Something Something Something Darkside

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[communistkenobi]

I don’t really think the pitt earns its name. like it’s not a pit. doctors can change the minds of anti-abortion mothers trying to force their teenage daughter to stay pregnant. health insurance barely ever comes up. everyone can be saved by a social worker. you can own anti-vaxxers with facts and logic. if you’re unhoused you should simply go to a hospital. putting an incel kid with a kill list of girls in a psych ward for 72 hours is wrong because he’s a just misunderstood little guy. understaffing can be overcome through the sheer grit of doctors and nurses. there’s nothing really dire about this place. there isn’t really any injustice happening that would infuriate you on a systemic level. it’s not a pit!

[catarinastone]

Do scrubs is still the best medical show?

[communistojousama]

Marxist unironically using the term "Middle class" like it's a real category

BLEAK

It is a real income category. get over yourself lol I understand both Marxism and economics in general far better than you

[catarinastone]

Idk if it makes sense to add to this, but like, it is a meaningful distinction to make in a lot of cases.

A middle class person is probably someone with a higher eduction, with training to do differentiated work such that can still command a reasonable wage.

It's someone who probably comes from generarional wealth.

It's going to be someone who isn't living paycheck to paycheck and who therefore will probably be able to one day buy a house or otherwise build generational wealth.

It's someone who, because of all of the above will likely have better access to health care.

And it's someone who is going to be better off than most of the working class and as such may be less invested in the idea of ending capitalism. But it's also someone who's main source of income is still going to be their wage and is therefore still very much working class and being shortchanged for the work they do.

I think it's also important to understand that the growth of the middle class during the cold war gave a lot of legitimacy to liberal democracies within those democracies. And that the decline of the middleclass is the greatest betrayal to the liberal promise that everyone would one day be able to achieve middle class status

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[lucieslucidity]

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

[fleshengine]

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

We gotta fix that.

[raginrayguns]

got a message from amazon that my ancient kindle will stop working soon. Maybe I can find a different way to load epubs onto it than downloading from amazon, but there was also a warning that after a hard reset it may not function at all... ?

im not sure exactly how this works but even though the kindle is after all ancient it left me with a bad feeling about it. Why was I relying on a specific company to load data onto my ereader for me?

I guess I should get a new one, but maybe i don't want a kindle this time. Something... simpler, to someone who knows how to use computers. Like something I can load books onto just by mounting it as an external drive. I mean I'm hoping I can do that with a kindle too, but... idk, something that doesn't have a subscription to an external service built deeply into it

i guess i'd have to figure out how to download my kindle books as epub but i mostly use the kindle to read out of copyright books from project gutenberg these days anyway

what are good non-kindle e-readers?

[andmaybegayer]

I use Kobo which is fine, handles epubs and mobis and can even do PDF, which is probably better on their bigger devices, I manage it through Calibre but I have also just plugged it into my phone and dumped an epub in the root directory and it'll just pick it up.

Not super flexible, as it is still only going to let you buy books from Kobo. If you'd prefer something platform-neutral that can run Apps, there's a whole host of Android based e-readers out there now. A fun one is the Boox Palma series which is shaped like a phone.

[catarinastone]

I buy other ebooks for my kobo all the time fron other stores. I just have to load them manually because kobo only syncs with its own store, but it's a total non issue

[prokopetz]

I think that realistically, the thing that kills AI data centres isn't going to be cost, regulation, or public opposition. I think it's going to be the gen-AI equivalent of the WDM fiasco.

For context, back when commercial Internet service was just taking off and the dot-com bubble was at its peak, a bunch of companies put down vast quantities of fibre-optic cables in anticipation of future demand. The vast majority of that fibre subsequently ended up laying dormant, becoming what's known in the industry as dark fibre.

The dot-com bubble bursting is often cited as the reason why, but it can't account for all of the problem, or even most of it; demand for commercial bandwidth continued to grow in spite of the bust, albeit somewhat more slowly than predicted. The real culprit was the development of a technology called wavelength-division multiplexing, or WDM.

