Smells of Books

My name is Eva. I like books, especially sf about people and nonfiction about thinking and communication. I do not have a tbr pile or list, I have a weighted spreadsheet 3000+ books long. I'm a teacher and I homeschool my teenagers. I help run an atheist church. I'm the token neurotypical in my family.

[thisisparamisia]

Pedophilia, hebephilia, ephebophilia, MAP, and child predator - what is the difference?

[ID: Pedophilia, hebephilia, ephebophilia, MAP, and child predator - what is the difference? /End ID.]

To start, pedophilia does not refer to attraction/arousal towards people under age 18. Thats just a popular misuse of the term.

Pedophilia refers to adults or older minors who are attracted to/aroused by prepubescent children. This usually refers to children who are under the age of 12-13 (though may range, as some children hit puberty sooner or later than this.) Infantophilia is a subset of pedophilia describing attraction/arousal towards infants/toddlers.

Hebephilia refers to adults or older minors who are attracted to/aroused by to early pubescent kids, usually ranging in the ages of 12-15. Pedophebephilia refers to a combination of pedophilia and hebephilia.

Ephebophilia refers to adults (usually in their older 20s+) who are attracted to/aroused by late pubescent minors (or very early adults), usually ranging in the ages of 15-19.

MAP (minor attracted/aroused people) is an umbrella term for anyone who falls under the pedophile, hebephile, or ephebophile umbrellas.

In most places, you will see these terms referring to sexual attraction or sexual arousal. But the reality is that any intimate attraction - romantic, queerplatonic, alterous, etc - can also apply.

Pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia are mental disorders falling under the paraphilic disorder umbrella.

Child predators, on the other hand, are people who groom, exploit, or assault minors for gratification or gain (usually of the sexual nature.)

What differentiates these disorders from child predators?

[ID: What differentiates these disorders from child predators? /End ID.]

Simply put, disordered thoughts and feelings =/= harmful action. Minor attracted/aroused people often cope with their attraction/arousal through other means, such as thought training to redirect their train of thoughts, roleplaying with a consenting adult partner, creating personal vent art, and a whole other range of activities that do not inflict harm upon others.

Think of it this way - if you have an intrusive thought about breaking someone's neck, does that mean you're going to do it? No, because its an intrusive thought. It doesn't indicate that you're an actually dangerous person.

In fact, minor attracted/aroused people are most likely to harm themselves out of guilt than to harm other people.

Additionally, most child predators are not minor attracted/aroused people. They are usually taking advantage of children out of opportunity, not ongoing attraction/arousal. Its the same way that most men who rape men identify as straight - they are acting on opportunity, not desire.

Even so, if a minor attracted/aroused person becomes a sexual predator, it doesn't mean the disorder made them that way. Blaming bad behavior on a disorder (ie; "narcissists are bound to become abusers", "people with ASPD are bound to become serial killers", etc) not only stigmatizes innocent people with the disorder, but it also absolves the blame on the person, and redirects it to their disorder instead. (Similar to how saying that "boys will be boys" takes away personal blame from misogynistic men, redirecting it to "the nature of their gender" that is "destined to occur", and applies blame to kind innocent men.)

This also applies to other paraphilic disorders, such as zoophiles (people attracted to/aroused by animals), necrophiles (people attracted to/aroused by corpses), biastophiles (people attracted to/aroused by rape), and so forth.

"Thought crimes" are not real. The thoughts and feelings in your mind shouldn't be illegal. They do not incriminate you as a dangerous person. Expecting someone with a para disorder to rid of their thoughts and feelings is the same as expecting the person to die, as most para disorders are unlikely to ever truly go away.

The reason why diagnosis for paraphilic disorders is so skewed towards criminals is because the general population rarely seeks out a diagnosis, and psychologists tend to only test these conditions on criminals. Think of it like this - if autism was mainly only tested in criminals, then autism would be known as a "crime condition", and assumed to be more common in criminals than in the general public.

This lack of diagnosis in the general public is due to stigma. If diagnosed, many people with para disorders get ostracized from their communities, locked in mental hospitals, heavily drugged, pushed into conversion therapy (which does not work), and/or put onto anti-androgens to kill their sex drive (which is both stripping them of autonomy and also isn't guaranteed to work, because some of them experience attraction rather than arousal, and killing libido would only kill arousal, not attraction.)

[thisisparamisia]

I am so serious when I say this - this account is NOT a safe space for people who believe children (discounting certain littles within systems) can consent to intimate partnerships or hookups with adults, or that minors with significantly large age gaps (ie; 12 years old with a 3 year old) can consent to intimate partnerships or hookups with each other.

"But proper sex ed would allow them to consent" - it would allow them to consent to people within the same age range as them. Not with people who are significantly older and more psychologically developed than them.

"Kids are autonomous and smart" =/= "kids are at the same developmental stage as those significantly older than them."

I support minor attracted/aroused people. I support pedophiles, hebephiles, and ephebophiles.

I absolutely DO NOT support child predators. Saying that I do not support child predators does not mean I hate MAPs. Disorder =/= abuse.

Acknowledging that child predation is wrong does not mean I hate pedophiles, hebephiles, and ephebophiles. It means I hate people who prey on children, regardless of what mental conditions they may or may not have.

Please stop using youth liberation as an excuse for child predation.

