Things

Hi! I'm Things (they/them). A nonbinary adult. I am allways looking for new friends, so feel free to message me.

[butch-bara]

the no kink at pride thing is really funny bc have you ever heard anyone say “no kink at halloween” or does everyone just think queer people are uniquely perverted and should be censored 🤔 i think it’s the latter…

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[jewish-joy]

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.

[jewish-joy]

#i love prayer plants but they're fussy so I don't keep them#can we have a picture op they're so pretty

Behold, Dorothea

(Naming my plant "Gift of God," and then giving her to a seminarian with just the explanation that it's a prayer plant? Okay, that's my bad.)

[biglawbear]

Oh my goodness she is so lovely and full! And she's flowering!! That's a happy maranta indeed

[sceptixfakemon]

this heatwave fucking sucks how am I going to serve my liege like this

[sceptixfakemon]

im never leaving this hellsite

[sceptixfakemon]

i swear if this is the second stupid sword picture post i make that gets to 10k i'll just go kill someone

[sceptixfakemon]

FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!!!

[fawnpalmer]

quarterly reminder that if i reblog something ai-generated it is 110% and always an accident and for the love of god please tell me so i can delete it from my blog

[neurodivergentaf]

im dying i completely forgot this conversation i had with a friend three years ago 😭

[pencildragons]

bro i LOVE indigenous fusion music i love it when indigenous people take traditional practices and language and apply them in new cool ways i love the slow decay and decolonisation of the modern music industry

[pencildragons]

I WILL !!! I WILL DO THAT

some of my favourite indigenous artists, in no particular order:

Inuit artists:

the jerry cans (esp their album Inuusiq)

beatrice deer

twin flames

Māori artists:

jordyn with a why

Indigenous australian artists:

tilly tjala thomas (i particularly love ngai yurlku nhiina)

kardajala kirridarra (srlsly check out ngajabu (Grandmother's Song))

i've also heard good things abt Baker Boy, but i haven't checked out his stuff yet

[columbidaae]

Another one for Inuit artists is Piqsiq! Two sisters who’ve been doing traditional throat singing since they were kids. They make some really gorgeous, eerie, atmospheric stuff. Highly recommend watching this video of them performing live a cappella using a looping machine, because they might be the coolest people on the planet actually

(Jo March nearly in tears voice) women,,,,

[aconissa]

For anyone into North Asian and Central Asian folk music, there's this incredible Siberian folk-pop band called Otyken! The group is mostly women and they're from multiple indigenous groups in Siberia, with songs being sung in their range of different languages. They're so much fun and their music videos are amazing!

[alqemizzy]

i'll go ahead and recommend The Halluci Nation (formerly known as A Tribe Called Red), an EDM group from First Nations Ontario that do really cool fusions of First Nations music with dubstep, moombahton, and hip hop.

[emeraldraccoon478]

I really really really appreciate people who share videos on posts like these, because almost without a doubt every time I love the music but I’ve never got the spoons to click on links and look through a bunch of music or worse google the artist I always end up too overwhelmed to start and I hate that

[morathicain]

Haven't seen Belle Sisoski here yet so here we go: she's the current Artist of Year for BURO impact Awards. She's from Malaysia and knows how to play an insane amount of ethnic instruments and mixes them with her own voice. She does covers and her own songs, mixes ethnic instruments with Techno and shows the process. And she's also a live DJ at 19!

And one of her own:

Oh and of course there's also the HU and Bloodywood for people who like more rock and metal mixed in:

[upthewitchypunx]

1876 is a Pow Wow punk rock band from Portland, Oregon

1876

[tieflingkisser]

Alien Weaponry is an awesome Māori metal band

Darkaside is a Papuan metal band

Shepherds Reign is a Samoan metal band

[vonclosen]

Ts'msyen (pacific northwest coast) black metal

[oyasumiwa]

[dragonie]

I also want to recommend King Stingray here! They describe their work as Yolŋu surf rock

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Lenin Tamayo, Quechua pop singer.

And of course I can't not add Mari Boine (Sámi) to a post like this:

And Arvvas, who I think have moved on to other things but did mashups of Sámi traditional singing and jazz:

[morbid-arachnid]

oooo you want to listen to Cemican....you want Maya and Metal fusion music so bad....

[sentimental-sil]

can we add Agalisiga to this! he writes and sings his own country folk & blues music in Cherokee, I stumbled upon him and am very in love with his music and especially with his song Tsitsutsa Tsigesv <3

[starlightxraven]

Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry.

[appalachian-werewolf]

"Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry."

It fucking better.

[mrsjdavis]

Like to charge, reblog to cast?

