Peter Bensley

[mewwon]

i feel like we really don’t need a million pride flags. it gives hogwarts houses and sweatshop temu accessories. it gives sense of identity through consumerism. it gives those pic art avatars fuckk whatever they’re called from 2019. and most importantly its unchic

[prokopetz]

Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:

Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.

Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.

Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.

Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.

"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.

AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".

Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.

Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Darren O'Connor

"Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so."

+

Rebecca Solnit 

Read this. The link to the paper discussed is here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922

[quinnception]

[ames-draws]

I'm fed up with "maybe later".

[wordpress-blaze-43915969]

New and old hostilities

In her new asylum policy statement last November, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood made it clear that she wants to reduce the number of asylum seekers coming to the UK, especially those who arrive in small boats. She writes as if, to her, most asylum seekers, however they get here, are illegal, and she declares that certain acts which are perfectly legal today may, if the government gets its way, be counted as “illegal” tomorrow; asylum seekers, she says, use rights available to them here to “take advantage” of the UK’s generosity, and she wants to stop it. Moreover, even if your asylum application has been accepted and you have been granted refugee status, and you think you are safe, you could be caught by Mahmood's new laws and regulations to find that you're not safe after all, that you have “no right to be here”, and that you will be deported. Your refugee status is only temporary.

Asylum seekers are not breaking the law

Let me start by stating what should be obvious: seeking asylum is not illegal. The UK has signed and ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention (the primary international benchmark for the treatment of refugees). According to that Convention, a refugee is someone who,

owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.[1]

If that’s you, you have the right to claim asylum.

Nevertheless, Mahmood uses the word “illegal” 32 times in her statement to describe asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants, and their perfectly reasonable, and legal, actions.

She says that if you arrive in a small boat across the Channel you are “illegal”.

You're not.

If you arrive in a small boat, you only become illegal if you don’t claim asylum. If you make an asylum claim which is subsequently rejected, you may then technically be here illegally, but you will almost certainly be deported rather than prosecuted.[2]

Previous governments have understood that crossing the Channel, by whatever means, is not illegal. Before the advent of small boats, many asylum seekers reached the UK border by hitchhiking on lorries (with or without the drivers’ knowledge), stowing themselves away on Eurostar or just clinging to the bottom of the trains.[3] Once discovered by the border guards, if they claimed asylum they would be given an initial asylum interview, directed to accommodation, and told to fill in a form for minimal financial support. This does not mean that asylum seekers were welcome and no one should imagine that this was an easy process: it was long, difficult and stressful, sometimes taking several days, with nowhere to rest or sleep comfortably after a long and often dangerous journey. Their interviewers, going beyond the stated purpose of a brief interview for the basic details of individuals and their claims, often went much further, accusing them of lying and threatening them with punishment; most of them eventually reached their accommodation, where they had another long wait for their main interview.[4] But they were not called illegal.

In fact,

Claiming asylum is not illegal.

Your route and means of transport are not illegal

your lack of a passport or other “authorisation” is not illegal

Mahmood, however, calls you “illegal” if you’ve come in a small boat. She also says that if you initially come here by what even she accepts is a legal route (e.g. a work visa or a study visa) and then claim asylum after your work or study period has expired you are “illegal”. She gives two reasons for this. First, because you have “overstayed” your visa period, which makes you illegal.

Except that it doesn’t if you apply for asylum.

