David Sikabwe from Going Spaceward

Frank Sinatra called. He wanted a rap verse for "Fly Me to the Moon". Happy to oblige. (My broken glasses are totally an aesthetic choice.)

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

Farthest group hug from Earth in human history btw

"...copy, Moon joy."

Liftoff. The Artemis II mission launched from @NASAKennedy at 6:35pm ET (2235 UTC), propelling four astronauts on a journey around the Moon. Artemis II will pave the way for future Moon landings, as well as the next giant leap — astronauts on Mars.

I think part of the answer is that this is actually the content America C wants, but no one would make it for them. Even our worst slop, up til now, has been made by artists, or aspiring artists! That biases the output towards what artists, as a group, want to make. Even the worst comic book movie still contains somewhere in it the sensibilities of hundreds or thousands of people who enjoy making art. Even the worst corporate dreck still is made by people who *assume* certain conventions of narrative art. It would never even *occur* to them to make something like this. The AI slop answers the question of “what would art look like without artists?” and one of the answers is that it would look like the most hideous, manipulative, garish, spiritually-abject swill you could imagine, because that’s actually what a good chunk of people want and have been denied because artists would resent making it too much. The whole history of the blockbuster or the sitcom, etc, is to some extent a negotiation between these forces—the sensibilities of artists, chained to the sensibilities of moron consumers. We could never get the full realization of what the dumbest, most vulgar people in the world wanted to watch until now, because the artists still pulled things in their direction, even if only a bit. Reality TV was probably the closest we’ve come to seeing what “art without artists” would look like, but even then it wasn’t fully realized. Remember that Nathan Fielder used to be a reality tv producer—there are still real artists embedded in the process, even there. But now with AI, we can remove the constraints of taste, quality, authenticity, meaning, and humanity that artists tend to try to impose even on their most cynical projects. Because they’re people who care about art, who want to make art. They can’t help but have a perspective, a sensibility, an aesthetic—taste. Even if it’s bad taste. AI is showing us the world of no taste, no sensibility, no perspective, just brute manipulation of the senses. It’s vile.

The fear isn't that AI will be better at making art/music/software than us. The fear is that it won't matter if it is better. What do you do when companies would rather AI-generate an animation that can't even get a logo right than pay a team of animators?

@ZohranKMamdani W

Always a good reminder that the people making these products are not using them. Zuck is spending his time doing MMA training, running a business, reading, buying Hawaiian real estate and talking to people. This is meant for you. Not him. He sells you plastic and rubber so he can buy wood and stone

We used to know how to write dialogue like this, man. RETVRN.

75 IQ country with all the nukes mobilizes its fat fuck Big Bang Theory shirt wearing SS to send random people to black sites while Real Estate Hitler & Meme Goebbels do car ads at the capitol. how is everyone not screaming 24 hours a day

Taylor Swift gon leave this man on god

Pls let me in the writers room. I have no experience.

Just finished a rewatch this weekend. I manifested this.

The other day I heard Jay-Z say "Attached to the track like SMPTE" in a 20-year-old song, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

the only thing america hates more than a rapist is a woman

This is what happens when five states pick the president.

SIRI CAN YOU PLEASE HELP ME PRETEND I CARE ABOUT PEOPLE? GOOGLE CAN YOU WRITE A HEARTFELT LETTER TO MY FAVORITE ATHLETE FOR ME? CREATIVITY MAKES OUCHIE IN MY BRAIN. ALEXA CAN YOU SLEEP WITH MY WIFE FOR ME?