dispatches from the ironsands

Fandom, minerals, and miscellaney. 53, cis, she/her, bi queer. If you follow, please be over 18.

[swirley1618]

[malnedott]

art by nell brinkley

[rosalesbeausderholle]

One thing that worries me about the use of AI is whether or not it can worsen people's dementia and alzheimer's in the future. When my grandmother was first diagnosed, we got her math activity books. Now, my grandmother never had a formal education, but we did our best to keep her sharp, get her to do math and writing activity books, sudokus, playing board games that required some level of strategizing with her. Her family is prone to alzheimer's and dementia (both her siblings had it and deteriorated very very very quickly, which yeah, scares the shit out of me being her granddaughter) but she was the one whose mind lasted the longest, she only passed away two years ago, at 88, ten whole years after her initial diagnosis and sure, she had forgotten things, recipes and where she put her glasses and appointments, but she never forgot any of us, ten whole years in, she still remembered us. Now, this may have been luck, but doctors always said the constant mental work + companionship + medicine helped her a lot. So I'm thinking, these people who are now relying on AI for everything, from email-writing to thinking what's for dinner to casual conversations, I've even seen people rely on it to calculate what time they should leave their house if they need to be at a place at a specific time and their commute lasts X number of minutes. As if that's not... the simplest math operation possible? You shouldn't even need a calculator for that!!! Idk I don't know how long it'll take us to see the effects of this + exposure to brain-rotting short form content that is completely meaningless + people addicted to right-wing conspiracy style media. Idk I'm very worried. Please, read, read complicated books! Take up a book on philosophy and try to decipher it and make your own opinions on it, please buy a maths activity book and relearn how to do math, please get a hobby that involves lots of thinking and concentrating. PLEASE!!!

[notalotgoingonatthisinstant]

As a neurologist, I’ll give you the pretty name for it: cognitive reserve.

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

TLDR: Yes. From the knowledge we have today, AI will increase the number and severity of dementia cases.

[andhumanslovedstories]

One of the stranger things about training brand new nurses is explaining how to min max small talk. It feels very weird to coach people on how to chat.

[andhumanslovedstories]

if I make and post an insanely detailed powerpoint on the twenty different equations I run mentally during casual conversation to make it flow better, everyone has to say that it's sexy and cool and not weird at all

[andhumanslovedstories]

remember, everyone promised to be cool! also disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer assume I said all the things you'd say to be like "i know human interaction is complicated, i know some of what i listed here would be very annoying to some people," and all that

[olderthannetfic]

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.

[zz9pzza]

Warming up a new database server….

[elfwreck]

When people involved with AO3 talk about “the cost of servers” they don’t mean “the cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.” They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.

While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

I Want Us to Own the Goddamned Servers

Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can’t be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.

[lierdumoa]

AO3 is what a website looks like when you seize the means of production.

[zhaan-deactivated20171022]

the best lord of the rings thing ive seen is the headcanon that gimli is like Prince Tier of beauty for dwarves and is absolutely stunning and legolas is like, for an elf, absolute butt ugly like relatively and everyones always like gimli how could you marry such a shit tier ugly ass elf and gimli is like ach.. nae…i love him

[thebyrchentwigges]

I'm tired of 2026 and I want to go home

[iamheavymeta-lll]

[kangarookawaii]

shwoing of her grub

#hergrub

[realshy]

let's be grubbly with mama

[tsumugiology]

random question:

what was your first exposure to prev and what made you decide to follow them?

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[thememedaddy]

[yamelcakes]

What Big Food Did to Ice Cream

The “encrapification” of the American pint — a chemist’s plain-language dissection

Really good article by a chemist on why most ice cream sucks now— it’s because it’s not really ice cream.

[18kgold]

It is tempting to look at the “encrapification” of ice cream as an inevitable result of inflation or shifting consumer health trends. But the data doesn’t support that. Dairy prices have fluctuated, but the pivot to “Frozen Dairy Dessert” wasn’t a survival move — it was a margin-expansion move. It was a strategic decision to trade brand equity for short-term earnings. [...] As a computational scientist, I recognize this as a constrained optimization problem — one in which the constraints were gradually redefined to favor producer economics over consumer experience. Every manufacturer optimizes for margin; the distinction lies in which variables are treated as fixed and which are allowed to move.

[quasi-normalcy]

[liberalsarecool]

Cosign.

[whatkindofnameisella]

ursula k le guin affirmations for your day:

it is our differences which make us dearer to one another

it is never too late to start loving

the enemy is not the foreigner, but the ones who tell you to hate the foreigner

everyone should have food, shelter, and work

everything is a yin and yang metaphor if you try hard enough

sci-fi is important

[timothyscratchit]

Standards are dropping.

[deramin2]

Been working with a little group of queer people thing to publish a local news zine, and so far I've had to explain WordPress, traditional web hosting, RSS, and Creative Commons licences, and I'm starting to realize that part of the way big tech companies have trapped us all into feeling helpless is they muscles out the entire conversation around Open Source as philosophical opposition to capitalism.

I don't resent doing so. They're today's Lucky 10,000. They've learned something powerful about the world. But I also feel so old. Like I'm talking about life back in the Old Country before Some Assholes fucked it all up and forced me to live here instead.

[deramin2]

Good question from @softness-and-shattering about whether WordPress is actually open source or another blogging platform with their own rules.

The WordPress website platform open source software project at WordPress.Org is free as in freedom. Host it on whatever server space you have to build whatever website you want.

One of WordPress's co-founders is Matt Mullenweg, who founded the company Automattic to monetize WordPress and took the URL WordPress.com. which hosts free blogs with feature restrictions or way overpriced fully-featured blogs, but either way they block you from moving your full website to another platform, and only allow talking the data. No other WordPress host does that. They do have content restrictions. They also do make some WordPress plugins like WooComerce useable on any WordPress deployment. This is where the confusion comes in, and why the Open Source community has been pissed about it for two decades. If you're setting up a WordPress site, stear clear of WordPress.com.

Automattic are also the current owners of Tumblr, so an entirely different culture of bloggers can be mad at them know for their poor decisions.

[softness-and-shattering]

So wordpress.org and wordpress.com are differrent things, the .org is a free open source....website builder? Site template? What exactly is a website platform? And .com is the more standard rulesed-up blogging site that Mullenweg stole the name and general concept of from the .org to try monetize a worse copy of the free open source project? Is that correct?

[deramin2]

WordPress is a website building tool meaning that instead of coding everything yourself it gives you a general design structur, pre-built page elements, an easy user permissions structure, easy media Manager, etc, so you can design a pretty good website by visually moving things on the screen instead of coding it. And then use themes to make it look different without changing any of the content. Also plugins that extend its capabilities even further. All free and open source.

Mullenweg is one of the founders of the Open Source project, and was initially trying to find ways of monetizing it. Including hosting WordPress blogs with easy setup and tech help, which was done under WordPress.com. later it was agreed that the open source part should be a nonprofit foundation instead, and the code was transferred to them. I believe that's when WordPress.org was setup. So he didn't steal it, since a lot of it was his work, he just runs a very confusingly named hosting site for people to easily make WordPress blogs. But the name recognition let's them get away with higher prices abs more restrictions than competitors. It's a tangled mess.