unangbangkay

Back here in case Twitter goes completely to pot

[excalibelle]

me watching monsters inc as a kid: how did it take so long for anyone to figure out that human child laughter not only produced energy like screams, but was more effective, and that children aren’t actually dangerous at all?

me watching monsters inc now: monsters incorporated, a multi-billion dollar corporate giant, stood to make extra profits off a scream shortage because low supply with high demand makes it possible to charge a fortune for a necessary commodity and everyone has no choice but to pay the high prices because they can’t go without electricity. Therefore Monsters Inc, as well as any other major powers that may have existed at the start of the era of using scream energy, fabricated the idea that only screams could generate sustainable energy sources in order to create artificial scarcity, because laugh energy was far easier to obtain and far more efficient, and therefore stood to lower the value of energy due to surplus. They also fabricated the idea that human children were toxic, in order to a) make other monsters too afraid to go near them to do research and possibly discover the secret of laugh energy, and b) to make monsters so afraid of going near them that there is a shortage of scarers, making it harder for rival companies to rise up and create competition. Even in the monster world, capitalism is based on lies, greed and cruelty, and even monster companies have no qualms about using and abusing children to maximize profits.

[left-reminders]

[bulldyke-rider-deactivated20251]

Watching people understand the plot lol

[excalibelle]

damn u right sorry i didn’t understand the complexities of capitalist propaganda when I was 4, I’ll try to be a better person going forward 🙏

[now-phaeton-flier]

I feel like this theory ignores the differences between Monsters, Inc and (real world) fossil fuel industry.

Switching from from Scream to Laughter is a lot easier than switching from being a coal or oil plant to, e.g. Solar. It’s the same technology (closet doors) and the same distribution and collection system. The only change is the front line workers, and given that laughter is so much more powerful, even a bad comedian could keep their job.

Waternoose isn’t running the De Beers company, happily creating/exploiting a fake shortage to get richer. The City is suffering from regular brownouts and he’s about to lose the Company, that’s why he needed to start kidnapping and soul-sucking random kids. If he knew about Laughter, he could’ve switched over for the cost of a few nights of comedy training for the scarers.

“Corrupt Executives will do horrible things to stay in business” is true; “Corrupt executives will ignore obvious, cheap, and legal solutions to problems even as they’re about to lose their riches” is not.

[phaeton-flier]

The funny thing is, the movie does have things to say about Capitalism and Business, it’s just not what OP insists it is.

Monsters, Incorporated, in the movie, is the lie of the Old Company, and Sully is the Company Man. If you show up, and do your work, the Company will take care of you and your community. Sully is proud to be a Scarer, not because it proves he’s cool or because he’s the best, but because hes proud to be part of this Great Work that supports the city. Monsters, Inc makes electricity and he gets to be part of that.

Mr Waternoose isn’t his Boss, some old coot in charge who doesn’t get the little guy: he’s a former scarer himself, a mentor to Sully. He might own and run the factory because it’s been in his family for generations, but he gets it! He presents himself as wanting good scarers not just because it makes him money but because the Company Needs It. He doesn’t want to lose the company not just because he wants to be rich but because he’s presenting himself as part of a system the city needs.

It’s a very out of the 50s idea, the company you work for your whole life and in exchange it takes care of you. It’s a very liberal sort of idea, honestly, this marriage of Labor and Capital.

And the film’s criticism is that The Company was a lie, it was not this happy family here to care for you, it was willing to do atrocities to keep from collapsing and it was willing to kill anyone—even the Golden Boy Sully—that might threaten that. You cannot, actually, trust Waternoose, however he presents himself—he is not your Dad, he is your Boss.

It’s a kids movie, of course, and not a strong polemic against the system—so it does end with the same system in place, Screams changed to Laughter and the Evil CEO replaced with a Good Boss.

[insertdisc5]

a tiny gift to end this weird year. SLOOP BATTLE ILLUSTRATION SPEEDPAINT!!!!!!

