millie, probably

professional yapper

[unicornhorse160]

age: 21

name: millie. or mills

pronouns: she. not her. I could never be her (tachibana izumi 💔)

I'm like asexual but also wildly down bad for a myriad of fictional characters (I am cringe but I am free) so catch my secret sideblog #1 going feral (betcha can't find it ooo betcha can't) (seriously though don't go looking for it I promise it's not a sideblog you wanna be seeing)

I'm also super unhinged :)

okay bye

[melodiesz]

In which you stumble upon their everyday searches ⋆˙⟡ Incl. lucifer, mammon, levi, satan, asmo, beel, belphie

LUCIFER

MAMMON

LEVIATHAN

SATAN

ASMODEUS

BEELZEBUB

BELPHEGOR

a/n: hey guys sorry it took me literal MONTHS to finally do another one of these... almost became a one hit wonder there. Thanks for reading! Hope everyone has a great Valentines C:

pt 1: <3

[melodiesz]

Emergency Contact!?

look at my emergency contact dawg I’m dying ✴︎˚｡ when they find out they're your emergency contact!

a/n: the idiot on a scooter was mammon cause lucifer sold his hellcat to pay back all the money he stole. no ones seen him since 😬 first smau in a while, hope I’m not rusty! c:

[melodiesz]

If I ever were to lose you . ݁₊ ⊹ .

When you ask the demon brothers what they’re gonna do when you die before them ⋆˚꩜｡

a/n: If you already saw me post a sukuna fic with this same title and plot no you didn’t. anyways, TYSM for all the love on my smaus!! I appreciate all the kind comment so much <33

[andypantsx3]

The great thing about Shouto being rich is that he can replace all the pots and pans that get destroyed from him convincing you that the dinner you’ve been making to help him recoup from his mission is far less important than him getting his hands on you right NEOW

And you are lucky he has an ice quirk given all the fires you inadvertently start!!

[caparrucia]

We need to talk about AI fearmongering.

I've been putting it off but damn, we really gotta talk about AI fearmongering. Specially now that the bubble is reaching criticality.

You need to stop fearmongering about AI. No, I get it, you hate AI. You hate the way it's been shoved into everything without rhyme or reason, purely for the sake of keeping an already bursting bubble going and making money for the most unlikable billionaire dweebs out there.

I get it.

You still need to stop fearmongering about AI.

We have gone past criticality on this. Fearmongering, if it was ever truly effective as a tool to fight AI, is no longer effective. AI is everywhere. Fearmongering about it doesn't actually get anything done about it, it only stacks more harm on people. And if your whole thing is harm reduction, you should be cringing right now. But if it's not, let me explain.

But again, for those of you with a tiktok level of attention span: tl;dr, AI fearmongering is BAD at actually getting rid of AI; I want you to be BETTER at advocating for AI free spaces.

Let's talk about BlueSky, the ATmosphere, the AT Proto conference and BlueSky's new AI tool to create feeds, Attie. This is gonna be my example of why AI fearmongering is actually terrible at what people think it's doing. Something that ACTUALLY happened, with links so you can go and see for yourself how these conversations happen... or more to the point, don't.

For those of you who don't know, BlueSky is part of a social media environment called the AT Protocol (also known as ATProto, or the ATmosphere, depending on the circles you hang out with). No, it is not a replacement for X/Twitter in the strictest sense. And a lot of the community issues that people have on the platform are often a result of misunderstanding what the platform IS.

Think of the ATmosphere as a park: it is a set of a standards for social media things like posts and likes and feeds. Those standards are rules that anyone in the park has to follow, and which in turn enable everyone in the park to connect/talk with each other. A PDS, or a Personal Data Server, is the picnic table that one can bring in at the park, to enjoy the stuff AT the park. BlueSky is a PDS. The reason BlueSky gets to moderate your content when you make an account with them, is because you are HOSTING your content on their servers. That means they're directly on the hook for whatever content you put in there. You're also not paying for hosting, so they get to make whatever rules they want as to what content is and isn't allowed.

But the magic of ATProto is that if you don't like their content restrictions, but you do like the vibe of the ATmosphere, you can make your OWN server or PDS, and move to host all your stuff THERE. And suddenly BlueSky's restrictions no longer apply to you. (Legal restrictions will still apply to you, I should have to specify that, and yet...)

