Every so often I encounter an owner of a male tortoiseshell who hears that their cat might have XXY chromosomes and therefore be sterile, and therefore thinks , awesome! They don't have to pay to get the lad neutered!
Which leaves everyone else trying to explain that a) he could also be a chimera and therefore fertile, and b) Sterile does not mean not horny.
Humans did not get very involved with cat breeding for milennia in large part because being around a fully hormonal adult cat when the mood strikes them can just be miserable. That is an artist who must make art and their favourite medium is piss.
Nobody cares about your piss art, Tommy. Go make kittens in the barn or back alley or something.
being told that being opposed to copyright is colonial when this is what the history section of the trips agreement is
TRIPS was negotiated during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986–1994. Its inclusion was the culmination of a program of intense lobbying by the United States by the International Intellectual Property Alliance, supported by the European Union, Japan and other developed nations. Campaigns of unilateral economic encouragement under the Generalized System of Preferences and coercion under Section 301 of the Trade Act played an important role in defeating competing policy positions that were favored by developing countries like Brazil, but also including Thailand, India and Caribbean Basin states. In turn, the US strategy of linking trade policy to intellectual property standards can be traced back to the entrepreneurship of senior management at Pfizer in the early 1980s, who mobilized corporations in the United States and made maximizing intellectual property privileges the number one priority of trade policy in the United States (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000, Chapter 7).
there’s very few things that drive me up the wall in fandom as much as this weird new assumption that fandom is primarily a space for younger people that older folks are only accepted into in a trial basis if they promise to centralize and accommodate younger fans, and further, anything else is creepy and predatory. IT’S OKAY FOR ADULTS TO PRODUCE CONTENT FOR OTHER ADULTS.
if I have to read “women in their 30s” used as an insult one more time I swear I’ll - step away from that user and just hang out with the other grownups who consistently create good content because I’m also an adult and too busy comparing car insurance to fight with teenagers on the internet, but goddAMMIT I’ll be annoyed
I'm old enough that the first fanfic I read was a mimeographed zine (it was a combo anthology for Beauty and the Beast & Dark Shadows) that came in an SASE. I laugh at those kids.
You know how there's that genre of posts that's like "[screenshot of something horrid and dystopian happening with technology] hahaha, I sure hope nothing bad comes from defunding humanities while pouring boatloads of money into STEM"?
I need an inversion of that that's like "hahaha, I sure hope we don't run into any problems with masses of artists and writers deciding that it's fascist to understand the law and computer science."
That would have to become a real problem with real societal implications first. I know, your older colleagues refusing to learn how to use Moodle is a bother, but that's nothing compared to literally 1984
It seems like every humanities grad and creative on the internet has decided that the only way they will survive the future is by enshrining copyright laws more expansive than ever before and by being allowed to sue anybody for having looked at their work and had a single thought about it.
Permanent DMCA regime and an end to fair use seems pretty dystopian from where I'm sitting and the fact that the comments on this post are full of uwu smol bean creatives who are very proud to say things like "I don't care how AI works, it's evil" but can't imagine how their attempts to define model training as theft might have downstream problems that harm everyone BUT megacorporations is exactly the issue that I'm trying to articulate.
The problem is not that my elderly colleague doesn't know how to use a software program, the problem is that I'm watching liberal arts majors gleefully cheerlead attempts at implementing absolutely devastating legislation because they don't understand laws or computer science.
"This son of a bitch is throwing a two-hit shutout. He's shaking me off. You believe that shit? Charlie, here comes the deuce. And when you speak of me, speak well."
"This son of a bitch is throwing a two-hit shutout. He's shaking me off. You believe that shit? Charlie, here comes the deuce. And when you speak of me, speak well."
"This son of a bitch is throwing a two-hit shutout. He's shaking me off. You believe that shit? Charlie, here comes the deuce. And when you speak of me, speak well."
I think there’s a really odd gap in general supply chain knowledge in which people scapegoat AI as this new devastating environmental concern, when internet data centers have been an environmental problem before that. The internet already had the infrastructure to support it in 2017, before GPT-1 was released. Data centers are not a new problem. The internet already had a large physical presence, but people didn’t really think much of it until there were new AI-related developments (and then attribute all data centers to being related to generative AI? Where do people think YouTube videos are stored? The literal clouds in the sky?)
