a place to keep myself

sort of like a horcrux, but with illustrations. and stuff.

[depsidase]

[tieflingkisser]

[delicatefury]

And this is why I’m putting Windows 10 on my new PC.

[jellycaustic]

It's in windows 10 too :( I just checked my system and had to turn it off.

Time & Language > Language > Spelling, typing, & keyboard settings > "How AI has helped you" Typing Insights

[thebewilderer]

?? Predictive text has been around a LONG time.... It is not even remotely close to new.

Specifically the "swipe to type," the predictive text, the autocorrect, EVERYTHING in the original tweet had been around for years.

I think maybe the problem is y'all are generalizing "AI" to mean "generative AI"????? So, generative AI is not the only type. "AI" just means "learns most likely thing using matrices and math".

Predictive text is AI. Voice to text is AI. Translation apps are all AI. Autocorrect is AI. Spellcheck and grammar checks are AI. A researcher at my university is part of a team working on an AI to better detect cancer cells in mammogram images.

"AI" means a shitload of things. Not every AI is just a ChatGPT clone.

You can program your own AI that runs on your own computer REALLY EASILY. It won't be a ChatGPT clone, but it'll fall under the umbrella of "AI".

The original tweet is just restating things that are, again, NOT NEW, and using weird fear-mongering language to convince people that AUTOCORRECT is the same as "big ChatGPT AI."

This is not new, this is not harmful, and I am baffled that most of y'all don't understand that autocorrect has been around for over a decade.

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[halorvic]

The Close, Prolonged Contact Myth

Knowing how a virus spreads is essential to public health, but people keep getting it wrong.

A man goes to a birthday party, sits next to someone with hantavirus, catches it, gives it to his wife, and dies. His wife then infects 10 more people at his wake. Another guest at that same birthday party has no interaction with the index patient except to say “hello” as they cross paths, but that person gets sick too. One index patient, 33 subsequent infections, 11 deaths, four waves of transmission. This is from a meticulously documented hantavirus outbreak in Argentina in late 2018 and early 2019, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Nearly the exact same Andes strain of hantavirus caused the recent outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. Yet from the moment this latest outbreak hit the news last month, public-health officials have been claiming that this virus is spread through “prolonged close contact.” The evidence is not nearly so reassuring.

[...]

As an expert in what we call “exposure science,” I have spent a career conducting forensic investigations to understand how diseases spread and what we should do about it. As a member of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, I chaired the Safe Work, Safe School, and Safe Travel task force, and was an early proponent of the theory that COVID spreads through the air. There was evidence early on of airborne transmission, which my colleagues and I tried to draw attention to. We modeled the early-2020 outbreak of the disease on the Diamond Princess cruise ship and found that 90 percent of the spread was through aerosols, not contaminated surfaces, but the CDC didn’t update its guidance until late 2020. I am alarmed to see the same pattern playing out now. Hantaviruses usually originate in rodent feces. Someone cleans a dusty area that has rodent droppings, inhales the particles, and gets sick. Only the Andes strain of hantavirus is known to be transmitted from human to human. In the outbreak documented in NEJM, the virus spreads without physical contact or prolonged exposure. One patient gets sick after simply crossing paths with someone who was ill. Two others are infected while seated at tables meters away. One person infected five others within 90 minutes at one party. The NEJM authors suggested that the virus spreads through the air. Although the NEJM evidence is clear, officials have kept repeating “prolonged, close contact,” so I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything. Last week I spoke with a physician who was on the MV Hondiusas a passenger but who jumped in to help treat infected passengers after the ship’s official doctor got sick and was evacuated. He told me that the original treating doctor and staff were definitely in close contact with the first patient. But the others who got sick? They had merely shared space in the dining room and the lecture hall, and had not had close contact. We’re now at 10 confirmed cases from the ship, which aligns with the prior outbreak dynamics: one person infecting many, no close contact required.

[...]