What all this means is that a bunch of nerds got together and said things like "wow, traditional social media sucks" and "I fucking hate it when there's a site migration and I lose track of ALL MY FRIENDS" and then designed an open source standard that allows users to OWN their own data and therefore be able to share it across multiple platforms without having to change services. It's all very technical and very cool. If you give a shit about the free internet, you should be very excited about ATProto. It was built by people who actually care and understand the issues of mainstream social media and actually want to DO something about it.

Anyway, where does the AI fearmongering come into all this? One of the limitations for the ATmosphere is the fact you CAN build custom feeds - basically your very own algorithm, built by you, controlled by you and monetized by fucking no one - but you need a certain threshold of technical knowledge to do it. And unfortunately, as BlueSky has grown, and with it, brought growth to the ATmosphere as a whole, the average technical skillset of the population has gone down.

Listen, Britney who works at Starbucks and just wants a place to see pictures of cute dogs is working for minimum wage during Current Events. Britney does not have time to learn how to fucking code in order to build a personalized feed of ONLY cute dogs. Even though having such a feed would materially impact her overall mental health in a very positive way.

There are hundreds of thousands of Britneys all over the ATmosphere.

Feeds have been a goddamn pain in the ass for everyone involved.

Enter the ATmosphere conference of 2026. In it, BlueSky showcased Attie, an AI feed builder, designed to break down the barrier of access to feeds. Here's what you need to know about Attie:

It is NOT part of BlueSky.

It is a SEPARATE app for the ATmosphere.

It was built BY the team at BlueSky, and it is OWNED by BlueSky, but it is not integrated INTO BlueSky. There are currently no plans or any intention to integrate Attie into BlueSky.

The AI bit of Attie is this: It uses a version of Claude Code to interpret instructions given in Natural Language and converts them into the code required to build a feed. The feed is now matched to your user, owned by you, and therefore it will follow you, persistently, across the ATmosphere, regardless of which platform or service you're using, ready for deployment.

The mostly tech illiterate userbase from Bluesky lost its mind and then immediately spiraled into fearmongering about AI.

And here I want to talk and describe why fearomngering about AI is effectively useless:

The most important one is that fearmongering is not tethered to reality. Therefore, it cannot effectively interact WITH reality. Rie, what the fuck does that mean? It means that people started having meltdowns in the comments and quotes of the announcement, and landed on things like "block the BlueSky profile for the app, that way they can't use your content in their feeds!" being passed on as secret wisdom to fight against the AI overtaking the space!

This is veritable nonsense. This is like saying "if you block the twitter profile of the IRS, you don't have to pay taxes anymore!" Or something equally asinine. This is pure mythologizing as a way to cope with a reality you don't understand. And fearmongering makes that anxiety worse. It actively prevents people from doing things that would actually further their goals, by allowing them to wallow in distraction and feel satisfied that they've Done Something About, even though they really haven't.

It's also actively doing harm to people who don't know better on how to parse the fearmongering. I saw no less than five people having meltdowns in the quotes of the announcement about having to leave the site because, to their understanding (fueled by fearmongering in their feeds), Attie is basically Grok but Woke. So BlueSky is the same as X/Twitter and they might as well leave before all their stuff is stolen and fed into an AI.

Also, let's not leave it implied: this kind of fearmongering makes you look stupid. It just does. Anyone who knows anything about the tech is squinting at this reaction and mentally dismissing anything you have to say on the matter because you clearly don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Fearmongering makes you look and sound hysterical and irrational, and therefore a lost cause as far as actual productive conversation goes. Any real, valid concerns you might have are now buried beneath the histrionics of everything you're yelling about that is not in fact happening in reality.

And that's my key point: fearmongering disconnects you from reality. It presents to you an easily understandable yet profoundly distressing window into the world and tells you "that's how it is!" and if you do not have any other access point into reality, but the fearmongering space you're stuck in? There's virtually no distinction between you and anyone else who is fully removed from reality and being loud about it.