[insertdisc5]

[reachartwork]

crossposting with permission from mrs sarah z

text under read more

In a strange position where I think there are massive, massive social harms to the proliferation of AI (misinfo, deepfakes, predatory 'companions', surveillance, labour rights) but also feel the mainstream arguments against it range from unconvincing (water) to actively harmful (copyright; "soul").

Like, I often hear "plagiarism machine that's killing the planet" but I'm very convinced that the copyright panic is actually harming artists far more than helping them. Strengthening Disney and Getty's IP rights in the name of "protecting artists" is a very bad thing, I think!

People often compare "AI bros" to "NFT bros", rightly so (often the same obnoxious people). Yet in the same breath, many will also essentially say right-click-saving an image is theft. I can't stand the spread of slop either, but I think that argument could set a dangerous precedent in other ways.

Or, you frequently hear "well, analytical AI is good, but generative AI is bad", but there isn't really a hard difference between the two. They often share identical underlying architecture. Like, transformers power both BERT and GPT. Vision Transformers handle tumour detection and image generation.

Moreover, tools classified as "analytical" are frequently used for facial recognition that automates surveillance & discrimination, and tools considered "generative" like diffusion models are also used in medical imaging for anomaly detection and classification. There isn't a hard "one good, one bad".

tl;dr on this one: the loudest AI criticisms are the ones that serve existing power structures, and yet its most serious harms are the ones that don't.

And it's a frustrating thing to see, because it's like, who benefits from the messy conversation around this stuff? The copyright panic benefits Disney/Getty/Adobe/etc. The analytical vs generative framing benefits companies selling surveillance tools. Presenting environmental stats taken wildly out of context benefits people who want to dismiss AI criticism entirely by making critics look innumerate. Meanwhile, the actual harms—like predatory companion apps targeting lonely teenagers, facial recognition enabling police harassment of Black neighbourhoods, algorithmic benefit denial systems destroying families, labour displacement without social insurance—don't have wealthy institutional advocates the way "protect our IP" does.

And then, I don't know, the criticism also becomes weird and individualistic. Like I have a dear friend who is a disabled artist who writes her own code for image gen and gets torn apart for it on the regular with straight up ableist disability porn ("X person drew with their feet, why can't you?").

Like, to be clear I think these companies are by and large straight up evil. Sam Altman releasing 4o is like. Practically criminal. Musk actively removing safety guardrails as a selling point, deploying it on a platform that's already a misinformation vector to generate racism and child exploitation.

But I just worry the current way these things are spoken about ends up actually obfuscating those harms. I might roll my eyes at some rando using an LLM to write their emails, but like I don't buy that they're doing something any more evil than taking a flight or eating meat or leaving the lights on.

And this kind of individualized critique is just the "ecological footprint" thing again, literally invented by BP's ad agency in the early 2000s to shift responsibility from fossil fuel corporations to individual consumers. The impact matters, but I wish it wasn't being discussed on Shell's terms.

AND I think that framing prevents good regulation. If your position is 'this shouldn't exist at all and I won't tolerate anything less than the technology not existing,' it's harder to advocate for 'here are the specific features and practices that should be required/prohibited.'

I strongly look forward to there being less of this shit everywhere. Every product suddenly has an AI feature nobody wants. LinkedIn AI-generated posts. Google AI overview and its wrong answers. Facebook flooded with Jesus made of shrimp. That viral UberEats fake Reddit post from the other day!!!

There's so much marketing hype; all the hype and some of the hate are often doing the same work of avoiding talking about its biggest dangers. I'm sick of AI bullshit everywhere, afraid of its worst applications, and also disillusioned with the way it's being talked about in many of my circles.

Anyway, one of these days I'm going to do an effortpost about Ethnically Ambiguous Homer Simpson. A truly fascinating look into training data and messy slapdash attempts at mitigating AI bias.

