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#neoluddites — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #neoluddites, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Why the Brain Prefers to Read on Paper

    by Kris deDecker, October 25, 2013

    " 'Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a #MentalRepresentation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure.

    "The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices.

    "Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

    "In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other.

    "Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there’s a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.' "

    notechmagazine.com/2013/10/why

    #SolarPunkSunday #TechAddiction #Books #PhysicalBooks #ASMR #FullyEngaged #NeoLuddites #LessScreenTime #LibrariesRule #ReadABook #PaperMaps #PhysicalLandscape #Handwriting

  2. Should we add "#SkinJobs" and "#Toasters" and "#GoRustYourself" to this list?

    How ‘#Clanker’ Became the Internet’s New Favorite Slur

    New derogatory phrases are popping up online, thanks to a cultural pushback against #AI

    by CT Jones, August 6, 2025

    "Clanker. #Wireback. #Cogsucker. People are feeling the inescapable inevitability of AI developments, the encroaching of the digital into everything from entertainment to work. And their answer? Slurs.

    "AI is everywhere — on Google summarizing search results and siphoning web traffic from digital publishers, on social media platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook, adding misleading context to viral posts, or even powering #NaziChatbots. #GenerativeAI and #LargeLanguageModels — AI trained on huge datasets — are being used as therapists, consulted for medical advice, fueling spiritual psychosis, directing self-driving cars, and churning out everything from college essays to cover letters to breakup messages.

    "Alongside this deluge is a growing sense of discontent from people fearful of artificial intelligence stealing their jobs, and worried what effect it may have on future generations — losing important skills like media #literacy, #ProblemSolving, and #CognitiveFunction. This is the world where the popularity of AI and robot slurs has skyrocketed, being thrown at everything from ChatGPT servers to delivery drones to automated customer service representatives. Rolling Stone spoke with two language experts who say the rise in robot and AI slurs does come from a kind of cultural pushback against AI development, but what’s most interesting about the trend is that it uses one of the only tools AI can’t create: slang

    " '#Slang is moving so fast now that an #LLM trained on everything that happened before it is not going to have immediate access to how people are using a particular word now,' says Nicole Holliday, associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. 'Humans [on] #UrbanDictionary are always going to win.' "

    Read more:
    rollingstone.com/culture/cultu

    Archived version:
    archive.ph/ku2Uw

    #BattlestarGalactica #AIResistance #AISucks #NoNukesForAI #NeoLuddites #ResistAI #LudditeClub #SmartPhoneAddiction #AreYouAlive #AreYouHuman