Fearmongering puts you in a state where no solutions are available to you. No mitigation is acceptable. No compromise is possible. This is by design: fearmongering does not trade in reality, it trades on feelings and the imaginary evil will always be bigger and stronger and grander than anything reality can offer to make it better. Nothing will ever be good enough to stop the crimes of the evil that exists solely in your head.

The kicker is that this reduces you to a loud, irrational minority that can safely be ignored, because the louder you get, the more obvious it is you're not engaging with reality. And if you're not engaging with reality, why would anyone bother engaging with you? And thus the vicious cycle around this: the less reality engages with you, the less you have an incentive to actually engage with it. Fearmongering doesn't feel GOOD in the traditional sense: it fills you with paranoia against impossible adversaries that are coming at you from all angles. But it is comforting in the same way as finally having a diagnostic after years of fighting to have your pain be taken seriously: you KNEW something was wrong, and you finally have an me for it! Even though you don't understand and are discouraged from discussing and better grasping what it means. It leaves you unable to parse reality or make any meaningful commentary about it, because you have so many assumptions based on nothing, that most people just refuse to engage. Trying to dismantle the web of stupidity feels like an impossible task that only someone who truly loves you will see the point in doing: in rescuing you from ignorance and suffering and let you grasp reality again, because they care about YOU and what you have to say.

Here's the kicker: the fearmongering about AI smothered a different conversation that weekend. A much more grounded, more realistic conversation, criticizing BlueSky for bringing AI into the mix.

Because there are teams currently working on solving the feeds issue, without fancy AI. Because feeds are a design issue for the ATmosphere and fixing them is priority to bring in better quality of service across the entire ecosystem.

But those teams got horrifically shafted and pushed aside by the introduction of Attie. It doesn't matter whether Attie works or not: because of BlueSky's size and presence in the ATmosphere, they wield very real power in the space. And their venture capital funding and fancy AI tools are actively pushing out real developers trying to provide solutions that aren't built on ethically dubious technology that is also currently subject of a bubble and all the uncertainty and instability that comes with that bubble.

And those are real, valid criticisms that BlueSky had to actually acknowledge and respond to, as opposed to a nondescript "wow, you guys are upset about AI, we heard you, lol" that amounts to nothing.

We're at the point where the bubble is starting to collapse. More and more people are calling bullshit on it. There are real risks associated to the technology that aren't the same three broken telephone complaints that people parrot out without really understanding what they mean: AI is bad at what it does! AI is bad for the environment! AI is built on stealing!

Here's the thing: I'm not saying those statements are not true, but they're nuanced. And this is a nuanced conversation. What happens now is going to be the result of a nuanced conversation. If you don't open yourself to nuance about this, you're not going to have a seat at the conversation.

If all you are willing to do is parrot talking points you don't understand and partake in the fearmongering, regardless of who it hurts and how ineffective it is: at this point, I don't think you're anti-AI or AI critical.

At this point, I think you're either an idiot or a plant.

We desperately need to have nuanced, difficult conversations about the datasets that exist today. We need to talk about usage and privacy rights and the way AI has gotten actually really good at the one thing it was built to do: code. We need to talk about how early failure is not permanent: the same way we told you that "six fingers is the mark of AI" was not going to work forever, you need to learn how to actually parse current failures and what those publicized failures are actually feeding into, as a general discourse.

We need to talk about AI.

AI is not magic or the devil. It's a tool. It's like a CNC. It's big, industrial, expensive and technically niche. Sure, your average Joe might do some silly or cool shit with it, and if you try to bring your CNC stuff into a handcrafts market and take up a stall, there's going to be problems. But you need to be able to parse it. You need to be able to understand what KIND of AI you're dealing with. You need to be able to handle distinctions and nuances and texture.

Because only by understanding that will you be able to advocate appropriately. If AI is stealing your data but not creating gen AI content, for example. Knowing that difference fucking matters! You cannot demand regulation and policy to be built, if you're not able to engage and describe reality as it is.

We need to be able to talk about AI.

And it starts with you, doing the reading, putting in the time and the effort. Listening to experts. ACTUAL experts, not just randos in the internet. People who understand how the tech works and what the impacts are. People who are actively working to prevent erosion to our rights. People who know what the fuck they're talking about.

