AninOnin

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP wove a traditional Chinese-style cover for her essential balm. Cnetizens also shared their handmade woven cases.

(fengyoujing风油精, literally wind oil essential, like tiger balm, it’s a daily household item in China. The light green liquid has a strong refreshing scent. Dab it on your temples and neck in summer to stay awake. It relieves itching and swelling from bug bites, especially mosquito bites, and eases dizziness and mild car sickness too.)(cr国家特级铲shi官)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Criticizing the everything machine

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/06/applied-counterescatology/#step-right-up

"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"

I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?

"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."

In 13 minutes.

You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:

https://bsky.app/profile/petermiles.eurosky.social/post/3mnffjqczjs2t

Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"

In 800 words:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."

Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.

What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv

Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.

AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?

This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.

Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.

Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.

My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Shortly after writing it, I turned it into a lecture:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.

[vault-of-amber]

watching an essek early scenes compilation and losing my mind over the mighty nein going "this really powerful guy that keeps giving our wizard spells and driving us around everywhere loves ominously mentioning how we're gonna have to pay him back soon... but hes niceys so im sure it'll be fine!" and then it literally was fine. he never asked for a single favour back. he almost started to but then they caught him doing treason and made him cry so it was forgiven. its like they're on a path of the most obvious foreshadowing in the world but jester keeps painting all the cobblestones bright pink. matt fighting for his life dropping increasingly unsubtle hints that this guy is not to be trusted but then they trust him anyway and it works out in their favour like this is the only character in the whole campaign they're not immediately plotting to kill, who starts off secretly plotting to kill them, but then without even consciously trying they change his mind through the power of friendship so it turns out they were right all along. who on earth is doing it like the mighty nein

[rederiswrites]

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

It's rude.

[lastvalyrian]

It's not just rude to make me read something you didn't want to write. It is that you expect me to respond to your email written by Claude. You don't even want me to talk to you. You want me to talk to Claude so that you can make Claude respond for you. It is rude to expect me to talk to a chatbot when I wanted to talk to you.

[ao3cassandraic]

It tells me that you don't want to talk to me.

You want to manipulate me. And you asked a goddamn machine how best to do that.

Fuck that and fuck you.

[headspace-hotel]

If the landscape actually was what people valued it to be, the global ecosystem would surely collapse. If suburbs were truly only houses, yards and trees selected by the homeowner, if pastures grew only the forages intended by the farmer, if agricultural land grew only crops, if a ditch next to an overpass was simply a ditch

If all the places we think of as "no longer wild" actually were, if the biodiversity we thought was gone actually was gone, life on Earth would not be able to sustain itself. The unintended and random plants, the wild weeds of lost and empty places, they hold us tightly, sustaining the few and meager scraps of symbiotic relationships that keep the Earth alive

The ditch beside the road is no longer a serene wetland. The wetland was bulldozed and destroyed and now it is a ditch, dirty and strewn with garbage. But because nobody looks closely, almost nobody sees...A few rushes and sedges have decided to grow here, there's a clump of stubborn and stunted cattails, and there in the weeds, a thickety willow cradling a blackbird's nest.

Easy to love the pristine wilderness in distant preserves, but will someone love this abused and ugly place? Will someone be moved to protect the wild of the roadside ditch and vacant lot as passionately as they protect the primeval forest?

Easy to see the importance of the Amazon rainforest for the very air in our lungs, but who will see the moss that grows between the bricks in the wall of their run-down apartment and realize, It is your oxygen that I breathe?

I read a paper one time suggesting that, even though the idea of monoculture is harmful through its influence on agricultural practice, monoculture does not actually exist, because in practice the weeds prevent it from becoming a reality.

I was thinking of that again, and wondering what it would be like if the weeds actually obeyed us...

[redstonedust]

the problem with movie remakes is that they always remake something that was already good, meaning at worst you ruin it and at best your remake is largely redundant. to make a truly good remake you need to start with source material that is absolute dogwater. ignore the pull of nostalgia. redeem the sins of moviemaking past.

