TechTakes

"Enjoy" this Rat fundamentally misunderstanding Banks:

https://www.boristhebrave.com/2025/09/14/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia/

JFC the comments on LW are even worse..

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia#comments

While the Culture is, on pretty much any axis, strictly superior to modern civilization, what personally appalls me is their sheer deathism.

If memory serves, the average human lives for around 500 years before opting for euthanasia, mostly citing some kind of ennui. What the hell? 500 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

"Why didn't Iain take my neuroses into account??"

Marvelous! This makes more sense of the culture than the books do.

"please sir may I pleasure you sexually"

OT: Baldur Bjarnason's lamented how his webdev feed has turned to complete shit:

Between the direct and indirect support of fascism and the uncritical embrace of LLMs and the overwhelming majority of the dev sites in my feed reader have turned to an undifferentiated puddle of nonsense…

…Two years ago these feeds (I never subscribed to any of the React grifters) were all largely posts on concrete problem-solving and, y’know, useful stuff. Useful dev discourse has collapsed into a tiny handful of blogs.

Many of our favorite people abuse meth and meth adjacent sustances. In the long term, this behavior visibly degrades dental health.

Therefore, it wont be long until we witness actual real life cases of smartmouth.

We need a word for when they make up a guy who doesn't exist and then get mad at him.

The billionaires' dreams of defeating death with technology have been "realised" by Marvel, which is planning an AI-Powered^tm^ hologram of him at L.A. Comic Con.

To the shock of nobody, this act of exploitation through digital necromancy is being met with unfiltered disgust.

probably offtop? bad tech killing people, no need for imaginary robots, just greed https://xcancel.com/hntrbrkmedia/status/1968661471056769252#m https://hntrbrk.com/dexcom/

LLVM is having a discussion on how to handle vibe coders attacking the project, and its causing Discourse^tm^ on the red site.

Doing my screaming into the void offtopic thing, but the Dutch parliament, consisting of the the liberal VVD all the far right (PVV, FVP, JA21) and half the extreme christian (but not far) right (SGP the reformed/protestants (*)) , and the conspiratorial partially far right farmers party (BBB) accepted a motion (also important to note that these are not that meaningful, nothing has changed legally) by the far right to declare antifa a terrorist organization.

Congrats to everybody here now being terrorists in the eyes of the Dutch gov. Ah the joys of living in an American colony.

*: Even less relevant to this sub, but perhaps interesting, did you know we have a so called bible belt in the Netherlands? See this wiki page and look at the voting results graph. (while there is no direct graph our second very christian party (The CU who often also votes with them (but didn't this time because they are not that extreme) also generally gets their votes from this area. What makes this downright weird is that these voters are basically from our rural areas, but on the line that historically splits between protestantism and catholicism. But all these votes are more from the protestant side. Some sociologists prob could/can have written some interesting papers on that. So it can't just be explained by pillarisation. Hope you enjoyed my random scream into the void which I tried to make somewhat interesting by talking about parts of our weird political situation.

(Bonus detail, the prot/cath split line is also the line of 'do they celebrate carnival really enthusiastically or not, for which the rule is, if you want a real party go to Maastricht (sorry link in Dutch), as it combines several styles of carnaval with its own thing (there are also some small dressup particularities, but as I don't know them specifically. Great fun if it is your thing (or so I have been told)). Anyway the further south the better (we have different names for the carnaval styles even, 'Bourgondisch carnaval' vs 'Rijnlands carnaval' for example))

A nonprofit that serves teenagers complains about getting mugged by Salesforce. dang dons his shining armor and dashes forth to save the uwu smol bean megacorp from the peasant mob.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887

Does anyone have a good definition or classic examples for the term mall ninja at the ready?

I first heard that term on this channel, and I feel like I should understand that phenomenon better.

https://www.kqed.org/arts/13981240/nvidia-california-college-of-the-arts-partnership

Clove cigarettes to be replaced with vapes.

The racism machine does a racism: AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities

Recently thought about how this one xkcd has probably done more recruiting for the rat community per unit effort spent making it than that 700k word salad.

Where are we on xkcd? I haven’t looked at it regularly for over a decade now. Nothing personally against the author or comic itself, I just completely deconverted from consuming nerd celebrity content at that point in the past.

Was reading some science fiction from the 90's and the AI/AGI said 'im an analog computer, just like you, im actually really bad at math.' And I wonder how much damage these one of these ideas (the other being there are computer types that can do more/different things. Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.

The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write), which now leads people who read enough science fiction to see the machine that can't count nor run doom and go 'this is what they predicted!'.

Not a sneer just a random thought.