Post Aq0hBg2Rvs69dk4hLU by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #Aq0d9YyioM81Lc4G7k by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-01-12T14:50:38Z
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"He burned our libraries. Why did he do that? It's so destructive. Can you think of anything more evil?" "I can, child. There is something worse than burning a library.""How!""It happened long ago, this was a time when books were not rare as they are today. Everyone had hundereds of books.""Hundreds! No!""Thousands.""Oh!""So, the new kings realized they couldn't possibly destroy all of the books. They would always miss a few.""What did they do?"1/
(DIR) Post #Aq0dPVnEQDaG6NIY1Q by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-01-12T14:53:33Z
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"They started publishing books of their own. The opened many printing presses and many paper mills and they made books even more common than they already were. They even gave most of these new books away for free.""I don't understand. How could making even more books be worse than burning them?""Think about it.""Were the books all propaganda?""Yes. Yes, many of them were, but some of them were not.""Then how did it work?""The new books were made by coping scraps from the old."2/
(DIR) Post #Aq0dcCgilUzuc5IxdY by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-01-12T14:55:51Z
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"But you still had the old books!""And hardly anyone could find them.""No one could tell the old books from the new, and the new books were ... they were not written by people. They were created by a mechanical process that allowed one to feed a machine several thousand books, and then produce new one, endless variations. But none of them quite right, none of them... whole.""I think I see now. That is awful.""It was, child. It was."3/3
(DIR) Post #Aq0dnm2peNiHSIAF96 by DEDGirl@mastodon.world
2025-01-12T14:57:54Z
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@futurebird 😢
(DIR) Post #Aq0dpXC9pcwFymMjJY by johnefrancis@cosocial.ca
2025-01-12T14:58:14Z
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@futurebird this is the same strategy that will defeat the ad tech, used by the kings' worst propaganda companies. 😁
(DIR) Post #Aq0eCLoKKBe1Kd6B7Y by pzriddle@mstdn.io
2025-01-12T15:02:20Z
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@futurebird "Fahrenheit 451" meets Borges' "Library of Babel"
(DIR) Post #Aq0fmBol3WIgiZxAxs by rayhindle@mastodon.social
2025-01-12T15:20:01Z
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@futurebird Why Fahrenheit 451 didn't happen for real!
(DIR) Post #Aq0hBg2Rvs69dk4hLU by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
2025-01-12T15:35:49Z
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@futurebird this made me think of google's mission statement ("to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and how, for about 15 years or so, they actually kinda lived up to that, and to removed some of the need to depend on librarians.Now that a.i. rot is spreading we'll need librarians more than ever, but they might be overwhelmed by the deluge of automated fake literature production...
(DIR) Post #Aq0kTDcwbUHObBCWga by gmeneses94@mastodon.social
2025-01-12T16:12:30Z
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@futurebird Sounds like dystopia, but also historical fiction. At first it reminded me of how nazis viewed proliferation of degenerate books. However, we have to discern prejudices from this total chaos antagonism. I’m not afraid of anyone mixing Bibles or Qur’ans, because 1. Qur’an is traditionally orally transmitted, 2. From my perspective the 2 rules of guidance are to worship the Hidden One secretely and to follow Golden Rule. 3. I’ve already accepted they have flaws.
(DIR) Post #Aq0kj30bql6QIeomGm by eleanor@chaosfem.tw
2025-01-12T16:15:26Z
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@futurebird watching this happen in real time makes me unspeakably sad.
(DIR) Post #Aq0klCNvxbmnxVkmae by tanepiper@tane.codes
2025-01-12T16:15:49Z
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@futurebird this is why I'm picking up as many books as I can these days - as many as I can, before they got tainted with reprints. History is contained in them that cannot be erased by enshitification or digital rot.
(DIR) Post #Aq0ktp61uuLuKuUXSa by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-01-12T16:17:28Z
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@gmeneses94 I'm mostly happy with books people choose to make. With some exceptions, but their existence isn't a problem. The issue here is the sheer volume is beyond what any person could read or sort in a thousand lifetimes.If you read a terrible book (or article, or post, or image) you waste a little time, but you also learn something about the person who made it. That is not the case with this pollution. When you want to obliterate text you write over it with more text. #slopocalypse
(DIR) Post #Aq0of2gTVzn1x1kJBA by beecycling@romancelandia.club
2025-01-12T16:59:32Z
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@futurebird Do you know about these bonkers pulpy propaganda books that are super popular in Russia, and that there were already massive numbers of even before AI. I'm sure they'll be making full use of AI to create even more. https://youtu.be/iCI6es9G0oo
(DIR) Post #Aq0otRmN0c6tpuN7qa by smallcircles@social.coop
2025-01-12T17:02:08Z
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@futurebird > 😱 child lost attention on smartphone.Well written, thank you.
