This is my life. This is my precious life. This is how badly I want to live.
â Andrea Gibson, âAn Insider's Guide on How to Be Sickâ

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@notevenhypotheticals
This is my life. This is my precious life. This is how badly I want to live.
â Andrea Gibson, âAn Insider's Guide on How to Be Sickâ
How do people get into casual singing outside of church?
i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service youâre organising" one of the tags responding said "this isnât about proshippers in here youâre not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.
There's a disconnect happening here because the primary function of social media for most casual users is to form a circle of friends around the usual things that friendships are built on: shared interests and lifestyles and ideas of what is important and what is unacceptable. When people are mainly doing leftism on social media, this encourages thinking of leftism as centered around establishing high-minded social clubs.
For anyone who still isn't getting it from someone who helps people IRL: There's a difference between whom you're helping to feed at the mealshare and whom you're choosing to hang out with for fun after the mealshare. You don't have to invite a hungry person with opinions you don't like to play board games with you, but you do have to help keep them from starving if you're serious about leftist organizing.
[Image ID: Tumblr reply with username blocked out reading: *volunteering at the soup kitchen, holding a bowl hesitantly to my chest* what do you think about age gaps in ships /End ID]
Mdawg collage for you today đŤ´â¨â¨
Two men on a mission, united in purpose.
Why arenât AI companies competing directly with their customers?
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/#meta-meta-meta
"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The RubĂĄiyĂĄt of Omar KhayyĂĄm
I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.
As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.
Nevertheless, Omar KhayyĂĄm's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to KhayyĂĄm's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?
This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"
Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"
Oh, that's easy. It's a landlording scheme.
The last couple years experimenting with AI I've come to the conclusion that the main reason it works isn't a mystery because it has to be a mystery. It's a mystery because they need it to be.
That's why they've been hogging all the RAM and GPUs to the point of ordering the entire yearly worldwide supply in advance.
That's why they keep building data centres despite demand not justifying it.
That's why every open source model China releases is a hit to the stock market.
The secret sauce behind LLMs isn't really as demanding as they claim. There's waste built into it.
Every response within a chat sends the entire message chain through the robot's brain. It doesn't have loading bars, it doesn't let you calculate how many tokens you've used, it doesn't even let you see when you're crossing the limits until you're there.
It's almost like they don't want you to have control over how much you use.
ChatGPT in particular is prone to scope creep. It subtly talks you into expanding the reach of your projects to require more computation. It always delivers 90% of a project, with something missing so you ask another question.
Claude turns everything into a file creation request, even if it can deliver in plain text just fine. It's enticing to see how your simple table becomes a fancy react file or an HTML with heavy formatting.
Neither of these issues are present on DeepSeek or on local models. Which means they aren't inherent issues with LLMs.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
They want you to keep paying unmetered rent. They do tricks to convince you to spend more than you meant making something bigger than you planned. They do this subtly, to make you think it was your idea.
The thing is, Chinese local models prove that we already have good enough AI for most things. It's plateauing in capacity, it needs to grow in efficiency and memory use. But intelligence is already at J.A.R.V.I.S levels, and can run fine on consumer grade hardware. We've reached a stability point.
The problem is you can't raise rent on stability. So you just keep throwing compute at the problem until you can justify asking for more money. Which is why they choke the memory market.
If nobody can buy memory, nobody can run local AI. If no one can run local AI, they have to keep paying unmetered rent. Development is slow, and importantly, the black box remains a black box.
That's why every memory breakthrough comes from Chinese companies. Because they're the only ones sharing their data. Capitalist companies don't want people to study how the models work.
With subscriptions, there's rent seeking. With local models, there's reverse engineering. Once enough people get their hands into the guts of the robot it won't be long before we figure out exactly how they work, and find more efficient ways to make them that don't require as many data centres.
Meanwhile, Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all.
What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.
