Rolodex and infohub for DIY HRT materials and resources, if that's something you're looking for. Formerly known as 'diyhrt.market'.

Perhaps pro-AI developers didn't want to talk to me or I just didn't run into any during my survey, because I heard an overwhelmingly negative assessment of generative AI's origins, capabilities, and risks. By the end, I'd heard dozens of developers make a case against using gen AI at all.

Surprise surprise, no one wants this shit who actually works in games.

Isaac Chotiner interviews Shimon Riklin, an anchor on Israel’s right-leaning Channel 14, and a Benjamin Netanyahu ally, who feels stabbed in the back by Trump’s Iran deal.

🚨🚨🚨NEW CHOTINER ALERT🚨🚨🚨

Some Chinese module makers are turning their backs on the big three RAM suppliers.

Economist-brained take I know but I do think it's kind of inevitable that manufacturers will figure out eventually that Chinese-made computer hardware does the job just fine. And hopefully that means that RAM/HDD/SSD prices can start going down again, because good lord.

A final Community thing is that over the past five or so years, Mozilla has been turning away from its powerhouse, the Community. I have no idea why, but I can say that it's a top down decision. At some point, some folk at a high level decided that Mozilla got to where it did on it's own. It did not.

Good rumination on leaving Mozilla from a now-former Mozilla employee.

AI "assisted" Code is still generative AI and it's weird how people try to justify that it's not.

Good breakdown of a current messy situation regarding SpryFox and generative AI.

The Chinese worker who slices a finger has access to a public health system; everyone in China today has guaranteed food, housing, clothing, education, healthcare, clean water and modern energy. That is not a quantitative difference in degree of suffering. It is a qualitative difference in the nature of the society: the difference between a state oriented towards the pursuit of private profit at all costs and one oriented – however imperfectly – towards common prosperity.

Jacobin's brand of socialism is increasingly annoying to me, and this article gets at part of why. There's a surface-level nature to a lot of the critiques ran in Jacobin, focusing on the aesthetics of things rather than their actual nature.

What the review offers, in the end, is an example of what Michael Parenti called “pure socialism”: measuring actually existing socialist construction not against the real alternatives available to a poor, encircled, formerly colonised or semi-colonised country, but against an imagined frictionless utopia.

If the policies of a socialist state are not based on the material conditions of that very society, it will undoubtedly fail. This is, without question, crucial to the success of socialism. The material conditions of each society differ, so of course we need to study and act upon them carefully.

But the reality of a leaderless and structureless movement started by 50 people is, who decides who’s in and who’s out? When millions are now joining you, how do you centralize messaging? How do you stay on target for what you are organizing? In a running theme of this era, the political explosion that MPL created against not a fascist military dictatorship, but a progressive, left-leaning democratic administration, gave open ground for the far-right to take control.

I think that it would be understandable for people to take issue with my growing feelings around needing strong, verticalized, centralist structures to build movements on, but it comes from the same feelings that motivate this piece. Horizontalism is a deeply frustrating way to organize an entire movement, or even worse an organization. Best case scenario is things are slow. Worst case scenario, you are destroyed by the same fascist forces you are hoping to defeat.

It is obvious we have seen consecutive ‘biggest protests in human history’ to little global systemic change. Spontaneous uprisings have been a feature of the 21st century. In some places, one political elite was simply replaced with another. In other places, the states and capitalists cracked down on the movement so hard it hasn’t recovered. Other places were broken by the political vacuums created with no real, organized working class movement to fill that gap.

Imagine for a minute, the ICE uprisings keep scaling upwards. Millions and millions are shutting down the country. Rolling General Strikes from state to state. Then mass marches on the capital, and Trump’s goons flee to Epstein’s Island or some other far hideaway. Who, or what groups, will take over the political power of the country? How will the next decision get made? Did classes disappear? Did the social ills created by US settler colonial society disappear?

This is the key question and my greatest frustration with the modern American left. I am tired of "street protests". I am tired of "calls to action". Not because these things are bad, or even unnecessary, but because in order to work they have to be backed up by concrete organization, something that I feel we are terribly lacking.

So when looking at the vast field of lost revolutions of the 21st century, and the gravestones of all the martyrs we lost along the way, we have to ask ourselves, did we organize correctly? And the answer from the available evidence in most cases says we didn’t. Now we are facing an even worse ecological crisis, rising fascism, a new state of imperialist world order, and mass fascist violence in the streets of the capitalist hegemon—the U.S.. What changes have been made? Are we organizing differently from 2011? Because if we wish to succeed, we must.