WDM tremendously increased the amount of data that could be transmitted using existing fibre-optic cables; post-WDM, many major urban centres found that they now had over one hundred times as much fibre as they needed to accommodate present and anticipated near-future demand for Internet bandwidth. Many of the corporations that had speculatively bankrolled that fibre installation ended up selling off their infrastructure for pennies on the dollar and subsequently went bankrupt.

Basically, I suspect that's what's going to happen here. The present rush to construct more and more AI data centres is being short-sightedly driven by predictions based on the first couple of generations of general-purpose generative AI technology. Any day now there's going to be some random unpredictable breakthrough that makes gen-AI models like a hundred times more efficient, and a lot of very powerful people are going to be left holding a lot of very expensive bags.

[prokopetz]

The plausible endgame for gen-AI isn't "the technology stops existing". It's "the bottom drops out of the infrastructure market because the technology reaches a point where a good-enough-for-Jane-Average version of the entire model can live in your pocket".

[prokopetz]

(If you're in the notes going "OP isn't this just DeepSeek", you need to understand that the efficiency gains achieved by DeepSeek are basically a rounding error compared to what could plausibly be achieved once we actually get this shit figured out – and if DeepSeek caused as much anxiety in the market as it did, imagine what serious improvements in model efficiency would do!)

[catarinastone]

The thing ia, deepseek is meaningful because it didn't have the impact you'd expect given what they were able to achieve with the much smaller infrastructure.

The current boom isn't actually being led by innovation. You don't get a ton of financing from nvidea and oracle to buy GPUs and build datacenters if you don't project astronomical increase of demand. So deepseek is actually detrimental to these deals.

In the end the story does end up in the same place. There's not going to be enough demand for all the infrastructure being built. Not because there's going to be a breakthrough that will make it obsolete but because it was never going to happen in the first place. They were never going to get the level of adoption and dependency they needed to make their business model profitable

[prokopetz]

Discovering a friend is familiar with your favourite media only via the shitty but popular TV adaptation is painful, but discovering a friend is familiar with your favourite media only via the shitty TV adaptation nobody watched that got cancelled after six episodes in 2007 is fascinating. Where have they been keeping you?

[demilypyro]

Do you think that you'll ever play your guitar at local shows and garages, or is it just for you and your personal joy with it?

It's too early to think about that stuff. I'm a novice at best. All I'm concerned with is absorbing the lessons from my teacher.

[catarinastone]

This too is like transitioning. At some point you have to realize that what's holding you back is in your head more than anything and that if you're ever going to stop boymoding you have to fake it till you make it.

That said, I've been playing guitar for a while now, longer than I've been out as trans and I haven't really played in public. But in all honesty you probably are already good enough to play rythm guitar in a random band

[catarinastone]

So I was going through the strixhaven precons and the two I liked the most are the silverquill and lorehold.

Guys... I think I might be a white player...

(Quandrix looked fun too, but I already have the ffx precon which is bantu +1/+1 counters, which...)

[innerchildabortionclinic]

saw this tiktok a guy made saying something like "if a pretty girl likes anime it's probably because her ex introduced her to it and every time you watch anime she's thinking of him" and idk why misogynists always insist on making their cuckholding fetish everyone else's problem, but do men think anime is some sort of super underground media? I got really into anime in middle school because some of my friends were weebs and it doesn't go deeper than that. we even went to anime conventions and cosplayed.

[cookingwithroxy]

There has been anime on tv since the fucking 80's. I watched Sailor Moon when it first aired on US tv.

But the real thing is that some people think women don't have any actual agency and everything we do is because of men. xO

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

I think my first anime was Ronin Warriors or I think it was called Blue Agent? Some stuff on Adult Swim before Toonami was a thing. Though my first mainstream were sailor moon and DBZ

[ultramaga]

So the sequence is a single man made a claim (but it is not even linked); that is then used as proof that all men hate all women.

Meanwhile, feminists wrote books about killing all men that saw other feminists sticking it on feminist bookshelves.

------

Back to anime. In the West, it was originally far more popular with males.

Astroboy, for example, has women as objects to be desired or damsels to be rescued. Incredibly popular back in the day.

You had lots of war stories, with pretty women and masculine men.

