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things have been very bleak and it feels like i'm mostly just trying to stay alive rather than stay hopeful

Making up lyrics to the Evangelion theme song but they're just about my dog

running low on perfect sentences this week because I had covid, if anyone wants to get in some last minute nominations please send them my way

youtube.com/watch?v=w_JEezynhr obsessed with this iPhone ad that emphasizes the cosmic origins of phone metals, extremely tragic for the asteroid that its apotheosis is...becoming a phone

this should not be a spicy world politics take and yet 

ethnostates are a bad idea that produce horrific outcomes for everyone and it's weird that a bunch of people make an exception for exactly one

is it a covid headache or a stress headache, who can say lol

there's never a great time to get covid, but now is certainly not ideal (symptoms mild so far but just a lot on top of a generally stressful time)

buttondown.email/perfectsenten this week in sentences: soil, vertigo, a strange bird, less interested, barista, beloved Silver Lady, eager to outlive

found out from a friend that her friend who very recently left Vice loved our episode on reading their bankruptcy docs and that she was sharing it with all her former colleagues! it is nice when the people affected by the story you're telling are into it ripcorp.biz/episodes/rip-docs-

“Companies have been trying to hide the full footprint of their data centers because they know the public could turn against them if they knew the reality. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google was found to be using a quarter of the city’s water supply to cool its facilities. Tech companies have been facing pushback elsewhere in the United States, but also across the world in places like Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, Ireland, and New Zealand. Now opposition is growing in Spain too, where droughts are wiping out crops and people are wondering why they’d give their limited water resources to Meta for a data center. But adopting generative AI will require a lot more of those data centers to be built around the world.

The tech industry is constantly incentivized to increase the computing power we use as a society, because that works for their business models — especially when Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have massive cloud computing divisions. But we never seem to stop and ask whether that additional computing power is necessary to improve our lives. As Hugging Face climate lead Sasha Luccioni told The Guardian, “we’re seeing this shift of people using generative AI models just because they feel like they should, without sustainability being taken into account.” Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, but it’s not clear that’s actually in anyone’s interests but those of founders and investors who are hoping to cash in on the latest AI bubble.”

Paris Marx reminds us that the chat behind the bot is not free.

#environment #tech

another minor housing thing 

it sucks to leave a home of six years but it really means a lot that my neighbors are genuinely sad about it and passing along leads

minor semi-positive housing update 

(an additional wrinkle in this is THEY OWN ANOTHER HOUSE in Vermont, which probably won't fetch as high a price as their Carroll Gardens building, but idk if I were in my 70s I would liquidate that for whatever I could get and hold onto the property with the passive income in the neighborhood my daughter and grandkids are still in??)

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minor semi-positive housing update 

it's still baffling to me that they've decided to sell the building and think they can buy an apartment in the neighborhood--which is a way, way more competitive market and after all the closing costs they will barely have the cash to buy outright; like you guys can have a nest egg or a home in Brooklyn but not sure you can have both!

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minor semi-positive housing update 

trying to not get my hopes up that their realizing the asking price is way too high might open them up to the offer we made to buy out our floor in a co-op conversion--probably won't happen, but I think their hope for a big quick payout is fading and maybe at least paying off the mortgage and cutting their share of building costs will become more appealing?

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minor semi-positive housing update 

we told our landlords that we would probs not be moving out before our lease ends and they took the building off the market to wait for us to move out. No one wants to buy a Brooklyn building right now that's going to have tenants for another 9 months. (Also they've had a very tepid response at showings--probably bc the asking price is way too high.)

So, still have to move but won't have my home bought out from under us and no more open houses.

It's very tempting to believe that KOSA is so bad that it won't really pass/won't survive but the past year of anti-bodily-autonomy legislation has liquified my remaining shreds of normalcy bias, and I'm worried. US folks, please call your reps if you can.

legal gray area: boring, vague

the Air Bud School of Law: delightful, implies dogs doing law (no rule that says they can't)

Last Thursday and Saturday, I posted the first two pieces of a four-part series on Meta in Myanmar on my site:

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis

These two posts stitch together accounts of what was actually happening in Myanmar between 2012 and 2018, both online and off. The third post, set to go up this coming Thursday, deals with what we now know about what was happening inside Meta at the time—inside the machinery of Facebook’s algorithms and inside the company itself.

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Horsin' Around

This is a hometown instance run by Sam and Ingrid, for some friends.