The specialist law firm Sterling Law states:

A protection claim may be lodged at any time, regardless of immigration status. Overstaying does not bar an asylum application.[5]

Secondly, Mahmood says that by applying for asylum when your visa has expired you “have made an active choice to come to the UK” and this, she says, makes you illegal. She counts it as “asylum shopping”. Previous Home Secretaries have also used this expression. It implies that asylum seekers are migrants on the make who cynically shop around for the country that looks like it might offer them the best deal and then apply for asylum there when they don’t need asylum at all. I doubt I have ever met an asylum seeker who has done that. The nearest examples I can think of are people like the young Kurdish man celebrating the Kurdish new year in Finsbury Park, North London. He told me: “I come here because England a democracy country.” I thought at the time that we should be proud of that. Mahmood, however, would no doubt say I was naïve. I would rather be naïve than cynically refuse someone the protection they need. What Mahmood says, however, is that if asylum seekers, on their journey, cross a safe country, they should immediately stop and claim asylum there and go no further. If they fail to do so, she says, they are “undermining an important principle that those fleeing persecution seek sanctuary in the first safe country they reach”.[6] But grand and universal as this “important principle” may sound, it isn’t. It simply echoes the Tory Nationality and Borders Act 2022, in which it was made UK law. When the last Tory government introduced it to parliament as a Bill, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) criticised it in the following terms:

The Bill is based on the premise that “people should claim asylum in the first safe country they arrive in”. This principle is not found in the Refugee Convention and there is no such requirement under international law.[7]

The Tory government of the time took no notice of the warning. When the Bill passed through parliament and became the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, it still included the following:

A refugee is not to be taken to have come to the United Kingdom directly from a country where their life or freedom was threatened if, in coming from that country, they stopped in another country outside the United Kingdom, unless they can show that they could not reasonably be expected to have sought protection under the Refugee Convention in that country.[8]

As a result, this rule does now exist in UK law, but UNHCR’s criticism remains. Unfortunately, the current Labour government’s intention is clearly to retain the law and enforce the rule. We will have to wait and see how the policy develops and whether there will be any challenges to it.

In one sense this is nothing new. Governments have long tried, at every turn, to avoid their obligations under the Refugee Convention. Take the question of how you should be treated if you apply for asylum and don’t have a valid passport or you have travelled on a false passport. The Refugee Convention stipulates that countries signed up to it “shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who … enter or are present in their territory without authorisation …”[9]. Yet UK governments have historically found highly questionable ways of avoiding this no-penalty obligation, often successfully. For example, they asserted that certain actions, though legal, were “credibility” issues. So the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004 laid down that

“failure without reasonable explanation to produce a passport on request to an immigration officer or to the Secretary of State”

“the production of a document which is not a valid passport as if it were” and

“the destruction, alteration or disposal, in each case without reasonable explanation, of a passport”

cast doubt on the asylum seeker’s credibility.[10] This ploy often worked, though it could be reversed during the appeals process.

No permanence, no duty to support, no security

In her policy statement Restoring Order and Control, Mahmood promises “an entirely new asylum model”.[11] Her style is combative from the start, her announcement contains beneath its surface, and in its harsh tone, accusations which she will spell out later. Under her new system, she declares,

refugee status becomes temporary - lasting only until a refugee can safely return home. Asylum seekers and refugees will not be offered the generous terms they currently receive. We will no longer have a duty to support those who have the ability to support themselves, nor those who break our laws or rules. Those who have assets will be forced to contribute to their bed-and-board.[12]

Here, then, are some of the changes to policy that Mahmood hopes will discourage the most desperate seeker after asylum from seeking after it in the UK.

Temporary protection

Your status as a refugee will be temporary, amounting to just 30 months. On 2 March, in a written statement to the Commons, Mahmood made this policy official, and made it part of the immigration regulations.[13] You will be able to renew this temporary leave to remain (for another 30 months) only if the government decides that your country is still an unsafe country. If the Home Secretary decides that it is safe for you to return to your country, you will be deported back there. One of the problems with this, as we shall see, is that government assessments of a country’s safety have historically been unreliable. But you will not be consulted about the decision. You will just be told. On her second visit to Denmark just before she announced the change, she said:

… once a refugee’s home is safe, and they are able to return, they will be expected to do so.

In her policy statement, Mahmood had already praised Denmark’s harsh asylum policy as an example to follow. Her second visit was unnecessary and the speech she gave was pure theatre. The theatre of the cruel.