A Makeship plushie has a bigger carbon footprint than a thousand LLM queries but it is seen as an acceptable environmental impact, because it has been deemed socially acceptable to contract low wage factories in the Global South to make toys to sell to customers worldwide at a 3000% markup, with all the profits staying in the Global North. Not many people think of that environmental impact
i think the anti-ai crowd, and even people who aren't necessarily anti-ai but just don't use it or see the point in it, kind of underestimate how many people do use it and benefit from it.
i think this is ultimately an issue of insular communities. independent artists and fandomites have largely decided it's taboo to introduce ai into their spaces, but what about people not in those circles? pretty much everyone i've talked to about my work with ai in my offline social circles finds at least some amount of interest in what i do. a coworker whom i went to high school with recently got meta glasses. my father in law, who's worked with computers for decades, actively talks with me about ai and enjoys making goofy generated images to show us.
and i think this is why people who are very anti-ai get so shocked when they encounter someone who actively uses it and sees no problem with it. it's a very odd sort of plato's cave, where people get blinded by the light, the idea that not everyone is on the same page as them, and rather than trying to build a better understanding of why that is, they declare that the world's gone mad before darting back into the cave.
When mankind had learned to walk backward through time, the first law was not awe.
It was paperwork.
No one went into the deep past by whim. A scholar who wished to set foot in dead ages had to give name, oath, blood-scan, grant trail, risk ledger, field aim, return plan, death plan, and six hundred pages of blame laid out in clean black marks. Three boards read the work. Two more boards read the readers. Every question bred three more questions. Every answer had to be stamped, countersigned, sealed, and sworn.
This oversight did not keep fools from foolish acts.
The boards knew of the games. Everyone knew of the games. No form had a box for them. No hearing chair ever asked whether a field team had wagered a month’s pay on who could land closest to the start of the the great Breath-Rise. without gear and still come home breathing.
To ask would have made the thing real.
So the boards turned their faces aside, stern as stone, while young doctors of time and bone-lore drank too much in basement halls and spoke with bright eyes of old air, green seas, red skies, and death at the edge of breath.
There were rules, though no one wrote them.
No exo-gear. No sealed lung-rig. No hidden blood-boost. No nurse-drone under the cloak. One witness. One clock. One step down, one breath taken, one hand raised before the jump-back.
The old brag was simple.
How far back can you go before the world kills you?
The first man to try it with any fame was named Harl Venn, though in most mouths he became only Harl the Hen-Man. He was not a sound scholar, but he had tenure, three dead marriages, and a pet thought he would not loose: that tyrant lizard flesh would taste like chicken.
He said this so often that men began to dare him toward it.
He went.
The record, sealed in a black file under four locks and one false name, showed ninety-one seconds of wet heat, buzzing flies, and Harl Venn laughing through his mask-clip before the mask-clip came off. It showed him cutting a strip from a fallen carcass in a fern brake, holding it over a hand-flame, and taking one hard chew.
He did not smile.
The thing behind him moved before the witness could shout.
The boards buried the tape. The basement halls did not. For three years afterward, any meat served in the south wing was met with someone lifting a fork and asking whether it tasted like Harl’s chicken.
The second death should have ended the game.
The third should have ended it harder.
By the tenth, even the drunkest bone-men had begun to give the stegosaurs a wide berth.
There was something almost shameful in it. Mankind had split time, chained paradox, mapped safe windows through ages no eye had seen, and still lost learned folk to a tail full of spikes because someone, somewhere, had said, “Closer.”
The word for the killing end was old, half-joke and half-memorial: Thagomizer. The dead had not found it funny. The living found it funny because the living were still breathing.
After that, the game changed. It grew quieter. No more boasts in the bright halls. No more open wagers. The stakes moved into old message strings, hand-carried slates, scraps burned in sinks. Names went out of the telling. Only numbers stayed.
Closest unguided step into high-carboniferous swamp: fourteen minutes, nine seconds, with lung scarring and one lost boot.
