Improv show, Micro-camper build, Age gates, and De-googling - Mar 2026
We did the end-of-course improv show and made stories about love and magic,I deleted Google off of my phone by installing GrapheneOS,I did most of the rebuild of the camper-van ready for summer,ranted about Age-Gating the internet,and Trump started a war in Iran.
Diary
Clocks
This month we skip an hour, and there was only 23 hours in one of the days.
The answer to the question “How many hours between 8pm and 4am” will always need the response “That depends, what country on what day in what year” but we could at least make it standard from now on at least.
Look maybe we should just compromise and stay half way between summer time and winter time all the time?
The world has 30 minute timezones. It’s not all whole-hours.
Improv
Hoopla / Story Show
Entertained a room full of people, made them laugh, played some games, told some stories.
It was a good time.
Story one was set around the building of the tower of London, with moats and spies and helicopters and submarines. The workers were being exploited, underpaid, whipped and suffering.
In league with the architect, the workers planned to murder the contractor. Take their revenge, and the tower.
Meanwhile Russian spies witness all and plan to take the tower and it’s lake of rose wine.
Story two was about a magic pebble left to a woman by her dying grandfather.
The pebble would bring love, and sure enough a lover appeared in the form of a police man who also busts ghosts. They had dates, busted ghosts, and married.
But at the alter the groom reveals his magic ring left to him by his own dead grandfather is what really bought the bride (and her money) to him.
Turns out though the spurned other-grand-daughter had stolen and replaced the magic pebble years ago anyway.
There is no magic, there’s probably no ghosts, there’s only love. Love brings you together, not magic trinkets.
Free Association
With the eight week improv course ending last week, I timed it well to start a new group with a new set of eight sessions this week.
The Free Association seem more serious than Hoopla. They have 50% longer classes for a start. Three hours rather than two.
More instruction and notes rather than just positive encouragement. Clearer aim even from the early levels. More like a classroom than a playground.
First couple of sets of eight at Hoopla are just aimed at getting youto lose your decorum and allow yourself to be free and spontaneous.All really short form games, lightning rounds. Parlor games rather than theatre.
But the Free Association’s aim from the start is to get you building scenes and then stories. Their first set of lessons is titled “intro to long form”. This one “Scene work”.
Not so much the one minute parlor games, more focus on acting and characters and drama.
In vague terms at early stages that is. I mean, they have more in common than different. Plenty of short games in warm-up at FA and I just finished a whole set on drama and story with Hoopla.
Three hours is pretty long though. Starts half an hour earlier, ends half an hour later. Good thing it’s also much much closer for me. Ten minute walk instead of 40 minutes on the bus.
We did lots and lots of first-scene head-to-head, mostly concentrating on trying to get specific. Check that after two minutes the audience knows where you are and who you are and how you know each other and what you’re doing and none of the players are unsure either. Make it all specific as soon as possible, ambiguity is the enemy.
And everyone got that and exercised it pretty much flawlessly right away. So good group.
The second week was on Grounding.
For a scene to be believable, it must be grounded in reality (or in a fantastical scene at least grounded in an emotional truth).
Improvisors can often jump quickly to the bizarre or the outlandish to try and get a laugh, but especially in early in scenes the audience needs to first know who these people are and what is going on and why they should care about any of it.
Three hours of scenes deliberately drilling practice of to have nothing strange or out of context happening, scenes in which everything goes according to expectation and nobody tries to be funny.
A useful skill to drill perhaps, but you can see why Free Associationget a reputation for being too serious and not laughing enough.
Three hours of scenes where mostly nothing happens might be the most dull improv evening I’ve had.
It picked up for week 3 on emotion work and how a character’s moodand emotions create a more effective scene.
Exploitative IT
Visited the family back up in the midlands. The folks are moving into a bungalow very soon. Helped move a wall mounted TV for ’em.
Cleaned up some of their computers.
