Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es

“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”

This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.

Last night the 11yo broke down the Google Slides middle school Chatroom for me:

1. At first they used a Google doc but the infinite scroll was too chaotic
2. In the slide deck each new slide is one “post”—some all text, some images, some both—
3. They use slides’ comments feature to “reply” to each other’s “posts”
4. This allows participants to easily flip between posts using the slide thumbnail navigation, so they can find the conversations they care about easily
5. He owns the file & if anyone spams it, deletes other people’s posts, or gets nasty, he can revert the file to its previous save state & remove the spammer’s access
6. He did share the file with me on purpose, I think because he was proud & wanted me to see what he’d made

Essentially they’ve created a chatroom with moderation in Google Slides, so they can get around the school’s ban on platforms like Discord. It’s kind of brilliant

BOSS: I need you to put these coupon stickers on all the Pick Me Up boxes

EMPLOYEE: Do you care where we place those stickers?

BOSS: Yeah, *on the box*. Don’t make me repeat myself. Idiots.

How gender are you feeling today?

Query for the trans, queer, neurodivergent &/or disabled people I see on my home feed

How are you all so very, very much a combination of:

• Pretty
• Gorgeous
• Stunning
• Handsome
• Funny
• Witty
• Lovely
• Adorkable
• Kind

🥺 :progress_pride: :disability_pride:

#trans #transgender #queer #LGBTQ #neurodivergent #disabled #disability

I think about this a lot. Every game is a miracle. #GameDev

my game boy transitioned, she’s a game girl now

Computers have been beating the best human Go players since 2016. The Go world champion retired in part because AI is “an entity that cannot be defeated.”

But a human just trounced one of the world’s best Go AIs 14 games to 1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/man-beats-machine-at-go-in-human-victory-over-ai

I think this news story is more interesting than it might first appear (without knowing details, so grain of salt). It isn’t just a gaming curiosity; it points to a fundamental flaw with “deep learning” approaches in general.
1/

I’ve had it.

The reason you feel you can’t effectively communicate over zoom is that you confuse “captive audience” with “engaged”.

Just cos someone is looking at you doesn’t mean they are paying attention. They’re just being polite.

You earn attention. You’re not owed it.

Because a friend found this useful yesterday:
Before tackling a problem, figure out whether it's the sort of problem where when you've solved 80% of the problem, you've solved 80% of the problem, or the kind where solving 80% means you've solved 0% of the problem.

This is especially important in security and privacy because that last 5% might be impossible.

The season 1 trailer is here! Listen now - https://audio.jumpleads.zone/trailer/

Listen to Dolly, do it on purpose

Just absolutely floored that the state-of-the-art in keeping language models on the rails is "give it a really firm talking-to about staying on script" and that this approach has been publicly and embarrassingly proven not to work multiple times, and that they still just keep trying with more elaborate and forceful pep talks

Sometimes you see negativity directed against people who “collect hobbies”, that is: people who have an interest for a short while, get the stuff they need to try it, and then seemingly abandon those supplies.
This might be tied to a shame about wasting something (money, potential, time). But as a fellow collector I want to say: don’t think like that! Every interest migh cycle around and when it does you get much more fun out of it if you already have the supplies.
#art #specialinterest

Hey, how's that New Year's resolution coming along?

On a completely unrelated note, here is a completely random reminder that you can make improvements to yourself and your life whenever you'd like.

If you've failed before, then that is just practice for the next time. Learn from that failure, and try again.

You've got this. You can make you the you you want you to be.

game development is seeing an ask for "two characters carry a box together" and proposing that the box carries the characters and only the box moves as an alternative and vastly simpler solution.