Reference Material @otatma - Tumblr Blog

Header's getting kind of long so I stuck it under a readmore.

standard disclaimers:

blockable behavior includes - empty blogs, botting, antiship frothing, terfs, troll posting, nuance free thinking, genAI accusations, digging for PII*

I also immediately block all those miserable folk who try to put words I did not say in my mouth. This is aggravated nuance free thinking.

I'm not here for pvp, y'all. Be gentle.

Expect many parenthetical asides. It's one of the comorbidities of ADHD.

a few active tags:

#puppies for ruby #endless march #kitty #autism feels #the cruelty is the point #this post broke into my house and killed me #i laughed #masterpost #why i will always be low contact with my parents #ffs

Tumblr DMs have low urgency to me; nothing (excepting politics) is time critical on this blog. If we're chatting in dms and you gotta leave, do it! Get back to me whenever, it's fine, it's slightly fancier and unawful and better-filtered email.

That's the Asynchrony Pact. Please deactivate all maladaptive people-pleasing reflexes however much you're able to. ❤️ We're all goblins and kobolds on here.

(e.g. if I answer fast it's because I'm bored, not anxious.)

Ok, I think that's everything. If you like my shit and you want to keep in touch after Tumblr finally slides into the abyss that consumes all unprofitable Internet content,

ot-atma.dreamwidth.org

otatma.bsky.social

and mutuals, I will seriously consider giving you my discord contact if you DM and ask. three or four of you already have it.

prepare.

*: Personally Identifying Information

#header #interacting with this post is a guaranteed block unless you are real

Wait, what.

#[tumblr]#glitch #what an uncanny discovery THAT would be #like three of my followers will get this

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

The real impact of AI at university level that I've watched in real time is how so many students come onto courses now - including Masters level - who straight up don't know how to analyse/evaluate things anymore. They just accept whatever they first read/hear completely uncritically. Every time you point it out you have to coax them into Actually Thinking.

I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.

"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"

"I'm sure I read it," he said.

"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."

The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.

"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."

Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.

"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."

Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.

A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.

I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.

Ngh. Yelling at the choir here, I know, but NNNNGH

ecrivainsolitaire

I can't be the only one who thinks this isn't a problem with AI, it's a problem with a for-profit college system that pushes inadequate students through in order to extract debt from them while failing to stop the progress of the illiterate. Back in the day you'd be laughing out of 7th grade English if you delivered something like that, let alone a master's degree. These people should have flunked out way before AI was invented, and forced to repeat half the curriculum in order to graduate, and only then be allowed to move on to the next stage. AI has become a scapegoat for all the growing problems the education system had long before its invention; it's the same as blaming phones or Wikipedia. The reason these students shouldn't have a master's isn't because they became stupid overnight in November 15th, 2022; it's because they were already stupid and no one educated it out of them, so the moment they found a shortcut to avoid using their brains they forgot what little they already contained. But just like with phones and Wikipedia, everyone will just blame the new tech and those damn kids on their internet, and absolutely nothing will be done to prevent dangerously ignorant people from eroding the meaning of a university degree because extraction tuition money is more profitable than giving a shit.

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

No.

This, as I said in the post, is a noticeable and significant problem in the last two years. It is affecting students who were fine three years ago, and now aren't. It is a very specific issue that is affecting very specific skills, including previously very intelligent people

This is already attested in the literature. Meanwhile, the for-profit education system has not changed in the last two years

Additionally, prior to the last 2-3 years, I had failed one student ever, and flagged one student ever for plagiarism. This year we've had to deal with five separate plagiarism cases on the Masters course alone, all of whom admitted to LLM use. Not one of them can analyse information worth a damn; all of them had excellent prior undergrad scores.

This is an LLM problem

daughterofscotland

Saw your original post uncredited on FB 😒

Comments were very much agreeing with you.

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

ON FACEBOOK???

#ai slop

funeral-dust

21 track album

The Prairieland case is Federal case prosecuting 19 people with terrorism after a noise demo at an ICE detention facility in Praireland, Texas in July 2025. Most have been convicted and are currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty on multiple federal charges. Towards the end of the noise demo an Alvarado police officer was grazed in the neck with a bullet. The Prosecutors claim this was a coordinated ambush by an “antifa cell”. In reality its a drag-net prosecution against loosely acquainted people. If the corrupt verdict of this case is not over turned it will set a precedent that participating in black a bloc is terrorism and can land you decades in jail. We support the non-cooperating defendants not because they are victims of a miscarriage of justice, but because we support all who fight back against domination. Punks have historically played an important roll in spreading and sharpening anarchy across the world. This tape aims to continue that legacy. We affirm that I.C.E. Prisons & Police must be destroyed. People, plants and animals must be freed from the claws of colonial civilization. Against the state, Against capitalism, Solidarity with anarchist prisoners now & forever.