My god the state of the software industry is insane. The companies that should be helping people understand and use their machines are instead viciously exploiting and tricking them, bamboozling them with impossible levels of complexity they can’t handle.
My brother’s machine is popping up adverts from strange domains through Edge several times a minute. They all lie that his machine is infected with viruses. He has no idea what they are or why they’re there or how to get rid of them or if his machine is in fact virus riddled. Does he need a new one?
Looking. Are these push notifications? I never have used Edge or Push-notifications or even modern Windows much really, so I dunno what they’re like.
I think that’s what they are?
I would never accept a push notification from a website, even the ones that some people like sound horrible. I don’t want websites messaging me! Interrupting me! But of course, cookie-popups have trained people to just immediately click ‘accept’ on anything.
I think I cleared all the permissions that Edge had been granted with a reset but I dunno what I’m doing with Edge on Windows either really. The lie about viruses seemed to stop.
Didn’t get rid of McAfee though.
Two machines there were always warning every day that the McAfee or Norton they had come installed with had had it’s subscription expired.
Windows has a virus-checker, there is no need for this shit. This is pure scam, but not illegal.
Nobody knows how to uninstall programs. They just have a worry they should pay what it asks, (without the knowledge of how to actually pay luckily). They just get nagged every day and worry.
One machine decided literally today when booting that it’s bit-defender key was invalidated and refused to boot.
I thought bit-defender was a password manager? No idea why the machine has decided secure boot changed and it needed this key which nobody has ever heard of, even me a computer professional.
I think maybe Bit Defender is a boot-disk encryption systemnot a password manager after all?
It suggests checking with your Microsoft account to get the key. Nobody thinks they have a microsoft account, even though they do. Nobody knows any passwords for them.
Password reset, sure, but nobody knows their email passwordeither. They never use email.
Google once lied to them that their password was wrong, and made them change it. But banned them from changing it to any old one that they actually know. It must be a new one they don’t know. They wrote some down, but probably these are old ones and there’s several different ones written down.
We get through all that with recovery methods for email address, luckily one phone was still logged in to read a reset email.
This bit defender key is attached to the account and I have to hand-type a 32 digit number from one screen to another.
My god.
If you only have one computer, then fuck you I guess.
Signal is on my dads phone but he doesn’t know it’s on his phone and I can’t find it on his phone. I’m stumped and confused. Play store says it’s installed, but can’t find it anywhere.
Apparently you can hide apps in Samsung’s Android? No idea how to do so. Certainly nobody has done so on purpose. On finding the list of hidden apps I find unhiding them didn’t even work.
Apparently you have to scroll down to a hidden ‘done’ button.
Mum wants to upgrade the phone package, but doesn’t realize she had a password or an account to log in with. Doesn’t know that logging into the website is how you do that. Does at least know the name of the phone company.
And when we to log in and password reset, the large-font size she has set so she can actually read anything has screwed up every page there.
Half the buttons are hidden. The page can’t be pinched tozoom out.
It’s trying to trick us into an 18 month contract instead of just more data. She has no idea how much 100Gb is.
The actual accept-and-pay-button is unclickable because its mostly off the screen because the increased actually-readable-for-her font size. We can’t really be sure if it’s a confirm-what-you-asked-for button or this agree-to-upselling proposal on the top of the screen.
We give up and do it on my phone which I’m old enough to have to squint to see but don’t up the font size usually yet.
IT Industry Failing
The industry is failing people, the companies that should be helping them are deliberately exploiting tricking and bamboozling them.
They can’t even switch to a free project which wouldn’t do that as much, because they don’t know it exists. If they did, they think that they can’t understand their current computer so anything new is going to just be even more confusing and worse.
And it might even be that in many cases. Certainly is on phones.
Age Gates
You know what won’t help? Making them prove their ID so theycan access a website. None of the 3 of them will even try.They are all over 50, but do not expect to be safe scanninga driving licence or whatever.