[newbarktownalumni]

[phantomrose96]

I think my most compact and simplified view on all this is that tech ventures spent about a decade between 2011-2021 willfully bleeding money in order to assert themselves as Good Guy:tm: science visionaries who wanted to revolutionize day-to-day life with technology. They were rolling out reliable, easy, order-from-your-phone Uber rides that were cheaper than scammy taxis. They gave you Twitter as a public square where everyone could be heard, not just the elite. They gave you Netflix over clunky, corrupt cable packages. Google had the "don't be evil" motto (which is a hilarious thing to do away with, like, well we're evil now sorry :( )

Then for the last 5 years (huge interest rate hikes, tech stock drop-off scare in 2022, US regime change in 2025, blah blah blah) they snapped the trap and decided to activate the money machine, which is rampant enshittification and bleeding everyone dry with higher baseline costs and forced subscription costs and forcibly app-ifying every single thing (needs a login needs a credit card needs an id nees a ) and backing pretty far away from the "your good relatable buddy" tech CEO image. Like it's been the world's most blatant and annoying pig-butchering scheme.

But, they're also rolling out AI like we're still in that 2011-2021 era of "we're your buddies revolutionizing your life with wow-worthy technology." They're shoving AI under our noses going "remember when you LOVED new technology? you love this, right? you love this? you want this? you want this?" and they're not getting why so many people are bristling and do not trust a single word out of their mouths.

[clarissasbakery]

wedding doodle of test tube and red 40 the absolute BEST flower girl ‼️‼️‼️

[pangur-and-grim]

VERY very quick and messy, but this is Tantalus's parents pre and post spider-curse! till death do them part, or something.

minds get changed post-transformation in a similar way to bodies, which means a lot of new instincts to deal with. web-making, egg-laying, post-copulation cannibalism..... just normal spider things.

and the next generation of arachnids (who have never known being human) hatch from their eggs as dog-sized spiders. they go through several developmental stages: a swelling develops on their heads, which eventually moults off to reveal a child's torso, and from that point on they become more sentient.

before "puberty" there's nothing to distinguish a male from a female, but after their fifth moult, it's revealed! males have a blue-black colouration on their legs, whereas females are a rusty orange. the females also continue to grow, much more swiftly from that point on, until they're several times the size of their brothers.

the colour difference was based loosely on Pamphobeteus tarantulas, while the size difference is closer to black widows, so there's no one species that arachnids draw all their traits from.

[glorious-spoon]

spent forty-five minutes today helping an 87yo woman who does not own a computer or a cell phone try to set up an email account so that she could then set up a second account in order to access benefits. went with protonmail, because they don't require 2fa, but it turns out that while you can still make a protonmail account without authentication you can no longer use it to create OTHER accounts without it, and the benefits page she needed to get to required both an email and a cell phone to create an account anyway. asked if she wanted to try going in person to see if someone there could help her, and she said that she had, and they'd directed her to the website. she tried signing up with her landline, but of course that didn't work because you can't do SMS authentication that way. finally ended up writing up detailed instructions for how to log in and authenticate her account so she can drive to her severely disabled daughter's house forty minutes away because that's the only person she knows and trusts who has both a cell phone and a computer.

anyway i fucking hate mandatory 2fa and i think the people responsible for it should have to spend a year navigating their lives with no cell phone and no internet access beyond the public library pcs. fuck.

[heyfruitcake]

Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

L'Odissea di Nolan tra "scheletri spazzatura" e relitti: Arpa al lavoro in Sicilia, che succede

Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i

[ignitelimelight]

They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government

[vithcy]

Can anyone stop being an anti black racist for a moment? I want a chance at enjoying things again

[vithcy]

I'm not even kidding it's so clear that everyone sees black people and especially black women as some sort of alternate species. I'm getting into doll collection & customization videos because I've been getting into collecting myself and toys and art are supposed to bring me happiness and even there I can't escape the anti blackness. Like... you're lucky if you find a character or doll that's consistently brown skinned and carefully designed in popular brands. Collectors will always favor light skin or fantasy colors anyways. I had to watch a white creator call a custom Garnet doll "dummy thicc" and describe her in progress proportions as "female rappery" why couldn't you just have said curvy? You're not funny or cool and I'm very tired

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

TLDR: this white queer person tried to hold other white queer people accountable for their racism and they DID NOT LIKE THAT

[post-trendy-things]

this is so dam well said! racism is such a pervelent in our comunity. it is frustrating that you can tell others about it and they will (willfully or uncounsiously) pretend not to understand the plain words you just said. we, white people, need to sit with these uncomfortable feelings and do some god dam self reflection! you not engaging with the topic dosn't make you not racist. it just means you get to continue benifitting from a racist society and feel good about it.

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

TLDR: this white queer person tried to hold other white queer people accountable for their racism and they DID NOT LIKE THAT

[dogpuppy]