Readers really despise and distrust articles that seem shaped by AI. They not only stop reading, but also block and punish the author. Non-native English speakers get little mercy. Readers overwhelmingly prefer imperfect-yet-authentic writing over LLMified prose.

Good!

Muslim delegates and attendees hoping to participate in the state Republican convention were shunned and rejected by members as they espoused themes of party unity ahead of the November election.

Look, man. Come on. Come on, lmao

With the backdrop of South Korea’s ascent into an information society, we present a rare firsthand account of Asadal’s design mall—and thus a huge part of “Frutiger Aero”—straight from one of its sources.

Fascinating interview with a figure prominent in graphic design in the early 2000s, in what we'd call the "Frutiger Aero" design space. Unfortunately he's entirely AI-brained now, but there's some really fascinating tidbits about the tech world in East Asia around the turn of the century.

If such a completely unsophisticated “attack” can break the supply chain of software development, what can intentional attackers with malicious or financial interests achieve?

Amusing little story about an attempt to foil and sabotage AI agents. I appreciate the author's bile for the tools.

We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently.

GenAI is dumb, untrustworthy, and not inevitable.

Heidi Blake reports on how the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.

Well-written and horrifying. I was particularly struck by the bit about how the ineptitude of police in investigating the Tates arguably set all this in motion. Of course the police wouldn't give a shit, half of cops love the shit that Tate does.

I am always a bit suspect of stories that position individual right-wing figures as Great Men, and I think in the grand scheme of things Tate is less of a central figure than he is a smooth operator in a Western political environment that has little cause to fight him.

His base in Romania is, of course, pertinent here -- a post-Soviet state plundered by capital in a revenge drive against the population for daring to attempt a more equitable way of life. Of course the Tates flourish there, the goal of American policy of the last hundred years has been to carve up the Eastern European nations for precisely this sort of horror and human rights abuse. This is what the United States has created.

Which again is why I think if I have any major qualms with this (incredibly in-depth) work of biographical journalism it is the fact that the author does not seem to grasp the political dimensions here, at least not fully. Tate is not a leader of a new movement, he is a beneficiary of a very old one -- anticommunism, at the hands of the United States.

Tate's particular brand of hyper-misogyny, right-wing agitprop, et cetera -- this is what the last century has been set up to create. Horrors upon horrors.

Against the madness, Israelis reach for equanimity through their bodies. They control their breathing to control their persons; the body is the first site of control. The colonizer understands this better than most.

Beautiful, venomous writing about the modern fascist ideology of Israel.

A doctor knows better than to blame a diabetic for their poorly controlled blood sugar or a soldier who looks down the barrel of their gun, locks in on a woman older than the Zionist state, pulls the trigger, then, months later, wets his bed or abuses his partner.

It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed Cretan axe, some grave goods for your strongest grandmother, or a brazier-fitted statue of Kronos to give just the right finishing touch to your tophet, you simply can’t do better than bronze. And demand isn’t likely to die down anytime soon!

I think this is one of the funniest things I have ever read and I need to make sure I keep track of it.

Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with FSR3 Quality and frame generation averaged 88 fps, compared with 232 fps on an RTX 4060 and 243 fps on Intel's Arc B580. Black Myth: Wukong reached 56 fps, while Forza Horizon 5 managed 48 fps on the Low preset.

Really strange framing on this article where the bottom line is that it offers 3060-level quality for $450, which in this current hardware market is perfectly good.

Slovenian “national reconciliation” during capitalist transition rehabilitated fascist collaborators, weakened anti-fascist memory, consolidated new elites, and legitimized capitalist restoration.

you will never hate the capitalist enough.

The intended conciliatory discussion between (former) partisans and their associations on the one hand, and the Catholic Church and representatives of the new state parties on the other, remained rooted in cultural struggle and did not actually deal with the past. Instead, the logical consequence was the rehabilitation of fascist collaborators as equal – if not more morally worthy – actors of World War II.

Agency and choice are slippery devils, and people are not always very good at pinning down and articulating their real concerns about them. Like ‘freedom’ in politics, I think that when people talk about ‘choice’ or ‘agency’ in games, they are often not talking about the same thing, or even about any single thing, and therefore don’t convey their concerns clearly enough to allow useful discussion.