I got a bit ranty on blog post
The Age-Gate Rant
The kids are not okay, and lots of people seem to think it’s the kid’s phones and social media that’s doing it so lets simply ban kids from social media.
Simple!
Only: it doesn’t sound very simple to me.
What is “social media”?
What do you actually want to ban?
Does Github count?
Does an anorexia-support forum count?
Does a queer-support forum count?
Does the schools own homework-submission system count?
Does Whatsapp, which the kids use to talk to family and to bully each other?
How about Telegram that the kids use to talk to their drug dealers?
How is it different?
Are we really saying nobody under 18 can watch youtube, and expecting that to make life better for those kids rather than worse?
How are you going to define ‘social media’ such that you’llban the harm you think you see without also banning any chance of support for a person looking to learn to program, or cope with their abusive parents, or seek advice about being anorexic or queer?
…
Much more there at the website in the blog post,I won’t burden you here with the whole thing.
…
Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.
And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.
I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆
It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.
Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.
So it goes.
We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.
The laws may push us there faster.
The race will go on.
GrapheneOS
So what about deleting Google? Can that help?
This month I have been deleting Google Off My Phone.
By installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel Six.
Graphene is a fork of Google’s Android with allthe Google parts removed. Ironically it only supportsthe Google Pixel hardware, but plans are to change that.
There’s a blog posts for that too.
It seems to do most of the things I need from a phone these days, if only because of how I’m already deliberately not using Google for address/calendar/email and instead try and do most stuff with self-hosted web-services.
Means if I have a browser I have most of what I want already.
Graphene here is going to work for me except for:
Organic Maps isn’t good enough for driving or for busses.
Banking apps
Luckily, with Graphene, the Google Play services can be installed and they install in user-space, so you can set your phone to have a Google partition and a Free partition and install Maps and Waze and Bank-apps in the Google unfree part.
Using a few new open-source things I wasn’t using before on Android. Molly is nice for Signal and solves that tablet-app problem I think.
More details in the Blog Post. anyway.
New VR Trackers
One of my VR Lighthouses died last month. These things are gyroscopically spinning 24 hours a day for, what, a decade now? Nearly.
Mostly the industry seems to be settling on using head-mounted cameras rather than sweeping infra-red beams and receptors on the head anyway.
It is true that lighthouses give accurate positioning, but means I can’t easily take the headset next door, say. Or to a party.
So inside-out, as they call it, is fine for the headset now and mostly okay for the hand-controllers.
But it offers no solution at all for the foot-trackers and hip-tracker that I need for puppetting the characters in the Starship Schrodinger’s Destiny project.
I found Slime VR, which do a set of five trackers for aroundthe same price of a single one of the light-house-style trackers anyway!
They just dead-reckon distances from accelerometers and then try to compensate for how badly that works with a skeleton model and some constraints.
They’re fully open and free-software. Make your own trackers if you know about printed circuit boards and accelerometers and things. Or make a company that makes them if you like.
Or since I don’t want to do any of that, just ‘pre-order’ them.
I Ordered some of them. Trouble is, that it is a ‘pre-order’. Join the queue mate. Could be a while.
So it was good when, as I sadly packed away the broken lighthouse, I found in the place that I would store them a backup lighthouse! I bought it when I bought a whole second-hand Vive set coz my old headset failed.
Hurray! The lighthouses live for a while yet. I even have another spare backup to go.
The SlimeVR actually arrived fairly quick though in the end. Just a few weeks. Less than a month for sure.
The software didn’t work on Linux/Debian/XFCE 😦 or even on Gnome when I tried that instead. 😢
I spent an actual whole day failing to get that working before I gave up and joined my first tech-support Discord to seek help.
Discord sucks. I have no idea what is happening. Why are people using this instead of a nodebb or something? I dunno. Can’t wait to quit it again when this is all working.
One of the reasons I’m so loath to ‘join a community’ to get access to a support forum is that the community don’t own their own support forum. Madness.
