My non horny posts on this account don't tend to be shared too widely, but I need to recommend this so damn badly.
I somehow lived 30+ years and never heard of The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.
If me posting about it can convince just one person to learn about it's existence, it's worth it.
The prose is beautiful, the world is dense. It may be one of my favorite books of all time, and I'm only about halfway through.
I can see it's fingerprints now in so much of the media I love. Elden Ring, The Dark Tower, and the works of Jeff Vandermeer. It's almost Pynchon-esq in the prose, while being more poetic and narratively satisfying.
Like...
"The best SF novel of the last century."
-Neil Gaiman
HOW DID I NEVER HEAR OF THIS UNTIL RECENTLY??! Possibly because it's obviously not translatable to other media?? A movie or game or show would diminish what makes it beautiful...
Anyway
Please, if you're a fan of weird fiction, scifi, fantasy, or just read The Book of the New Sun. It's so fucking good.
So just a primer for anyone who doesn't already know about LLMs and GPTs.
At a high level, it's using the same core idea as autocomplete: guess the next word (or words).
Even thinking about this even from the outside, you might immediately suspect some of the problems (and solutions) researchers used to improve this workflow:
You can pull in some context from earlier statements.
You can add randomness to make sure things don't repeat.
You can use feedback from your early versions to improve.
You can expand out your sources to nearly everything online (if you can spare the space and computing power)....
Add all these in (and more!) and things get much, much more complicated... but still the same idea in the end.
To be super reductive, all the AI text stuff today is just this: the autocomplete idea scaled up a million times, with dozens of extra steps before the output.
So now we know Generative AI is just really overpowered "next word prediction" engine. Then way is everything a chatbot?
Nerds love their chatbots. Since the 1960's the "spot the AI in chat" has been a big deal. People have spent decades trying to build little text-only chatbots to prove they can trick humans.
There's a whole rabbit hole you can go down about ELIZA and if talking = thinking, but I'll leave that be. Let's just say academics are really obsessed with making AI talk and "think" like humans.
And the old way of doing this is teaching AI what thing are, what they mean, and a bunch of other systems of information to understand context.
Wait, how did we get from "guess the next word" to superpowered ChatGPT?
The short answer: you stick enough power behind that supped up auto-predict engine, tweak it a bit and it just sounds like a real person?
The best way I've seen it summed up by AI researchers:
This isn't a thinking machine, it's a really really fancy trick that weirdly emulates humans.
You can use to do a bunch of shit a human world normally do, put a little filter at the endpoint with some hard rules... and guess what? It outputs close enough we can slot it into a bunch of processes.
I have a couple of AI academic friends that find the whole "hallucination" label maddening: it's ALL hallucination, we just learned to slice the window of output just right to get it to look friendly.
Again, it's all an oversimplification, but it's critical to keep this all in mind when you ask something of current "Gen AI" models:
They're not thinking in any deep sense. They use prior examples to predict what should come next in a pattern.
They're monstruous black boxes that we somehow tricked into seeming human enough.
So after getting my 10th or so account termination reversed, thought I'd share what I've learned. Hopefully this helps others who are going through the same issue.
The webforum Tumblr directs you to doesn't always work for termination. While you should still try this first, terminated account emails are sometimes wonky/blacklisted. If you don't receive a confirmation email in a few days of filling it out, you may need to email [email protected]
ToS violations that result in termination aren't specifically associated with the offending post/behavior. This one is tricky, but when you are terminated the content in violation may not be removed after reinstatement by the support team. If you don't proactively follow their advice, you can receive more warnings or terminations from that same content being flagged again in the future.
It may take a few days for them to respond, but review and action is almost always near-instant if they do reverse the termination. Almost always, I had access restored before getting the communication. In one case, the reveal happened with no email or support communication. If you have a ticket in, check your account periodically to see if it's been resolved.
Finding ToS violating content can be tricky, use the archive download to deep search. In my case linking to an "untrustworthy" site (BDSMLR) caused termination. I finally tracked down all my posts by downloading my account archive and doing a local search for text and HTML in the full archive.
Check the ToS to make your case with support. Text only erotic writing is specifically allowed with the lastest policy update, as long as it has a Mature Community Label (and is not promoting other ToS violating content like abuse or scams).
Make sure to tell support if you have alt accounts. A few times I've had access restored to my primary account, but my alts were soft-locked (visible but uneditable).
Check if you still have old (2018) Mature post or account restrictions that may be different today. I was able regain the ability to add a profile pic and header to my blog after taking with support.
If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side-load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money.
This is a fucked up and dark day for the United States.
