the oh well of loneliness @stitchclyffewell - Tumblr Blog

I passed a flower shop next to a tattoo shop and at first I laughed because I thought it was ironic and then i freaked because IMAGINE YOUR OTP IN A FLORIST/TATTOO ARTIST AU

stillalittlekid

OMG I COULD TOTALLY IMAGINE THEM LIKE THAT IT WOULD BE SO PERFECT

christ-with-a-why

melancholygirls

I cannot BELIEVE a post I made when I was 13 is circulating! And also apparently started this trope? I thought somebody had the idea separately and it blew up that way😭

dream-boat-annie

This would be really funny if it weren’t an email from my bank.

madenthusiasms

You can actually predict bubbles, especially ones this obvious. Everyone who wants to know how should read A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith.

Yes, it’s dry.

Yes, it’s 30 years old.

But it gives a tidy little checklist of “is this a bubble?” and AI has been checking every one off like a to do list. Just like NFTs and ponzicoin did before it.

redwooding

You can also read This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. It's on bookshop.org and, of course, on the Evil Empire website. It's all in the title, which is an ironic quoting of people who say what bubble-istas always say - what AI people are saying right now.

dailyhistoryposts

Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do (1989) by art collective Gran Fury. Poster on the side of a bus.

everythingfox

DOG

dog dog dog

svlc

death-by-sc0tland

here’s my pitch for next doctor who. budget of 5 cents and a dream. a female doctor with female companions and a female master. they will all get horrendously gay for each other. we will make 5 billion dollars. bbc please hire me.

hope-for-the-planet

These pescatarian birds are directly exposed to PFAS contamination due to the island's position near the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

While continued vigilance a regulation is needed, this data indicates that regulations are working to reduce PFAS concentrations in marine ecosystems.

sattarehi

Yes!!!! I did a review of literature on PFASs in human drinking water about half a year ago, and there is a lot of really good progress! Please celebrate this, please don't let this solution be forgotten (at least so quickly) as the ozone layer or acid rain.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

Environmental problems CAN BE SOLVED.

akajustmerry

anyways, I'm still so angry over that Deadline article about Disney nuking Ncuti Gatwa's era of Doctor Who because of "woke" (not even kidding), because they received "overwhelming" feedback that the show was "too woke" for international audiences. It will never not piss me the fuck off how woke was/is literally aave for being politically aware that's been so co-opted by white establishment conservatives that this bastardised co-opted colonised concept of "woke" is now weaponised against Black people, people of colour and other marginalised people to justify casting us down and out. A literal fuckinf alien was played by a Black gay actor and old white people lost their shit and now a 60 yr old show is basically dead because some white people hated they weren't being directly pandered to. I'm never not gonna be pissed the fuck OFF

akajustmerry

Hey, people in the comments who said I was wrong about the show being dead because I could see the writing on the wall months ago....well, now there's the official announcement. I really hope that no one ever forgets that Doctor Who was cancelled because of anti-Blackness, racism, and corporate greed.

castformi-deactivated20241025

dystopia au where we are all assigned one of two chosen genders at birth

peppylilspitfuck

Thanks to ultrasounds, the genders can be assigned before birth. The people are so excited to conform they throw “Gender reveal parties” to make sure their offspring exist in a strict binary since before they can even form thoughts.

slightlykylie

Children are color-coded according to their binary assignment.

darkersolstice

One of the genders is seen as inherently inferior.

yothobro-deactivated20200505

This all sounds really effing creepy when you put it that way

rooksandravens

#BECAUSE IT IS

fuckyeahfeminist

And if you deviate from the assigned gender you can be disowned by your family, fired from your job, and beaten by authorities.

rodserlingofficial

shamebats

Also, if you’re assigned the “needs to be weak, little & pretty” gender they feed you less.

andmaybegayer

it still makes me go insane that somehow no social media site bothers to implement interleaved text and images. Fediverse cannot support it broadly, Bluesky can't handle it, Facebook can't do it, Twitter can't do it, fucking, LinkedIn doesn't do this, somehow only Tumblr has this, and it barely even counts as a popular social media site.

palant1r

well you see we're the new pdf

zooophagous

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

qonphuceingey

I’m really starting to think you people don’t understand what university is for. You’re buying the accreditation that you can do these things. It doesn’t matter how you do them.

