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This article by an Xoogler illustrates why things at Google are hard to change.

From the point of view of my own issue, it shows why Google Scholar, with all its unearned academic authority, will never be able to change to be inclusive of trans authors.

medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is

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“Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews,… and reorgs”

medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is

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"Oh it's just early days, we'll fix it"

My sibling in code, you can't even explain how it works in the first place, how are you going to fix it?

I’m playing the Total Nuclear Annihilation pinball machine and the mystery award blinks through fake ones like “choose your score” and “tilt next player” before settling on the real one.

One of them is “Add more beep” and it made me think of @lenalia

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This is how you review an antisemitic, transphobic, piece of shit video game: you roast it in the review and turn the buy link into a donation to Trans Lifeline.
wired.com/review/hogwarts-lega

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Gotta be honest, the number of you who are ascribing some sort of agency to these language models is pretty depressing, it's like breaking up a fight between a person and the chair they stuck stuck googly-eyes on because the chair is winning.

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It's just very bad design to ask a user to do something that they literally cannot do, and this is the first thing we ask of new users. "Choose wisely!" Okay, what does that mean? How do I do that? "Choose wisely!"

When people talk about how alienating getting started on Mastodon is, this is a big part of it.

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Imagine if moderators of different instances could agree on a method of conflict resolution.

No, escalating the conflict until it leaves a smoking crater that harms uninvolved people is not "conflict resolution", but apparently it's the only thing we know how to do

ever more convinced today that federation doesn't work

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"I know you," said Alice. "Are you to present me with a puzzle? Perhaps one of you tells the truth and the other lies?"

"Oh no," said Bingle-Dum.

"We both lie," added Googl-E.

"But there must be a clue," pouted Alice. "For how else am I to tell when to trust what you say?"

"That's the point!" laughed Bingle-Dum.

"We don't know when we're telling the truth either!" said Googl-E, finishing the other's sentence.

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I will be semi-contrarian and say that I have made Mastodon my primary social network home for the past month-ish, and I still find a lot of it clunky and unintuitive. I think it is designed to do the things it is designed to do, but they don't line up very well with the sorts of things I like to use social media for.

harry potter 

People who shouted "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE" at people lined up to buy books in the '00s were ahead of their time. Absolute visionaries

Historical linguistics fact: the phrase "Google it" became prominent in the '00s to mean that you could actually look something up in Google Search and find an informative answer.

This is very different from its current meaning, which is "go fuck yourself, you don't deserve to know things"

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"QUICK. WHAT ARE THE 128 MOST IMPORTANT INSTRUMENTS? WE NEED TO HAVE THE GENERAL MIDI SPEC IN TOMORROW!"

"UH FUCK, PIANO 1 PIANO 2 PIANO 3 FLUTE OBOE GUN"

"GUN???"

"HELICOPTER"

Another stream - I'm playing the randomizer of Ittle Dew 2, a very clever puzzle adventure game

twitch.tv/arborelia

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!