(DIR) Post #Aq0q4oJFgKkqqujbWK by tessarakt@mastodon.social
2025-01-12T17:15:26Z
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@futurebird "copying"
(DIR) Post #Aq0s0aiWTZMtRjfdtg by isotopp@infosec.exchange
2025-01-12T17:37:06Z
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@futurebird @gmeneses94 why stop with overwriting books, when you can overwrite reality, like @cstross did in https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/w3ztgi/palimpsest_by_charles_stross_what_the_fuck_did_i/
(DIR) Post #Aq0yvsLmBjw0MjjIfY by profdc9@mastodon.social
2025-01-12T18:54:38Z
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@futurebird This sounds a little like Jorge Luis Borgeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
(DIR) Post #Aq0zrdbBBz1VPVTfLU by ArchaeoIain@archaeo.social
2025-01-12T19:05:05Z
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@futurebird this is brilliant.
(DIR) Post #Aq11CznFy3Q2HWsHfU by grepe@ieji.de
2025-01-12T19:20:10Z
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@futurebird 4/3"But why didn't librarians stop them?""They couldn't, child. There were libraries and librarians, but they weren't the same as they are now. Libraries were... they were just these obscure places from the past that hardly anyone used.""Because everyone had so many books at home?""Exactly. And everyone could share books freely and get any book anyone had.""But how did they know which books were good and which were not?""They thought they can just read them and find out..."
(DIR) Post #Aq19cWa9zopmqaQtyi by PizzaDemon@mastodon.online
2025-01-12T20:54:25Z
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@futurebird how do I know this wasn't written by one of Adrian Tchaikovsky's AIs ? (Ant intelligence computers)
(DIR) Post #Aq19ld8N0RJlm0mBbU by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-01-12T20:56:07Z
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@PizzaDemon You Don't. LOL.
(DIR) Post #Aq1BidBcYRTWyXziD2 by nomad2035@infosec.exchange
2025-01-12T21:17:57Z
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@futurebird save paper books. Keep them protected. Use them to continue to educate young ones, when there will be no teachers anymore and only AI. Diffuse old books, explain them, keep the freedom memory alive.
(DIR) Post #Aq1E3drdQimd4CnCoy by julianstaylor@me.dm
2025-01-12T21:44:09Z
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@futurebird Excellent description of our plight.
(DIR) Post #Aq1HlXHJZpCxFHQTA0 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-01-12T22:25:40Z
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@ohmu @datarama uuuuuurrrrghhhh
(DIR) Post #Aq1HuxDGWOyIHq1Tvc by paninid@mastodon.world
2025-01-12T22:27:21Z
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@futurebird
(DIR) Post #Aq1M7hXmUQw7Grx8JE by kathichaffeedonegan@mastodon.social
2025-01-12T23:14:26Z
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@futurebird "They burnt the eyes of the children, every other one. To distract us"
(DIR) Post #Aq1ROlNI03NPqV05FQ by mjgardner@social.sdf.org
2025-01-13T00:13:06Z
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@futurebird Sometimes when I find something online I want to keep, I lightly edit and re-set it in Markdown format for my own use. I hope that’s OK here.
(DIR) Post #Aq31AqZ3hMgpOa830q by draeath@infosec.exchange
2025-01-13T18:29:11Z
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@futurebird #microfact more like 🥲
(DIR) Post #B1Cw8sJMKAz1Hy73Jo by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-12-13T13:53:03Z
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@futurebird Whenever I see something like this, I feel obligated to bring up the scene in Iain M. Banks's _The Player of Games_, where an enemy general — after promising not to destroy even a single character of an occupied world's treasured library — renders it unusable by sorting all of the characters and/or bytes of binary date, creating pages of A's and images of a nearly contant hue.
(DIR) Post #B1CzhdDajPwgTbgD3o by cmthiede@social.vivaldi.net
2025-12-13T14:32:56Z
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@futurebird we're all just nodes on an ever growing neural net. Everyone giggles at interfacing their "hive mind" for answers. Take a node away, doesn't matter. More detrimental to a single human brain (stroke) but not the world brain, as it recovers quickly via redundancy. The H.G.Wells novels can be found conveniently packaged under one cover today: Time Machine, World Brain, War of the Worlds. A great gift idea in case anyone still hasn't found something for that someone yet.
(DIR) Post #B1EQgfo4Vwoe8RTFCK by obucate@bildung.social
2025-12-14T07:10:02Z
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@futurebird Thank you very much for this great piece of microfiction. I'd like to take about it in class, how can I attribute your text?