zooophagous

I can assure you if you're going to school to be an xray tech or a surgical assistant it does very much matter how you do the stuff your accreditation says you can do. We aren't all business majors.

qonphuceingey

Yes, but you actually can’t do an X-ray without an X-ray machine and you can’t do surgery without scalpels. We already rely on technology for everything. Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more. If you can do your job with chatgpt, but can’t without, you can still do your job. I’m sure you would find university much much harder without access to google or the internet too.

zooophagous

Do you think scalpels are magic and do a little song and dance and perform the surgery themselves like Beauty and the Beast characters and the surgeon is there to conduct the background music

darlingofdots

What do you think will happen when your employer, who hired you because they saw you have a certificate to say that you have specific skills and knowledge, starts expecting you to have and use those skills and knowledge and you can't because you think a university degree is just a piece of paper that you buy

ariaste

"Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more"

When you're in school, the cognitive tasks are there for the explicit purpose of being brain exercises. It's weightlifting. It is FOR building your mental muscles and making you a stronger thinker and planner. "Offloading the cognitive tasks", then, is just Not Doing The Weightlifting. What happens when you pay for your gym membership and just stand around messing around on your phone? Nothing. Nothing happens. Just money leaving your wallet. Nothing else.

Using AI is a short term pleasure that is going to fuck you over in the long term, and by the time you realize that you didn't build the necessary muscles you need for the cognitive tasks required of your ACTUAL JOB (or, like, adult life in general), it's going to be too late to do anything about it... except going back and doing the real work all over again to get you up to speed.

And if your response as a college student is "Ugh i'm already good at this though, i don't need the practice" -- sweetie, you have no idea how good at it you could be though. If you're good at it now but you keep working on it, you're going to ASTONISH yourself in a couple years with how good at it you can get. I was a good writer when I was in college; I am an ASTRONOMICALLY better writer now, because I put in the work. But you have to lift the weights and build your muscles to get there, even when it's tedious. There aren't any shortcuts for this. You can be content with your own mediocrity, or you can believe that you're capable of growing towards brilliance. Which one will you choose, mediocrity or brilliance? You get to pick right now.

skodasforge

I’m a Surgical Assistant and that ChatGPT stan pissed me off so I’ll use my job as an example. 90% of our job as surgical assists comes down to memorizing the names and usages of the thousands of unique instruments and equipment and sutures involved in surgery as well as having the critical thinking skills to anticipate the needs and expectations of the surgeons we work with. That’s a “cognitive load” that cannot be pawned off on a computer. If I relied on ChatGPT to tell me what instruments to have ready for a case, it would create a composite of what the most likely instruments to be used in a given surgery and assuming that it’s even accurate, it would be effectively useless if my surgeon didn’t use any of those because each doctor is different. Surgeons get pissed off if you give them the wrong diameter size suture, so why would I rely on a soulless algorithm to tell me what my surgeon wants? And if I’m not figuring out for myself what they may need based off my own learning and not machine learning then why am I even there? There’s a reason robotic surgery still requires a surgical assistant and a surgeon to operate the robot, technology is an easement not a replacement for human labor and in college learning is the labor you should be doing.

A common thread with ChatGPT simps seems to be that they truly believe all labor is as easy as their cushy middle management jobs in the tech industry. “Buying an accreditation” might work there but can you imagine someone in the medical field not actually knowing the subject they’re licensed or accredited to know? I’ll give you a hint: the word we typically use is malpractice.

shower-thoughts-last-responder

I would also like to add as somone who did a one degree about 10 years ago when academia was just startingto make the switch from fully physical to full online, it is entirely possible to do a degree without really using the Internet or Google. You turn up to lectures, you collect the reading list, you go to the library, you find the book you need on the shelf, you take it and several others back to whatever desk you're working at and the you read them and make notes (I made notes on a PC but plenty of people in my group used paper notes pads), you critically evaluate the information amd decide whether or not to include it in your assessments. No Google required, it's not that fucking hard.

selwyngrimm

Let me introduce you all to the building trades concept of "buying your book."