Anyway, after the annoying unhelpful robot, some cool helpful person on there said to try the new beta: it’s GUI is built with Electron, but that sucks less than Tauri/Webkit which is why the GUI won’t work for me.
And that did indeed work.
I was hoping the five trackers could be set up on each foot, hips, and elbows.
But the system to avoid sensor-drift and compensate for the errors you get from dead-reckoning needs a particular skeletal model. A five-set of trackers have to be: Ankles, Knees, Chest.
And I definitely need Hips.
My characters dance. 💃
So had to pre-order some more.
The next one is Hips, so maybe 6 would be enough, but after Hips come the ‘foot’ attachments: They can be mini-trackers which don’t have wi-fi themselves, and cable-connect to the ankles. Makes them cheaper.
Then after feet you can do Elbows with another couple.
They go on further than that, you can use 20 apparently, but I just ordered enough to get to the 10 (two of which are the minis that attach by cables to others)
So that’s my advice on these so far: Get the ten-tracker set: the five tracker set takes all five just to do legs really. If you gotta dance, you need hips and elbows!
And use the beta software, at least on Linux: the stable release can’t draw it’s window for some reason.
I am pleased though. They seem like they’ll be good enough and when the project is opened this year the hardware cost barriers to entry of anyone else using it will be much less than I thought.
Stu Goldsmith
Went to see Stuart Goldsmith doing his work in progress stand up show about the climate at the local theatre.
He’s a funny man and has a good friendly personality (or stage-persona at least I guess) and is terrified and anxious and angry about the way the people are treating the world without out even being their fault.
It’s a good show, he’s a good guy, you should go see him do it at Edinburgh or whenever he’s in your town.
No action you can take as an individual really makes much difference to the end of the world stuff. You should be vegan perhaps, ethical banking perhaps. But really the only thing that works is mass social pressure, so talking about it is the best thing you can do. If you can’t be vegan, at least say you are.
Perhaps telling everyone on linked-in to book him for their climate sessions is best he reckons 😆 but I don’t do corporate social media at all really, so Mastodon and cross post to Bluesky is the best thing I can do perhaps.
Stu’s a friend of a friend, we’ve met before. Don’t think he recognized me sitting in the front row without context againstthe stage lights though. Maybe a little at the end with some context when he’s rushing to get home.
Still love that Captain Pike hairdo.
Campervan
The bedroom is long finished and summer is fast approaching so spring is the time to DIY the campervan.
Early last summer the guy booked to do the professional job of that gave himself a nervous system crisis by only drinking distilled water in a misguided heath-kick. On the week he was booked to do it for me.
So that failed. He left me with a boot-kit, which barely served the purpose and then before I could fix it much I fractured my wrist. Great.
Nothing in the way now so it’s the DIY Microcamper Easter Special!
Over the last few days I have cut the boot-kit to enable it to open one leg at a time. Single bed or double bed. Painted it, coated the exposed surface with a vinyl blue wood-effect wallpaper.
Added a door into the back/inside to allow access from inside the van.
Seems pretty nice inside my flat here, but will of course be much more cramped and much lower roof when it’s inside the van.
The van’s metalwork is exposed in the back and it is far from actually cosy in there so the job was to cover the entire insides in a foam insulation.
Seems to have gone okay. I certainly have lots of spare left over, only used about half.
My cuticles do not stand for even one days manual labour 😭 Where have they gone? 😢
Unlike the wallpaper, where I had ordered 3 mini-rolls instead of big ones.
So, as expected, out of wallpaper before even attempted the doors at all. Gonna be next weekend before I can do much more really.
It is…. Not great. Wallpapering curved surfaces is tricky and I have no idea what I’m doing.
Might re-try some large chunks of what is done once there’s spare to re-try with.
Took the floor trap door back to the flat and added the ring-pull and carpeted it.
Cleaned up and badly caulked the joins in the back third in the hope of keeping the wallpaper from peeling.