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[thememedaddy]

[depsidase]

[calebwittebane]

person typing into google search bar: obfuscate meaning

google ai overview: Understood! From now on, all meaning will be hidden from you, and you'll be forced to wade through the dreary vastness. Whether it's things you've always held dear, or new ideas you've yet to discover, nothing will make sense or appear to have any real value. This could be the beginning of a fascinating journey!

[covid-safer-hotties]

One in six Americans who had COVID-19 developed long COVID, Mass General Brigham study says - The Boston Globe

Researchers say one in six COVID patients developed chronic disorder.

Full text and paywall-jumped link in our archive

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[qillermeme]

[depsidase]

[depsidase]

[been-here-b4]

[tiny-imaginaries]

whoa

[enki2]

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Sometimes my little cat will approach me all "what if there was a little cat now" and it's always an excellent idea I love when there's a little cat

[mortalityplays]

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter was one of the best works of sci-fi of our generation and one of the best works of transgender fiction ever written, and there are world renowned authors who still have successful careers after they publicly assassinated the nascent woman who wrote it. I don't think they should ever know peace.

[mortalityplays]

Isabel Fall is the patron saint of works unwritten and art unmade by a culture that cannot tolerate trans women

[mortalityplays]

I think this constantly and then I get angry for thinking it, because trans women should not have to be martyrs or saints to animate our politics and our art. that work should have been her debut, not her epitaph. I should be moved by her career, not her absence. I could spit.

[mortalityplays]

read it again

[dduane]

Nasty and sophisticated scam: BEWARE of this!

That "Pending PayPal Charge" Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal

If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call 855

Don’t get caught off guard by this. It’s quite a slick one.

[kerryweaverlesbian]

What to actually do If you get one of these, the answer is boring and it works every time: Don't call the number. Don't reply. Don't click links in the email — not even the unsubscribe link. Open a fresh browser tab, type paypal.com yourself, and log into your account. Check your activity. You'll see either nothing, or a tiny incoming payment from a stranger that you can ignore. Then forward the original email as an attachment to [email protected] and delete it. If you want to go a step further, report the phone number to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov — every report makes it slightly harder for these operations to keep running. And if you've already called? Don't beat yourself up — these scams are designed by professionals to fool smart people. Hang up, run a malware scan if you installed anything they asked you to install, change your PayPal and bank passwords from a different device, and call your bank's real fraud line (the number on the back of your card) to flag your accounts. Move fast, but you don't need to panic.

from the above linked article. For the UK the email to forward phishing scams to is [email protected], texts can be forwarded on to 7726 (for free!) and as a victim of fraud you can report it here (or here for Scotland)

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

— If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call [phone]" — don't call that number. Don't click anything. And whatever you do, don't panic-dial to "stop the charge."

You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.

The actual transaction in the email body is for 1 forint. There is no $987.90 charge. There never was. But by the time most people read carefully enough to notice that, they've already dialed the number. —

[youtube-privacy-union]

YouTube bug is eating up 7GB of ram and an ad blocker is the only way to solve it

(funny enough, a lot of people have been saying it's youtube forcing ads, but that's not the issue, nor is this intentional)

YouTube Bug Turns Browser Tabs Into RAM-Eating Monsters

YouTube bug causes browser tabs to consume 7GB+ RAM through infinite button layout loops, freezing systems across Firefox, Chrome, and Edge

“your YouTube tab just consumed 7GB of RAM and froze your entire browser.

That’s not user error or aging hardware—it’s YouTube’s latest interface bug turning routine video watching into system roulette.

Reports flooded Reddit and browser forums late last week as users watched their browsers transform into digital quicksand, with tabs becoming unresponsive and entire systems grinding to a halt.”

The main issue is the Like, Dislike, and Share buttons

“Developers tracking the issue through Mozilla’s Bugzilla pinpointed the problem to YouTube’s flexible menu container below each video.

The interface enters an endless identity crisis: it checks whether all buttons fit horizontally, hides the overflow, recalculates the available space, then shows them again—repeating this cycle thousands of times per second.

Think of it like someone obsessively rearranging furniture in a room that keeps changing size.”

All browsers are experiencing the same thing

Google has said nothing

Reports have said that a temporary fix is to use ublock origin and Add this filter: www(.)youtube(.)com###menu

This removes the buttons under the player but immediately stops the memory leak and freezing.

[pinnedwings]

one of the most difficult things about deciding you want to write a fictional doctor (of the non-who variety) is writing actual medical scenes. we all know that medical dramas are notoriously cliched, and i for one fully understand how unimportant factual accuracy can be to the emotional importance of a scene. sometimes you don’t have to get it write for your story to work. i have a disclaimer on my blog that i myself am just a layman, but i like to at least know what i’m writing about! in the interest of being as accurate as i can, i would like to spread that love around. here’s a list of medical fiction/fantasy writing resources i’ve found!

surgeonsblog

article i found this from^ (w/even more resources)

redwoods medical edge

^article where i found that

this article is short/basic/doesn’t link anywhere else, but i found it very helpful anyway

supposed to be good but to me, seemed difficult to navigate. (dp lyle)

this on the otherhand, is the jackpot (novelmalpractice)

tumblr blog centered around this topic

this is more about the common pitfalls/anachronisms of medical fiction but still helpful

writing medical scenes: useful links by paul anthony shortt

the last one im going to include is an article by a doctor about common mistakes in popular medical shows, i liked this one

tagging who liked the interest check on this @hesjustcarter @prodigiumamare @frankengeeks