Until 2 March, your initial period of protection was five years, after which you could apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) and, subject mainly to the “good character” requirement, you would receive it. Mahmood deplored this state of affairs and, since 2 March, it is no longer the case. And you will not even be able to apply for ILR until you have been here for 20 years. All this, says Mahmood, is a move “towards a more basic, and temporary protection, which we call ‘core protection’.”[14] It’s hard to disagree with the Refugee Council’s comment when it was just a proposal that it “would leave people living in decades of insecurity, fearing removal even after rebuilding their lives … and leave families stuck in limbo for years.[15]

Family reunion

“Under core protection”, says Mahmood, “there will be no automatic right to family reunion.” Sure enough, an update to the Home Office website on 8 January announced that the Refugee Family Reunion section “is now closed to new applications pending a review”. Preparations were made for this well in advance of Mahmood’s November announcement. According to the update, your application would not be considered unless you submitted it “before 1500 on 4 September 2025.” British Red Cross says: "We don’t know what the new rules will look like, but it is expected they may involve stricter requirements. This could include (but is not limited to):

An application fee and Immigration Health Surcharge fee attached to each application.

A mandatory delay before a new refugee becomes eligible to apply for refugee family reunion.

A minimum income requirement for the sponsor. Or maintenance and accommodation requirements for the sponsor.

English language requirements for the family members applying to join the sponsor."[16]

This speculation on the part of the Red Cross seems reasonable. In the case of the minimum income requirement, the application fee and the English language requirement we already know that during the suspension of the Refugee Family Reunion route and until the new eligibility requirements are announced (probably in spring 2026),

people with refugee status can still apply via the family visa route, also available to British citizens and those with settled status. However, the main applicant must earn a minimum of £29,000 a year, prove their knowledge of English language and pay an application cost of £1,938 and the Immigration Health Surcharge (which for most individuals aged over 18 is £1,035 per year) per applicant.[17]

Again, it is difficult to disagree with the assessment of the Refugee Council: “Without accessible routes to reunite safely, families are at risk of remaining separated for years or trapped in dangerous circumstances.” The Council points out that this denial of an automatic right to family reunion has been announced “despite 90% of visas previously going to women and children.”[18]

One of Mahmood’s concerns, however, seems to be about money rather than protecting refugees’ family life. She says that under the previous system “refugees were also able to bring their family to join them in the UK … without incurring a fee and without having to demonstrate that they can accommodate or otherwise support them.”[19] She deplores this, much as she deplores the granting of ILR after five years. But the Refugee Convention doesn’t mention money, it just mentions protection. The European Convention on Human Rights, in its Article 8, doesn’t mention money either. It just establishes the right to family life.

Removing support

If you are an asylum seeker you are not allowed to work. Under the current system, however, you may receive the support of state benefits until your asylum application is either granted or refused. This will change under the new system. In a chilling sentence, Mahmood declares, “We will remove the current legal obligation to provide support to asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute.”[20] The government can do this because, post-Brexit, the EU law that imposed that obligation no longer applies to the UK. “In the coming months”, says Mahmood, “this duty will be revoked.” We will instead go back to the pre-2005 system of “discretionary support”, i.e. support when the government thinks fit. It’s not clear what this will mean in practice. Mahmood simply says that this approach “will ensure asylum support is reserved only for those who need it and comply with the system.”[21]

But even if your asylum application has been granted, and you are a recognised refugee, albeit on a temporary basis, you are not safe from Mahmood’s strict regime. For example, unemployed refugees, disparagingly described as having “deliberately made themselves destitute”,[22] will also be denied support. But she offers another solution to them, if only they will take it.