They're out there! So maybe next time you hear the dreaded "AI", take the plunge and look for the experts and their opinions, instead of the screeching asshole trying to give you a fucking heart attack.

Sources:

AT Protocol

Attie

Agentic environment for the Atmosphere

ATmosphereConf 2026 VOD Rooms

Browse AtmosphereConf 2026 VODs by room, with schedule-first navigation and Streamplace playback.

The Marshmallow Test - Bluesky signals it's willing to eat its young

At AtmosphereConf, Bluesky celebrated its community, then signaled it's willing to eat them alive. No context. No acknowledgment. I was in t

Exploring the Frontier of Feeds - The Open Garden

Reorienting distribution and monetization in the attention economy.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Redirecting-the-Focus-of-the-Agenda%3A-Testing-the-of-Jang-Park/d1ee83cfc223bd502d1ad40c196797c754f9b81e

[curlicuecal]

[Quoted:] The most important one is that fearmongering is not tethered to reality. Therefore, it cannot effectively interact WITH reality. Rie, what the fuck does that mean? It means that people started having meltdowns in the comments and quotes of the announcement, and landed on things like "block the BlueSky profile for the app, that way they can't use your content in their feeds!" being passed on as secret wisdom to fight against the AI overtaking the space!

This is veritable nonsense. This is like saying "if you block the twitter profile of the IRS, you don't have to pay taxes anymore!" Or something equally asinine. This is pure mythologizing as a way to cope with a reality you don't understand. And fearmongering makes that anxiety worse. It actively prevents people from doing things that would actually further their goals

[caparrucia]

We need to talk about AI fearmongering.

I've been putting it off but damn, we really gotta talk about AI fearmongering. Specially now that the bubble is reaching criticality.

You need to stop fearmongering about AI. No, I get it, you hate AI. You hate the way it's been shoved into everything without rhyme or reason, purely for the sake of keeping an already bursting bubble going and making money for the most unlikable billionaire dweebs out there.

I get it.

You still need to stop fearmongering about AI.

We have gone past criticality on this. Fearmongering, if it was ever truly effective as a tool to fight AI, is no longer effective. AI is everywhere. Fearmongering about it doesn't actually get anything done about it, it only stacks more harm on people. And if your whole thing is harm reduction, you should be cringing right now. But if it's not, let me explain.

But again, for those of you with a tiktok level of attention span: tl;dr, AI fearmongering is BAD at actually getting rid of AI; I want you to be BETTER at advocating for AI free spaces.

Let's talk about BlueSky, the ATmosphere, the AT Proto conference and BlueSky's new AI tool to create feeds, Attie. This is gonna be my example of why AI fearmongering is actually terrible at what people think it's doing. Something that ACTUALLY happened, with links so you can go and see for yourself how these conversations happen... or more to the point, don't.

For those of you who don't know, BlueSky is part of a social media environment called the AT Protocol (also known as ATProto, or the ATmosphere, depending on the circles you hang out with). No, it is not a replacement for X/Twitter in the strictest sense. And a lot of the community issues that people have on the platform are often a result of misunderstanding what the platform IS.

Think of the ATmosphere as a park: it is a set of a standards for social media things like posts and likes and feeds. Those standards are rules that anyone in the park has to follow, and which in turn enable everyone in the park to connect/talk with each other. A PDS, or a Personal Data Server, is the picnic table that one can bring in at the park, to enjoy the stuff AT the park. BlueSky is a PDS. The reason BlueSky gets to moderate your content when you make an account with them, is because you are HOSTING your content on their servers. That means they're directly on the hook for whatever content you put in there. You're also not paying for hosting, so they get to make whatever rules they want as to what content is and isn't allowed.

But the magic of ATProto is that if you don't like their content restrictions, but you do like the vibe of the ATmosphere, you can make your OWN server or PDS, and move to host all your stuff THERE. And suddenly BlueSky's restrictions no longer apply to you. (Legal restrictions will still apply to you, I should have to specify that, and yet...)

