Forgotten days encased in bone and meat

And anyway, who really wants to live in a world where everything is soul?

[st-just]

Okay have had the wherewithal to set up two now, so, sideblogs!

Some-small-mercy - Writing/worldbuilding/attempts-at-fiction/fanfic-if-I-ever-write-any. Four variably detailed settings and counting, plus stuff written for various rps and games long enough I feel like saving it somewhere.

Literary-Illuminati - Bookblog, SFF and nonfiction with the very occasional actual literature sprinkled in. If I end up listening to any longform podcasts will probably post about them there too. (ty @lifeattomsdiner for the name)

[sadclowncentral]

so many misguided metaphors around violence and desire. if the open maw of a panting beast fills you with the want to be devoured, that does not make you prey. while the rabbit trembles in fear, its deepest desire is to run. evolution demands it. in fact, the desire to be eaten does not make you any small animal at all.

it makes you a fruit.

[st-just]

'Straight/cis guys never have to worry about being the victims of sexual violence' is, like. Clearly untrue, and depending on context and audience sometimes an incredibly cruel thing to say. But you see the broad social and psychosocial phenomena being gestured at, and often said in a context where it's clearly more overheated or sloppy speech than considered opinion.

However. If the discussion is about interactions with law enforcement or the criminal justice system or what an appropriate punishment for something is I, uh, don't think it's too much to expect that you wait for neurons to connect before saying shit. Especially in an American context lmao.

[queenrizzardnthelizardscissored]

this feels like something someone trying to dismiss sexual assault of women (both trans and cis) and V-coding would say, or, more specifically, someone who believes misandry is a real thing. Sure, sometimes cis men get sexually assaulted - just like how sometimes, cis men (with gynocomastia) get breast cancer. But if someone's talking about how breast cancer affects primarily trans men, and trans and cis women, bringing up that cis men can get breast cancer too is extremely stupid and almost certainly has ulterior motives

[st-just]

Right yes that's exactly what I'm doing, gold star on the amazing good faith reading. BTW what's your opinion on sexual assault rates in American men's prisons; not a real problem?

[st-just]

'Straight/cis guys never have to worry about being the victims of sexual violence' is, like. Clearly untrue, and depending on context and audience sometimes an incredibly cruel thing to say. But you see the broad social and psychosocial phenomena being gestured at, and often said in a context where it's clearly more overheated or sloppy speech than considered opinion.

However. If the discussion is about interactions with law enforcement or the criminal justice system or what an appropriate punishment for something is I, uh, don't think it's too much to expect that you wait for neurons to connect before saying shit. Especially in an American context lmao.

[st-just]

Attending the local pride parade (idk why we have it in July) and I do appreciate the naval contingent being marching band playing YMCA. Just leaning into all those stereotypes

[argumate]

4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.

5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.

some interesting thoughts (!) from "head of strategic futures" openai

[argumate]

Sam Altman's AI Metered Utility: Pay-Per-Token Billing Like Electricity | explainx.ai Blog

Sam Altman envisions AI as a metered utility like electricity, with pay-per-token billing. Critics see dystopian gatekeeping, supporters see

nothing Altman says can be trusted of course because he's a pathological liar (according to everyone who has ever interacted with him?) but this whole thing is incoherent: massive investment is required to create a utility that is too cheap to meter and doesn't earn any return; meanwhile open weight models will lead to a dystopian communist hellscape and must be stopped because they may deter the investment needed to create this unprofitable behemoth.

[lumsel]

[st-just]

And today in internet discourse: "is this messy and unphotogenic coping mechanism/venting sympathetic and understandable or a sign you're dangerous/broken/fundamentally a monster? You'll never guess how we tell!"

[st-just]

'popular (especially romance) media targeted at woman often has incredibly regressive politics (esp. around gender)' is a great example of discourse that seems theoretically interesting but somehow invariably attracts just deeply, deeply tedious and/or insufferable people on every side in practice.

[st-just]

Of them all the people who seem earnestly convinced that all #problematic or reactionary tropes/tendencies in media aimed at female audiences are the result of some patriarchal conspiracy/men involved in the production pipeline are easily the most aggravating and exhausting though.

Just a total refusal to actually contend with aspects of reality they find uncomfortable.

[st-just]

just a brutal drive-by on France there.

[st-just]

I on the other hand have the opposite sort of problem where whenever I'm reading about horrible atrocities by some state or paramilitary part of my brain is always distracted wondering how it compares to base rates for the time period or region.

[st-just]

One of the stranger tropes of tumblr (and like, to a lesser extent general) discourse is like - anger or disbelief or outright contempt/mockery for someone whose suffered a traumatic experience or serious misfortune that was not the most statistically likely course of events to occur and/or that is counter to the narrative they find politically convenient? Well mostly that last bit, I'm sure.

On the most zoomed out and least loaded level I can think of, it is basically axiomatic that large military operation by any organized and armed force will commit some atrocities. It's one of the reasons people say (but mostly don't believe) that crimes of aggression are the most serious and foundational war crimes of all. Despite this, basically no one on here who has ever picked a side in a conflict as 'the good ones' seems capable of accepting their guys might have done a massacre or tortured prisoners or abused civilian populations.

Certainly people seem incredibly resistant to accepting that states or administrations (or even specific policies and projects) that they consider praiseworthy has some price in blood and tears. The reaction to first-hand accounts of said price are usually reacted to as entirely bad-faith propaganda.

To instead use as personal and loaded an example as possible, see the intense emotional investment a certain number of people have in women being Safe and incapable of being abusive in relationships.

[txttletale]

it is--if not really surprising--so frustrating how extremely elementary, like literally "race in media 101" type criticisms of the racism in video games is received by white liberals with pronouns the exact same way that anita sarkeesian was received by neogaf chuds

[kuttithevangu]

I need all the hyperlexic statistical outliers on tumblr to look up what’s meant by low literacy, it means like, can’t read the notice from the electric company that says they’re cutting you off. Can’t read your doctor’s instructions on how to treat yourself at home. It means “school system failed you so badly that it might kill you”, if you’re reading simple fiction for fun you are already so far out of the window of maximum concern

[str4wbsstuff]

that moment when your attending fully implies that he will be killing himself after giving you his house.

[spookyboywhump]

I do really love it when women write graphic and fucked up things. I feel like so often people react to fucked up fiction with “of course a disgusting man would write this 🙄” and it often carries an unspoken (honestly sometimes spoken) message of “a woman’s PURE and DELICATE and FEMININE mind could NEVER think of something this VILE”. Thank you women in fucked up fiction 🫡

[circusheart]

If I keep practicing I might even be a person soon

[st-just]

'popular (especially romance) media targeted at woman often has incredibly regressive politics (esp. around gender)' is a great example of discourse that seems theoretically interesting but somehow invariably attracts just deeply, deeply tedious and/or insufferable people on every side in practice.