What was here once is no longer

Not even a real abbot

[afloweroutofstone]

I feel like I hate AI slightly less than the average Tumblr user, but it still scares the shit out of me to see how many people now engage in internet arguments by submitting their opponent’s argument to an AI bot and saying “explain why this is wrong and I am right.” It is concerning first because most AI models are sycophants that will tell you exactly what you want to hear, which makes then extremely potent delusion-confirmers. But it’s even more concerning because learning how to argue for yourself— how to evaluate claims, to assess an argument, to find and check sources, to spot flaws in someone’s case— is one of the most important skills you can have in life. If you don’t have that, you are unable to evaluate what is true for yourself. You will walk right into the arms of the first crackpot or cult that talks to you when you don’t have Claude available. Extremely grim portent that many people seem to find this acceptable

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

It might be a skill that gives you good feelings internally but I don't think it's an important skill. Almost everyone is epistemically helpless across most domains that matter, I do not think you can protect yourself from anything simply by getting better at arguing.

Also the idea that AI's are sycophants is nonsensical for anyone who's interacted with a recent model

[blackgirlsreverything]

[weepyemperor]

I want people to be so jealous of my expensive car that they spend 24+ hours taking Adderall in order to b able to continue masturbating to the thought of defacing it with spray paint

[prismatic-bell]

I recently discovered laundry stripping and y’all, no matter how much of a crock of shit you think fast fashion is, you’re underestimating.

[prismatic-bell]

[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]

OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?

Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.

Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.

What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.

Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.

You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.

When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.

Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.

It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!

I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.

Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.

Go forth. Rejuvenate your clothing. Strip your laundry.

[ankewehner]

I have a question about the "set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment" bit: What is your regular pretreatment?

[prismatic-bell]

For grease: Dawn dish soap and a toothbrush. For blood: soak in peroxide, rinse, apply more peroxide. For ink: alcohol. Rubbing alcohol is best, vodka is an acceptable substitute. Do not use colored liquor like tequila or whiskey. Aerosol hairspray will work in a pinch. For red wine or grape juice: white wine. For "what the fuck is that, anyway?" stains: OxyClean Max Force Gel Stick. For "oh shit, there was a red shirt in with my whites" stains: I'm very sorry. Try bleach? Spot-apply all of these. In other words don't just toss your period panties into a sink full of peroxide, pour some peroxide over the crotch. Apply alcohol with a cotton facial pad or, failing that, a washcloth or kleenex. Let it sit for five to fifteen minutes, then throw it in the wash. Try to use cold water; hot water will set stains.

[leebrontide]

So my regular laundry detergent is a home made mix of grated Fels Naptha bar (about 1/6th a bar per gallon), 1/3rd a cup of WASHING soda, and 1/3rd cup of baking soda. I toss all that in a bit under a gallon of water for a gallon of detergent.

And sometimes I load the washer, including the detergent, and then open the lid. The laundry automatically stops itself, and I just let it sit overnight. This is great for stains (I have a 5 year old) and for clothes longevity.

It's also fragrance free (so great for many allergies), CHEAP, and Eco-friendly.

We never have to ditch clothes for being dingy.

[abandoned-as-mustard]

So what if we don't have dawn dish soap or borax?

[prismatic-bell]

Then you're probably in the EU, and I'm sorry, I do not know what alternative is available as I do not live there.

[alexseanchai]

bio says Aussie, but like, that doesn't get closer to answering the question

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

where the fuck are you people buying your clothes from

[deadgenerations]

I don't believe religions should have any single right above those afforded to a youth footy league, a knitting circle, or a book club. certainly not any rights above a private citizen. Its utter lunacy that we live in a world where this is not the norm for civil society!! You live in a world where just because someone believes something it means they can be exempt from certain civil law and from certain taxes!!!

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

Who exactly is taxing your knitting circle?

[the-grey-tribe]

You will think I am taking the piss, but I am not. I am completely serious, and I am also not trying to clown on anybody. I mean it.

There should be such a thing, such a concept as the "flip side of the banality of evil", where absolutely reprehensible people with rancid views do good, because they are part of a large, slow-moving bureaucracy that does good, and these people just do good for a pay-cheque.

[andmaybegayer]

What Isotta and Albertini came up with was a gun design that is actually bent sheet metal. Like, everything on this can be made with essentially a press brake. So you're literally just folding pieces of steel instead of complex stamping dies and then instead of welding even, this is held together by rivets which are, again, a simpler process to actually manufacture.

Incredible. No one is doing it like this anymore, with good reason.

