Ken Alba

Change in Headline

all you fascists bound to lose ❤️

“Get in, we’re going back to Ilmar.”

Since it apparently needs to be explained again honey dears: this is all just a DISTRACTION! It is a play of MERE APPEARANCES over ESSENTIAL FORMS! We are SUPPOSED to be spending our NIGHTMARISH LIVES contemplating GNOSIS!

“Do you want to watch the movie about the lying scammer getting ready to go to jail or the one about the OTHER lying scammer — yes, the one who is the richest man in the world and currently struggling to buy a whole bunch of elections?”

Stellaris is the best game I know of at capturing the scope and grandeur of good space opera, but what's the competition?

Joseph Weizenbaum's creation of ELIZA proved to be a foundational moment in #AI. For @nybooks.com, James Gleick reviews "Inventing ELIZA," a history of the influential chatbot. @berrydm.bsky.social @markcmarino.bsky.social @sarahciston.com @davidmberry.bsky.social

Maybe a dumb question, but are any _state houses_ likely to flip during the midterm election?

saw this, immediately thought of @katie.bzky.team :

Generally, books are better than their film adaptations. But with Project Hail Mary, the problem is Andy Weir thought he was writing Very Serious Hard Sci-Fi, whereas Phil Lord and Christopher Miller correctly understood in a "death of the author" way it's really a campy buddy comedy sci-fi story.

LOOK WHAT WE GOT ⛏️

Now watching

LOOK WHAT WE GOT ⛏️

Just got all my boys together to take on the wandering ronin who came to town. There’s like 15 of us and only one of him so pretty much the only thing that would give me any pause is if he was master of the devastating and lightning-fast iaidō style. But that’s not likely. Coward hasn’t even drawn h

hot take: Galaxy Quest kinda sucks. it has some good stuff to it, but "we're self-aware about not giving the girl one anything to do but talk to the computer" doesn't change the fact that the girl one has nothing to do but talk to the computer.

influence!

An explanation on why Big Walk isn't available on Xbox. bigwalk.game/xbox

no, no, I said i'm a DUELIST. your insipid theory of consciousness offends my honor and I demand satisfaction

Friends. I, too wrote off Digger trailers as a pretentious ham-fisted satire about climate change & oligarchy starring actors unaffected by the troubles of the industry. Turns out it might be one of the smartest, funniest, most tragic films about storytelling and I was just being a judgmental bitch.

this remains one of my favorite Twine games: a short and spooky piece of interactive fiction that really stuck with me. by @ztul.bsky.social ztul.itch.io/the-uncle-wh...

Passed a car on the highway today with a full-width decal across the rear window reading, in fancy script, “pull the trigger Budd Dwyer.” What is the message here?

My support for bluesky/atproto is pretty much explicitly a "political" project. It is bad for a small number of (mostly right-wing) people to literally own all the sources of media. Open-source algorithms + the ability to move your account without negative network effects opposes this.

Had the interesting experience of discussing something with a rando who was being weirdly hostile towards me, looking up their name on their bio, and finding their Rate My Professor page - and finding students saying he was weirdly hostile in the classroom, too.

The forest is stirring, new things have emerged... Self-destructing & conditional Bluesky posts are here! Schedule posts to be deleted in 6 hours if someone hasn't replied. Disable quotes if > 30 likes. Also: - Feed Summaries/Sentiment - Better Post Adviser - Improved Alt Text Enter: anisota.net

Nobel Laureate Anne Carson, with one of my all-time favorite opening lines and one of my all-time favorite closing lines.

Not that this audience needs to hear this, but "super intelligence" over "artificial intelligence" is bad for a slew of reasons. The etymologist in me objects to the way it explicitly creates a hierarchy - "super" coming from the Latin preposition for "above." Not great!

@nealstephenson.bsky.social : In my book I invented The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [without a ractor behind the scenes] as a cautionary tale. Tech company: At long last, we have created the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [without a ractor behind the scenes] from the classic novel....

Anne Carson wins the Nobel Prize! Anne Carson wins the Nobel Prize!! Yes!!!! 💯💯💯👏👏👏👏

Spectrum Allocation xkcd.com/3307/

Just finished @lukeoneil47.bsky.social ‘s WE HAD IT COMING. It’s grim but not relentlessly so, and good, and familiar in a good way, and sometimes quite funny. It’s worth getting and reading.

it is way more fun and perhaps more behaviorally healthy to call LLMs "machine ghosts" instead. so like "you should not jack off to porn made by the machine ghosts" has a real weight to it

revisiting my Figma presentation about Adrian Tchaikovsky and spiders and I think it's one of the best things I've made. Very fun, can't wait for our next drink-talk-learn. www.figma.com/deck/FIMGKSY...

it is AGATE HEAD/STONE SOUP DAY!!!

Found a stump that looks like a guy