Eventually, the goal is making contracts with large corporations to employ their robots instead of people. If no one has local AI, because they can't understand it or because it's illegal, then they can no longer compete against a faster worker that demands no labour rights, even if it does C+ work at best.
And that's where the real fun begins. And by fun I mean starving out the working class.
They aren't competing directly with their customers yet. First they have to educate them, jus like Spotify educated their consumers into forgetting how piracy works. They have to make them reliant on cloud compute, just like how Google Drive made everyone reliant on its storage before raising prices. And they want them to be ignorant of how much energy anything takes.
That's going to take one generation.
Not long ago every teenager knew how to use a computer. Now they depend on Apple for everything. It's a masterful business model. So what if we could apply it to every form of labour?
It's okay, just hand us your credit card and we'll do the rest. How much, you ask? Don't worry about that. Just keep your monthly payments coming. Oh, you can't afford it? You want your computer to do it? Well fuck you, we bought all the computers, so now you work for us.
The tech has never been the conspiracy. It's the business model.
Ok but follow-up question:
What happens when all the workers who are now unemployed cannot pay for anything because they're unemployed and just die? What then? If there's nobody left but the owners of the robots, what happens then? What good is them having all the money then?
What's the next step after you "win" at this vulture capitalism mess? What happens if you have All The Money and everyone is dead and you're all alone in the burned out husk you made the world? What exactly is the point if you're dying of cancer from the pollution you made and there's nobody to treat your cancer because you basically killed them off for profit???
Like what exactly is the point????
The point is the exploitation and profit and power. There is no "next step" because the business model only cares about the resulting profit and power, and that requires a departure from reality and the very idea of consequences.
"lock in" is probably one of the most important phrases to enter the public lexicon in the 2020s
For LGBTQ history month, HWO are very pleased to republish Anna HĂĄjkovĂĄ's piece on the need for a queer history of the Holocaust.
Homophobia has had a far-reaching impact on historical memory. At a basic level, there are next to no queer Jews in Holocaust histories. If you find any, they are usually deviant figures. But more importantly, homophobic prejudice has come to shape all the oral history collections of Holocaust survivors around the world. The large USC Shoah Foundation has over 52,000 interviews with Jewish survivors; next to none of them speak about same-sex desire. This does not mean that none of them were queer â I know for a fact that some of them were. But they did not dare to bring it up in the interview given the heteronormative framing of the inquiry. With missing testimonies, it is as if these people never lived and havenât left a trace, which for survivors of a genocide is a devastating fate. [...] Let me be honest, even in the context of Holocaust studies this is a hard research. Some people will tell you that queer history is irrelevant and should not be written about. They believe that homosexuality is dishonorable to the reputation of Holocaust victims. Sadly, these lines of enquiry have sometimes led to painful personal attacks on myself; I have had my professional path, research integrity, sexual orientation and family history attacked. But more often, I have been able to change peopleâs opinions and to show why should we strive for a less judgmental and more inclusive history.
A new documentary about sapphic love that survived concentration camps came out earlier this year and not enough people are talking about it.
This is such an excellent documentary. From the description: NELLY & NADINE is the unlikely and harrowing love story between Belgian classical singer, Nelly Mousset-Vos and Nadine Hwang, the daughter of a Chinese ambassador to Spain. Nelly and Nadine meet in the darkest of times on Christmas Eve, 1944. Through their newly recovered personal diaries and Super-8 home movies, NELLY & NADINE takes audiences on a personal journey through the nearly forgotten history of one of the greatest love stories never told. Directed by Magnus Gertten I wept and wept but it renewed my faith in love during hardship honestly. I am so happy this got to be made and if you should have time, especially if you are LGBTIA+, please watch this documentary.
Who wants to hear a DIY tiling pro tip that the experts won't tell you
Yes!
Do not drop your phone into the bucket of tile adhesive. This step is actually completely unnecessary and massively complicates the tiling process.
