Grumpy Monoceros

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

In the end a vote to recess to a future meeting failed 4-16. Madison Common Council then voted to fire Interim Police Monitor Glass 14-6, as people yelled from the gallery, with Zhang, Glenn, Harrington-McKinney, Matthews, Mayer, Nzegwu voting no.

There were some real assholes in that room and I have little good to say about the people who sent them there, but a lot of them I feel were just deeply misled about how one effectively engages with the democratic process

Caveat #2 - many of those nonprofits do real useful work (maintain DV or homeless shelters for example, with city funding). It's their political advocacy arms that are utterly unhinged.

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

Thinking about Minneapolis and the hard, thoughtful, and strategic work their local activists did in response to Metro Surge, destroying public perception of ICE while making ICE's job much much harder. Wish we had more groups like that here.

Caveat #1: I think a great many people in that room were earnestly trying to do the right thing. I blame the individuals less than I blame the leaders of the nonprofits in question. A lot of good people being led around by glory seekers.

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

And it's even easier when your city council are a bunch of mild-mannered progressive midwesterners who largely agree with you, so when you scream at them you don't face any real pushback or consequences!

They knew our mayor wasn't going to, for example, eject the people disrupting the proceedings or otherwise go on the attack. She was going to just sit there and let them burn themselves out. They chose this venue because it was *easy* and *cathartic* not because it was effective.

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

If they wanted to affect change, they needed to lobby the state government. Should be pretty easy - we have a big state election in 2 weeks that will likely radically reshape both the governorship and the legislator, so lots of opportunity to affect the legislative agenda and the conversation.

But they haven't been doing that. Pushing for real change is hard work and it isn't always satisfying, but getting in the room and screaming at your city council is cathartic and you get to feel like you're fighting in some grandiose war of good vs evil.

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

They wanted a police officer who shot Cory Ruiz (a Black man) arrested - illegal because Wisconsin state law mandates that the city isn't allowed to do anything until the state DoJ completes their investigation.

They wanted the police dept to release all the evidence around the shooting to the independent monitor. Also illegal and not even possible (all the evidence is in the hands of the state DoJ and nothing can happen until their investigation is finished).

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

Meanwhile, Alder Pritchett - one of the alders they were screaming at and calling a fascist white supremacist - is a Black woman who grew up in segregated Alabama. She had to move to New York to go to nursing school.

To the extent that these people had coherent demands, they were demands that the Madison government literally could not legally meet.

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

One person accused one of the alders of sleeping with the mayor. One person claimed that "Nothing has changed since 1963". One of them used this opportunity as a thinly-veiled attack on liberalism in general and referenced the "Democratic genocide in Gaza" (??????)

Talking about the city council as if they were the powerful establishment in the pocket of the police. Meanwhile Madison alders are *part time* and earn $15k/year, and are the very same body that created the independent police monitor in the first place!

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

When the city council moved to fire her, those nonprofits flooded the council meeting, screaming and interrupting the proceedings, shouting down speakers who they didn't like, refusing to abide the 3-minute-per-speaker limit for public comment, and otherwise cosplaying as revolutionaries

The comments themselves - with only a small number of exceptions - were unrelated to the actual issue at hand. Commenter after commenter called the city council fascists or white supremacists or went on tirades about capitalism or Breonna Taylor

Watched the whole thing (all 12 hours of it) and man, this showcases everything that's wrong with reactionary progressivism (warning: long)

Zenz@therealzenz.bsky.social

Extremely oversimplified context for non-Madison people: Madison has a temporary/interim independent police monitor who picked fights with and burned bridges with every city employee she had contact with, including the city attorney, the head of HR, city council, and (obviously) the police chief.

She ignored many of her core job duties - such as hiring a full-time non-interim police monitor. However, the structure of her appointment was such that she was mostly accountable not to any city employee but to a handful of leaders of local nonprofits

nytimes.comOpinion | I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down. (Gift Article)Students come in with noble intentions and leave with flawed expertise.

Bold take but I think there's something to it. There's a strong argument that MBA-brain is a huge chunk of what's wrong with modern capitalism.

Grumpy Monoceros reposted

Brian Ragle

@vagabondvisions.bsky.social

I decompiled Block Blast! myself to check the TikTok claims about rigged games and ad farming. Every major claim held up. Thread with my own video response and a link to the receipts is below. But first, check out the original video to get an idea of what is being discussed.

Morgan Johnson@poormojo.bsky.social

No joke. I think this is the most important video I have ever seen about mobile games. This guy breaks down how this game psychologically profiles you, and makes the game harder or easier in order to show you ads

So I'm a little late here but is there any real evidence for the idea that the Yandex attacks affected far-right activity on social media? It feels plausible, and yet...

thelondoneconomic.comReform figures see social media engagement drop as bot accounts 'fall silent'The social media engagement on posts from Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.

Most of the claims when you dig into them seem to be a mix of wishful thinking or a misunderstanding of what "bot traffic" means. The closest thing to evidence I found is this article from a...questionable source with even more questionable methodology.

But various European politicians including Zelensky are repeating the claims which makes me think there may be more to it than that?

futurism.comHow Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per MonthBrown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.

17 Sept

LLMs being built at a time of peak scam culture sure is something

Maggie Harrison Dupré@mharrisondupre.bsky.social

NEW: Brown Brothers Media is the most successful media company you've never heard of. For years, its success was fueled by AI, fake writers, and fake reporting. When we started asking questions, BBM started mass-deleting content. Somehow, what came next was even worse. futurism.com/artificial-i...

