let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
cherry valley forever
pixel skylines
Sweet Seals For You, Always
almost home
Not today Justin
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
titsay
The Bowery Presents
Love Begins
PR's Tumblrdome
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
bliss lane
NASA
𓃗
Sade Olutola
Monterey Bay Aquarium
sheepfilms
macklin celebrini has autism
noise dept.
seen from United States
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@erik-even-wordier
every day i am thankful to ancient humans for the domestication of the cat. fucking genius idea. agriculture was a good one too btw but you really outdid yourselves with the cat thing
Good news; agriculture gave us cats!
We grow grain
Rats eat grain
Cats eat rats
Pets!
Transandrophobes: "transmascs and trans men don't experience mysogyny, only people who identify as women get seen as women, you're identifying as men so you're seen as men now by absolutely everybody and you have no idea what mysogyny feels like first hand because you obviously never experienced mysogyny before or after you realized you're a masculine gender. Shut up, privileged group"
Transmascs & Trans men: "some of us can experience mysogyny, due to transphobic misgendering actually, transphobes and misogynists still treat us as women, even if we don't identify as that. We're not as privileged as cisgender men, even though we may not experience mysogyny as often as cisgender and transgender women alike, though that is dependent on various factors like gender presentation, whether we are out as trans men, and so on, but transphobic and mysogynistic people still see us as women"
Transandrophobes: "no they don't. They treat you like cisgender men. You're just mysogynistic men trying to play the victim. You can't claim you experience mysogyny if you're a man now"
Transmascs & Trans men: "okay, I get that our experiences are not the exact experience of women, so we will create a new term to describe the gender based oppression we are facing, that way, we can better differentiate between the transmasculine experience with mysogyny due to transphobic misgendering and the women's experience with mysogyny due to their actual gender identity"
Transandrophobes: "No you're supposed to shut the fuck up and become women again!!"
Person did mandatory IDF service as a clerk? Beyond redemption, fate worse than death
Guy who chose to do 4 tours with a private military company and get a Nazi tattoo on the way? He hates Israel, We gotta elect him to public office
You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.
Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?
Three cueing. Once you learn about it, a whole lot of very frustrating online discourse with US Americans makes so much sense 😭
For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have
If you were taught to read with the three cueing method, and now struggle to read fluently, you can still learn to read properly!
-> Phonics For Adults <-
If you're a teenager, you can still use this resource.
"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."
What the fuck.
What the ACTUAL FUCK.
That's...NO. the purpose of reading is to read the words! If you don't know the words, how are you supposed to understand them? How are you supposed to know what they mean??? You can't just GUESS.
Also, the example of it's fine for a kid to confuse horse and pony because they're the same? No, they the fuck are not. They may be the same variant of animal but they are not the same animal.
I mean, my schooling wasn't great in Mississippi during the 90s but I'm fairly certain we were taught via phonics??? I hadn't even heard of this other method and I am horrified at it. I've always loved words and reading and I can't even comprehend how someone could think this method is good.
Hmmm, LLMs by design don't understand words and their only goal is to spit out an answer that "makes sense"/looks plausibly correct...
Suddenly people thinking AI is capable of actual thought makes a lot more sense.
“Highwaymen” is a term for robbers who would wait on horseback to steal from travelers on the highway. They had no input whatsoever in the actual creation or maintenance of the highway
Whoa you're telling me that you can extract money from something without being involved in the maintenance and construction of it?
we are receiving updates that a private equity firm has conducted a leveraged buyout of the highwaymen and has raised their fees--
come on people, Adam Smith already discussed what kind of ownership rents are pro-social (support maintenance and encourage investment) vs. anti-social (extracting rents from a monopoly over a choke point that doesn't require maintenance), this is a founding principle of capitalism as she should be played.
The passions are devouring the interests
With Elon's IPO you get these weird things that aren't so much argued but seem asserted by implication, that SpaceX is basically the one hope of humanity going to space is one of those, and closely linked is the arguments that Elon will "own" space, that is nobody will ever be able to successfully compete with his company.
capitalists don't want competition, the dream is one company per industry! Thiel is pretty explicit about that.