With the back third done, I could install the newly rejuvenated boot kit.
That gives us the butane cooking ring out back under the door, the space for the tiny mini fridge and the couch-shape when its folded up, just about allowing access to that trap door to the area below that used to be the wheelchair ramp.
Added carpet tiles to the front two thirds around the trap door. These crates are great. Stackable and collapseable and fit in the gap between the front seats and in the spaces under the folded-out beds and have a wooden table surface on top.
Fetched all the cushions in, the sofa would be comfortable to anyone 10cm shorter than me, but I gotta hunch. Can’t afford a pop-top.
But we do get the configuration it’d mostly be in during a camp. Single bed out, sink and fridge available, batteries under the bed.
Note the infinity mirror in front of the mini-fridge. Pretty.
And if the bed feels too cramped, the fridge and sink can go under the other side.
Nice. It’s useable now. More to be done. That wallpaper is pretty terrible in places and the doors all still need doing. Going to need to apply glue to things as they fall apart. Needs curtains. Has some tiny little battery LED lights, but I’m thinking a strip all around the roof really on top of that. Lots of 3M Dual Lock strips everywhere to enable things to be locked down and avoid sliding around so much.
Done as much as can be done until more wallpaper arrives at least.
Watching
Devils Hour
Watched “The Devils Hour” because it’s got Stephen Moffat producing and Peter Capaldi acting as a mad man apparently from the future or something.
Started quite slow and fairly normal but escalated and speed up to quite a frenetic pace across multiple timelines.
Spooky and suspenseful and confusing.
I like it.
Trouble is it stopped after two series and series three isn’t ready yet so there’s this interminable gap to wait now since I’m not a time traveller.
Nor is Capaldi in this show exactly really. Something stranger.
Looking forward to the next season but seems like the wait for time travel shows associated with now or once with Capaldi and Moffat is going to be long in general this year.
Old Doctor Who
Watched newly rediscovered old Doctor Who.
Daleks, in the future, are teaming up with the heads of the other galaxies to overtake the Solar system and destruct time, and the Doctor’s only got Steven (a pilot from the 24th Century) , Katerina (a slave girl from ancient Troy), and a local soldier to help.
The guardian of our Solar system has betrayed us to the Daleks! He’s mined 50 years worth of Terrainium secretly from Uranus to power the core of the Dalek Time Destructor.
The Daleks say “Execute” when they have found someone guilty of negligence, vs just when they are a pest to be exterminated.
The doctor nips in, under disguise, to investigate the council, steals the Terranium and the president’s ship, then gets the team stranded on the Solar system’s prison planet.
The prisoners try and raid the ship but the Doctor has set a trap and electrocutes the invaders, just in time for them to fix the ship and escape.
Only one prisoner has stowed away on board.
[Then there’s a episode still missing, in which apparently Katerina wrestles the prisoner into the air-lock and they are both spaced. The Doctor and Peter return to Earth to warn about the Daleks.]
They arrive on Earth (future earth remember, but all the computers have giant tape drives and knobs) as an experiment on mice is in progress.
I guess the experiment was to try and make mice turn into negative images screaming in slow-motion and then bounce up and down as they are transmitted through space many light years away. And the Doctor, Steven, and some security guard chasing them get sent along too. With the Daleks following on in their ships.
The Daleks exterminate the mice 😔
There’s 8 ft tall invisible creatures on this planet so the mice were gonna be in trouble anyway. The Doctor beats them off with sticks before being apprehended by Daleks.
[Then there’s four still-missing episodes in which the Doctor and Steven steal a Dalek ship, trick the Daleks with a fake Terrainium core, meet the Monk who attempts revenge, and celebrate Xmas on a silent film set. All with Daleks giving chase]
The security guard and the Monk are still with them in the next archived episode, when they are in a Egyptian tomb for some reason and the companions including the monk are captured.
The doctor faces the Daleks to negotiate his companions’ return.
