ENBY Elder. Any pronouns. It's 80s Will Graham all the way down. I'm mostly here for #Hannigram, #HEU (mainly #SpaceDogs) #Tron, #TheMatrix, #BladeRunner #Sinners, and some politics.
I am a person who is not quite a woman, not quite a man. I am what life has made me—someone who wishes to be gentle and is sometimes not. Someone with werewolf tufts who sometimes turns inside out. Perhaps this is true for you, too—a feeling of being a little bit strange, of having some fur and teeth, and shadows of the forest flickering across the back of your eyelids. If so, I wish you the exhalation of breath when your heart has synced with that of a horse, a friend, or another species, and that you can relax into a very real place, where you are the animal you were thousands of years ago, before people tried to wipe away your instincts with religion and greed and jealousy and fear. I wish you freedom and the knowledge of being a part of the world's tenderness. And I hope whenever the chance comes you will take it and feel your heartbeat along its true original course—down the ever-changing river of you.
Neko Case, THE HARDER I FIGHT THE MORE I LOVE YOU.
There's always a moment of intense cultural whiplash whenever I realize I'm talking to someone who thinks "legal" and "illegal" are meaningful categories and ascribes innate goodness to following the law. It's like meeting a space alien.
“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
I work in tech, and any time I see a precipitous and incorrect decision like this — ESPECIALLY if it’s made by a technology company — the explanation that seems most plausible to me us that the management of that company has decided to implement an “Agentic” AI — i.e. a large-language model, attached to a program whose instructions are “Do whatever the large language model spits out”.
The problem is that large language models only care about spitting out an answer that sounds syntactically plausible. They’re designed to provide a response that is a reasonable simulacrum of human language, within a reasonably short timeout, but there is absolutely zero actual understanding behind it. It is basically a bullshit machine. There is no evaluation of veracity or reasonableness happening — that’s not a thing it’s capable of. It’s just trying to spit out a plausible answer before you get impatient and give up interacting with it.
Without doxxing myself, I’ve recently seen a case exactly like this in telecom.
A third -party project manager (not me, I was just a witness) put in a request like “Placeholder - port date to be determined for this toll-free number, belonging to Customer XYZ. I will update this ticket when the date is determine, and provide the required paperwork. For now, please just assign to the correct porting coordinator and hold.”
Instead of doing that, Carrier A’s customer support department immediately sent a port order to Carrier B, with the authorizer listed as [random person in customer’s call centre who wasn’t a manager and wouldn’t be listed as a signing authority on Carrier B’s billing record].
And then Carrier B, rather than being like “Who the fuck is Tragedeigh Molyneux? Our billing record clearly says that for Customer XYZ, the signing authority is Humperdink Snufflebugger” , instead just went ahead and released the toll-free number to Carrier A.
This was a couple months ago, and I can’t remember if callers were getting a busy signal, or just an infinite gentle-music hold loop, but it was a fucking shitshow, and the customer was furious.
We hurriedly implemented a workaround (a weird hairpin-routing-loopback to get callers to agents whose phones were still connected to Carrier B’s system), but the customer was absolutely furious about the outage; like “How TF could this have happened??? We never set a port date, and in any case, Ms. Molyneux never had signing authority to authorize changes with either Carrier A or Carrier B???”
And the poor project manager is getting absolutely excoriated, even though she never asked for this number to be ported immediately. She was just trying to give Carrier A lots of notice, because they are usually very behind on their port requests. And she’s just like “I don’t know, we’ll have to ask Carrier A and Carrier B to investigate how that decision was made within their support organizations.”
And like… to me, the technician watching this unfold, it seems that either:
A) Both Carrier A and Carrier B suddenly have customer support staff who are extremely eager to help, and also extremely lacking in critical thinking, or else
B) One (or both) of these carriers (one of whom is a large, publicly-traded company) has recently offloaded their first-pass ticket handling to an “agentic AI” (i.e. an LLM / syntactically-plausible bullshit machine, hooked directlyinto a system that just blindly implements any instructions the LLM sends to it).
I strongly suspect it’s Option B, because I’ve worked in this industry for over a decade, and I’ve never encountered a human person whose impulse to help wasn’t thoroughly outweighed by their fear of making a mistake that brings down an entire call centre.
The biggest bullshit with Adultism is basically that the people will defend it with: "Well, if we did not force X on kids, kids would not do it, because they hate X."
And then you actually look onto the research.
Kids do not generally hate learning or school. Quite the opposite. Children tend to enjoy learning and are naturally curious. It is exactly the fact that they are forced into school and into the rigid structure of it that often punishes curiosity but also is hostile towards the differences inherent in people, that kids hate it.
Kids do not naturally hate medical care. While medical care is scary at times, the fear usually comes from medical care scenarios being defined by adults overriding a child's agency, not explaining things to him, and otherwise being abusive, that makes children afraid of medical procedures. Additionally the way a lot of medical procedures go hand in hand with denying a child's reality ("Look, it is not that bad") tends to be traumatizing to children.
There have been studies done in this. If you explain a child - even a toddler - what you do and why, children will generally be a lot more okay with stuff like needles and simple procedures, and will even agree to necessary surgical interventions.
If you create a learning environment that allows more for self-directed learning, and involves less specific testing, most kids actually will enjoy learning.
The way kids hate school, and are afraid of doctors is the result of those interactions being associated with violence and coercion. The hatred is because of the coercion, rather than the hatred making the coercion necessary.
The Troubled Teen Industry exists, child trafficking is not an adult topic.
Children get raped, sexual assault is not an adult topic.
Children have alcoholic parents, addiction is not an adult topic.
Children get beat to the point of hospitalization at school, that level of violence is not an adult topic.
That when these things get into "kid friendly" media at all, they tend to be heavily censored is about protecting adult control over kids, not about protecting children.
just like cop shows love engineering scenarios where they can go damn we would have caught the serial puppy killer by now if only police had even more money and power, doctor shows love engineering scenarios where they can go damn we would have solved every problem with this patient's body by now if only patients weren't so pigheaded and lazy and entitled and dishonest
i know folks are gonna call me a pedo for this one, but i grew up seeing my mom and grandma naked. they had health issues and at times needed care and help showering. and i truly think more kids need to be shown the nonsexual reality of naked women at a young age. there is nothing sexual about my grandmothers breasts, they were simply body parts. more women die of heart attacks because people are too afraid of breasts to do real chest compressions, because they are scared to touch their breasts. the sexualization of our bodies literally kills us. i need people to be more normal about naked bodies and i'm 100% serious.