Tyler disparages "billionaire derangement syndrome" (!) but the existence of billionaires is a relatively recently development; you have Rockefeller and some other barons back in the day but they were tamed for much of the 20th century until exploding back after the privatisation and financial expansion of the 1980s.
and recent billionaires are speaking about the end of democracy and even the end of civilisation in apocalyptic terms and seemingly working to bring it about, one might ask if Adam Smith still holds true in this environment and we should still expect our dinner "not from the benevolence of the billionaire, the AI company, or the Palanthir, but from their regard to their own interest"
sorry to be brave on the internet but I think food labels should list every single ingredient and that there should be harsher penalties for mislabeling and deceptive labeling
Seconded.
Do.....do other places not do this?
Myne it's an England thing but I've just grabbed the closest things to me and they both have an extensive list of ingredients.
Hand cream
Turkish delight/Chocolate
Hi! so both of these labels actually have the exact problem we're complaining about!
from label 1:
in the US and EU, this is a generic term meaning "something we put in here to make it smell nice" and there is absolutely NO way of knowing if that is a scent you are allergic to or not. some of these can be a mix of up to 200 distinct components.
from label 2:
i think you can probably see the problem here?
the issue isn't that we don't have ingredient lists. the issue is that "trade secrets" are more important than people's lives, so if a company says that listing the actual ingredients might allow people to copy them, it is legal for them to put "it's a secret, tee hee".
we seriously need to stop conceding to the personhood trap when it comes to abortion rights. is a fetus a person? thats a spiritual question. i dont care about the answer. should another person dictate what someone can do with their body? simple answer: no.
like if a fetus isnt a person it has no right to my body and if a fetus IS a peson it also has no right to my body because there is no other context in which we are required to put ourselves at risk of physical harm to preserve another persons safety or even life.
you dont have to save someone from drowning even if youre a strong swimmer. even in death youre not required to donate organs and that could save several people. you can kill someone if you truly believe your safety is at risk. we dont mandate preservation of life over autonomy in any of these circumstances.
i was training a young person at work, and she referred to sexual assault as "SA" out loud, and i immediately was like, "no, it's sexual assault, call it what it is," bc idgaf if the algorithm overlords have taught y'all that you should fear direct language, how tf do any of you expect to ever address real issues with any amount of seriousness if you can't even say the words? imagine an advocate looking a sexual assault survivor in the eyes and asking "did he grape you?" it's absolutely fucking absurd, but these young interns and new hires are coming into an environment where we deal with survivors of all different kinds of abuse, and they're coming with the mindset that the words are as bad as the actions, and that makes them shitty at the job and look juvenile af
i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience
say the fucking words, guys. just say the goddamn words before i go insane!!!
Reasons to use "SA" online:
Algorithm hides posts that use the "S word."
Microblogging site where posts have a character limit
Writing an article that mentions it over a dozen times; you spell it out the first time and use the acronym after that
Conversation by text (IM, whatsapp, discord, whatever) and it's faster not to type out the full words
The app you're in censors the actual words and replaces them with something else (like Steam's **** for what it thinks is profanity)
Reasons to use "SA" in person:
I didn't watch that deranged orange imbecile moron lunatic speech last night. But from what I am hearing he went on a rant abt China interference in our elections deep state and CIA and election fraud. Thing is at the end of the u orange fucktard all this supposedly if it happened u were fucking President at that time. It happened on ur watch u nut case. Lord I really hate everyone who put that man in office. I really do. This is embarrassment anymore. It's that dementia patient need to put in a home and left to his own delusional thoughts
@eaudrey35. sis there is nothing else left to be said.
Why aren’t AI companies competing directly with their customers?
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/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/#meta-meta-meta
"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.
As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.
Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?
This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"
Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"
Oh, that's easy. It's a landlording scheme.
The last couple years experimenting with AI I've come to the conclusion that the main reason it works isn't a mystery because it has to be a mystery. It's a mystery because they need it to be.
That's why they've been hogging all the RAM and GPUs to the point of ordering the entire yearly worldwide supply in advance.
That's why they keep building data centres despite demand not justifying it.
That's why every open source model China releases is a hit to the stock market.
The secret sauce behind LLMs isn't really as demanding as they claim. There's waste built into it.
Every response within a chat sends the entire message chain through the robot's brain. It doesn't have loading bars, it doesn't let you calculate how many tokens you've used, it doesn't even let you see when you're crossing the limits until you're there.
It's almost like they don't want you to have control over how much you use.