At the hostage exchange the Doctor hands over the core as the ancient Egyptians attack the Daleks. It’s a slaughter of course. All the Egyptians die, but they made a good distraction and the Doctor skips off.
He’s knicked the Monk’s Tardis’ directional compass so theMonk goes to who knows what random place now.
The Doctor aims to try and materialize the Tardis at the point the Daleks are likely to use that Terranium, to take over the galaxy and destruct time, but seems like the Tarids fails.
[And then there’s another two still-missing ones in which the security guard ages to death in a time-mishap, and an entire planet is wiped of all life to thwart the Daleks.The Doctor and Steven lament the senseless deaths of the three of them that they cared about.]
Crikey. I guess they used to bounce around in time and space more during a story when it was twelve 20 minute episodes. That Prison Planet was there only to be landed upon, have the Doctor electrocute some people, and then leave with a stowaway. The 8ft tall invisible creatures are in like 2 scenes.
Incredible body counts. Just absolute carnage compared to most New Who.
The background of mega-death while the protagonists lament the death of only their own reminds me of the way the contemporary news will focus on one marooned soldier over the deaths of hundreds. Humanize only their own.
The Monk is a good candidate for a return. He’s got this great Frankie Howerd like mischievous campness. Exited this story with a randomizer on his tardis vowing revenge.
Releases
Trump’s war of choice in Iran continues.
We did a five minute tarot reading to investigate the causes and effects of this war, to find out where it will lead.
Watch the show or read the transcript at the website:
https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2026-03-24-wariniran/
Links
What’s been good on the web this month?
Our media covering Iran War
“Worthy victims are people who are killed or oppressed by Official Enemies of the West, such as the Soviet Union (and now Russia), North Korea or China. These victims garner considerable media attention in the propaganda system, marked by sympathy, indignation and fury. Their suffering is humanised, described in detail, and used to generate moral outrage directed at the offending regimes or governments, often as part of a concerted attempt to topple them for the benefit of Western geostrategic interests.—‘Unworthy’ victims, by contrast, are people who are killed or whose democratic aspirations are crushed by the West or ‘our allies’; such as Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1960s, Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and Israel in the present day. These victims are less prominent, even absent, in western media coverage or are often discounted as ‘collateral damage’: a lesser kind of human, robbed of their individuality, their …
Fediverse
“there’s something quietly beautiful about a place where people just… share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what’s happening. It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.”
AI
“If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of delivering the service. It’s not just that a chatbot charges less to tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot itself means “go fuck yourself.” A chatbot is basically a “go fuck yourself” emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole”
I hate the term “hallucinations” for when AIs say false things. It’s perfectly calculated to mislead the reader - to make them think AIs are crazy, or maybe just have incomprehensible failure modes.AIs say false things for the same reason you do.At least, I did. In school, I would take multiple choice tests. When I didn’t know the answer to a question, I would guess.
Age Gating
This investigation documents a national lobbying operation spanning corporate spending, think tank infrastructure, dark money networks, and competing model legislation templates. Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). But the operation extends beyond Meta.
Fedi
Not all social media is run by massive companies who can changeCEO and take a hundred million dollars in Blockchain money thatthey will have to give back.
Fediverse is not owned, unlike Bluesky which took a hundredmillion dollars of funding and changed their CEO this month.
Link Everyone knows when Toni Schneider says he’ll
help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growthas new CEO he means adverts right?
The next phase is the one where they tighten the thumbscrews and see who will stay anyway.
But not the Fedi. Here’s some stuff I boosted this month:
AI
I am convinced we are on the verge of the first “AI agent worm”. This looks like the closest hint of it, though it isn’t it quite itself: an attack on a PR agent that got it to set up to install openclaw with full access on 4k machines https://grith.ai/blog/clinejection-when-your-ai-tool-installs-another
But, the agents installed weren’t given instructions to do anything yet.