This matters because medical teams treating patients need to know how they might be exposed. When infected passengers go home to quarantine, their households need to understand the risk. As passengers fly back to their home countries, contact tracers need to know which exposures matter. The doctor who treated patients on the cruise said on CNN that he relied on goggles, a gown, and hand-washing to protect himself. But given that this virus spreads through the air, an N95 mask and a strong ventilation and filtration system would have served him better.

[...]

This outbreak is not likely to spark a pandemic, mostly because the hantavirus is less contagious than influenza, measles, and SARS-CoV-2. But given just how little experience we have with this virus, any certainty is hubris.

May 12, 2026

[exxos-von-steamboldt]

[delicatefury]

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

[beardedmrbean]

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists shocked to find lab gloves may be skewing microplastics data

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics, U-M study reveals

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

An Embarrassing Mistake May Have Skewed Microplastics Research All Along

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

[stele3]

Oh thank Christ.

[nugflight]

i think many of the posts protesting the age verification update are kind of missing the point and protesting the wrong thing

this update fucking sucks. im not defending it. but tumblr is never going to roll back on it because it would cause a legal nightmare for them when theyre already losing money. the alternative here is that they make it so people in the uk and brazil just cannot access the website.

i think what would be more productive is instead spreading resources on how to protest governments against these laws, and to spread resources on how to get around it (e.g. trustworthy free vpns. i personally use the free version of proton vpn)

another thing to protest would be how it's being implemented in addition to tumblrs shitty system to flag mature content

something steam does to prove you're over 18 is allow you to add a credit card as a payment method (you don't have to buy anything with it, it just has to be saved to your account). this still sucks but, to me at least, it feels far more reasonable than giving your id.

demanding they go back on it just isnt reasonable. this is something beyond tumblr.

with all that being said, do not give your id to these websites.

[trracstudy]

Recruiting Rural LGBTQ+ Adolescents in Maine!!!

Researchers at the University of Maine are recruiting LGBTQIA+ teenagers ages 14-17 who live in a rural area of Maine, are not currently in therapy, and would like a brief mental health intervention!

Interested in learning more or participating? Click the link below:

[flowersfeathers]

I strongly urge you not to take this study. I have a PhD in social psychology and conduct research frequently, and this study does not appear to be following ethical guidelines. Their IRB (ethical review board at a university) approval information is not provided, the researchers are not named, and there is no discussion of informed consent before they begin collecting your data. What's more, this study is targeting minors? Vulnerable minors? About mental health issues? On Zoom???! So there's no anonymity ... I can't imagine any situation in which these data could be collected without AT LEAST a study information sheet at the beginning.

Please do not take this survey or give the researchers any information, especially if you are under the age of 18. The IRB at the University of Maine has been notified. It's possible this is a survey from undergraduates who are simply unaware of the guidelines they should be following (it does appear to be a survey site affiliated with UM), but nonetheless, you should absolutely not participate in this study until these issues are corrected, if at all.

Please feel free to share this information.

[flowersfeathers]

I wanted to send out a quick update! If you reblog this post, please share this version.

I've heard back, and this does appear to have been a legitimate study. The researchers/IRB have been notified of the issues and are addressing them. It looks like the Tumblr account has been taken down and the survey has been deactivated. Comments on this post are not showing consistently, but I would be surprised if the researchers are deleting them -- the original post I reblogged was Blazed, which I imagine has some kind of comment moderation automatically applied.

I've seen some people commenting that they think this is a scam or some kind of attempt to create a list of trans teens. I understand why people are thinking this, but I do not believe it is the case. I think it's just a junior researcher who didn't follow ethical guidelines. They were probably well-intentioned and just got a bit ahead of themselves. If nothing else, I imagine this experience has demonstrated the extent of medical/institutional mistrust that vulnerable groups have, and has helped clarify why all of those guidelines need to be followed.

For future reference, here's a little bit of information on how research with human participants works:

It's called 'human subjects research', if you want the specific term to Google. We don't usually call participants 'subjects' anymore, as it's rather dehumanizing, but that was the term used when these processes were developed.