[liskantope]

I don't really want to draw the attention of the Tumblr-user whose blog this is on since I've picked on them enough, but right after making a couple of Animorphs-related posts and after my commentary on the ethos of their blog being dedicated to strenuously reading queer stuff into Animorphs, my dashboard gave me another possibly even clearer exhibit of this.

Ignoring the whole "Tobias is trans" idea and its likelihood from the text on the grounds that the thread isn't claiming this time that it's textual but rather imagining a hypothetical alternate universe where Tobias is a trans girl, it looks like evidently Rachel isn't straight after all, which supposedly should have been clear the whole time since Tobias lives by default as a bird, thus her attraction to Tobias has nothing to do with his physical form (as if she never knew him, or periodically still hung out with him, when his form was that of a human boy); let us leave aside this argument's implication that Rachel just doesn't experience sexual preferences for anything physical which is contradicted blatantly in the books. And evidently Rachel, one of whose defining characteristics is being superficially extremely conventionally feminine to the point of being obsessed with the art of "how to be a girl in superficial presentation" in late '90's teenage girl culture, would be totally happy to dress partly in men's clothes.

I used to only observe this in the webcomic Questionable Content, where it seems the cartoonist wants to make almost every single character, no matter how straight they initially appeared, turn out to be bi or queer in some other way, but it's clear to me now that this feeds into a much larger subculture, and I have to lean towards Tumblr user northshorewave's explanation that this comes from a "folk religion" of no universe being interesting or worth investing in and nobody being worthwhile unless a queer identity is involved.

As I've said before, in the grand scheme of things it's harmless and I shouldn't pick on it, except as far as my believing it to be important that people are aware of when they're immersed in it.

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

It's always "stop harming yourself or we'll have to lock you up!!!" and never "what do you need to change to want to harm yourself less and how can we help you make some of these changes?" and that's why we're not getting anywhere

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

I find it fascinating that people who have clearly had severe mental health issues can seriously countenance these sentiments. Even as someone with very mild mental health issues very often, the answer to " what can make this better" is "absolutely nothing that could ever be reasonably asked of almost anyone"

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

Not enough people in my life are capable of saying "Yes the extremity of your emotions is irrational but they are directionally correct".

They have to deny my feelings without reservation which makes me feel like I'm insane.

I do not have a disease which makes me incapable of perceiving reality I have a disease that makes me over-react to reality.

[transgenderer]

scott alexander is kind of a worst case scenario for reading nonfiction as each book he reads seems to have a roughly equal chance of making him understand the world *worse* because it is full of stupid lies

[transgenderer]

@kata4a said: did he recently review a book?

ever since he read from bauhaus to our house he's been using it as a major example in his theory of like taste and social change and stuff, and as far as i can tell it's just like. total fiction about the history of modern architecture. like. its a blatant hack job by someone who hates modern architecture and has blamed it on communism. he's mentioned it less often but afaict the rise of christianity is also bullshit (its history by a guy whose specialty is sociology. so like. its bad. god sociologists are so bad at their job. ethnographer or bust).

[latinotiktok]

[willkill4pudding]

Translation: Person behind camera; *knock down one card* “Go.” Other person;“Is your character mentally stable?” Person behind Camera; *Looks at card* “Yes” Other person; *Slaps down all but one card* “IT’S MOMO”

[sighinastorm]

I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS.  THERE WERE ONLY A FEW DOZEN NOTES WHEN I SAW IT LAST.

[ohlookitsatree]

[perdvivly]

Rating: NOT CUTE

Asking a yes/ no question that narrows the pool from 11 options to 1 gained you 3.459 bits of information. Which means if the answer had been no you would have narrowed the pool from 11 options to 10 and gained 0.138 bits of information.

The expected information gain from the question is the probability weighted average of the yes/ no responses, which works out to 0.439 bits.

You could have asked a question with an expected information gain of 0.994 bits by asking something that would split remaining options into 5 vs 6.

Asking questions like this hurts the ghost of Claude Shannon and as such is ghost abuse. Shannon didn’t fight and possibly die for your right to party just so you could ask questions with suboptimal expected information gain.

[raginrayguns]

rationality technique: read the book you're talking about

you may end up "less wrong" about it

[tsarina-anadyomene]

is everything okay dear? you've hardly touched your pride discourse

[tsarina-anadyomene]

Pride month isn't just a date on the calendar. When someone starts talking about he/him lesbians and you feel the urge to lunge at then, that's pride month. When you're in a flame war over whether gay or bisexual men are more problematic, that's pride month. Anywhere there are debates about whether straight people can feel love as deeply as sapphics is pride month. Pride month is anywhere you say something about being gay and get told to eat shit!

