I remember a recent convo (last ten years) regarding an elderly British couple talking about the rise of LGBT+ issues in politics,
HUSBAND: It’s actually refreshing to see the young people openly talking about it. WIFE: I don’t think we’ve ever known anyone like that. Do we? HUSBAND: Dear, I was in the navy for ten years.
If you think about it, it’s very much a thing in parochial schools as well.
I believe that it’s a team of four people, each with strengths and weaknesses who are on a common journey and have teamed up against the elements and a vengeful antagonist while on a journey to meet a common consultant.
I can’t speak for Scarecrow and Lion, but in the book the tin man absolutely had prior business with the WWW that didn’t end well.
All four of the travelers had a problem with no clear answer and were going to ask the Wizard who might have some sound advice. So it’s a road trip for folks with a common destination
Also the flying monkeys were their own people and geased to obey the amulet, which WWW possessed.
Also, the solution really was the friends they made along the way. If I were Dorothy, I’d rather be there than Kansas.
TOKYO – A 25-year-old man has been served a fresh arrest warrant for allegedly creating a computer virus using generative artificial intelligence (AI), the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)'s cybercrime control division announced on May 28, in what is believed to be the first such case in Japan....
What freaked me out were the IV drug dispensers that dialed into wifi for app control (and yes, they’re less secure than your roomba).
It’d make a great fictional assassination story if one was commandeered to kill a VIP by morphene or insulin overdose. No such incident has occured yet IRL. But I’m sure it’s worth like 20 cyberpunk dystopia points when it does.
I’m remined of the Freikorps militia groups of Weimar Germany that would become the meat-and-potatoes recruits for the Sturmabteilung and early Schutzstaffel of the SS. On their own, The Freikorps served as law enforcement and peacekeepers, typically by disposing of town undesirables and locals in disfavor with the business class. In exchange, they got room and board and pretty much anything else they wanted (including the local womenfolk) since it was a really bad idea to deny them something they wanted.
This was a Donald Duck comic when I was a kid in the 1970s. The smart inventor (Ludwig Von Drake) was trying to mine gold from the ocean, but the energy cost was too great and so it was done at a loss.
We try this once in a while, and it’s still too expensive.
As I have had a really bad run of terrible dentist experiences, bridges are scary and implants are expensive, I’d really like this to work well, and be reasonably priced.
Time (people have been known to have straight periods, gay periods, horny periods, ace periods, etc.)
There are probably others that we relate to kink and paraphilia.
So the very gayest person would have to be specifically defined. Which is gayer: the horniest bisexual or the average-libido gay who has absolute-zero-Kelvin interest in the other sex? Or the gay man who is totally in love with (and exclusively devoted to) his hubby and has been this way for fifty years?
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
Believing in yourself as per the old media coming-of-age trope is a really good way to get exploited in the twenty-first century, in which we harvest talent shows even more for cringey acts by which the good acts can be presented.
There is nothing wrong with you (we can a commodate for a lot of disabilities, such as paraplegism or blindness) In a better world you wouldn’t be obligated to make yourself useful, but would find opportunities to do so and the natural motivation to take one. (If you don’t have that motiviation, that is avolition, a symptom of depression.)
However, our world is fiercely competitive and based on dominance hierarchy, only slightly more cooperative than the wild jungle. Furthermore, every industry is gamed to make employment openings scarce and in demand, hence the high level of abuse and bullying that is epidemic in the industrialized commercial sector. You can be awesome at your job and still end up unemployed or locked into a shit job because of pure bad luck and because no corporation takes management or talent hunting seriously.
And if you’re an adequately sexy human specimen, you will get harassed, extorted or exploited. Multiple times.
So it’s not you, it’s the world we live in. And the whole believe in yourself trope presumes the world will meet you half-way given a bit of luck and pluck. It won’t. And going in believing in yourself will get you chewed up and swallowed, or turned into an abomination of your former self, broken from within.
But this isn’t a call to just give up. It’s a call to go creatively renegade. Believe in plan A, but have Plans B and C and a bug-out bag just in case.
Maybe take a pointy knife lined with ricin, just in case.
While I’m a pretty strong critic of myself, I’ve assessed my copy. Usually it’s passable, sometimes it’s crap and occasionally it’s brilliant. I’m okay with this.
It also won’t land me jobs… at least not jobs I’m willing to take.
Also observe how ghost attacks, vampire snacks and demonic possession go unrepresented in this list. (Bear attacks has its own list. Lightning strikes are a low statistic)
Also curiously absent, death by meteorite — meteorites have punched holes in engine blocks but so far have missed humans — and murder / assassination by hacked IoT device. Intravenous drug dispensors that are connected to the internet are often hooked up with dangerous medications like insulin or morphene, but to date, no one has exploited their poor security to kill someone.
What came to mind was the New Coke reformation of 1985, which seems like a brilliant idea (in retrospect) only if you imagine it a 5D chess move to get people to panic because the Coke Classic was about to be discontinued. In fact, the marketers of Coca-Cola since admitted they thought they were getting killed by Pepsi and were sincere in their new release, but the company was able to not only recover thanks to responding to public feedback, so they sold Coke Classic, and New Coke and to this day it’s a popular soft drink. (The company still does shit things like employing death squads to keep their offshore workers scared of unionizing, so it’s still a typical large publicly traded multi-national corporation)
Coca-cola marketing didn’t have that kind of foresight, but there’s a tiny chance that some folks at Google have that kind of hindsight, knowing Google could absolutely afford a ploy like willfully goofing up and then recovering with aplomb by listening to the public. It’s also a way to sneak such a ploy past the shareholders by insisting they were sincere in their implementation of AI at the time.
Unlikely, of course. Most of the time the upper management of big companies are glad to just half-ass everything. But it would make a cool movie at least.
Is this actually credible?? (lemm.ee)
What's Scarier Than Unchecked AI? A 'Swarm' of 3,400 Corporate AI Lobbyists (www.commondreams.org)
Not My Castle, Not My Monkeys. (slrpnk.net)
Internet Archive is continuing to face DDoS attacks after several days, says “this attack has been sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean” (www.neowin.net)
I was summoned for jury duty and all I got was this pretty photograph. [OC] (pixelfed.crimedad.work)
cross-posted from: pixelfed.crimedad.work/p/…/701420324655555426...
Saturn rule (slrpnk.net)
Man accused of using generative AI to create virus in Japan 1st (mainichi.jp)
TOKYO – A 25-year-old man has been served a fresh arrest warrant for allegedly creating a computer virus using generative artificial intelligence (AI), the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)'s cybercrime control division announced on May 28, in what is believed to be the first such case in Japan....
Cop Rule (sh.itjust.works)
Researchers explore mining seawater for critical metals (grist.org)
How do you date/marry a zombie?
After successful animal trials, human trials to begin for tooth regrowth drug (www.theregister.com)
Spectrum rule (feddit.uk)
CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
I'm 14 and this is rule (lemmy.ohaa.xyz)
Sterilization, Murders, Suicides: Bans Haven’t Slowed Abortions, and They’re Costing Lives (theintercept.com)
My cat being a cat (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Alt text: A very fluffy orange cat laying on a red towel in a bath tub
I won't fall for such nonsense 😡 (files.catbox.moe)
mfw they can’t spell “atheists”
List of Unrulesual Deaths (lemmy.world)
Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination (gizmodo.com)
Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.
Families of Uvalde victims sue Activision, say Call of Duty is 'the most prolific and effective marketer of assault weapons in the United States' (www.pcgamer.com)