Money raised from this compilation will go towards the legal fees of the Prairieland Defendants

For more info check out:

Crimthinc's article “The road to Prairie Land”

prairielanddefendants.com

Anarchist Black Cross: www.abcf.net

fireantmovement.org

cptapathy

I've had a couple of 10k posts so please help to spread this for me

Last year we broke the record for an LGBT+ mass lobby of Parliament. Will you help us break it again? Join us on 25th June 2026 to demand be

On the 25th of June people in the UK will be attending parliament to lobby their MPs asking them to challenge the new transphobic EHRC guidance.

The new guidance bans trans people from all toilets. Trans people will be excluded from their genders toilets by virtue of being trans, trans people will be banned from their AGAB's toilets by virtue of not looking like their AGAB.

Trans people are being pushed out of existence. Our MPs have an opportunity to oppose this becoming law, but they won't do it unless they are scared of the electorate kicking them out of office.

We need to show up in force, we need to show them that passing these laws and the upcoming section 28 2.0 will alienate the voters and they will lose their seat.

Please spread this, please come, please write to you MP.

Here is a link to a letter writing guide

The EHRC's new guidance marks a dangerous step backwards for Trans+ rights in the UK. Far from protecting equality, it risks giving cover to

Last year we lobbied against the ruling, and we had the largest public lobby in queer history, larger than the lobby during the AIDs crisis. Join me in the streets as we fight for our rights and let's make this the largest lobby in all of history.

somethingtocallmine

villagewildflowers

The legacy of France can and should only be remembered as one utterly stained by (or, more accurately, formed from) its brutal colonialist and imperialist endeavours.

siwar-fen-deactivated20240307

@sissa-arrows source (french)

French police killed at least 100 people in 1961, throwing some of them into the River Seine to drown them.

this part is especially triggering for me, since i learnt this past 17th October, that my Grandmother, who was 15 years old at the time, arrived with her mother at this horrific scene a bit too late and was nearly arrested by the police. I can't imagine what would have happened to her if they had left the house earlier.

sissa-arrows

The rare white people who witnessed this on the right side of history said that one of the things they won’t forget is how they fellow white parisians turned into informants for the police and how during all of the night they called the cops on the Algerians who managed to hide or escape.

Over 200 Algerians were killed that night over 500 if you count the one killed in the following nights but thousands more were arrested (over 10000) every single ministry was an accomplice they used to public buses to transport them kept them in a stadium because the precincts were not big enough… While the people killed were men and women, the people arrested were a huge majority of men. So the following days the women and children started calling for a peaceful march to ask for their husbands and fathers to be released. This time they knew that the public opinion wouldn’t look kindly to it if they killed them. So the police instead arrested the women and sent them to a psychiatric hospitals saying they were unstable and needed to be locked inside. Luckily the director was a good man so he refused to lock the women inside the hospital saying they were perfectly sane but he also refused to let the police take them. So he waited until the police left to help the women leave back to their places.

There’s a documentary about it (I don’t remember if the psychiatric hospital was in this documentary or in an other) made by an Algerian woman in the diaspora in France. It’s filled with testimonies and a woman explains that when her husband left for the protest he told her to take care of the children and that if something happened to him she needed to make sure their children would go to school school and be good students. He survived to October 17 but was found and killed by the police on the 19th.

Lastly in 2021 Macron pretended to atone for what happened and with the police prefect they went to pay their respect on the bridge where most of the massacre happened and they went to put flowers. He was the first president doing it. Except after doing it in front of the camera the police then stopped the peaceful march that the survivors and the families of the victims organize every year and they kept them from putting flowers there and pay their respect. Macron did a lot of fucked up shit but pretending to acknowledge a massacre from the police while using the police to stop Algerians from paying their respects to the victims was really the thing that stayed in my mind the most. Nothing says “we actually don’t regret sending the police against a peaceful protest of Algerians and will do it again” as well as sending the police against the peaceful march organized by the descendants of those killed and by the survivors…

assignedmale

that-stone-butch

personalized ads are so funny to me

'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'

and the end result is

'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'

like no i'm good actually. you might be aware that i already have one

banchie

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

covid-safer-hotties

#covid #anti knowledge maniacs sound exactly like this #how were you convinced science is fake when you live in a tech world throw away your phone car stove AC screens glasses etc etc

haunteddollsgeorg

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

odinsblog

This is their logic:

argumate

I keep thinking this! very frustrating

argumate

fuck!

nudityandnerdery

The White House will prioritize the “neutralization” of groups it considers “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

As opposed to the previous administration targeting white supremacists, this is who our current regime is going after.

shamebats

From the OP: "If you sit at a desk or stare at your phone all day, this is for you. Here's how to undo the damage: - Banded Chin Tucks - Strengthen your neck flexors and fight forward head posture - Banded Pull-Aparts - Target your rotator cuff and improve shoulder stability - Banded Abduction - Activate the midline of your scapula for better posture - Lateral Deltoid Raises - Build shoulder stability and control - Banded Up-and-Overs – Boost scapular mobility and range of motion These simple banded drills will help you stand taller, move better, and feel stronger - even after hours at a desk."

Some of these are the same or similar to the exercises my physical therapist taught me.