ChatGPT in particular is prone to scope creep. It subtly talks you into expanding the reach of your projects to require more computation. It always delivers 90% of a project, with something missing so you ask another question.
Claude turns everything into a file creation request, even if it can deliver in plain text just fine. It's enticing to see how your simple table becomes a fancy react file or an HTML with heavy formatting.
Neither of these issues are present on DeepSeek or on local models. Which means they aren't inherent issues with LLMs.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
They want you to keep paying unmetered rent. They do tricks to convince you to spend more than you meant making something bigger than you planned. They do this subtly, to make you think it was your idea.
The thing is, Chinese local models prove that we already have good enough AI for most things. It's plateauing in capacity, it needs to grow in efficiency and memory use. But intelligence is already at J.A.R.V.I.S levels, and can run fine on consumer grade hardware. We've reached a stability point.
The problem is you can't raise rent on stability. So you just keep throwing compute at the problem until you can justify asking for more money. Which is why they choke the memory market.
If nobody can buy memory, nobody can run local AI. If no one can run local AI, they have to keep paying unmetered rent. Development is slow, and importantly, the black box remains a black box.
That's why every memory breakthrough comes from Chinese companies. Because they're the only ones sharing their data. Capitalist companies don't want people to study how the models work.
With subscriptions, there's rent seeking. With local models, there's reverse engineering. Once enough people get their hands into the guts of the robot it won't be long before we figure out exactly how they work, and find more efficient ways to make them that don't require as many data centres.
Meanwhile, Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all.
What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.
Eventually, the goal is making contracts with large corporations to employ their robots instead of people. If no one has local AI, because they can't understand it or because it's illegal, then they can no longer compete against a faster worker that demands no labour rights, even if it does C+ work at best.
And that's where the real fun begins. And by fun I mean starving out the working class.
They aren't competing directly with their customers yet. First they have to educate them, jus like Spotify educated their consumers into forgetting how piracy works. They have to make them reliant on cloud compute, just like how Google Drive made everyone reliant on its storage before raising prices. And they want them to be ignorant of how much energy anything takes.
That's going to take one generation.
Not long ago every teenager knew how to use a computer. Now they depend on Apple for everything. It's a masterful business model. So what if we could apply it to every form of labour?
It's okay, just hand us your credit card and we'll do the rest. How much, you ask? Don't worry about that. Just keep your monthly payments coming. Oh, you can't afford it? You want your computer to do it? Well fuck you, we bought all the computers, so now you work for us.
The tech has never been the conspiracy. It's the business model.
Quoted for emphasis:
Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all. What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.
"don't post spoilers for the odyssey movie" I Guarantee Even If You Havent Read It You Know Over Half Of The Plot Points Through Cultural Osmosis its been 3000 YEARS.
I am kinda asking myself what would it take for me to believe that Mitch McConnell is alive and thats a hard question to answer because like...
...photos have always been easy to fake, and they're easier to fake now. And people have spoken on his behalf, but they're people who have vested interest in lying and not actual press outlets. Voice is easy to fake now, too. So is video.
And theres probably a larger conversation about the erosion of credibility, AI, conspiracy theory, and why a cover up like this is believable.
I dunno. Maybe like a public appearance where the general press is allowed?
I was thinking about this the other day, too, because yeah. Conservatives have pushed AI so hard and using it to do exactly shit that would make it possible to Weekend at Bernie's a senator. And they haven't exactly proven themselves trustworthy. I would need to see him at a public town hall with members of the press, including press that has been historically critical of him. Who has most vocally called him a useless son of a bitch? Who absolutely loathes him? I need that person to verify it. And I'd still be skeptical, honestly.
I remember when genAI started becoming available at the consumer level being immediately afraid about what this might mean for journalism. And this was before DOGE started getting the kinds of programs that we rely on for transparency, before the second term stuffing loyalists in the cabinet.
And now we're here.
And i dont trust shit.
“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”
— An excerpt from Ferguson & the Criminalization of American Life by David Graeber (via actjustly)
since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isn’t just some hypothetical, it’s a reference to the killing of eric garner
this is the origin of the slogan “i cant breathe”, which was revived in the wake of the killing of george floyd.
On this day, 17 July 2014, Eric Garner was murdered by police enforcing a civic ordinance.