Earn your keep

Although the Refugee Convention identifies persecution in your home country and fear of returning to it as sufficient reasons for applying for asylum, Mahmood insists that protection must be “earned”. She wants refugees to integrate “more fully into the communities providing them sanctuary”.[23] This implies that she doesn’t think they integrate “fully” at present. I could introduce her to plenty of refugees – many of them now British citizens – who have integrated fine into their new home country. But I don’t think she’d be interested in meeting them. She seems convinced that refugees are lazy and ungrateful, that they will abuse the generosity they have been shown. So, arming herself with the work ethic, she offers “a new, in-country Protection Work and Study route”:

A person granted protection will be eligible to apply to move into this route if they obtain employment or commence study at an appropriate level and pay a fee. Once on this route, they will become eligible to ‘earn’ settlement sooner than they would under core protection alone.

Mahmoud announced a “consultation on earned settlement, covering both legal and illegal migrants”. The consultation ended on 12 February, so its findings are being considered but there’s little doubt that the government will get what it wants. But what happens if, in these precarious times, a refugee who wants to sign up to this route can’t find a job or a place in a college to study or train for an appropriate skill for their future employment? Or if the trauma experienced in their home country has made either of those aims difficult to achieve? The answer to that is not spelt out. We are simply told: “The government does not believe that refugees should seek to remain on core protection long-term.”[24]

Yet elsewhere in her policy statement, Mahmood seems to fear the opposite: asylum seekers, barred from working, are apparently too eager to work: “it is far too easy for people without the right to work to disappear into the UK’s illegal economy,” Mahmood complains. Solving this by giving asylum seekers the right to work does not appear to have been considered. Instead, there has been

a significant crackdown on illegal working – raising enforcement activity to the highest levels in recorded history. In the year ending September 2025, 11,000 raids were carried out by Immigration Enforcement; and by June 2025, over 2,100 civil penalties were issued to employers found to have hired illegal workers totalling over £117 million.  Over 1,000 foreign nationals encountered on these operations have since been removed from the country.[25]

And once your employer has been cracked down on, your future seems likely to be destitution or deportation. And the reason for such an outcome will not be your misbehaviour or lawbreaking. It will be the government’s determination to dissuade, deter, reduce arrivals and increase deportations. The duty to protect is nowhere in sight.

I will discuss more of what the government has in store in the next blog. Much of it will require legislation, which will take longer to grind its way through parliament than a simple change to the regulations. There will be opportunities for resistance and protest both inside and outside parliament.

[1] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 & 1967), Article 1, A. (2), UNHCR, Geneva: The 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees | UNHCR

[2] “Is it illegal to cross the Channel on a small boat?” Channel 4 News Fact Check: FactCheck: Is it illegal to cross the Channel on a small boat? – Channel 4 News

[3] Many still do, but by the year ending December 2025 “Small boat arrivals accounted for 89% of detected arrivals” via what the Home Office calls “illegal routes”: How many people come to the UK via illegal entry routes? Home Office, London: Immigration system statistics, year ending December 2025

[4] Mouncer, Bob (2009), Dealt with on their Merits? The Treatment of Asylum Seekers in the UK and France, para. 5.2, University of Hull, Kingston-upon-Hull.

[5]Immigration Rules for Overstayers in the UK (26/5/2025), Overstaying in the UK, UK Visa Expiry Rules, Sterling Law, London:  Overstaying in the UK | UK Visa Expiry Rules – Sterling Law

[6]Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy (accessible) (November 2025), Home Office: Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy (accessible) - GOV.UK

[7]Updated Observations on the Nationality and Borders Bill, as amended, para. 7 (January 2022), UNHCR: UNHCR Updated Observations on the Nationality and Borders Bill, as amended | UNHCR UK

[8] Nationality and Borders Act 2022, s. 37(1), The Stationery Office Ltd, London.

[9] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 & 1967), Article 31, UNHCR, Geneva: The 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees | UNHCR

[10] Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004, section 8 (Claimant’s credibility), subsection (3) (a), (b) and (c), The Stationery Office Ltd, London.