What all this means is that a bunch of nerds got together and said things like "wow, traditional social media sucks" and "I fucking hate it when there's a site migration and I lose track of ALL MY FRIENDS" and then designed an open source standard that allows users to OWN their own data and therefore be able to share it across multiple platforms without having to change services. It's all very technical and very cool. If you give a shit about the free internet, you should be very excited about ATProto. It was built by people who actually care and understand the issues of mainstream social media and actually want to DO something about it.

Anyway, where does the AI fearmongering come into all this? One of the limitations for the ATmosphere is the fact you CAN build custom feeds - basically your very own algorithm, built by you, controlled by you and monetized by fucking no one - but you need a certain threshold of technical knowledge to do it. And unfortunately, as BlueSky has grown, and with it, brought growth to the ATmosphere as a whole, the average technical skillset of the population has gone down.

Listen, Britney who works at Starbucks and just wants a place to see pictures of cute dogs is working for minimum wage during Current Events. Britney does not have time to learn how to fucking code in order to build a personalized feed of ONLY cute dogs. Even though having such a feed would materially impact her overall mental health in a very positive way.

There are hundreds of thousands of Britneys all over the ATmosphere.

Feeds have been a goddamn pain in the ass for everyone involved.

Enter the ATmosphere conference of 2026. In it, BlueSky showcased Attie, an AI feed builder, designed to break down the barrier of access to feeds. Here's what you need to know about Attie:

It is NOT part of BlueSky.

It is a SEPARATE app for the ATmosphere.

It was built BY the team at BlueSky, and it is OWNED by BlueSky, but it is not integrated INTO BlueSky. There are currently no plans or any intention to integrate Attie into BlueSky.

The AI bit of Attie is this: It uses a version of Claude Code to interpret instructions given in Natural Language and converts them into the code required to build a feed. The feed is now matched to your user, owned by you, and therefore it will follow you, persistently, across the ATmosphere, regardless of which platform or service you're using, ready for deployment.

The mostly tech illiterate userbase from Bluesky lost its mind and then immediately spiraled into fearmongering about AI.

And here I want to talk and describe why fearomngering about AI is effectively useless:

The most important one is that fearmongering is not tethered to reality. Therefore, it cannot effectively interact WITH reality. Rie, what the fuck does that mean? It means that people started having meltdowns in the comments and quotes of the announcement, and landed on things like "block the BlueSky profile for the app, that way they can't use your content in their feeds!" being passed on as secret wisdom to fight against the AI overtaking the space!

This is veritable nonsense. This is like saying "if you block the twitter profile of the IRS, you don't have to pay taxes anymore!" Or something equally asinine. This is pure mythologizing as a way to cope with a reality you don't understand. And fearmongering makes that anxiety worse. It actively prevents people from doing things that would actually further their goals, by allowing them to wallow in distraction and feel satisfied that they've Done Something About, even though they really haven't.

It's also actively doing harm to people who don't know better on how to parse the fearmongering. I saw no less than five people having meltdowns in the quotes of the announcement about having to leave the site because, to their understanding (fueled by fearmongering in their feeds), Attie is basically Grok but Woke. So BlueSky is the same as X/Twitter and they might as well leave before all their stuff is stolen and fed into an AI.

Also, let's not leave it implied: this kind of fearmongering makes you look stupid. It just does. Anyone who knows anything about the tech is squinting at this reaction and mentally dismissing anything you have to say on the matter because you clearly don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Fearmongering makes you look and sound hysterical and irrational, and therefore a lost cause as far as actual productive conversation goes. Any real, valid concerns you might have are now buried beneath the histrionics of everything you're yelling about that is not in fact happening in reality.

And that's my key point: fearmongering disconnects you from reality. It presents to you an easily understandable yet profoundly distressing window into the world and tells you "that's how it is!" and if you do not have any other access point into reality, but the fearmongering space you're stuck in? There's virtually no distinction between you and anyone else who is fully removed from reality and being loud about it.

Fearmongering puts you in a state where no solutions are available to you. No mitigation is acceptable. No compromise is possible. This is by design: fearmongering does not trade in reality, it trades on feelings and the imaginary evil will always be bigger and stronger and grander than anything reality can offer to make it better. Nothing will ever be good enough to stop the crimes of the evil that exists solely in your head.