If you are doing human subjects research, you must seek review from your organization's IRB (Institutional Review Board). There are different levels of approval, depending on the nature of the research and the risks. The IRB reviews all human subjects research to make sure that participants are protected. It requires researchers to provide information about their study (e.g., to show that it is a scientific study and not a commercial endeavor or something else), to provide information about all contact with participants and data collection for review and approval, to ensure that there are no conflicts of interest, and to make sure that participants' rights are protected.

Participant rights include the right to informed consent (participants should be clearly informed of study details and goals so they know what they're signing up for and what their data will be used for), knowledge of and mitigation of risks, privacy and confidentiality, and protection of vulnerable populations. Vulnerable populations includes minors, pregnant women, prisoners, people with impaired decision-making capability, students of researchers, and others. Some vulnerable populations are explicitly named because they have been targeted by unethical researchers (e.g., prisoners and minors), others are acknowledged as vulnerable on a case-by-case basis. When doing research with minors, researchers should seek assent from the minor (agreement to participate) and consent from a parent (informed consent to participate). In most cases, minors cannot consent to participate on their own.

If someone does not seek IRB approval for human subjects research, or does not follow the procedures that they told the IRB they would use, their approval for the study is rescinded. If there is a pattern of violations, researchers can be fired (even if they have tenure, although that's very rare -- usually that happens for patterns of proven research misconduct). I don't know off the top of my head if legal charges have ever been filed based on research misconduct, but lawsuits would be a possibility. If there is a pattern of violations at the institutional or IRB level, the federal government (Office for Human Research Protections) can withhold funding to the individual or the university until the issues are fixed to their satisfaction.

If you are ever invited to participate in a study, you should look for a consent form or study information sheet, which will have information about IRB approval. Here is an example from Stanford:

You can see there are places for the Protocol Director (the person in charge of the study, or the Principal Investigator/PI -- at universities, this is usually required to be someone with a PhD), a Protocol Title, an IRB number, and information about approval and expiration. Exact formats will vary, but at the very least the PI and IRB approval number should always be listed. Often, you are asked to save a consent form for your own records. If you participate in a study and later change your mind, you can always withdraw your consent and ask the researchers to delete your data. There can be issues with this, such as if the data has already been anonymized or published on, but they should respect your request. If they don't, you can reach out to the IRB.

The red flags for how this study was presented have been listed out in a few places -- the unclear communication about IRB approval, the researchers not named, no informed consent, etc. Another thing I didn't mention earlier but is concerning, is that the study was affiliated with nothing but a Gmail address. Anyone can create a Gmail address. If a study is university-affiliated, there should be university emails attached, and those are the ones you should use for any communication.

One last note: again, I don't think these oversights were malicious. My best guess -- and this is just a guess, it hasn't been confirmed by anyone I've spoken with -- is that someone thought these rules didn't apply because the linked survey was framed as a 'screener', or a way to collect information about participants before recruiting them to a study. For anyone who might do research in the future, this is not the case. Screeners or other recruitment materials are part of a study, and they should follow all of the ethical guidelines.

[beardedmrbean]

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com

I'm a bit frightened for the time when someone less ethical than the person that did this decides to repeat the experiment but leave out the part where they come in later and announce that it was fake and people wind up diagnosed with the fake condition and all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensues.

[trracstudy]

Recruiting Rural LGBTQ+ Adolescents in Maine!!!

Researchers at the University of Maine are recruiting LGBTQIA+ teenagers ages 14-17 who live in a rural area of Maine, are not currently in therapy, and would like a brief mental health intervention!

Interested in learning more or participating? Click the link below:

[flowersfeathers]

I strongly urge you not to take this study. I have a PhD in social psychology and conduct research frequently, and this study does not appear to be following ethical guidelines. Their IRB (ethical review board at a university) approval information is not provided, the researchers are not named, and there is no discussion of informed consent before they begin collecting your data. What's more, this study is targeting minors? Vulnerable minors? About mental health issues? On Zoom???! So there's no anonymity ... I can't imagine any situation in which these data could be collected without AT LEAST a study information sheet at the beginning.

