The Queendom

genderfluid, 24, with a hodge-podge blog. Sometimes I make art.

[fladurblegon]

Super cool how nearly every institution meant to help people has demonstrably gotten worse at doing so.

[thewinningside]

Things are being intentionally broken so the argument can be made to get rid of these institutions entirely (or privatize them).

[cazort]

Institutions are also being badmouthed and portrayed unfairly. You see this a lot with U.S. public education. Conservatives are constantly talking about every school being "failing" when 99% of the time, all that they mean is that the test scores are low in districts that have a high portion of special needs kids, kids from low socioeconomic status, and/or ESL kids, all of which are factors that result in lower test scores.

I went to a school district that was always characterized this way. It had a high dropout rate, high teen pregnancy rate, and poor performance on standardized tests.

It also was an excellent school with excellent teachers and extracurricular activities. It offered every AP course there was, and I took 8 of them and got 4's or 5's on most of them. It looked bad on paper because it took kids who from poverty, broken families, and plenty who just didn't speak English natively. It was a great place and my experience there was priceless.

It pains me to no end to see so much of the media and also actual everyday people trash-talking not only my school district, but similar school districts across the country, including ones that I have friends working in where the friends tell me what is going on from the inside and really, the only problem in the districts is that they don't have enough money, often because conservatives push charter school systems that draw funding out of them.

It's the same with blowing allegations of "fraud and abuse" out of proportion for types of benefits where fraud and abuse is low, and ignoring other types of government spending (like defense contracting or highway spending) where fraud and abuse is rampant.

[liberalsarecool]

Parasites don’t care when they kill the host.

[stumblngrumbl]

i think this is the case for most of them

but

i suspect that some of them think they can ride it out and lord it over a vastly decreased populace

[vanglaggle]

IT'S CALLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! COMPASSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOT EMPATHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE WORD YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS COMPASSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[yay855]

Empathy is the ability to mirror other people's emotions, while compassion is the ability to care about what other people need and want. You can have high empathy and low compassion and low empathy and high compassion, and tbh generally having too-high empathy fucks with your ability to practice compassion because you're overwhelmed when someone else has it bad.

Feeling what other people feel is meaningless compared to actually doing right by them.

[goodluckdetective]

So Hank Green got caught using AI and it’s a whole huge blow up, and I really don’t have much interest in adding to the pile on.

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Anyway, my main thought here is you are not smart enough to outwit the dopamine machine. It wants your attention and nothing more. Do not assume you can resist just because you know what’s under the hood.

[goodluckdetective]

Whenever you decide to use a tool, you should consider “what is this tool designed to do” and for LLM’s that answer is “maximize user engagement.” Anything else is in service to that goal.

[goodluckdetective]

My read of this came from Hank’s own response to the situation which you can find here. I’ve screenshotted the part in particular that drew my attention and spawned this post below:

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.

4. I have book recs on this topic. As you can guess, this is an academic interest of mine. But that’s another post if folks are interested.

[partywithponies]

Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.

[partywithponies]

Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.

[partywithponies]

There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.

[dizzyghoast]

i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.

I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case

[leviathan-supersystem]

weird that this is happening all across the usa at the same time. oh well. probably doesn't mean anything.

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[darkshrimpemotions]

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[sial-nawfed]

"i dont like intersectional feminist terminology because it implies that i have the capacity and means to enact violence and thats unfair because im literally so niceys" - one of the most dangerous and unsafe people youll ever meet

[sial-nawfed]

these people will say "hey dont group me in with all the other white/male/cis/TME people, im one of the good ones" without a shred of self-awareness

[awfulpunk]

this is insanely racist and I haven't even seen much about this online yet

[checkyourasianbias]

after Bad Bunny won they added a Latin song category and after Rosé got three nominations the grammys added a k-pop/c-pop/j-pop category they have always been afraid of well-performing artists of color challenging white artists in mainstream categories

[desinteresse]

Men who talk shit about gold diggers underestimate the grit it takes to put up with an insufferable man, even when money is involved. We should be thanking them for their service like they are veterans.

[little-trash-ghost]

Can't leave this in the tags..

[boringkate]

I love incidental benches. Like any kind of knee high concrete ledge that you can sit down on. I'll even sit on a nice staircase. Fuck it. If it's late, I'm tired, there's nobody around, and I'm going down then I'll even sit on an escalator. Just try to stop me.

Obviously intentional benches are preferable, but I'll take what I can get.

There's even a bit of a nice thrill to sitting on a non bench. Like it's an exploit. The game devs never meant for you to sit there. Speed sitting strats.

[vintage-tigre]

Art by Worry Lines

[slyandthefamilybook]

purely balanced

[myrandomstuffpage]

[seymour-butz-stuff]

This is why you see so many many many "we can't vote our way out of this" posts online. They know that sentiment will depress turnout. Turnout that will get the people paying them kicked out of power.

Vote

[jacobwren]

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

[pauljpeg]

I wish all the pee came out in one go like a shotgun blast

[dovv]

[shrimpkidd]

[equius]

you just dont get this on other websites

[amirdrassil]

i have always known that if you're using wet mediums in art, then paper type reeeeeally really matters. but i have been stubbornly ignoring this fact because a sketchbook with the right sort of paper is freakin spensive!!!!! and thus would make me terrified to use it. but i just tried my usual wet media on the good type of paper and FUCK it really is so much better

[anundine]

not to horn in on your post with unasked-for advice, but i used to be terrified of wasting The Good Stuff and what encouraged me to actually, you know, do art was reframing it as the purpose of art materials is to be used. the only possible way to waste supplies is to not use them. all art is good art, the only bad art is the art you didn't make.

[amirdrassil]

no i like this, you are absolutely welcome to offer this advice because it is good advice. and you're right..... you are right. takes this advice and tucks it carefully in my pocket. thank you

[captain-price-returns]

Only an American outlet could ponder "Millions of lives are at stake and a country is doing something to avert that crisis...why?"