17 Sept

There's a tendency in tech (and among nontech people talking about tech) to assume that the tech is the only important skillset when often our work touches a huge number of other disciplines we're mostly not experts in. Academia figured this out but SV never did.

Thorne 🌸 - Play Cozysters! 🎢@ens0.me

Part of the problem with a lot of AI discourse is that a lot of it devolves into a philosophy argument, which neither side is well-equipped to argue. A lot of people have rigid, narrow concepts of terms like "thinking" and "knowing" that would be dispelled by a 100-level class on epistemology.

firstmonday.org View of The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence | First Monday

10 Sept

Welp learned about the TESCREAL bundle for the first time today and now I realize my prior contempt for SV billionaires was somehow insufficient. Thanks @timnitgebru.blacksky.app and @xriskology.bsky.social

Grumpy Monoceros reposted

Zach Weinersmith

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social

26 Aug

Replying to @zachweinersmith.bsky.social

The only thing that will protect you is epistemic hygiene. Sources, reasoning, humility. It is not a luxury. Especially when you're emotionally engaged.

12 Aug

One thing I hope folks recognize is that whatever your issues with the candidate, *any* Democrat has to work with and is subject to pressures from a hypothetical Democrat legislature. The governor alone does not set the agenda.

Ben Wikler@benwikler.bsky.social

At every step in the WI-Gov primary, my message has been the same: whoever you've been supporting, commit to doing all you can to ensure that the nominee wins in November. It's all on the line.

12 Aug

Which means if the winner isn't exciting to you, get excited about being able to bug your state senator/assembly rep and push through things you want that way.

11 Aug

Right. We don't need to pretend those mistakes or excesses didn't happen, but we also don't need to pretend like a society-wide effort to be more empathetic and right injustices was somehow a bad thing.

jw 👻🎃🕷️😘@farwent.net

The most useful way to look at the "excesses of woke" is to imagine society as a massive supraorganism trying, over a period of years, to get the right handle on a complicated problem. Mistakes will be made as we home in on the answer. This is not "bad"; it's just how figuring something out works.

I'll go a little further than this - I think Satya's handling of this situation was very impressive. She was under immense pressure to do something, but taking action too early could have escalated the situation in ways that could caused a ton more damage and gotten people seriously hurt.

Grumpy Monoceros@grumpymonoceros.bsky.social

Also, she publicly empathized with their position, she provided city support (porta potties, road closures, etc) to keep the place safe and sanitary. She offered housing vouchers for the unhoused to give people a place to go. She applied pretty much the lightest possible touch here.

By striking that careful balance she pissed off the anti-encampment people by letting Willy St residents suffer for so long, and pissed off the pro-encampment people by removing the encampment at all.

She pissed off *everyone* and seems to have thrown her political self on the metaphorical sword for the sake of minimizing harm to the community and de-escalating the situation and I think that deserves enormously more credit than is being given currently.

Grumpy Monoceros@grumpymonoceros.bsky.social

But with each passing day the area was suffering more and more, and livelihoods built up over years were going to start collapsing, so waiting longer wasn't really an option

She offered support for their demonstration but firmly told them - many days in advance - that the encampment needed to end, making what was coming later pretty clear. As I understand it, the city & MPD were very cautious to avoid escalation while it was being removed.

5 Aug

Really feels like Madison could learn something from Minneapolis. They locked arms around their neighbors to the point of buying groceries for people who couldn't leave their house in the face of armed federal government thugs.

5 Aug

Meanwhile, our protestors are intimidating local businesses and shutting down free meals for the unhoused to protest their city government which has absolutely no authority to give them what they want because it's all governed by state law and state funding.

3 Aug

Very telling that so many commenters here seem to think the two types of people are "Liberal Bsky politics posters" and "far-right MAGA extremists".

The Verge@theverge.com

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

Grumpy Monoceros reposted

SMBC Comics

@smbccomics.bsky.social

2 Aug

Hope you like malicious compliance! COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/prompt-2 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Grumpy Monoceros reposted

ceej

@ceej.online

31 July

ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity! OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission. ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evil

madison365.comAlan Robinson: The city we owe him | Madison365Corey Ruiz, a movement without a map, and the work of turning grief into power

29 July

My biggest pet peeve with Madison protest culture is that it often feels aimless, like people are just shouting into the void rather than organizing with a specific achievable goal in mind. This article is a really really good roadmap for doing more than just causing a lot of noise.

Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway@satyaformadison.bsky.social

"We are grieving without a map." - Alan Robinson

mallow's hyperrealistic blood

27 July

Gonna go with...C&C, Warcraft, pretty much every big RTS franchise. AOE is perhaps the only one that really survived.

headfallsoff@headfallsoff.com

what's everyone else's fab examples of once massively popular and influential landmark titles in especially western games from back in the day that have just been forgotten and abandoned completely now. mine is black and white

Grumpy Monoceros reposted

@bajablastenjoyer.bsky.social

20 July

Replying to @bajablastenjoyer.bsky.social

you're not immune to propaganda and the more you think you are the bigger of a sucker you are

16 July

So many of the problems of AI are just our collective brain rot. We've convinced a lot of people that only things that are easy/convenient are worth doing and so obviously the potential they see in LLMs is making a few bucks by flooding Amazon with slop.

Grumpy Monoceros@grumpymonoceros.bsky.social

[incoherent screaming]