From memory, robotech had a woman win a battle because she was singing a love song and made all the male enemies have lovey-dovey feelings.

Robotech influenced battletech, which later made a lot of success in the computer game world. It was mostly about killing.

It's only in the last twenty years that Western anime was feminised, stuffed with slice of life stories. Many males find that boring, and gravitate to fight anime.

These were enormous hits in their time. Mostly male fans, lots of fan service.

It's only recently that one or two anime have been released in the West that appealed to both women and men.

Frieren, for example, balances being a terrifying force of nature and a cute grumpy girl whose tantrums are legendary.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

really a lot going on here

[catarinastone]

Not enough femenists are writting books about killing all men

[innerchildabortionclinic]

Observation: Conservative men seem to avoid dating conservative women and fetishize alternative women with politics they disagree with

Explanation 1: They want to take one of these women and mold her into a subservient housewife as punishment for deviating from patriarchal norms

Explanation 2: Marxists are often sexy and irresistible

[catarinastone]

Explanation 3: being a conservative makes you less attractive, even to other conservatives

[communistkenobi]

It’s frustrating that the progressive party line around trans women in sports is that actually they suck at sports just as much as cis women, so they should be allowed to play on women’s teams. like you’re already fucked when you start from the premise that cis women are “biologically” inferior, but don’t worry, trans women are biologically inferior too! Look at all the hormones they took to become weaker and shittier at everything. If you talk about professional sports purely in terms of weight class and skill, all of this becomes incoherent nonsense, but sex segregation remains the baseline that divides skill/class levels in sports, so people just automatically accept that framework when talking about this. I don’t accept that premise to begin with, so all these “debunking” claims feel like eating dirt from cis people. It reveals how misogynistic cis women are about themselves when they use this defense, and now we’re going to humour their own bigotry in order to argue with them? like it puts me in the contrarian position of being like, okay, let’s take this to its logical endpoint, because even if literally every trans woman on planet earth was better at sports than every cis woman, they should still not be excluded from sports. the point of sports is to be good at them. if there’s a group that’s better than everyone else, they should be the ones playing sports. if you’re mad about this then you should try being better at sports.

but that’s not really a productive position to take either lol. so I’m just like ok sure fine let’s talk about trans women’s blood proteins and how their humours are aligned with the planets exactly like a cis woman’s and that’s why they should be allowed to play on the I AM BIOLOGICALLY INFERIOR team. because realistically that’s the most popular framing that is going to be used to undermine transmisogynistic laws around professional sports. grim all around

[catarinastone]

This is why whenever this topic comes up I do an "uhm, sctually" and say that testosterone levels are not a good predictor for performance for a lot of sports and that MONEY is the greatest predictor of perdormance

[prokopetz]

Survival-themed cyberpunk RPG where instead of weapons having durability, you need to purchase subscriptions for each of your weapons, which deplete based on how much damage you inflict. Hit points exist in-universe as a value calculated by your weapons' built-in biometric scanners to meter subscription usage. You can top up a weapon's subscription credits at conveniently located kiosks, or "bank" extra credits beyond a given weapon's rated capacity by carrying gift cards.

[prokopetz]

If you hurt someone by hitting them with a rock or some other non-networked object, this is a serious felony – not because of the violence, but because due to a series of obscure legal precedents, using an object with no associated weapon subscription to cause measurable harm counts as circumventing copy protection.

[flying-butter]

What about beating someone to death with a firearm? Is that considered jailbreaking?

[prokopetz]

Assuming the gun has a linked weapon subscription, it just deducts from your credits in the usual fashion. Remember, you're being charged per hit point of damage inflicted, not per shot fired; the biometric monitors don't care how you inflicted them, as long as it was done using a weapon with an up-to-date subscription.

(Of course, the trick is, if you're firing the gun, it can helpfully prevent you from going over your credit limit by refusing to chamber the next round. If you're just pistol-whipping people senseless, you need to keep an eye on the readout manually!)

[kingofinfinitespace]

[catarinastone]

Wait, so what happens if you miss a shot?

[tpwrtrmnky]

I think defining transmed as "the belief that being trans is a medical condition" is troublesome, because "medical condition" is nebulous and could extend as far as just. Anything that could possibly be treated with medication. And at that point the fact that many trans people do take medication to transition basically makes the term useless.