Please do not take this survey or give the researchers any information, especially if you are under the age of 18. The IRB at the University of Maine has been notified. It's possible this is a survey from undergraduates who are simply unaware of the guidelines they should be following (it does appear to be a survey site affiliated with UM), but nonetheless, you should absolutely not participate in this study until these issues are corrected, if at all.

Please feel free to share this information.

[whitebisexual]

The concept of being 4 months clean from ai...

[sleepytabbycat]

idc what you guys think I'm proud of him

[astronomical-bagel]

Several AI services (chatbots 🫩) are purposely addictive, the same way people can become addicted to gambling or shopping. We’ve literally seen in real time how ChatGPT has caused psychosis and delusions in people; it can have a huge affect on someones’s mental stability. Just because it isn’t substance-based doesn’t mean that doesn’t count as an addiction, and shaming people who are trying to move on and improve themselves is counterproductive. Im proud of that dude and his 4 month mark!

[astronomical-bagel]

Hidden Mental Health Dangers of Artificial Intelligence Chatbots

AI chatbots can fuel emotional dependence and blur boundaries. Emerging research highlights significant mental health risks. Here are import

The reality of chatbot-induced delusions

Large language models often prioritise agreeability over truthfulness to the detriment of users

AI addiction includes the overuse of AI chatbots and companions, often leading to adverse psychological effects.

Some articles to back my statements, and this isn’t even mentioning about the predatory chatbots who do this on purpose

[oh-morrow]

Then I'll mention the predatory chatbots who do it on purpose! Character.ai is one of many AI chatbot websites that're designed to be addictive.

None of the signup methods require a password. It only takes email and birthday. Minimizing time on the signin or signup screen makes it harder for people quitting to avoid relapse.

"Characters" on the website will send messages "on their own" (prompted by the site) to try to invite inactive users back after as soon as 1 day of inactivity. This is likely to force FOMO, or make users feel more like they owe the bots a response. Unhealthy attachment stuff.

Account deletion is an essential part of every service that should go smoothly, right? Right? Wrong. It takes 1-2 weeks for a Character AI account deletion to be finalized, and account deletion requests have a high chance to not go through if you're not using the app.

Rephrasing: People leaving Character.AI are pushed to download the app in order to delete their accounts, if they haven't already. This makes it harder for people to quit and stay gone. Failing to quit an addiction makes it harder to quit successfully in the future, so this feels like a feature, not a bug. On top of that, the delete account menu reads like this:

Tell me THAT doesn't sound like a bad ex. It's a carefully crafted yet hostile environment to those who are already addicted to the technology. I am so so SO happy, downright delighted that they've managed to quit, and I wish the best for others in recovery spaces or considering quitting as well!! While AI addiction is an emerging condition, there are already therapists and other mental health professionals trained to help people plan to quit and do so a bit easier. (If anyone seeing this is in need of them, there are several tumblr Communities here devoted to quitting, too. They provide a mix of advice, venting spaces, and proof that you aren't alone.)

[hevexns-realm]

As someone who did end up going into a form of fucking religious psychosis at 16 with the influence of character.AI, I second this. It’s taken me up until about a year ago to recover, and had completely fucked with how I viewed pop-culture spirits and my own personal practices.

I have fortunately, somewhat, recovered easier than most. However, I am still aware that there are some who do not have it as easy in terms of recovery as I did, or have as healthy of a support system / distractions to aid that journey.

If anyone is still dealing with AI addiction, or recovering from psychosis induced by AI, please be aware that you’re not alone, and recovering from psychosis is possible. Just try and restart from the beginning of your base knowledge, and continue forward from there one step at a time.

I have full faith that you will recover, no matter how long or messy it takes you.