[northstareclipse]

Hyper-individualist cultures go, “Your emotions are your personal responsibility. Don’t burden others. Regulate privately. Maintain functionality. If you’re upset, process it offstage so the machine keeps moving.” Meanwhile certain collectivist or harmony-focused frameworks go, “Your emotions disrupt group cohesion. Don’t create discomfort. Don’t impose disharmony. Transcend or contain your reactions for the sake of the whole.”

Different mythology, same trembling fear that one person saying “actually, I feel terrible” will cause civilization to peel apart like wet drywall.

[zoesupreme]

generational abyssmal dogshit coming down the pipe

[zoesupreme]

he's so real tho

[wilwheaton]

““Fundamentally the problem here with this whole thing is: How is it that you had Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place, and then this other woman was in third place. You would expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern,” Vance said. “But somehow we find ourselves in a situation where number one—they’re still receiving ballots, not just counting ballots. And number two—the way they’re coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two, so it’s a Democrat-versus-Democrat runoff.”

—

JD Vance Isn’t Handling Republicans’ Defeat in Los Angeles Very Well

Hey, stupid, just wanted to remind you that – hey, look at me when I’m talking to you, Jeffrey Dahmer Vance – I just want to remind you that Los Angeles has nearly 3 times more registered Democrats than Republicans, we have not elected a Republican this century, and votes are counted from different precincts, as well as mail-in ballots, starting when the polls close. A lot of stupid people voted for Pratt, sure, but vastly more people who aren’t complete idiot mouth breathers did not, because he is an idiot, just like you. 

You know that, you dumb fuck – I swear to god, Jorts Dingus Vance, take your hand out of your pants, stop staring at that couch, and listen to me – you know that this is how elections have been decided for two centuries in America.

And, yes, the loser in this mayoral contest is the incompetent, unqualified, Republican scumbag who everyone in Los Angeles hates as much as we hate you and that rapist piece of shit you work for. Because he is a loser, and no amount of billionaire money or whining about his loss changes that.

You and your toadies don’t lose elections because they are rigged, Jackhole Dipshit Vance; they lose because voters hate you and your party, and everything you represent.

Run along now, and find some other losers to hang out with while the clock ticks down, ever closer to the moment you are a footnote in a history book, a punchline to a joke that wasn’t ever funny to begin with.

[thesitharts]

Once you start noticing the erasure and exclusion of trans mascs in everything from media to academics you can never stop noticing it

[burning-gray-mon]

Back when I was in university we were asked to do a brief research exercise on a health condition impacting a community. Can't remember what I wanted to look at now, but it was something to do with the trans community.

Whatever it was, to put it this way, if there were 10 studies on the trans community as a whole, there were 3 on trans women and trans fems and 0 on trans men and trans mascs, and 0 on nonbinary people. All of the mixed studies were also pretty much useless for my purposes as well because they were all so lopsided.

I think I swapped to a bunch of different things - addiction rates, smoking, depression, mental health in general - nothing that was even roughly equal in looking at all of us. Trans men, trans mascs and nonbinary people are so under researched as to be nonexistent.

To keep this brief since I've rambled a bunch - this is a major issue health wise since we have not a lot of literature on what testosterone does to certain bodies. This can lead to major health complications, not because of the testosterone itself, but because there might be an interaction thats missed or a complication that's not noticed (which is the same for any medication that's under researched on certain bodies. This is not me scaring people off of hrt, this is me pointing out its a medication like any other.)

[genderkoolaid]

#the therapist who wrote my permission slip for hrt was a trans man#and during that appointment we talked about the erasure of trans men from basically everything#and i talked about an article i had read a week or so earlier about trans people and hiv#it very in depth about risks prevention treatment etc#except that it exclusively referenced trans women with a single sentence at the end basically saying 'oh trans men are at risk too'#less than a year later i saw that same therapist speaking at an hiv organization fundraising event#he talked about how he had just recently been diagnosed with hiv#and had to sit there while this doctor told him all about how the treatment options had never been tested on trans men#none of them#they knew that the treatment would work#but not how effective it would be in comparison to its effectiveness in other demographics#no idea what kind of side effects he might experience#how it would interact with his body and his hormones#what the long term effects would be#nothing#he had to sit there while his doctor told him he would have to be a guinea pig but its not like he has a choice#the only alternative is dying from aids#that whole thing was kind of a wake up call for me#and i started paying more attention getting tested regularly myself and all that sruff you're supposed to do#and over time i befriended the person who did most of my testing#they were also trans masc and we would talk about this kind of stuff#and i told them i wanted to get on prep but every doctor i asked had a wildly different answer on if i even could take it#which verison i could take etc#and they said that only one form of prep has been approved fot trans men but its never actually been tested on trans men#and that one version isnt good for long term use because it has some pretty serious side effects long term#and they said that they regularly go to conferences and meet with representatives from all these drug companies#and they ask 'wheres the data on trans men' 'when are you doing clinical studies on trans men'#and the answer#every single time is: we have not done any studies on trans men and we have no intention to ever do studies on trans men#this is not some passive result of trans masc invisibility it is an active act of erasure that needs to be recognized as an act of violence