Oldest naked-hand soil touch: one billion, nine hundred million years before present, under shore-light dim as ash. The hand blistered. The hand lived.
Earliest no-gear breath: disputed. Three claimants. One grave. Two sealed hearings.
By then the forbidden work had thrown off more truth than half the clean grants.
They knew which old airs bit the lungs slow and which bit fast. They knew the taste of iron in a young sea wind. They knew what spores made skin swell, what insects drove a grown scholar to claw at his own faceplate, what quiet water could hide a jaw, a spine, a bloom of poison. They knew that some eras killed with teeth, some with heat, some with air that looked harmless and went into the blood like a knife.
They knew, too, that none of it could be printed.
A paper needs a method.
A method needs a field record.
A field record needs a reason why Doctor So-and-so, sworn fellow of the Ninth Chronologic Chair, was standing bareheaded in a Devonian marsh at 03:12 station time.
So the findings slept.
They slept in locked drives, in misnamed folders, in jokes told too softly, in scar tissue, in lungs that never fully cleared. They slept in the hands of gray scholars who had outlived their wildness and now sat on the very boards they had once slipped past.
When young applicants came before them, bright and clean and hungry for dead worlds, the old ones read the forms with care. They marked weak tether plans. They struck down loose sampling aims. They asked for stronger masks, better return locks, clearer death clauses.
And sometimes, when a candidate asked why the rules were so hard, one of the old board members would look over the rim of their lens.
They would not speak of games.
They would not speak of Harl Venn, or the tenth Thagomizer, or the woman who came back from the red shore with one breath left and blood at both nostrils.
They would only tap the paper with one bent finger and say, “The past is not waiting for you.”
"AI art is stealing Studio Ghibli's work/art without compensation" boy wait until you find out who drew and animated all of those frames and who got paid most for the end result
liberals are all about "stolen labour" when it's an "intellectual property" being stolen from a company, but not so much when it's the proletariat's labour being stolen by companies. funny that huh
Time travelers are not immune from “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”
In the far future, time travel exists
It is very tightly regulated and available for use only to academic researchers who have jumped through a lot of very complex hoops, filled out an obscene amount of paperwork, and have secured the approval of multiple ethics boards.
Even so, humans are still humans, and stupid competitions exist.
The oversight boards refuse to acknowledge that these competitions exist
And getting caught indulging in such is a good way to get every single credential you ever had issued to you shredded.
Even so, you still end up with people who try for shit like, how far back can you go before you die?
Obviously, you can’t go past the great oxygenation event without exo-gear, but there’s a lot of bragging rights in seeing just how close to that point you can go without dying.
The first guy who tried was a loony who had a pet theory that T-Rex would tase exactly like chicken. (It very much did not, but he did win a Darwin award.)
The second, third, and tenth people to attempt died via Thagomizer, strangely enough.
Since then, we’ve accumulated a large corpus of data on exactly how unfriendly to humans the pre-hominid eras are, but a lot of it can’t actually be published because then the researchers would have to disclose what they were actually doing when they were gathering said data.
I feel like advertising is probably the funniest place anyone can choose to predicate their moral arguments against AI on the basis of environmental impact because like. The advertising industry is already probably the most wasteful i dustry in terms of environmental costs vs. actual value it provides, to the point that adding AI to it amounts to a very small drop in the world's biggest bucket. Like.
"Using AI to design flyers looks cheap and tacky" 👍 I completely agree.
"Using AI to design flyers is bad for the environment" I can tell you with 100% absolute certainty that the environmental impact of printing hundreds of paper flyers which will be looked at exactly once and then thrown in the garbage is like. Several orders of magnitude bigger than the environmental impact of generating the picture that will go on said flyers.
Like I find it hard to think of a position that more succinctly communicates "I never think about where anything comes from or how it's produced or how it's disposed of or the environmental costs of any steps in that process unless there's some sort of moral panic telling me to be concerned about it" than thinking that the "AI" part of "ads made with AI" is the part that's bad for the environment.
When they aired originally, I think they tried to argue that they had been shunted to a different earth after the Hydra reveal, but all the time travel and alt-earth plots they threw in after that I dont think anyone has any idea what is or isnt "official" main line cannon.
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