Masked Meme Men feat. Lara Whyte

"Data Aura Farm"

Personal fave from the vault: https://m.soundcloud.com/inshortpod/5-walter-benjamin-the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction-abridged

Objective models of Taste? Someone get these nerds a philosophy book .....

Why does this feel like the the height of secretarian violence during the us civil rights movement

I can see this going on in Quebec with less intensity, all the old nationalist infrastructure that used to be aimed at the Anglo economic elites is now laser-targeted at Woman Wearing Hidjab

Walter Benjamin opposed mechanical reproduction, photography is chemical reproduction.

when you see gorgeous white guys on Fiverr begging for scam jobs you know EVERYONE is fucked

In the midst of all this, I am at least open to the possibility of a future where Elon Musk enrages the IRA

I imagine being in a city and realizing that everything around you is closed hours earlier than it should is akin to being in a forest when all the animals suddenly go silent

Incredible interview, please do more like this

The Troubles II: His Majesty's Boogaloo. British forces have reoccupy NI, but these time they're fucking up the loyaltist

Right Wing agitators should be deported to the Atlantic.

I wonder what Lenin and Stalin would have to say about 6 7 and if the Soviet Union was around today would kids in Moscow saying ! ! ! шесть семь ! ! !

Listening to y’all talk about noticing the step change in flag flying in Belfast and England outside central London reminds me so much of what it was like living in post-9/11 America.

What is truly crazy is that basically with Claude code on medium effort and a little bit of sensible development technique I can write any program. I can one shot any idea. I can turn a design mockup into a real app in an hour. But the idea has to be good. The design has to be good. You need to fully understand what you’re doing before you do it. There are so many interesting ideas and techniques that don’t deal with thinking about LLMs as people or replacing people or creativity. I mean, I just have a voice to text interface to programming now and it works. But for some reason, all the startup ideas are about actually replacing all the parts of people that actually make using LLMs interesting. But, having an average text generator is crazy useful in many ways. Just not the way everyone thinks. Also, it drives me crazy to see that for example the ChatGPT desktop app basically doesn’t even work half the time. With the tools that they have they could fix this if they had half a brain in about a second. I think it goes to show that these people probably have no creativity. I’ve been making every single app that I’ve always wanted to for fun and it’s taking me like a couple days each but again I’m a staff software engineer with a lot of experience. I really do not understand what’s happening - most people are using these tools in a way that amounts to talking to an idiot. But if you just stop doing that, for coding at least it works and it works 100%.

I do want to say, as somebody in the sticks, the flag thing is regionally dependent. I'm in Gloucestershire and they definitely tried it in 2024, but as the time has passed and the flags have been cut down, they haven't gone back up. In fact, the twats resorted to sticking them on lamp posts in the middle of busy roundabouts, because they realised people wouldn't bother to cut those down. It's region-dependent and some areas are surprisingly unwilling to tolerate that bollocks.

important question: does riley know that openai likes to benchmark their gpt models on sommerlier exams?

Twink, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Oh, and with regards the flags on the mainland-I live in a quiet bit in the urban core but outside city centre and walk all over the city. The more monochrome the area the more flags-and there is an area where I wish for a convoy of MRAPs due to the awfulness of english queerphobia (will hire all the blackwater guys from that day in Iraq y'all got minimally prosecuted for to crew this. If you're reading) which is saturated- every lamppost with at least a george's cross, crusader flags, lamposts with the irish tricolor, st andrew cross and union flag (reading from bottom to top) . Which is kinda how you'd flag a prize of one nation which you had captured from another before it were condemned by a prize court, but I digress. Anyway, yeah, there're also maybe a dozen houses that are hyper-festooned and I would suspect if you wanted the flags to stop they'd be where to deliver the inert (and anyway simulated) friends' day presents.

Fantastic episode, and thank ye for getting someone from the North to give a brilliant analysis of what’s going on. Coming from the Republic, I was reared on Irish republicanism but missed out on all the developments post-GFA. The fact that now Fine Gael are apparently publishing a plan for a United Ireland in November has me thinking about what reunification will look like, especially if the peace process is under a serious threat for the first time since Omagh. Fair play

AI brain really makes you raise 20 million dollars from venture capitalists instead of learning an instrument or how to draw, my god

Thought this was a super quiet mix but then recalled having lent my good PPE to my mistress last nite. Am retrospectively very glad of the cash I spent on those ear protectors in light of being reminded how shit the standard issue ones are.

Paid racists? That's Tommy Robinsons who career!!

I’m an Irish-American raised Catholic though I’m a Taoist now. I also study history. I’m old so I grew up here on the San Francisco Peninsula and I lived here during The Troubles. I’ve also been to Ireland and love the place. So The Troubles never really ended. Less of a surprise than I thought. These things are generational.

I feel that Riley has the wrong end of the stick in his criticism of the Tasteful AI. He seems to think these people are aiming at beauty, but that isn't what they're selling: what they're describing is a machine that can replicate what is currently fashionable. Given that one of the things AI does well is shallow stylistic mimicry, this seems totally doable. The fun thing about this is: fashion follows wealth, taste is exclusive, and mass production signals the death of any given highbrow trend, so what they are in fact proposing is a machine that kills fashions. Happily none of the people involved will ever have the nous to point it at anything that's actually good.

eh, I'm pretty sure MI5 trafficked those twinks for... various reasons, including strategy of tension ops and if they get caught you just pin it on one state enemy or another, then you offer them... unorthodox plea deals in court.

Ms. Whyte's story where people asked if her nan was IRA upon learning Unionists murdered her was horrifying.

It was good to hear from Laura. I'm a NI TF sub but I wouldn't have put myself forward, simply because I'm from a comfortably middle-class background and my lack of knowledge of paramilitary dynamics is always embarrassing when I'm abroad. The only mercy is that most of the rest of the world knows so little about Ulster that this usually escapes notice.

It’s weird to say that Benjamin was “worried” about those things happening, since they had already happened and he was just commenting on it.

I've seen so many slop ai fash callout posters over the past week, the tech has really given them something to run with

Derek Zoolanderavich absolutely took me out 🤣🤣

Yeah I think the issue with Russiagate was less that it was false than that it was presented as a sort of thrilling detective-themed episode of the TV show The News for the nation's paranoiac Cold Warrior lib boomers who completely swallowed reds-under-the-beds anticommunist propaganda rather than a story of quite ordinary corruption and the connections between the shadier, less polished elements of capital in the West and a country where the equivalents of those elements are incredibly empowered

I instinctually interpreted "Trashfuture Towers" as analogous to Alton Towers. I guess "theme park" can go along with oil warehouse, SPAC, hedge fund, and short-selling research firm

"Not another one" - Threads, 1984/Trashfuture Nevermind us, it might actually do *you* good to seek out unrelated good news. Kassabian did it for explaining Unit 731, there's no reason you can't do it for your own good (and ours)

I hate to live during heavy news hours at Trashfuture Towers.