[creekfiend]

doing all the post COVID exposure stuff (saline sinus rinse, azelastine nasal spray) just to be careful bc we didn't mask today, and wondering why it's so seldom talked about to people who won't mask for whatever silly reason like "I don't like them on my face" or "they make me claustrophobic" or "no one can hear me talk" or whatever like... I've never heard anyone who refuses to mask say "and because I don't do that, I do all this other stuff to ensure I am lowering my chances of spreading respiratory disease." its always "I can't mask and I don't do anything else either" and no one ever goes "well, have you considered all of these other things you can do post exposure?" because those things aren't as effective as masks, I guess, but THEYRE WAY WAY BETTER THAN NOTHING if you do then right after you go somewhere unmasked (you can do the spray before, too, and it will help even more. even if you contract COVID the spray reduces viral load and symptoms.) it's weirdly absent from discussion of this kind of thing

[swordshapedleaves]

I genuinely didn't know there was anything other than masks and vaccinations to help prevent covid transmission. OP says in the replies that its too exhausted tonight to get into it so I started looking on my own and the top ten results are all Isolate, mask, get tested, vaccinate.

Searching for "azelastine nasal spray covid" did get me this study though. I wonder if my pcp would prescribe me some for after I spend time around people unmasked, since I've got long covid already.

[brainrockets]

Check this out for a round up of some Covid research around antihistamines including nasal sprays.

https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/805203.html

[mikkeneko]

Also they are still coming out with COVID booster shots. Those are still available.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Our junk fee is not a tip

[sunny-sourzii]

They make me sick btw

[oneheadtoanother]

idk anything about this but I love it

[lynati]

If any competition needed to be on Tumblr, it's this one.

[agoldenplum]

Thanks @slightlylightly founded by Sunny Somrat, This is  SSFood Challenge

The players in and around Bangladesh play and are rewarded with food even losers get food. The combination of colorful games and the feel-good factor of nobody going home empty-handed has given Somrat a genuine hit.

[depsidase]

[haunted-hideaway]

I’m glad that OP:

1) Figured this out.

2) Shared so others can learn from their mistake.

[caspercryptid]

I would actually go as far as to say that MOST abuse is unintentional. I think most people will go through their lives without ever experiencing intentional abuse. People are abusive because they're selfish, because they're stressed, because they care more about what society thinks they should do than the impacts of their actions on their children and partners, because they think what they're doing is correct, because they've made it make sense in their own heads, because they think they can fix their victims, they think they can fix their relationships, they think they can stop you from leaving, they think they can make you a better partner to them, they think that means you need to do what they want. We've sort of constructed mental illness in a way that doing this shit to other people counts as a form of mental illness because it is anti social behavior in the literal sense— it is behavior that causes social harm.

I don't say any of this to excuse it. I think everyone needs to be more aware of this because if you think abuse has to be intentional you will never realize you are capable of abusive behavior. You will never realize you are being shitty to the people you love, because YOU know what you mean, YOU know you don't mean any harm. But you're doing harm. You need to pay attention to the impact you have on other people, and you need to do it all the time, Especially when you feel least capable of doing so. Sorry! You live in a society. Get your head out of your ass.

[aurpiment]

“It’s easy to assume”: someone’s misconception is about to be amiably corrected

“It’s tempting to assume”: someone’s assumption is about to be criticized

“It’s comforting to assume”: someone’s assumption is going to be read for filth