Soon they will be. And when they are, the havoc will be massive. Unlike traditional worms, where you’re looking for the typically byte-for-byte identical worm embedded in the system, an agent worm can do different, nondeterministic things on every install, and carry out a global action.
I suspect we’re months away from seeing the first agent worm, if that. There may already be some happening right now in FOSS projects, undetected.
“Grammarly’s “expert review” feature offers to give users writing advice “inspired by” subject matter experts, including recently deceased professors, as Wired reported on Wednesday. When I tried the feature out myself, I found some experts that came as a surprise for a different reason — one of them was my boss.
The AI-generated feedback included comments that appeared to be from The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, as well as editor-at-large David Pierce and senior editors Sean Hollister and Tom Warren, none of whom gave Grammarly permission to include them in the “expert reviews.”
The feature, which launched in August, claims to help you “sharpen your message through the lens of industry-relevant perspectives.” When users select the “expert review” button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions “inspired by” related experts. Those “industry-relevant perspectives” include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others.
The Verge found numerous other tech journalists named in the feature, as well, including former Verge editors Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, former Verge writer Monica Chin, Wired’s Lauren Goode, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon, Gizmodo’s Raymond Wong, Digital Foundry founder Richard Leadbetter, Tom’s Guide editor-in-chief Mark Spoonauer, former Rock Paper Shotgun editor-in-chief Katharine Castle, and former IGN news director Kat Bailey. The descriptions for some experts contain inaccuracies, such as outdated job titles, which could have been accurately updated had Superhuman asked those people for permission to reference their work.”
Two o’clock in the god damn eh emm in the terminal watching logfiles scroll up the screen in my terminal, study looked like a bad hackers film, people are not supposed to do this, I should’ve been asleep, all throughout the next day the sun was shining outside and I should’ve been doing human shit like making some kinda little structure out of mud for birds while wearing a couple of leaves and instead I’m indoors trying to stop anthropic and facebook and google from bringing down my website, we were put here to be the gardeners of the world but instead I’m trying to outwit nonsense machines made by nonsense people who also should be rolling naked in the fresh spring grass
Also, and I want to say more on this soon, but if you think that the big AI players are hoping for anything but them being able to put a legislative moat around themselves where output is copyrighted and training materials are restricted but they’re the only ones able to play, you’re being a fool.
Their key goal is to capture rent on all intellectual pursuits.
My dogs I am crying. They have a whole series of exception types that end with _I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS and the docstring explains this is “to confirm you’ve verified the message contains no sensitive data.” Like the LLM resorts to naming its variables with prompt text to remind it to not leak data while writing its code, which, of course, it ignores and prints the error directly.
War
This will come as no surprise to you, but this claim is bullshit. Capitalist ownership is the product of power relations, not the performance of any useful labor. If we didn’t already know this, we would just have to look at capitalists bidding down the price of oil futures while Iran is mining the Strait of Hormuz because a demented conman told them what they wanted to hear.
Capitalists listening to Trump gaslight them about the war and eating it up is the human equivalent to LLM psychosis. These are people who want to be led into a delusion, who eagerly assist their manipulator into deceiving them.
The Iranian state fields two separate militaries.
The first is its regular army, the Islamic Republic of Iran Army, or Artesh. It does regular military stuff: territorial protection, power projection, etc.
The second is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. Its mandate is the protection of the “Islamic Revolution” of 1979 and the resulting Islamic republic. It is, in short, the ideologically-oriented component of the Iranian armed forces.
This arrangement is pretty typical in autocratic regimes as a mechanism of ensuring the regular armed forces are kept in check as a potential coup threat. Hitler built the ideological SS in parallel to the regular Wehrmacht; Saddam Hussein built the Republican Guard in parallel to the Iraqi army. Trump has taken initial steps to do something similar with ICE.
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Oil
I am VERY tempted to write another long post about how the decision in the 1970s not to establish a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund in favour of simply using the oil money to prop up finances at the time, has done more damage to the UK than any other decision in history. LONG THREAD, SORRY.