The kicker is that this reduces you to a loud, irrational minority that can safely be ignored, because the louder you get, the more obvious it is you're not engaging with reality. And if you're not engaging with reality, why would anyone bother engaging with you? And thus the vicious cycle around this: the less reality engages with you, the less you have an incentive to actually engage with it. Fearmongering doesn't feel GOOD in the traditional sense: it fills you with paranoia against impossible adversaries that are coming at you from all angles. But it is comforting in the same way as finally having a diagnostic after years of fighting to have your pain be taken seriously: you KNEW something was wrong, and you finally have an me for it! Even though you don't understand and are discouraged from discussing and better grasping what it means. It leaves you unable to parse reality or make any meaningful commentary about it, because you have so many assumptions based on nothing, that most people just refuse to engage. Trying to dismantle the web of stupidity feels like an impossible task that only someone who truly loves you will see the point in doing: in rescuing you from ignorance and suffering and let you grasp reality again, because they care about YOU and what you have to say.

Here's the kicker: the fearmongering about AI smothered a different conversation that weekend. A much more grounded, more realistic conversation, criticizing BlueSky for bringing AI into the mix.

Because there are teams currently working on solving the feeds issue, without fancy AI. Because feeds are a design issue for the ATmosphere and fixing them is priority to bring in better quality of service across the entire ecosystem.

But those teams got horrifically shafted and pushed aside by the introduction of Attie. It doesn't matter whether Attie works or not: because of BlueSky's size and presence in the ATmosphere, they wield very real power in the space. And their venture capital funding and fancy AI tools are actively pushing out real developers trying to provide solutions that aren't built on ethically dubious technology that is also currently subject of a bubble and all the uncertainty and instability that comes with that bubble.

And those are real, valid criticisms that BlueSky had to actually acknowledge and respond to, as opposed to a nondescript "wow, you guys are upset about AI, we heard you, lol" that amounts to nothing.

We're at the point where the bubble is starting to collapse. More and more people are calling bullshit on it. There are real risks associated to the technology that aren't the same three broken telephone complaints that people parrot out without really understanding what they mean: AI is bad at what it does! AI is bad for the environment! AI is built on stealing!

Here's the thing: I'm not saying those statements are not true, but they're nuanced. And this is a nuanced conversation. What happens now is going to be the result of a nuanced conversation. If you don't open yourself to nuance about this, you're not going to have a seat at the conversation.

If all you are willing to do is parrot talking points you don't understand and partake in the fearmongering, regardless of who it hurts and how ineffective it is: at this point, I don't think you're anti-AI or AI critical.

At this point, I think you're either an idiot or a plant.

We desperately need to have nuanced, difficult conversations about the datasets that exist today. We need to talk about usage and privacy rights and the way AI has gotten actually really good at the one thing it was built to do: code. We need to talk about how early failure is not permanent: the same way we told you that "six fingers is the mark of AI" was not going to work forever, you need to learn how to actually parse current failures and what those publicized failures are actually feeding into, as a general discourse.

We need to talk about AI.

AI is not magic or the devil. It's a tool. It's like a CNC. It's big, industrial, expensive and technically niche. Sure, your average Joe might do some silly or cool shit with it, and if you try to bring your CNC stuff into a handcrafts market and take up a stall, there's going to be problems. But you need to be able to parse it. You need to be able to understand what KIND of AI you're dealing with. You need to be able to handle distinctions and nuances and texture.

Because only by understanding that will you be able to advocate appropriately. If AI is stealing your data but not creating gen AI content, for example. Knowing that difference fucking matters! You cannot demand regulation and policy to be built, if you're not able to engage and describe reality as it is.

We need to be able to talk about AI.

And it starts with you, doing the reading, putting in the time and the effort. Listening to experts. ACTUAL experts, not just randos in the internet. People who understand how the tech works and what the impacts are. People who are actively working to prevent erosion to our rights. People who know what the fuck they're talking about.

They're out there! So maybe next time you hear the dreaded "AI", take the plunge and look for the experts and their opinions, instead of the screeching asshole trying to give you a fucking heart attack.

Sources:

AT Protocol

Attie

Agentic environment for the Atmosphere

ATmosphereConf 2026 VOD Rooms

Browse AtmosphereConf 2026 VODs by room, with schedule-first navigation and Streamplace playback.