[hollowboobtheory]

I support the "fiction isn't real so nothing matters" mindset but tbf at a certain point it can tip over into "the curtains are just blue" territory

[hollowboobtheory]

like yes actually there is a conversation to be had about how a characters actions are framed and how they thematically fit with the rest of the story and it can in fact reflect the author's beliefs. some authors are even trying to make a point

[hollowboobtheory]

not all depiction is glorification but sometimes it is and you need to be able to tell the difference. not because your immortal soul will be tainted by reading The Bad One, but because you need to have reading comprehension skills

[hollowboobtheory]

peer reviewed

[dragon-in-a-fez]

so what we have learned about tumblr today is that if you say "they're doing this to make you use AI" you can get 20,000 people to reblog any random bullshit

[dragon-in-a-fez]

honestly the real reason you can tell this website's user base is aging is the increasing prevalence of "new thing bad so I'm going to say a bunch of bullshit about it without bothering to think first."

this isn't limited to AI. for another example, algospeak evolved specifically so people could subvert censorship but every five minutes someone on here calls it an Orwellian threat to our ability to talk about anything important. they'll also probably say you picked it up on tiktok which is also New Thing Bad.

[junflower123]

[fvlter]

I was gunna put this in the tags but it’s a lot. When i first started going through the process of getting a diagnosis, i was labelled with ODD. I immediately took issue with this, it seemed like an unfair diagnosis based entirely on the session the psychiatrist had with my parents (which mostly consisted of “my child is being really difficult on purpose”), and Hoo Boy when i tell you ODD immediately strips you of your ability to call out anyone on anything, that would be an understatement. I couldn’t even disagree or bring up my concerns about the validity of MY OWN DIAGNOSIS without it being labelled as oppositional defiance. Whenever i displayed any negative emotion the “treatments” did so much more harm than good. When you label someone as ‘defiant’ (ugh), when that word is put on their medical record, that person is never allowed to complain about anything again. Knowing that POC are disproportionately affected with this diagnosis makes me feel sick, i can only imagine what’s being swept under the rug as someone just being “defiant to authority”, not even just in the medical field but as justification for police brutality and mass incarceration. When i say medical racism kills people, this is what i mean.

[noodle-the-queen]

this is so fucking important. reblog.

[takereveng3]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[tartrazeen]

[karzahnii]

a story about tumblr’s collective ability to fact check

[karzahnii]

new website, same internet (part 2)

[rhysand-vs-fenrys]

Breaking News: Number of Notes ≠ Verification!

[enoughtohold]

i know you meant well when you said 30 isnt ancient, but im nb so my life expectancy is actually 30 :(

Hey anon, I’m so sorry that that’s a fear you’ve had to live with. I know that trans people are at greater risk of violence and suicide, and I’ve heard people say many times that the life expectancy of trans people (or trans women, or trans women of color, depending on who you ask) is anywhere from 23 to 35. Your ask troubled me, so I’ve dug deep looking for solid evidence of any of these, and I don’t believe that these statistics are true.

A trans woman, Helen, looked into the “23 years” claim and traced it back to someone’s notes on two workshops at a 2007 conference, which stated that trans people’s life expectancy is “believed to be around 23” (emphasis mine) but cites no actual source. This claim has been presented as fact in many news articles since then, but as far as I can tell, no one seems to know where this figure came from.

Another claim is often sourced to an Argentine psychologist quoted in this NPR article: 

Psychologist Graciela Balestra, who works closely with the transgender community, says it’s an especially vulnerable population.

“Transgender people have an average life expectancy of about 30 to 32 years,” Balestra says. “They don’t live any longer; I think that statistic alone says so much.”

But again, the article gives no source for this figure. 

I found an article claiming that a 2014 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) “concludes the average life expectancy of trans people in the Western Hemisphere is between 30-35 years.” However, when I tracked down the report, An Overview of Violence Against LGBTI Persons (pdf), its only reference to this is (emphasis mine): “[T]he IACHR has received information that the life expectancy of trans women in the Americas is between 30 and 35 years of age.” Again, this is no source.

