysis clinic. It's pretty boring and really confirming that my passion is in acute care, emergency care, critical care - anywhere but here. Also it starts at 4am and it's killing me to recover from.

At least I can walk to work.

[ultroid2068]

I really thought I'd find a new job by now. A thousand applications, three interviews later and I'm still working at the place I thought would be just a temporary thing.

[hexbugswallower]

You could never make me world dictator because my ass would immediately start doing stuff like this

[hexbugswallower]

THE HEXBUGSWALLOWER REVOLUTIONARY CALENDAR:

- Each day of the ten-day week is named after a different invention.

- Wheelsday (wheel), Leverday (lever), Hoistday (pulley), Rampsday (incline plane), Wedgeday (wedge), and Screwsday (screw) are the working days, all named after a different “simple mechanism” as defined by the renaissance thinkers.

- Rest days are more loosely themed, but broadly speaking they’re named for inventions that significantly increased leisure. The 4-day weekend consists of Andorsday (Simultaneously commemorates logic gates, Boolean logic, formal logic in general, and computers), Pressday (printing press and related technologies, including the Internet and widespread literacy), Sparksday (anything involving electricity, fire, combustion engines, heavy industry, or energy production), and Sayday (language, but also a catch-all for the nonphysical inventions like “the self” or “universal human rights”).

- Rest days fall in the middle of the week and at the end, so it goes 3 days on/2 days off twice a week: Wheelsday-Leverday-Hoistday-Andorsday-Pressday-Rampsday-Wedgeday-Screwsday-Sparksday-Sayday.

- As the day with the most “spiritual” namesake, it seems only fitting that Sayday takes the sunday spot as the rest day that ends the week. You’ll note I did not capitalize “sunday”, because capitalizing days used by the outmoded reactionary gregorian calendar will be a crime under my regime. Other things to note: Leverday and Wedgeday both fall in the middle of their working week. Leverday is the “fulcrum” of the first week, and Wedgeday “cleaves” the second week in half. Similarly, Wheelsday “gets things rolling” and Rampsday is when the second week “ramps up”.

- Since Sayday is the day that pertains to social innovations, it follows that many civil rights-related holidays will be rearranged to fall on Sayday. Of course, this includes holidays which relate to women and feminism. That’s right: The Sayday Hawkins Dance. Aren’t you glad you read to the bottom of this post?

[hexbugswallower]

After a little more consideration, I’ve determined that “Pressday” does not fit in with the other rest days. Even though the printing press is a front-runner for “best invention”, it’s far too specific alongside stuff like Sayday. Therefore, Pressday is now FARMDAY, to commemorate advances in animal and plant husbandry, medicine, and biotech. This means the days now cover basically every invention, with the added bonus that all four social classes (farmers, factory workers, intelligentsia, and robots) all get their own dedicated rest day.

Additionally: The French revolutionary calendar tried to compete with the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints by making every single day in their calendar correspond to a different part of the rural economy. So like they had a day for apple trees and a day for hand scythes and stuff. This is hilarious, but I'm gonna do them one better by giving each day of the year a specific invention which also relates to the day of the week it falls on.

So for example, every Leverday will be associated with a specific famous lever (crowbar, claw hammer, tweezers, etc). There are 30 Leverdays in a 365-day year, and all of them get their own specific lever. Similarly, any given Wedgeday might be named after, say, the hatchet or even the humble shovel. Sayday might commemorate the Magna Carta or Semaphore Flags or something. You get the picture.

Months in the FRC were given faux-Greek names meant to evoke the weather of the month. This is really good already, but I'm gonna outwoke their frog asses by naming all ten months with nonsense words designed to sound like different world languages. The Autumn months are based on the Indigenous languages of the Americas, Winter months are based on the native languages of Europe, Spring months are based on the languages of Asia, and Summer months are based on the languages of Africa. Enlightenment philosophers wish they were as humanist as me. They're all like 'fuuuuck, I was so eurocentric, now I see the error of my ways future man' and I'm just like 'instead of September we have Ch'il-N'ohii, which has no meaning in any language but is loosely based on the Diné word for grape because the Grape harvest is in the beginning of Autumn-- oh, sorry, you probably know them as the Navajo'

The 12 30-day months only account for 365 days, the remaining 5 days (6 on leap year) are dedicated to various holidays which are scattered throughout the year. Also, we celebrate leap day exactly like they celebrate leap day in that one episode of 30 Rock.

Instead of Christmas we have Lathe Appreciation Day and instead of Jesus we have a really well-crafted lathe

[ultroid2068]

Me while I'm at work cannulating a patient on Wheelsday: well today's my Screwsday, so I'm going to go celebrate after work with a Hituhana Tai like the Ch'il N'ohii sign that I am :)

[jamesusilljournal]

Two Figures on a Bed, Pepijn Simon, 2020