A Queer Poly Socialist

He/Him, 29, queer/bisexual/relationship anarchist This blog, as a commentary on my life, has either no theme or 9,000 themes and it's unclear which way we're leaning.

[covid-safer-hotties]

[rikaklassen]

Image description: Stylized gouache painting showing a colorful grid of 9 banned or restricted objects: vaccine vial and syringe, a COVID mask, a bottle of PrEP, an IUD, a passport, a condom, a porn magazine, HRT vials, and a can of "soup for my family" Note: taken from the tweet above.

[disciplesofmalcolm]

“You don’t know whether people relate to the breakfast program, because you’ve never fed anybody. You don’t know anything about the free health clinic because you never asked anybody. You don’t know anything about the good that a gun does you, because you never tried one. And we say that if you was born and if you said you didn’t like pears and you never tasted pears, you’d have to be a liar. You don’t know whether you like pears, but you can’t claim that you don’t like pears. The only way that anybody can tell you the taste of a pear is if he himself has tasted it. That’s the only way. That’s the objective reality. That’s what the Black Panther Party deals with. We’re not metaphysicians, we’re not idealists, we’re dialectical materialists. And we deal with what reality is, whether we like it or not.”

— Fred Hampton speaking about how you must practice your theory, or else it’s irrelevant, 1969.

[this-is-a-love-story-isnt-it]

This insane update from Neocities

[flock-of-cassowaries]

I have no evidence to back this up, so, 🧂🧂🧂; but:

I work in tech, and any time I see a precipitous and incorrect decision like this — ESPECIALLY if it’s made by a technology company — the explanation that seems most plausible to me us that the management of that company has decided to implement an “Agentic” AI — i.e. a large-language model, attached to a program whose instructions are “Do whatever the large language model spits out”.

The problem is that large language models only care about spitting out an answer that sounds syntactically plausible. They’re designed to provide a response that is a reasonable simulacrum of human language, within a reasonably short timeout, but there is absolutely zero actual understanding behind it. It is basically a bullshit machine. There is no evaluation of veracity or reasonableness happening — that’s not a thing it’s capable of. It’s just trying to spit out a plausible answer before you get impatient and give up interacting with it.

Without doxxing myself, I’ve recently seen a case exactly like this in telecom.

A third -party project manager (not me, I was just a witness) put in a request like “Placeholder - port date to be determined for this toll-free number, belonging to Customer XYZ. I will update this ticket when the date is determine, and provide the required paperwork. For now, please just assign to the correct porting coordinator and hold.”

Instead of doing that, Carrier A’s customer support department immediately sent a port order to Carrier B, with the authorizer listed as [random person in customer’s call centre who wasn’t a manager and wouldn’t be listed as a signing authority on Carrier B’s billing record].

And then Carrier B, rather than being like “Who the fuck is Tragedeigh Molyneux? Our billing record clearly says that for Customer XYZ, the signing authority is Humperdink Snufflebugger” , instead just went ahead and released the toll-free number to Carrier A.

This was a couple months ago, and I can’t remember if callers were getting a busy signal, or just an infinite gentle-music hold loop, but it was a fucking shitshow, and the customer was furious.

We hurriedly implemented a workaround (a weird hairpin-routing-loopback to get callers to agents whose phones were still connected to Carrier B’s system), but the customer was absolutely furious about the outage; like “How TF could this have happened??? We never set a port date, and in any case, Ms. Molyneux never had signing authority to authorize changes with either Carrier A or Carrier B???”

And the poor project manager is getting absolutely excoriated, even though she never asked for this number to be ported immediately. She was just trying to give Carrier A lots of notice, because they are usually very behind on their port requests. And she’s just like “I don’t know, we’ll have to ask Carrier A and Carrier B to investigate how that decision was made within their support organizations.”

And like… to me, the technician watching this unfold, it seems that either:

A) Both Carrier A and Carrier B suddenly have customer support staff who are extremely eager to help, and also extremely lacking in critical thinking, or else

B) One (or both) of these carriers (one of whom is a large, publicly-traded company) has recently offloaded their first-pass ticket handling to an “agentic AI” (i.e. an LLM / syntactically-plausible bullshit machine, hooked directlyinto a system that just blindly implements any instructions the LLM sends to it).

I strongly suspect it’s Option B, because I’ve worked in this industry for over a decade, and I’ve never encountered a human person whose impulse to help wasn’t thoroughly outweighed by their fear of making a mistake that brings down an entire call centre.

But yeah. All hail the future of technology.

[teathattast]

[roycohn]

idk man when i was a kid i remember a lot of adults saying "if you can read and follow directions, you can cook" so i was like yes i can do these two things. doesn't seem that hard. and it wasn't! so it just always surprises me when i see people of any age who are capable of reading and following directions bemoaning how impossibly hard cooking is. like i know i'm always on this hobbyhorse but it just seems like a lot of people have never developed basic life skills and instead of going "oh wow that's embarrassing, i should learn and catch up" they instead get defensive and turn it into a learned-helplessness thing where they CAN'T POSSIBLY be expected to learn something that's SOOOO HARD. and suddenly somehow we're the oppressors for thinking it's weird that a grown adult can't grill themselves a cheese.