[basedbluearchivetakes]

Relevant video:

[basedbluearchivetakes]

[betchi]

a really little animated black cat with giant eyes and no other discernible features

[betchi]

do you get it or do you not know anything

[betchi]

more examples that people keep getting upset with me for not adding

[rainbow-lizzard]

[digital-magus]

That’s just how black cats be

[not-evil-anymore-beasty]

[etirabys]

probably no one else finds this funny and I’m driving away my friends a fraction of a percent at a time every time I do it, but I think the height of comedy is when you react to an emoji with the same emoji in a chat medium that permits this

[transwarlock]

literally

[knottahooker]

to escalate this, react with multiple versions of the same emote because nine different servers all have it available:

[unangbangkay]

When you've got multiple variations on the same emoji that can also signal a different kind of escalation:

[3amsoda]

Your art isn't good, learn proper anatomy and stop drawing with your dick.

[maxanite]

Friends got me into ff14 why is this the popup for becoming a weaver

[valeriehalla]

as the web in the United States becomes increasingly divided by a patchwork of mutually-conflicting age-verification laws, surely at some point we’re going to have to address the fact that it’s technologically impossible to know where anyone on the internet actually lives, right?

right?

oh, sorry. let me explain. see, now that we’re legally demanding that websites hosting adult content collect the IDs of users who live in particular states, you may have made the reasonable assumption that it is (for example) possible to do that.

this is a classic error.

maybe an analogy would help. if i were to call you on the phone, your phone would probably display my caller ID. it would show you my number, and below that number would be the text “Orlando, FL”. you, seeing this, would make the reasonable assumption that i am calling you from Orlando, FL.

but in fact I’m calling you from Portland, OR. i don’t live in Orlando: actually, I’ve never lived in Orlando in my entire life. i once lived kind of sorta in the general vicinity of Orlando, which is how I got this number, but that’s not where I live now and it’s not where I’m calling from. your phone just looked up my phone’s area code, and used that to guess where I’m calling from.

IP addresses are to the internet as phone numbers are to the phone network. if you run a website, the only piece of information you can know for certain about any user who visits your website is their IP address—their “caller ID”, so to speak. that IP address is the only bit of information you can use to determine where they live.

but if guessing a caller’s location from their phone number is impossible, it is tenfold more impossible to guess a user’s location from their IP address. behold this fucking mess:

IP addresses do not have area codes.

IP addresses do not uniquely identify a user (there can be hundreds or thousands of users sharing the same IP address).

most users get their IP address from their Internet Service Provider, which may be located in a different city, a different state, or even a different country entirely.

many users access the web through a VPN, which is a service that effectively lets them keep their identity private by changing their IP address entirely.

the fact that IP addresses are (as a general rule) useless for finding a user’s address is not a new problem, and it is not a secret. as you can imagine, this sort of thing gets litigated all the time. there is a mountain of legal precedent attesting to this fact.

“but if there’s no way to tell where a user is,” you may now be thinking, “how do you know whether you need to collect their ID before showing them Adult Content™?”

HOW, INDEED!!!

consider the following scenario:

Texas has an age verification law on the books. Any website accessible to a user in Texas must check the user’s ID before serving them adult content.

New Mexico has no such law.

User A lives in New Mexico, but their ISP assigns them an IP which flags them as living in Texas (as determined by a third-party geolocation service).

User A attempts to access a titty video from Titty Vids Dot Biz, an adult content website based in New Mexico.

Titty Vids Dot Biz, presuming that User A is from Texas, demands to see User A’s government-issued ID.

User A gets annoyed and leaves.

The state of Texas has, somehow, legislated out of existence a commercial transaction which would otherwise have occurred entirely within another state.

who fucked up here? well, you could argue that the third-party geolocation service fucked up—after all, they’re the ones who incorrectly guessed User A’s location. but they did the best they could with the available information. remember: it is not actually possible to determine a user’s location from an IP address. there will always be errors, and these errors affect millions of people.

you could say that Titty Vids Dot Biz fucked up for trusting the judgement of a third-party geolocation service. but what else can they do? get sued by the state of Texas for allowing Texans to see naked boobies without a license???

well, yes. in fact, Titty Vids Dot Biz is damned no matter what they do. because for every User A who fails to access content they should be allowed to access, there’s a User B in the borderlands of Texas who will succeed in accessing content they shouldn’t be allowed to access: IP-based geolocation fails both ways around.

