Rose

*quickly steps in a time machine that takes me to the employee lounge in Google HQ in 2005, in middle of a lunch hour*

Hey guys! Don’t mind me too much, I’m from the future! But you should know that in 2026, Google gets the bright idea of limiting which schools have access to Google Search.

*hears assorted cries of “WHAT???” and “HOW?!?!?!” from the crowd*

*grins devilishly, waves, and steps back into the time machine*

A lot of stuff what billionaires are doing shouldn’t be swept under personal privacy.

“Don’t bug me, it’s my own business how I spend my money”, some would say. For random people, that’s true. But when you command absurd amounts of wealth, maybe all of that stuff has consequences to the rest of the society.

We demand transparency from people who have power over our lives, and oligarchs shouldn’t be an exception to that rule.

I hope that in the future, we look back at “the world’s first fully AI generated [X]” with the same kind of attitude how we look back at UFOlogists who kept saying “probably the most well-documented UFO encounter in history.” (…they say that about all of them)

The Joy of Painting

Nobody is going to write a book called The Cold Hard Business of Prompting.

(…They’ll generate it instead. And they’ll put it for sale on a ridiculous price, and never figure out why it isn’t selling.)

Threads has introduced extremely strict rules for servers that want to federate.

That’s hilarious, considering just as soon as this whole Threads fediverse integration project was announced, a whole bunch of prominent fediverse hosts joined up and blocked them en masse. Like, fuck it, we’re not talking to Facebook, nope nope nope. (Turbo Based.) (Check your Mastodon instance. Chances are they’re still blocking threads.net.)

I remember watching That Kiljunen Family (1981) as a kid and being shocked by one particular scene. Summary: This is a Finnish comedy film about a goofball rural family who win a contest and get to go to Helsinki. Goofball Family in Big City level hijinks ensue. The scene that terrified me was the one where the kids go joyriding trams. Probably too speedy for my kid brain.

After my father passed away, I found out that he had this film in his DVD collection, and my mother was like “sure, take all movies you want.” (…doubled my DVD collection and then some.) Okay, the tram scene wasn’t that bad. Obviously. (…I don’t know, the humour hasn’t dated the movie, it’s just that a lot of the gags are only funny in theoretical sense. I did find one scene funny. One of the kids turns light switch off, it inexplicably cuts power to a whole city quarter, a foreign dignitary gets rescued from an elevator stuck between floors and shouts “down with nuclear energy!”)