For everyone who may not grasp the implications of this. If you somehow are callus to the direct and dangerous consquences of restricting reporductive health...
I'd ask you to also consider that this also shakes the legal foundations of same-sex marriage, contraceptives and LGBTQ rights.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday called for overturning the constitutional rights the court had affirmed for access to contra
No Patriarchy or Misogyny play for a while. This shit's not fun, not fantasy. We're getting awfully close to Handmaid's Tale level shit.
Just had a moment reading a "mainstream" book where I spotted dead on EMCSA style reality style.
It's possible the author is just tapping into something universally twisted - a gender and power dynamic that could be arrived at from many angles.
But damn if it's not an uncanny, well written "Mind Control Erotica" scene.
I do wonder from time to time how many published, mainstream authors consume/create the same erotica I'm familiar with.
Seems like every fifith or so book published thin the last half-decade has some suspiciously familiar aspect that's very kink prose adjacent?
Not even talking about the 50 Shades erotica-lite books. Just mainstream genre fiction with relationships that scream "this was ripped from horny fan writing".
Could just be my projection, but also seems naive to think authors raised and living in a post-internet age aren't also enjoying some smutty text online.
Looks at Lindsay Ellis publishing thinly veiled Transformers ship fic.
I'd suspect that we'll be seeing an even bigger generational wave of writers weaned on AO3 soon. I'm all for it - here's hoping for more normalization around the consumption and creation of erotica.
"porn is damaging" and "porn is fun and pleasurable when used responsibly by people who are educated in fantasy vs. reality" and "the porn industry is damaging to the performers" and "porn is important for sex workers and they enjoy their work when they're in control of their own bodies just like every other person on this planet" are all ideas that can coexist. nuance people NUANCE. 👏👏👏👏
The company said it will start banning "sexually explicit content" in October.
Just to add onto this - since I'm just pissed about this whole situation: It's going to keep happening.
My partner pointed out it may be possible to get around the OnlyFans porn ban by hosting the content elsewhere and just link to it with a unique "members only" key.
This is probably something that will happen. The internet is clever, and I imagine OnlyFans will be fine keeping their base without the liability of hosting adult content and pissing off their payment processing vendors.
BUT Where can they host it? Most places that can reliability and securely host porn are...
Well, there really aren't any. All of the big players in CMS and cloud hosting (Microsoft, Google, AWS, WordPress, etc.) have odd restrictions on adult content.
Cloud storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive are quickly changing how consumers deal with content on a day-to-day basis. But each
Don't get me wrong - there are some places that can do it, and I'm sure there will be popups that will try to support the OnlyFans. Porn makes money, and middle men will never be in short supply.
But... what happens if one actually is successful? When they start scaling up?
They either run out of overhead to stay porn friendly, or they need to start monitoring the content and moderating it.
And no one has solved for that at scale.
Hell, even Facebook - which doesn't allow NSFW content and has billions to throw at AI and human moderation - can't keep with compliance.
Moderating billions of posts a week in more than a hundred languages has become Facebook’s biggest challenge. Leaked documents and nearly tw
So we'll see another startup or smaller platform offering safe haven for the creators put out by the OnlyFan changes.
If they actually do their job well? If people use their service and they start making profit?
Well, then we're right back to the beginning.
Until something changes, the platform shuffle is going to just keep happening every couple of years for NSFW creators.
I've seen people tag this as an "implosion" or #pornapocalypse
But this is what happened to Tumblr, Pornhub, Discord, Patreon, Imgur, Twitter...
And until there's a better financial support system for NSFW creators and sex workers, it's going to keep happening every few years.
Great breakdown of why OnlyFans (or any NSFW supporting platform) is going to struggle financially.
TLDR: No reliable services for payment processing means income models will be risky. Investors will be difficult to secure, meaning once your overhead gets into "success levels" of internet startup volume - you're pretty much fucked.
“I'm seeing a lot of people staggered by the sheer stupidity of OnlyFans' announcement today.
As someone who also works in the adult arts,
Pro tip for anyone who needs to maintain a NSFW alt with Chrome on desktop:
Using the Chrome Profiles, you can set window color to make sure you always have an visual indicator about which account you're on!
nfts make me want to die.
entirely pointless and a drain on the environment
I agree with the overall concept of NFTs being a shit, inefficient and speculative overall.
That said: it does have a sliver lining of allowing creators to actually having a substantive way to profit off their work. This is 100% of hating the game, but not blaming the player IMHO.
I won't be buying any NFTs myself, but if someone like Naomi Wu can cash in on some of her internet fame?
