#GenAI #TheOneRing #Evil #Tolkien
Via: https://www.tumblr.com/ellipsus-writes/822936303010267136

🆕 blog! “Book Review: Foreign Fruit - A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh”
★⯪☆☆☆

I didn't care for this book. It attempts to interweave botanical and cultural history with an autobiography and ends up doing neither particularly well.

For every dose of poetry about the far-flung and exotic journey of the fruit, there's a dull recitation of …

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/book-review-foreign-fruit-a-personal-history-of-the-orange-by-katie-goh/
⸻
#BookReview

@mekkaokereke @Arleka Sí: Argentina tuvo presidencias como la de Roca y la de Sarmiento que buscaron llevar a cabo un proyecto civilizatorio que copiaba el modelo europeo y estadounidense. Sí: eso implicó el avance sobre la diversidad. Pero también es cierto que hubo luego más de 100 años de transformación de nuestros valores.
Es un error asumir que nuestros historiadores, nuestros partidos políticos y nuestras bases populares no han cambiado esos valores.
La historia escrita por las élites hasta mediados del siglo pasado es completamente cuestionada por nuestros historiadores de hoy, educados en la universidad pública, gratuita y de calidad.
Sin embargo, aplicar las categorías históricas de otras geografías en nuestra historia constituye el principal error de esta conversación (y, de hecho, significa continuar el legado de Sarmiento y de Roca, que es lo que se supone que cuestionan).
Hay que estudiar el período de Rosas para entender el lugar de las personas negras en la sociedad argentina previo a los proyectos de gobierno de la élites racistas.
Pero, fundamentalmente, hay que entender que: (1) el problema de racismo en Argentina hoy es otro, que va contra los pueblos originarios; (2) las élites argentinas siguen siendo discriminadoras; (3) para hablar del genocidio de personas negras primero tenemos que reconocer el genocidio significativamente mayor realizado hacia los pueblos originarios. Esto último constituye un problema actual, una parte negada de nuestra cultura, pues no nos asumimos mestizos cuando sí lo somos.

Por último:
Desde hace una semana, desde los países que Sarmiento, Roca y la dictadura copiaron (los que fueron base de inspiración y socios directos para los proyectos de exterminio) se nos acusa de ser lo peor del mundo. Aún así respondemos con paciencia y respeto los pésimos planteos que nos hacen.
Bloquearnos no te hace tener razón. Bloquear es invisibilizar la diferencia. Eso es lo que hacen los historiadores racistas.

@libreoffice

Thank you Libreoffice for such an excellent product.

I dumped microslop years ago, absolutely no regrets.

@neil you love to see it, so much

The new Euro bank notes really are a combination of mostly EU institutions on the back and nature on the front, I kind of love it?

@cratermoon yeah, some bullshit about how “when companies pay, candidates become the product”… which, yeah? that’s how employment works. we sell our labor, a product, to an employer who has the budget to pay for labor. like, come on

#ConfessionFriday
J'ai jamais rien capté au concept du jeu de Démineur.
Oui oui, même le vieux truc de Windows.

@onepict
I very trying to bring this issue from an anthropology lenses into NGOs and very often the reaction is like "we don't do philosophy" in our report. Leftist NGOs BTW.
"
I might be a bad writer and also bad analyst but, I think, it tells us something close and not similar to "we are politically polite / sensible / balanced ".
I mean, it's not just philosophy, but it could be. It's anthropology and it's definetly not a matter of "category". And it's about fact and clues. Something distorted or destroyed by AI / LLM and previously by other Carbon actors.

So what, in your view, is the point of categorising a fact established by scientific consensus differently or in a different context?
I don’t want to jump to conclusions, and I try not to judge (it is through judgement that we categorise things). I’m trying to understand.

Very often, the topic of AI/LLMs triggers strong emotional reactions, which are often fundamentally contradictory.

In some ways, this resembles what I’m experiencing and observing with regard to the issue of pesticides or plastics.

https://we.riseup.net/assets/857041/Pollution%20Is%20Colonialism%20

https://civiclaboratory.nl/

Cc @timnitGebru

i don’t usually respond to these kinds of emails, but this one made me so fucking mad that i blacked out and regained consciousness with this in my outbox

@andrewnez I am not comfortable.

@hryggrbyr I can't remember exactly when it happened, but as they obviously didn't redo the dubbings from Episode 4, it's a bit strange when you watch the OT in French (I think Chewbacca gets his original name back in Ep 5 or 6, but C-3PO stays Z-6PO for the entire trilogy, etc).

@cirku17
Grazie millissime!

We can ban under 16s from social media, but children are not the most at risk from radicalisation | Michael Marshall

While the UK has moved to limit the harms of social media by restricting access for children, Facebook and Twitter continue to radicalise people of all ages.

https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2026/07/we-can-ban-under-16s-from-social-media-but-children-are-not-the-most-at-risk-from-radicalisation/

I am producing an AI version of "The Odyssey" in which Helen of Troy is played by Taylor Swift.

Which means, of course, we are swapping out Damon for Travis, duh.

[this makes as much sense as most of the stuff you read now]

Meanwhile the area by where we are is also burning. 200-300 hectares of the Dublin-Wicklow uplands scorched. Apparently under control now.

(You can smell the smoke in the air in Bray; found ash on my clothes after my morning walk.)

https://www.independent.ie/county/wicklow/wicklow-wildfires-under-control-but-estimated-200-300-hectares-of-uplands-scorched/a/158999554.html

#ireland #wildfires

@hryggrbyr A few changes made sense for dubbing reasons: C-3PO became Z-6PO, probably because "Z-6" in French is closer phonetically (and in lip movements) than "C-3" in French.
However, there wasn't much coherence in those changes (the same way that there wasn't much coherence in the choices of names from Lucas, and they drew from different languages, not just English) So, eventually the French names were dropped and the original names started to be used. ⤵️

@viticci So jealous!

@neil @bloor @Edent @marramgrass if you're expecting the kid to have to drive crappy older cars for some years it might be worthwhile, but otherwise it's probably obsolete.