A "book" is (a slightly outdated beyond this specific topic) term for your union card, which states that you're a member in good standing of your local/union and ostensibly means that you have the coinciding skills that go with the title of journeyworker or apprentice or whatever. Typically, to become a journeyman, you serve an apprenticeship (usually 5 years) and then have to take a test of some sort to prove you've acquired all the necessary skills to earn the qualification. The card/book is the proof that you have a basic level of competency.

Sometimes though certain locals, usually in the South or other places where right-to-work or similar attitudes are stronger, will "sell books," which is to say they will allow people who either haven't served an apprenticeship or passed a skills test to buy their card so that they may work on union jobs.

There's a myriad of reasons and reasonings on why a local might do this, but on the ground, it means that if I'm on a big job, anyone from areas or locals that have a reputation for selling books is automatically assumed to be under-qualified. This sucks, because I've known plenty of badass hands from Southern Locals, but because they come from book-selling locals, they had to overcome that stigma. To an extent, this whole thing is self-regulating because if you bought a book and can't hack it, you only come to a travel job once before they will never invite you back, but it is a constant source of sand in the gears for the whole labour management process.

Anyway, learning is important and faking learning WILL bite you in the ass if you have any desire to exist in the world in a meaningful way.

bruzum

lastvalyrian

This is literally what people are talking about when they say AI will be used to mainstream widely held bigotry. LLMs are trained on frequency and probability -> straight relationships are more well represented in the dataset -> straight pronouns and terms become the "correct" normal.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

Combine this with the mass of people inclined to believe (and being encouraged to believe) that if AI says and does something it must be correct

severeannoyance

I worked briefly in regulating AI back when the US actually believed in that and this was exactly the shit that I, the single queer enby in the office, spent trying to beat into the heads of all the white straight men around me.

It is worth noting that as one of its first actions, the Trump administration pulled federal funding and halted federal work on preventing bias in AI (and then proceeded to rip up all the guardrails I and my fellow ethicists had installed).

There is a reason the AI shitsunami has hit over the last two years and it's that someone went and erased all the regulations.

Sigh.

bruzum

lastvalyrian

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

Combine this with the mass of people inclined to believe (and being encouraged to believe) that if AI says and does something it must be correct

azspot

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

emwheezie

"time heals all wounds" WRONG. time is chasing me with a knife

aka-maggie

marzipanandminutiae

help some Racist Nonsense someone came at me with has sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how common enslaved dressmakers were in the antebellum southern US, but the continued lack of understanding even among historians that Seamstress and Dressmaker were two different things in the 19th century is making it REALLY difficult

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

(like. yes, enslaved clothing-makers were AI clothes generators who had no skills of their own and had to be given very precise instructions to produce the desired output. of course. sounds legit. </s>)

marzipanandminutiae

Also just speaking of the book in question, genuinely, it is so 1930s to be like "oh yes, we make clothing ourselves now, so in the olden days before modern technology, they must've made their own clothes even harder!!!!!"

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash

(really the period when it was at all a money saving endeavor to make your own clothing at home from scratch was so small in western history, and the practice was geared at such a specific subset of the population, that it's not at all what people today imagine it was. Like for most women, making your family's own clothing at home being a thrifty or even just viable proposition was more likely to happen in the 1950s than in the 1850s. I'm not saying that nobody in the 19th century was in that position, but far fewer people than anyone imagines in the present)

achronalart

I recently read a book* on British women dressmakers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.

*The book is Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid: British Dressmaking in the 18th and 19th Centuries, by Pam Inder, Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2020.

marzipanandminutiae

Book recommendation! Thank you! And such a good breakdown too

(worth noting that slavery was in something of a legal gray area in the UK during the 18th and early-mid 19th century when it was legal in other parts of the Anglosphere; it was never technically legal in the UK itself, but of course it was legal and commonly practiced in their colonies, and many enslaved people who were brought to the UK Were treated as though they were still de facto enslaved until they were taken back home again. And of course you don't have to rely on chattel slavery to make a business off of unfair labor practices, which was extremely common even after slavery was outlawed and/or fell by the wayside)

it's interesting also that some dressmakers offered a sliding scale of services, from making up entire outfits on the high end, to cutting and fitting and basting the pieces together in the middle, to cutting and fitting but leaving the women of the household to do the physical sewing themselves as the Budget Option. I find that fascinating