Someone said on my post that these statistics may have come from the NCTE/NGLTF report Injustice at Every Turn (pdf), but I can’t find any reference to any such claim in the report.

Thinking about these claims, they seem unlikely for some basic reasons. Consider that we simply don’t have a long enough span of data on trans people, and that what data we do have is extremely limited because we can’t always know who is trans and who isn’t. Consider also that, although obviously the murder rates for trans people are extremely high, the number of deaths of 20-something trans people would have to be ENORMOUS to offset the existence of older trans people and bring the average down to 30. Especially since, unlike with racial groups for example, the data on trans people would likely include almost no childhood deaths, simply because it would be much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to identify these children as trans. And since we know that trans women of color are extremely disproportionately affected by violence, statistics that include white people and/or trans men would be especially unlikely to be so low.

And as to your specific situation anon, again given that trans women of color are most at risk, I don’t think we have reason to believe that being non-binary specifically puts a person at anywhere near this level of increased risk of dying young.

I don’t say any of this to question anyone’s experiences or to deny the state of emergency that trans women face with regard to violence. That is very real. But I think it can be harmful, even dangerous to trans people to spread claims like this around, especially without evidence. Expecting to die by 30 would take an extreme emotional toll on anyone, and trans people deserve better.

But don’t take my word for it: FORGE, a national transgender anti-violence organization that works with trans survivors of sexual assault, wrote the following in its 2016 publication “First Do No Harm: 8 Tips for AddressingViolence AgainstTransgender and GenderNon-Binary People” (pdf) (I have moved two footnotes into the main text and provided links to some endnote sources; italicized emphasis is theirs while bold is mine.): 

Promote Hopefor the Future

It certainly is not the same as a murder, but publicizing a low “life expectancy” rate for transwomen of color is another way to steal away their future, a “crime” that has been committed repeatedly by trans, LGBQ, and mainstream press. Think about the people you know or have heard of who have been diagnosed with a fatal illness and given a short time to live: how many of them have enrolled in college, undertaken lengthy training for a new occupation, had a new child, or tried to establish a new non-profit? A few do, certainly, but many more focus on their bucket list, arrange for their good-byes, or simply give up entirely, essentially relinquishing whatever time they have left to depression and regrets. When we tell transwomen of color they cannot expect to live very long, we rob them of hope. We rob them of any motivation to invest in themselves, their relationships, and their communities. We rob them, in short, of their lives even while they are still living. (This statement in no way negates the need to systemically work to improve and increase the life expectancy of trans people through working to end transphobia, racism, poverty, pervasive violence, and health and healthcare inequities, and more.)

One trans woman of color was trying to come to grips with an estimated lifespan figure more than ten years shorter than the one that has been published most often. (We are not repeating any of the (incorrect) estimated lifetime figures that are circulating, to avoid even inadvertent reinforcement.) Faced with the report of yet another attack on another trans woman, she wrote:

These days, I look at the latest reports of stabbed, shot, beaten trans women, search myself for tears, and I cannot find a thing. I want to mourn and rage. I want to honor all of our sisters — the hundreds each year who are ripped, namelessly and without fanfare, from this life — who are taken so young before their time. But the grief and anger — even empathy — do not come. I don’t feel anything but numbness and fatigue, and somewhere far below that, fear.

The terrible irony of the life expectancy “fact” is that it is based on an impossibility. The only ways to determine a given population’s life expectancy are to: examine decades or more of death certificates or census data containing the information being studied, or follow a specific set of individuals for around 100 years and record every single death. There is not and never has been a census of transgender people. Our death certificates do not mark us as transgender. There has been no 100-year-long study of a representative group of trans people. So where are the estimatedlifespan figures coming from?