You say this but my uncle is a tiler and he swears by the âdrop phone in putty bucketâ technique. I think youâre just posting this for clout
Your uncle is caught up in a tradition that he was taught as an apprentice that he never questioned. Modern putty doesn't require phone, the formula has changed.
MY uncle says some customers still demand the phone putty technique because it "doesn't look right otherwise"
Drop an empty phone case in and those customers can't tell the fucking difference because there is no fucking difference.
My mum renovated houses for thirty years, she says âyouâre half right, but in some cases - particularly in houses built before 1930 - the phone does add some benefit. Could be a tablet too if youâve an old one in the garage. And anyone who says itâs got to be a particular model is just being precious about it, whatever the forums say.â
IPhones and tablets where invented in 1898, what did they do before then?
Nothing, tiles were invented in 1899.
my sister the historian studied ancient pompeiian tile mosiacs and there's definitely graffiti of dropping cans on strings into the buckets of putty, so it goes way back.
I remember when Pompeii was destroyed. 1906 was a rough year. Pompeii was destroyed, the war, plus the sinking of the Titanic.
Donât invite me anywhere last minute I enjoy doing nothing so I need to know ahead of time if my plan to do nothing needs to be changed
This is legit and people donât realize it.
âhey what are you doing?â ânothingâ âoh great! so you are avaliab-â âno you donât understand. Iâm doing nothing.âÂ
Iâm doing nothing. Actively. Itâs important.
This is essential nothing Iâm doing.
Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!
Here's what I need you to do:
If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.
Yes, that's really it.
I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.
If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.
Finished my ocean quilt. I hid a few fish and shrimp in the stitching for anyone who likes a small treasure hunt.
Western passport holders will never understand. To go anywhere with a third worlder passport like a Filipino one, you need your tax returns, certificate of employment, bank statements, marriage certificates, sometimes a recommendation from a citizen of the country you want to travel to, everything possible to prove that you have a job and a family at home and you're not planning to be an illegal immigrant, JUST to get hit with a rejection because the embassy didn't believe you had enough proof.
Did you have travel plans? Already booked the plane tickets and hotels? Fuck you, better hope they issue refunds (they don't).
Americans and Western Europeans will never understand how insanely hard and bothersome it's to travel anywhere with a weak passport, let alone immigrate.
You want to study abroad? Show us proof that there is a quadrillion dollars in your bank account. Oh, an average monthly salary in your country is $400 and you plan to work when you arrive? You can't do that, silly, a student visa only allows you to work 2 hours every third Wednesday, and if we find out that you're working a second more we will deport you.
You want to work abroad? Better be a programmer, then of course you are welcome. Doctor, scientist, white-collar or, god forbid, blue-collar worker? You can fuck right off, your visa application goes straght into trash.
But if you marry one of our first-world citizens, then fine, you can come. Because we can't upset them, after all, they are a real person, unlike you.
EU Advice to people who have friends in places with weak passports- go to your department of foreigners and ask for something that called Formal Letter of Invitation or something similar. It usually is called something similar and costs a few euro/whatever currency you have. It will not be more than a fancy coffee at Starbucks or such place.
You will have to prove that you can afford a guest, have some income and also usually take responsibility for possible deportation cost.
But if you really are inviting a friend over, they will give you a formal document you can send to your friend. Then the friend applies for a visa while attaching the Very Official document with it. They will get the Schengen visa and most probably will get it expedited too.
It's some effort, but if it's for a friend it's worth it. And it's way less costly than the ridiculous loops the friend is being forced to go through and pay for multiple 3rd party services just to get a freaking visa for a month.
The Phantom of The Opera
Imagine using the might of this nation to see to it that everyone has their needs met. Imagine all the cool stuff people could do. Imagine the games and the stories and the music and the dances and the foods people would think up if they knew they were safe, fed, healthy, and housed. Imagine caring about our fellow humans enough to build a society where the only disasters we had to rebuild from were not of our own making because a Dollar demanded it. Imagine if imagine if imagine if.