The definition of transmed that describes the ideology correctly in my opinion is "the belief that the hegemonic way of medicalizing trans people is legitimate". That's where you get the "never DIY, doctor must control your transition, 1mg estrogen 300mg spiro" shit from.

[catarinastone]

Counterpoint. Medical condition implies that you need a diagnosis and as such it's at the discretion of your doctor whether or not you should get access to hrt.

Ofc the actual core of the issue actually lies on what standard you need to meet to be considered (diagnosed) trans (what do you mean you're a trans woman and you aren't even wearing a dress/skirt or and/or makeup?)

[alexanderwales]

I've often heard the sentiment that historical people weren't any smarter or dumber than we are, that they were just people, and I sort of get that ... but most historical people lived in times of food scarcity and disease, two things that could severely handicap intellectual development.

So I do sort of scratch my head about this and wonder whether "they weren't any stupider than modern people" is wholly accurate, but I think to get a good picture of it I'd need some statistical analysis of malnutrition and its impact on cognition. But it would be a matter of more than just whether people had enough food, because malnutrition includes e.g. iron deficiency, iodine deficiency, etc. There are parasite burdens, lead exposures, times of famine ... very complicated to get a handle on in any kind of scientifically rigorous way.

And I don't think that historical people were much different from us, fundamentally, but "their entire population was affected by malnutrition and stresses we simply don't have, which means that most people were not reaching their potential" seems to me like it's a more empathic reading of history. It's just not something that you can use as a go-to holistic explanation.

[catarinastone]

I hate to bring up IQ, but... the flynn effect

[hybridzizi]

Sometimes, when I try to talk about progress and how great the industrial revolution was, someone will snort derisively and say “yeah but only for billionaires.” 

Anyone who claims that things have only improved for the rich is either lying or stupid. I’m done politely pretending otherwise.

Have you been vaccinated? Are you less at risk of diseases? Can you expect all of your children to live through infancy? Can you choose not to have children while still being sexually active? Wow! Incredible! What progress! What great improvements to your life!

Do you have up-to-date information on the lives of your loved ones, even when they live across the world? Do you have the ability to fly to them in a matter of hours should an emergency occur? Amazing!

Can you get access to healthy, diverse food? Even when you have weird dietary restrictions? Can you cook the food by nuking it for 5 minutes in the microwave instead of needing to dedicate hours to tending a fire? Wow!

How long does it take to do your laundry? How long do you spend sewing your own clothes by hand because you ripped your last pair of pants? Do you have to go outside to piss in a hole in the ground or do you have a fucking flush toilet in your house?

I have asthma medications! I have migraine medications! My mom and baby sister did not both die during the relevant pregnancy! I can listen to my favorite music whenever I feel like it without bothering the people around me! When I lose my favorite pair of gloves I can order a replacement for cheap! If your political opinions need me to pretend that none of that is true, then your political opinions are worthless. If your political opinions don’t require this elaborate farce, then stop trying to make me participate in it! 

Things could be better. Not everyone does have all these things! I hope we keep working to improve conditions! But compared to how they’ve been historically? They’re pretty damn good!

[catarinastone]

You're conflating a lot of different things friend. The industrial revolution is not why you have vaccines. And if you look into the history of industrialization you will find that it was pretty brutal. The working conditions were horrible and people died horrific deaths due to unsafe working conditions. People were also pretty poor and didn't really enjoy the fruits of industrialization. It was actually improvements to workers rights that came to make an improvement to workers life and give them a share of what industrialization had produced. Just for example, loom up the 1831 factory act in the UK

[tpwrtrmnky]

Hello, Tumblr user. In front of you is a death note, and a second magical notebook where you can write someone's name, and get a list of every bad thing they've done. The Sin Note is 100% infallible.

Your mission is to NOT immediately write the names of a bunch of random trans women you've got parasocial beef with without bothering to check the Sin Note.

[catarinastone]

I feel like they will just use the sin note to only check on transfems, use it as justification for using the desth note and never bother to check if any person belonging to any other group has any meaningful sins