i’m not a lawyer, but when this problem gets litigated (and i’m sure it’s being litigated now, as we speak), i can only think of a few possible outcomes:

courts recognize the technological impossibility of determining a user’s location by their IP address, and either these laws get struck down or become effectively unenforceable as the user simply has to swear they live in a state where they’re allowed to see titties without an ID—in other words, the ol’ “Enter your date of birth to access this content:” popup gets exactly one extra dropdown to fill out; or

courts sidestep the issue by saying “obviously Texas (etc) can’t sue a corporation not based in Texas (etc) for declining to adhere to Texas (etc)’s censorship policies”, and adult content businesses just legally incorporate in safe states.

the haunting third possibility is that somehow courts simply uphold these laws as-is in spite of the technological impossibility, meaning that any website which might serve users in Texas (etc)—i.e., all of them—must perform age verification all the time (because there’s no way to know a user isn’t in Texas). i don’t know how plausible this outcome is—for one thing, each state’s age verification law differs in the specifics, so you can’t just enforce all of them at once. (but you can’t put anything past this supreme court, so...??? scary!!! scary!!! bad!!!)

anyway, as always, call your representatives and hammer them on age verification as hard as you can. do this whether you live in a “safe state” or not. don’t let them forget how unpopular these policies are!

[ralfmaximus]

Some users report Firefox scoffing CPU power

: You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

[a-for-effort-f-for-execution]

if you want to turn off as much ai crap in firefox as possible, from this post on mozilla's connect forum, you should also set all these to false using about:config:

browser.ml.enable

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:

sidebar.revamp

unrelated anyone got browser recommendations for when we have to jump ship from firefox

[mckitterick]

and now keep in mind that all the other browsers are doing this shit, too, but you can't reconfigure them as with Firefox

on A for Effort's last point, is there any browser that offers users even half as much control as Firefox? if so, I'd like to try it as a backup

[mckitterick]

irritatingly, the list of AI settings in Firefox has grown. to kill them all as of today (Nov 20, 2025), go into about:config and set all of these to false (yes, you'll have to copy and paste them one by one):

browser.ml.enable

browser.ml.chat.enabled

browser.ml.chat.menu

browser.ml.chat.page

browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge

browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

in addition to nuking AI, it'll also speed up your browsing

[igotstuckinthevoidhelp]

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[ekjohnston]

*weeps uncontrollably at 9 o'clock in the morning*

God, I love randos on the internet who just want to be kind.

[magicratfingers]

[thesewersofparis]

this painting came to me in a dream

[sludgebones]

NO ONE appreciated my joke and its two revisions when i posted it so i’m posting it here

[galileosballs]

Games that let you pet dogs are a dime a dozen now, but let's not forget that Tales of Symphonia let you go a step further by having one of your party members personally assign a name to every dog in the world, with a reward for finding them all.

Note that you cannot name dogs when this party member isn't in your party (or when... she doesn't feel up to it, to put it in a spoiler-free way) and that once a dog is named its speech bubble will have its name in it. There are 30 dogs in total. Some are missable. The walkthrough has to include the note:

They just don't make 'em like they used to.

[unangbangkay]

artist: hey boss, need a design for the new nikke girl. concept is: she's the classified archivist, and is she has to have her memory wiped a lot for security reasons, leading to an ongoing identity crisis

lead: latex dress so tight has to be vacuum-packed and sealed on. zippers be physically impossible to zip

artist: you got it boss

lead: wait!

artist: ???

lead: ...tactical granny shawl

[unangbangkay]

artist: new girls, boss. they're ambivalent baddies with a bone to pick with the other baddies. can't be sure if they're good or evil.

lead: black oil and melted carbon fiber…they're all attached to motors and stuff. devil horns

artist: alrighty

lead: wait!

artist: ??

lead:….womb tattoos

[unangbangkay]

artist: hey boss, new concept came in…unique npc…the producer character for Anis' idol subplot, and…oh no…"she must be visibly over 30 but fit nikke's chara design ethos". But how?!?

lead: …

artist: OK, i'll send it back t-

lead: Wait. give me the tablet, i'm about to hauve covid

[xiranjayzhao]

I don't even know how to feel about this new reputation of mine