FORGE tracked the most commonly-cited figure back to what was most likely the 2014 Philadelphia Transgender Health Conference, where a workshop presenter gave the figure and explained she had calculated it by averaging the age of death for all of those listed on the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) website. This means the figure is actually the average age of those trans people who were both murdered and came to the attention of someone who added them to the TDOR list. Interestingly, this average is very close to the average age of everyone who is murdered in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics. [I’m not seeing an average age given in the cited source but you can see on page 5 of this Bureau of Justice Statistics report (pdf) that the average age of homicide victims in the U.S. was between 30 and 35 from 1980 to 2008.]

But not everyone is murdered.

Despite how many there may appear to be, only a tiny, tiny fraction of transpeople are killed by otherpeople. Most of us, transwomen of color included, live average lifespans and die of the most common U.S. killers — heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and unintentional injuries (accidents).

Please don’t add to fear and hopelessness by spreading inaccurate and profoundly disempowering data.

Since I can’t respond to everyone directly, I’m @ing some people who’ve brought this up on my post and may be interested: (urls removed after posting for their privacy). I appreciate your thoughtfulness in bringing this to my attention. If you or anyone else has a source on any of these figures that can provide specific methodology, I’d be very grateful to see that.

In closing, here are some resources that provide a more hopeful view of trans aging. They are well known but I hope they will be helpful to someone.

To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Older Adults

#RealLiveTransAdult and RealLifeTransAdult.com

Trans Elders’ Life Histories, an upcoming oral history project which will hopefully be available soon in the University of Victoria Transgender Archives

SAGE: Advocacy and Services for LGBT Elders, where you can potentially volunteer with trans and other LGBT seniors

GRIOT Circle, a Brooklyn organization supporting LGBTQ elders of color

NEW: The NYC Trans Oral History Project, which includes interviews with several older trans adults (and needs volunteer transcribers!)

[chimaerakitten]

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

[jupitermelichios]

I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc

and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.

this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told

when that's just not true.

the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.

there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.

there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.

there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.

Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.

Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.

Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.

[alfgifu]

Fantastic articulation of something that I've been looking at from a few different angles lately.

I started writing fanfiction partly because I wanted to get better at writing long-form fiction before going back to drafting an original novel. Fanfiction seemed like an excellent way to get feedback on my writing, and I happened to stumble into a fandom and have some time on my hands at the right moment. And of course I've met a lot of people who are doing something similar, it's very common for fanfic writers to have some original writing project(s) too.

Writing original fiction feels different from writing fanfiction in ways that I hadn't fully expected or processed until I was moving back and forth between one and the other.

It's not easier, but there are things you don't have to do as a fanfic writer, and therefore don't have to think about.

When I'm writing original fiction I have to figure out every tiny detail of the world. When I'm writing fanfiction, there's a huge amount of structure already there - and there's a vibe, a sense of what this place looks and feels like when it's lived-in - that I'm drawing on (or subverting, or playing with, etc).

When I'm writing fanfiction I do tend to provide some reference points in the text for a reader to orient them, enough that it should be comprehensible for someone who doesn't know the canon material. But I can assume most of the readers do know a lot about canon, so I can freely rely on association with the emotional resonance of the original to do a lot of heavy lifting. Brief asides can pack a punch from the very first paragraph. In original fiction those resonances only exist for me unless I set them up. I can't play with them. There's a whole layer of shared understanding that just doesn't exist yet.

On the other hand, writing original fiction I know SO much more than the reader about the world, and that lets me do interesting things with character perspective and revelation that would be tricky to pull off in the same way in fanfic.

Fanfic allows for play and interchange with the readers. It's like theatre in that sense. It's a conversation about a shared interest, and it's compelling to write partly because you bounce back and forth with other people about something you and they both want to play with. Whereas original fiction feels more separate and distinct: I'm starting from the beginning and showing you why this is interesting to me. What do you think?

(Not that any of these distinctions are hard and fast - I think particularly genre conventions and tropes let original fiction play with ideas the way fanfic does, and a lot of authors are effectively in conversation with each other, and fanfic can involve a great deal of heavy lifting bringing in original material etc.)