[11]Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy, Foreword from the Home Secretary, Home Office, London, © Crown copyright 2025: Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy (accessible) - GOV.UK

[12] Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy, Foreword from the Home Secretary, Home Office, London, © Crown copyright 2025: Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy (accessible) - GOV.UK

[13] Asylum changes: Home Office written statement, made on 2 March 2026: Asylum changes: 2 Mar 2026: Hansard Written Answers - TheyWorkForYou

[14]Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy, 1. Protection rights, Home Office, London, © Crown copyright 2025: Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy (accessible) - GOV.UK

[15] Five Critical Concerns about the New Asylum Plans, Refugee Council, 21 November 2025, London: Five critical concerns about the new asylum plans - Refugee Council

[16] “Refugee Family Reunion changes expected in 2026”, Family Reunion for Refugees, British Red Cross: Family reunion application guidance | British Red Cross

[17] Changes to Refugee Family Reunion, The Boaz Trust, 25 November 2025: Changes to Refugee Family Reunion | Boaz Trust.The Boaz Trust is a charity supporting asylum seekers and refugees. It was registered as a charity in 2005.

[18] Five Critical Concerns about the New Asylum Plans, Refugee Council, 21 November 2025, London: Five critical concerns about the new asylum plans - Refugee Council

[19]Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy, Home Office, London, © Crown copyright 2025: Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy (accessible) - GOV.UK

[20] Restoring Order: Section 2, Asylum Support

[21] Restoring Order: Section 2, Asylum Support.

[22] Restoring Order, Section 2: Asylum Support.

[23] Restoring Order, Part 1, Section 1: Protection Rights.

[24] Restoring Order, Part 1, Section 1: Protection Rights.

[25] Restoring Order, Part 2, Section 3, Illegal Working.

Source: New and old hostilities

[i-am-a-fish]

fuck, I just realized that if I spend my life being too intimidated to make art then that means I don't even get to make bad art. I end up making NO art. that's way worse

[spiralatria]

this 'being really tired after work' thing is really getting in the way of this 'pursuing my artistic hopes and dreams' thing has anyone else noticed this

[teaboot]

I hope this doesn’t derail your post OP but like. Yeah actually this should piss us off more❔❔❔

I’m an artist! I’ve always wanted to be an artist! And I’m a pretty good one! But I work two jobs in an unrelated industry so I can pay rent, and when I’m not exhausted from THAT I can do the thing I enjoy and have talent in as a hobby. And when I try to enjoy other people’s art, it’s completely saturated in AI shit made of stolen art generated by an algorithm used by people who have no skill and no desire to learn, who don’t actually appreciate the creative process.

My colleague has a degree in archaeology! He’s passionate about it! But he can’t afford to keep studying and works two jobs to pay rent. And when he’s not exhausted from THAT, maybe he can go online and watch videos and read articles… which are increasingly saturated by fake videos and conspiracy theories and unsourced bullshit hidden behind fancy headlines full of ads.

It’s like… People with skills and interests are too busy struggling with food and shelter to produce real art and real science and real tangible things, because prices keep going up while quality keeps going down, so the creators and the innovators who aren’t lucky enough to be born into wealth are stuck doing mindless shit they hate while machines churn out slop at low quality and low cost, and it’s all just become a race to the bottom.

All that’s left is tired broke people and grifters. And it’s exhausting

[mercurialmilk]

New reaction image for ‘posting something on the internet and having it be wildly misinterpreted’

[antgirlmusic]

[ID: screenshot of a comment reading: I guess you could interpret it that way if you wanted something to be upset about /END ID]

[avianavionthebird]

@bad-faith-misinterpreter

[bad-faith-misinterpreter]

PEOPLE KEEP MENTIONING ME ON THIS!!! THIS IS NOT ME-CORE!!! THIS IS FAKE!!! I DO NOT WANT TO BE UPSET ABOUT ANYTHING AND IT'S BIGOTED TO ASSUME I WANT TO TRAUMATIZE MYSELF BY READING SOMETHING AND TAKING THE WRONG MESSAGE FROM IT AND ALSO LITERALLY CONFORMIST TO THINK THERE'S ONE "RIGHT" MESSAGE TO EVERYTHING!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Enshittificator

Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide. Read more on forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree

[nowiloveblackberry]

I've always wanted to move to Norway...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

[coto524]

as a welsh person i want you all to accept that W is a vowel because honestly it makes pronouncing acronyms so much easier. wlw becomes ‘ooloo’, wjec becomes ‘oojeck’, love yourselves and stop giving us shit when we tell you welsh has 7 vowels. english actually has 15 vowel sounds but because y’all only use 5 letters you have to rely on a spelling system devised by satan

[saethwr-blog]

and please, enough with the “keyboard smashing” jokes. not original, not funny.

[coto524]

“ #okay but can any of y'all even pronounce your own town names tho? #bye”

yeah, we can actually because the spelling is phonetic. meanwhile english folks have placenames like bicester or keighley or beaulieu, which you have to learn the pronunciation for individually because the rules are so inconsistent. i mean people can’t even agree how to pronounce marylebone but sure welsh place names are the weird ones

[coto524]

“#But are you aware your language literally looks like a potato rolled across a keyboard”

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

fun fact: the english have been taking the piss out of welsh for years, just like they’ve been doing for irish, and scots gaelic, and cornish, and british sign language, and a hundred and one other languages, because evidently the fact that the whole world isn’t anglophone and monocultured and Still Part Of The Empire is a problem, and something that needs to be corrected

[slowedmountains]

i’ve seen a few comments on here from people saying how much they want to learn welsh but not knowing where to start and good news, because the Welsh Government would love you to learn Welsh too!

Did you know you can do a taught, 22 week long online Welsh course with a professional tutor for only £100? Did you know they sometimes cut that to £50? That they offer different levels of learning and you can choose between northern and southern dialects?

Go and learn some welsh https://learnwelsh.cymru/learning/find-a-course/?culture=en-GB&w=1.00,45.00

[tygerbug]

ubi, universal basic income

[persianmom-deactivated20260602]

carl jung girl you were so right about avoidance

[persianmom-deactivated20260602]

“if we don't accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. if I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. a neurosis is a much greater curse! in general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something. one cannot do more than live what one really is. and we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. after much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result-because avoidance is much worse.”

[thosetiktoks]

Credit: meg_langton_

[sing-you-fools]

oh hey i have one for this

[mino2aur]

cybertrucks are so amazing to me. sure it may be unsafe to drive and unimaginably expensive and ugly as shit but at least everyone who sees you driving it thinks youre a nazi

[teaboot]

As a childhood know-it-all who has grown into the Weird Facts Person. Please know that sharing wonder is my love language. I’m not trying to ‘look smart’ I’m trying to share the joy and excitement and nothing makes me happier. Tell me your weird niche knowledge back I promise that’s all I want

[teaboot]

“You don’t need to share all the time can’t you just shut up god were you an only child or something ”: Incredibly hurtful. Guess I’ll die

“Aw yeah it’s another Tea Fact”: I would die for you

[chronicallyawkwardandshameless]

Koalas' brains are the size of a walnut and are full of holes; their heads are so large because they have massive amounts of cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) to protect their brain when it bounces around in there when they fall out of trees.

Your turn. I would like the tea fact please!

[teaboot]

It’s illegal to shoot Bigfoot in Canada not because Bigfoot exists, but to eliminate legal precident that would absolve hunters from criminal charges in the even of attempted murder!

So you can’t defend yourself by saying “because I thought he was Bigfoot” because you shouldn’t be shooting Bigfoot, either! 😊

[kropotkindersurprise]

We salute an absolute icon 🫡

[gaylor-moon]

[patrochilles-or-bust]

This the white allyship I need at all times 🤣