Older And Weirder

Over the hill and getting weird with it

[frigidandeldritch]

Yes, I am a luddite. Why is my school promoting students to become codependent on LLMs for basic tasks? Has everyones brain truly turned to complete mush for them to have to ask ChatGPT to summarize a simple poem, or for it to solve a maths question which they could easily master with practice and patience?

[olderandweirder]

Also - as someone who works with AI professionally - it’s wrong or inept quite a lot.

AI tools, in my experience, are good for two things: summarizing data sets and having meaningless conversations. Atlassian’s built-in AI can navigate our enormous confluence and Jira database and pull relevant information for me much faster than I could find it myself, and it can provide links to sources and useful context. It’s an incredible tool in that way. It can also convincingly simulate human interaction, because it has been engineered to be addictive, like social media.

Many people believe it to be excellent for coding. It can be, in a lot of ways. It’s great for generating boilerplate HTML or whatever. But if you’re executing complex code you don’t understand in the context of any kind of meaningful computation you’re a moron and you deserve the inevitable cascade of failure that is coming for you.

In the end, general-purpose AI tools trained on enormous data sets encounter a lot of contradictory, false, poisoned, out-of-context, or otherwise bad data.

Also, and this is critical, IT CAN’T THINK. It is an enormous statistical algorithm that calculates the probability of the next word being encountered given recent context. Mediocre people think it is amazing because it is programmed to sound like a mediocre person. The executive class loves it because it’s an empty, vacuous, soulless machine that tells them what they want to hear, and that’s their idea of something smart: it validates their own sense of superiority regardless of whether they’re right, wrong, or even remotely in touch with reality.

ChatGPT can’t possibly give you a good answer about anything important because the core data is largely garbage. That AND it can’t think, AND the bot has been built to be an addicting little sycophant, not a useful source of truth. In addition to the soul of the bot being rotten, it seems like everyone’s forgotten the core principle of computing: GIGO. I guess for those who want a world of garbage it’s fine. But I want something better.

[olderandweirder]

I think there’s a difference between being considerate of others and being expected to continuously manage other people’s emotions. For example:

My youngest daughter recently had a landmark life event, and there has been a lot of planning to bring the various sides of the family together to celebrate. However, in the course of planning, she indicated that she did not want to include her older sister’s boyfriend. While I am normally all about inclusion, there are multiple reasons I support her decision not to include this individual, which are outside the scope of this post. Suffice it to say he creeps her out and my wife and I think she should listen to that feeling because he creeps us out too.

Initially, her sister was fine with this. But then The Boomers got involved. They couldn’t handle the idea of a young woman establishing a boundary with someone she finds creepy. There was a lot of talk about “we respect your decision BUT…” followed by a lot of back-channel communications excluding the younger daughter.

This eventually all manifested in the older sister - or, more likely, the older sister’s boyfriend, texting as her - sending long hateful screeds essentially threatening to derail the entire party. Planning for the event began to revolve around the older one and her toxic boyfriend, not around the younger one who we are celebrating. The boomers, the boyfriend, and the older sister successfully created a vortex of dysfunction that engulfed the entire party and made it about them.

So we cancelled it. Fuck them. We talked to the youngest one and we’ll re-plan something she wants and likes, and ensure that this creepy fuck doesn’t get to become the center of it all.

But then the Parade of Tears began. The Boomers began calling and texting her and explaining how they “respected her decision” but “wanted to make this work” by forcing her to accept someone she has good reasons to dislike at an event oriented around her. The guilt tripping and the sadness and the “well I just wanted everyone to get along” and “we just have to accept him” and “oh it hurts me to see the family this way” and allllll the other horseshit started flowing in.

The amount of guilt-tripping, woe-is-me, I-can’t-do-anything-right emotional manipulation that was dumped on our youngest daughter by a pack of boomers sticking their noses where they don’t belong was horrifying.

The boomers didn’t care about what she wanted. They didn’t care about her preferences, they didn’t care about her needs. Everything revolved around making her older sister - and her toxic boyfriend - happy, because seeing the facade of a happy family matters more to them than anything else. This whole generation is used to catering to the worst people in a sort of epic go-along-to-get-along mindset that is destructive to everyone. 

10 years ago, my wife and I - both raised by narcissistic boomers - probably would have rolled over and tried to make the event work for the boomers just to keep the peace. But we are no longer playing those games. We are no longer going to manage our lives in such a way that it provides emotional safety for an entire generation of people who refuse to do any work on self improvement and insist on derailing other people’s lives so that they can enjoy some façade of happiness. We are no longer managing their emotions.

Oh, you’re sad that you couldn’t manipulate this party to be what you wanted it to be? You’re sad that someone is pushing back on your attempts to force her to include an obviously toxic walking red flag in a celebration that is supposed to be about her? Go fuck yourself. Get a therapist. Do some inner work, you degenerate, emotionally destroyed, self-centered, arrogant, hateful old fucks.

I’m not managing these boomers any more. I’m not tiptoeing around their feelings. They are masters at using sad emotions, guilt, and obligation to manipulate people. I have spent 40 years of my life dealing with it, and I’m not fucking doing it any more, and I’m teaching my daughter not to do it either. It’s one thing to be considerate of someone else’s feelings, to be tactful and polite in communication, etc. It’s a whole other thing to be expected to rearrange your entire life to make other people happy. And that’s a distinction that we all need to learn how to make.