[teaboot]

One time my dad and I got into an argument cause he said it was unprofessional for a man to wear a skirt to work because a man would only want to wear women’s clothing if it was a sexual fetish and at the time I just thought it was stupid but in hindsight I think I learned something deeply personal about my dad

[teaboot]

“I wouldn’t be caught dead in any kind of dress because dresses are for women and I’m a man so it would be perverted, the only reason a man would wear a dress would be if he was getting off on it” really is the most weirdly conservative way to admit you find crossdressing so intensely erotic that you cannot imagine a reality where it’s boring, huh

[teaboot]

I have no idea if there’s any merit to this at all but now I can’t stop and it’s requiring my brain

“cleavage is slutty and suggestive” only if you think it is. Why are you giving boobs power over you like that

“crossdressing is erotic” Why? Does it turn you on? And if it does, why is that anyone else’s problem? Are sandals erotic? People with foot fetishes aren’t banning flip-flops

“same sex relationships are perverted” Even if they never fuck and just do taxes and shit? Why are you so fixated on gay people doing horny stuff. Why can’t you divide a category of people from porn

Like

Am I late to the fucking game or does just about every single social taboo related to promiscuity boil down to “your insistence that it’s kinky is the only thing making it kinky instead of boring”?

[teaboot]

Imagine being so pornbrained that you cannot conceive of a reality where a dude might want to hold hands with his husband or go to a nude beach or wear a cute summer dress to the farmers market without being insanely rock hard about it the entire goddamn time

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

this is the kind of post that makes me have the realization "Oh, oh right. Very few people are actually using words in a straightforward way, they say things that.superficially appear to be about the external world but in fact they only appear that way because relating to the external world is a useful way to communicate an affect"

[sigmaleph]

what does it mean to say 'trans women are the same sex as cis women'.

i can understand someone saying biological sex isn't real. I disagree, but I can understand it. what does it mean to say that sex is real, not as in 'having sex'* but as in as above saying a person 'is' a sex, and also that all trans women and all cis women belong to the same one. is there only one sex, the human sex.

i suspect people who say this do not have a coherent model for what it means for a human being to be a particular sex and are just saying things that sound nice about trans women. please prove me wrong. i also like saying nice things about trans women but i prefer them to be true and meaningful.

[just-a-random-nerd]

Sex is in practice defined by phenotypic expressions. With sufficient estrogen, broadly a given, trans women match much closer with the Woman phenotype than the Man one. One of the points of "trans women are the same sex as cis women" as a slogan is "hormone replacement therapy works and creates a range of changes throughout the body and thus treating these two types of women the same in eg medicine is actually reasonable and sensible" Admittedly it also has political signalling usages that you can agree or disagree with separately.

[futuristicstarfishcollection]

But this is just straightforwardly false? Estrogen post puberty has a very limited impact on phenotypic characteristics. Not none, but not particularly large either, I would be willing to bet that if you were to get a large dataset of naked trans women, cis men, cis women, with the genitalia obscured, and have people classify, trans women would much more consistently be assigned to the male category than the female

[nostalgebraist]

I keep thinking about that attempt I made to characterize people I get along with, a few days ago.  There’s a specific thing there but I’m just not sure how to phrase it.

It’s like a sort of … feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things you’d never expect.  It’s not exactly “skepticism,” and not exactly “humility.”  It’s compatible with having a high view of oneself or one’s intellect, though not with certain versions of those things.  It’s compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.

It’s having your most instinctive response to the world be “this is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.”  And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it.  Sometimes you become quite attached to them.  Sometimes maybe too attached.  But if you become too attached it’s not because you think your concepts are reality.  It’s because you feel you’ll be so terribly lost without them.

When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with “oh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.”  It’s not that these people are too political, or too certain.  It’s that their politics and certainty doesn’t feel like a lifeboat they’re clinging to in a vast roiling ocean.  They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.

And lots of things follow from this.  You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense – sometimes dulled, but never gone – that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that you’ll never find your way in it.  So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos.  You collect #quotes.  You learn to laugh when you see something you don’t understand, so that you don’t instead despair.

You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori.  You like data.  But not in the sense of “the data is in”; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again.  But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many.  You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation.  You want the species, not the specimen – but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.

You come to observation, to experimentation, to something like science, even to something like positivism, not out of a zeal for the general but because you know the particular will wash over you and crush you.  When the concepts are stripped away everything is laughter and awe and horror and you bring the concepts back, not to perfect life, but simply to bear it.  And you tend to your collection.

[nonevahed]

jesus fucking christ Sam Kriss you can't just serve winners like this when i'm late night procrastinating sleep i'll wake the neighbors