[isuggestlandback]

If you ever wondered why they call tattoos and piercings "unprofessional" and "unsophisticated"

Source: Lainey Molnar

[headspace-hotel]

literally. Cesare Lombroso "father of criminology" and disgusting racist and eugenicist had a whole thing about hating tattoos, and he even explicitly said that tattoos were something that """savages""" did and that criminals got tattoos because their brains were similar to """savages"""

dont obey the racist bullshit

[degrommunism]

I really do not think the average person understands how different the training resources and access are for a cis man playing sports vs everyone else. I wrote an article last month about how until 2020 they were given the Swedish women’s national hockey team expired protein bars for tournaments and only five practices leading up to it. More often than not people who aren’t cis able bodied men playing a sport do not have equipment properly fitted to them. Women’s teams do just straight up get less court or field or ice time. Coaches and trainers will refuse to train you on certain things because they just assume you cannot do something.

Idk. We have seen the athletic accomplishments of cis men come very far in the past century as they got more specialized training and the sports industry as a whole grew. Yet People still really think physical advancements and progression can only be done by cis men, and the the upper limit of what’s been recorded by everyone else is this permanent, unmovable thing. For a long time people thought it was impossible for a woman to do a triple axel until it happened.

[unamusedsloth]

“Vicious” Leopard seal tries to keep national geographic photographer alive by feeding him penguins.

[bendablebananas]

@maculategiraffe tags

[toasthaste]

according to An Immense World, apparently giant squid eyes are, like, UNREASONABLY large, even for something their size living at those depths. the next largest eyes on earth, blue whale eyes, are less than half the size, and swordfish, who live at similar depths as giant squid and have the largest eyes of any fish, have eyes that could fit inside a giant squid's pupil.

eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??

turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.

sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale lurking around

and also I gotta say, the imagery... the huge lurking threat betrayed only by the ambiguous glowing shape of its movements through the water, is really evocative, if spooky deep-sea games aren't already using that to make things extremely ominous then they should really start

[cafffine]

woke up this morning, rolled over, and very confidently tried to blow out my alarm clock like a candle. absolutely no precedent for that.

[rumplefuckingstiltzkin]

Ebeneezer in 1742 wakes with a start as for some reason he has put out his guttering candle by slapping atop it ith the palm of his hand. His hand is burned and his nightgown and cap are spattered with hot wax.

[feyosha]

Fascinated by the perceived necessity of an Equivalent Exchange

[psychotic-gerard]

x

[kiragecko]

[Image of text saying,

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

End ID.]

[anarchistmemedistro]

[isuggestrevolution]

i have a suggestion

[disquetlibrary]

Nixon for those who are curious.

[anarchistmemedistro]

this is generally true about neoliberalism in general. nixon got the ball rolling, reagan intensified and structuralized it.

[weavemama]

daily reminder that there is absolutely nothing normal about being expected to waste a majority of your life at a corporation to survive instead of indulging in better life experiences ✨

[ralfmaximus]

In the 1960s it was a common speculation that by 1980 the typical work week would consist of 4 days. And by the year 2000 we’d be working no more than 3 days a week.

Because of computerization, automation, and better efficiencies in workflow.

Guess what happened instead?

[yeahiwasintheshit]

[northern-punk-lad]

The guardian trying to find who’s responsible for increased transphobia in this country

[fuckyeahcomicsbaby]

Different Stories Resonate with Different People

[lovingmyselfishard]

I will always reblog this.

[brightwanderer]

I once spent three hours scouring the internet to find this comic again, I will not let that be repeated.

[aqueerpolysocialist]

Happy birthday, Harvey. You'd have hated the kind of rhetoric we see from transphobes today. And you were dead on - we have to be out, we have to be loud, we have to be joyful. That's the only way we win.

"If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."

RIP Harvey Milk, 22/5/1930 - 27/11/1978

[vrabia]

the silmarillion is wild because you read it and you're like huh okay, and then you read lotr and it turns out everyone's just going around doing their own thing while the surviving elves are living through the final chapters of a post-apocalyptic horror story

[vrabia]

rivendell's a pretty chill place, right? everyone gets along splendidly. dream retirement home et cetera. solid chance the guy you're having afternoon tea with has either survived or personally committed war crimes. also the reason it's so chill is elrond has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time

galadriel's been around since the beginning, like, for pretty much all of middle-earth's history you understand, she has Seen it all and despite what you may have been led to believe is at all times this close to snapping. also the reason lothlorien is so chill is she has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time

i can't emphasize enough how much of a post-apocalyptic horror story thranduil lives in. homeland destroyed and half his people massacred. has fucken sauron in his backyard and the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light puttering about on his lawn. a dragon lives next door. does NOT have a magic ring and is therefore obliged to rule over his murderforest in normal time

just so we're all on the same page here, legolas' day job before joining the fellowship was to hunt the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light and it's not like, a big deal or anything. he just has to do it. he's used to it.

'elves are leaving middle-earth and it's so sad :(' they have ptsd samwise.