Richard Pendavingh

Editor of The Unravel. A website dedicated to history, anthropology and popular culture.

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

Amid all the D-Day retrospectives it seems like a good time as any to remind people that the main way that Hollywood films sanitise war is through casting decisions.

https://t.co/6BW9jLYv6X

[Edward Ongweso Jr @bigblackjacobin]

debate over whether AI-written or ghost-written op-eds gets to the aesthetics point I made in Tulsa and have been harping about on TMK and that others have made in one way or another. aesthetic and moral arguments against technology are pretty convincing and seductive in the moment, but sit at the lowest level of thinking about this technology. you have to articulate an opposition that will survive improvements in the technology. biometric surveillance opposition premised on racial bias was valid and made a lot of sense but the companies just went out and scanned faces of black & brown homeless to improve their capabilities and the argument fell to the wayside. what is the actual opposition? what is the opposition to what pervasive surveillance does to social relations and society at large? and what is the opposition to the proliferation of AI-generated text on a deeper level?

[yoshimi battles video game addiction @nise_yoshimi]

elon musk owns X The Everything App, and has to some extent probably contributed a lot to poisoning the promise of the internet forever, but mostly he has made a playpen, for him and his braindead ilk, to play house with dollies of various SS officers and afrikaner nationalists

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

@SelkieBosun How I imagined the ladies would respond when I started blogging about military history.

[cremaster & margarita @goat_wang]

hey please help my friend🙏
even any small amount you can spare could help make a big difference.
cash app: $jpreader
venmo: @jp_reader
paypal: @jpreader
https://t.co/25C3AC38SX

[Vincent Bevins @Vinncent]

Elon Musk obviously succeeded. The 'vibe shift' was a leveraged buyout --- North South Notes:
https://t.co/25NT3OVdUS

[Carlos Villasante @cvillasante]

Foto al eclipse hecha hoy con mi Xiaomi 17 Ultra y un filtro protector de la lente. ¿Notáis algo raro?

Pues sí, la luna era la otra. Ha detectado una esfera brillante en el cielo, se ha puesto en modo "superluna", y directamente se ha inventado toda la superficie

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

@uncorrelated_ @GolerGkA @moultano Buddy if you wanna talk to bots there’s plenty of other chat windows where you can do that all day.

Most people want to talk to actual humans and revealed preferences suggest you feel the same way.

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

@GolerGkA @moultano Can’t help but notice you didn’t answer the question.

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

@GolerGkA @moultano If you spent ten minutes trying to rescue a duckling from a storm drain would you be disappointed if it turned out to be a bath toy?

[Ryan Moulton @moultano]

I fucking hate spammers man.

[christina 死神 @chhopsky]

It's pretty simple.

AI has destroyed the internet and all trust in the people and contents of it. You can no longer trust anything that has been submitted to you on it nor that you find on your own. There is a pre-nuclear steel cutoff point at which the age of a post has become an element in its trustworthiness. That destruction has taken out the work of creating those things and removed humans from the process because greed told business owners they could do it cheaper this way but it just made everything way worse.

And because it kind of sucks but does a passable job if you squint, it's replaced a tonne of juniors while still requiring seniors to oversee it, thus interrupting the flow of juniors who could become seniors and choking off the natural lifecycle of human progression required to have continued service. When the seniors retire we will not have new ones to replace them and their capabilities will be lost forever.

The ability to make kinda shitty versions of stuff and carry on conversations has automated theft, fraud, harassment, and political manipulation on a scale previously unimaginable. Computers that were once deterministic will now lie to you with the confidence of a con-man. The greed and manipulative accounting of shifting revenue around has destroyed consumer computer markets and people can no longer afford what they need to work, or play, once again driving people back into the arms of business owners who can't wait to rent it to you for a subscription. And because investor eyes light up at the new Flavor Of The Month (like they did with blockchain before it) it's being jammed in everywhere it doesn't belong and now every product you liked is worse.

Search doesn't even work anymore and attempting to use any of the AI chatbots for this removes the element of context from your ability to determine trustworthiness of a source, because there isn't one. It's a remix of a remix of a remix, reconstituted from parts, and the average it makes from the slop could be true or it could be full of shit, which is way worse than having to evaluate multiple real human points of view to construct your own. We are taking the averages of averages away from the contexts within which the data points were made in the first place then wondering why everything is slightly wrong now.

And to achieve all this, unaccountable tech billionaires have stolen generations of work from creatives, technicals, and anyone else with a "who will stop us" attitude, making it clear to everyone that the rule of law is over because there's so much profit available it's in their best interests to just ignore it. They know this now, and they will keep doing it forever. We have rewarded the very worst behavior from the very worst people and what little power the individuals had has been transferred back to more corporations.

AI is a race to make everything worse for everyone while a handful get rich, and if you have to stick your fingers in your ears to pretend you just 'dont get why people dont like it' I have more respect for the people doing that evil on purpose than I do for you.

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

@chhopsky Glad someone else recognised the ChatGPT-as-radioactive-pollution analogy.
https://t.co/FvR0VCnnJp

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

@jlgolson What do you reckon explains that? A functional moral compass?

[Ben @B3n0624]

@ishuagra02 Not defending it. Where was the moral outrage when the intellectual property of millions were stolen to build these tools? I wager that the only reason to be upset over a watermark is the risk of being exposed as a fraud.

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

@johnennis Mate, have you read your company website?

[Richard Pendavingh @SelectAv]

@tedlasai The tech is impressive but you’re not just de-blurring images. You’re adding data that wasn’t in the original image - which puts you on a slippery slope to outright fabrication.

https://t.co/McUmgNySQ2

[keewa 🇵🇸 @keewa]

Americans genuinely don't understand the stranglehold their garbage TV has on global consciousness, to live in the world is to be forced against your will to know who some yank TV host prick is

[Solo Monk @JJKALE2]

Andrew Brown:

“Australians are not being investigated for hating Jews. They are being investigated for objecting to a genocide.” Andrew Brown on the Royal Commission into Antisemitism"

What a fantastic read:

https://t.co/vOEvDa118k

[Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled]

🚨New John Dolan @TheWarNerd book dropped: To The Crows.

Read it. Know it. Review it.
https://t.co/6H1NopOjQg

[David Milner @DaveMilbo]

Naarm/Melbourne has again showed up in force to protest Israeli atrocity in Gaza and the West Bank, grotesque Australian government and corporate complicity, and the silence and indifference of the husks posing as human among us. From the river to the sea.