[olderandweirder]

Morning nature report, live from my back yard:

My favorite mockingbird is out again. Something about hearing the cricket noise really tickles me. The mockingbirds have devoured most of the suet in the front feeder, time for a refill.

The millet seed in the backyard feeder has sprouted into grass.

There are two woodpeckers who are either fighting or about to fuck (hard to tell with birds) in the big pine tree in my back yard.

There’s another local bird with a strange call I don’t recognize. It’s screechy, almost simian. Can’t seem to lay eyes on it though.

The ant colony near the West Pine tree is very busy. Many ants on mysterious errands.

Some very small species of frog or toad making its way through the grass.

The world can be bleak, but I’m trying to keep my little slice of it friendly to nature.

[depsidase]

[olderandweirder]

Burn it all down. Fuck these tech-bro assholes. Use open-source software on old machinery. Code your own website. Take out reference books from the library. Delete your google and meta accounts. Stop giving these degenerate fucks your money. Learn to draw. Learn to meditate. Read. Do whatever it takes. But burn this disgusting, enshittified, bloated, destructive, evil system to. The. Ground.

[olderandweirder]

My favorite mockingbird is out again. This one learned to make a cricket noise. There are dozens of them in our neighborhood and they usually have a similar assortment of calls: blue jay, cardinal, hawk, miscellaneous songbirds. This one specific individual bird does crickets as well and I just find it super charming.

[olderandweirder]

The tree frogs are out. After some heavy rains yesterday the chorus of frog voices is loud and ceaseless. I’m delighted that they’re back.

[olderandweirder]

I’m reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt and it’s such an uncanny book.

I know for a fact that I have never read this book before. My only exposure to this book was one episode of a podcast that I listened to one time about three years ago. And yet I get this strange feeling that I’m re-reading it, this pervasive long-lasting Déjà vu.

I don’t know what to make of it. It gives me the same feeling I get when I encounter a synchronicity or have a dream that sticks with me.

In some strange way I almost feel like the book is reading me.

[olderandweirder]

Goodness but the petrichor is strong today. We’re getting a good-sized thunderstorm (finally!) and it’s starting to spit rain. Walked from my car to the therapy office and it was like swimming in a sea of rain-smell.

I’m firmly on Team Rain this year. We have been dealing with a significant drought where I live and while massive rains are likely to cause some problems, they pale in comparison to the problems caused by an empty aquifer. I vaguely hope that this summer is one of those Pray for Rain, Get a Flood things.

[anxietyproblem]

[depsidase]

[olderandweirder]

If the boot fits.

[shamebats]

[olderandweirder]

Uh oh

[miketalkstrash-deactivated20170]

Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

That’s excellence.

[latinagabi]

Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.

[princessnijireiki]

Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

SWAG

[sugaryumyum-deactivated20170907]

I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.

[elodieunderglass]

when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud

[liza-not-lisa-deactivated202401]

I was never taught that he was Black either. WTF.

[petermorwood]

General Dumas (aka Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie) looked like this…

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

…he was also a foodie.

[sicktress]

He was also born in present-day Haiti. Back then, it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

[you-are-talking-about-this-deac]

General Dumas was also the highest ranking officer of African descent to have command of a European army. EVER. 

[biblioaesthetica]

His stuff is in the public domain, you can find them on Project Gutenberg here:

Project Gutenberg offers 73,007 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.

And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:

LibriVox

[olderandweirder]

I had no idea!

[technofeudalism]

Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral

The World War II-era "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" is full of steps that office workers can take to resist leadership.

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”  Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet). 

Link to the Guide at Project Gutenberg can be found here

A Wikisource entry can be found here.

Mirrors can be found here, here, here, here and here.

[breelandwalker]

Gosh it would be a shame if this got even MORE visibility.

Whoops my cursor slipped.

[thesluts2004]

jowls are normal double chin is normal stretch marks are normal armpit fat is normal. none of the things that tiktok and instagram are telling you to change are things you need to even consider changing. you can have a normal body, it will be okay

[olderandweirder]

Imperfection is human. Striving for a manufactured ideal plays into the hands of the people who want to manipulate you for fun and profit.

[theconcealedweapon]

The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.

[rostekhorn]

Yet another reason this is insanely revisionist is that it pretends the whole reason millennials felt so much pressure to go to college wasn't that conservative politicians had spent the eighties and nineties wrecking the shit out of labor unions to the point that by the time millennials turned eighteen, it was suddenly a lot harder to count on being able to work at a working-class job all your life and still have a good living.

College, all of a sudden, went from "something I'd like to do if I can get in" to "a lifeline in an economy where blue collar jobs are going to shit."

The wheel's turned long enough that now college students are being treated the way union workers and union-adjacent workers were treated in the eighties and nineties, so now college grads are the ones that it's fashionable to shit on, and the new fix-all solution is supposed to be "go into the trades!" Which means that by the 2050s at the latest, we'll be coming up with some new lie to blame people in the trades for the fact that now they're in trouble. And we'll have some new job that everyone should have been doing instead.

[olderandweirder]

It seems like the problem is the people at the top who pit those of us at the bottom against each other. If only there were some solution to this problem, perhaps one devised by angry peasants in response to the systematic exploitation of the lower class by the aristocracy.

[olderandweirder]

LOUDER FOR THE ONES IN THE BACK

[olderandweirder]

Sometimes when I’m sitting outside with the dogs I watch this little ant colony that lives under one of my landscaping bricks. Millions of the little guys, coming and going. Sometimes they drag back these incredible finds: a beetle, random yard debris, chunks of dirt. They’re remarkable little guys.