The Marshmallow Test - Bluesky signals it's willing to eat its young

At AtmosphereConf, Bluesky celebrated its community, then signaled it's willing to eat them alive. No context. No acknowledgment. I was in t

Exploring the Frontier of Feeds - The Open Garden

Reorienting distribution and monetization in the attention economy.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Redirecting-the-Focus-of-the-Agenda%3A-Testing-the-of-Jang-Park/d1ee83cfc223bd502d1ad40c196797c754f9b81e

[curlicuecal]

[Quoted:] The most important one is that fearmongering is not tethered to reality. Therefore, it cannot effectively interact WITH reality. Rie, what the fuck does that mean? It means that people started having meltdowns in the comments and quotes of the announcement, and landed on things like "block the BlueSky profile for the app, that way they can't use your content in their feeds!" being passed on as secret wisdom to fight against the AI overtaking the space!

This is veritable nonsense. This is like saying "if you block the twitter profile of the IRS, you don't have to pay taxes anymore!" Or something equally asinine. This is pure mythologizing as a way to cope with a reality you don't understand. And fearmongering makes that anxiety worse. It actively prevents people from doing things that would actually further their goals

[caparrucia]

We need to talk about AI fearmongering.

I've been putting it off but damn, we really gotta talk about AI fearmongering. Specially now that the bubble is reaching criticality.

You need to stop fearmongering about AI. No, I get it, you hate AI. You hate the way it's been shoved into everything without rhyme or reason, purely for the sake of keeping an already bursting bubble going and making money for the most unlikable billionaire dweebs out there.

I get it.

You still need to stop fearmongering about AI.

We have gone past criticality on this. Fearmongering, if it was ever truly effective as a tool to fight AI, is no longer effective. AI is everywhere. Fearmongering about it doesn't actually get anything done about it, it only stacks more harm on people. And if your whole thing is harm reduction, you should be cringing right now. But if it's not, let me explain.

But again, for those of you with a tiktok level of attention span: tl;dr, AI fearmongering is BAD at actually getting rid of AI; I want you to be BETTER at advocating for AI free spaces.

Let's talk about BlueSky, the ATmosphere, the AT Proto conference and BlueSky's new AI tool to create feeds, Attie. This is gonna be my example of why AI fearmongering is actually terrible at what people think it's doing. Something that ACTUALLY happened, with links so you can go and see for yourself how these conversations happen... or more to the point, don't.

For those of you who don't know, BlueSky is part of a social media environment called the AT Protocol (also known as ATProto, or the ATmosphere, depending on the circles you hang out with). No, it is not a replacement for X/Twitter in the strictest sense. And a lot of the community issues that people have on the platform are often a result of misunderstanding what the platform IS.

Think of the ATmosphere as a park: it is a set of a standards for social media things like posts and likes and feeds. Those standards are rules that anyone in the park has to follow, and which in turn enable everyone in the park to connect/talk with each other. A PDS, or a Personal Data Server, is the picnic table that one can bring in at the park, to enjoy the stuff AT the park. BlueSky is a PDS. The reason BlueSky gets to moderate your content when you make an account with them, is because you are HOSTING your content on their servers. That means they're directly on the hook for whatever content you put in there. You're also not paying for hosting, so they get to make whatever rules they want as to what content is and isn't allowed.

But the magic of ATProto is that if you don't like their content restrictions, but you do like the vibe of the ATmosphere, you can make your OWN server or PDS, and move to host all your stuff THERE. And suddenly BlueSky's restrictions no longer apply to you. (Legal restrictions will still apply to you, I should have to specify that, and yet...)

What all this means is that a bunch of nerds got together and said things like "wow, traditional social media sucks" and "I fucking hate it when there's a site migration and I lose track of ALL MY FRIENDS" and then designed an open source standard that allows users to OWN their own data and therefore be able to share it across multiple platforms without having to change services. It's all very technical and very cool. If you give a shit about the free internet, you should be very excited about ATProto. It was built by people who actually care and understand the issues of mainstream social media and actually want to DO something about it.

Anyway, where does the AI fearmongering come into all this? One of the limitations for the ATmosphere is the fact you CAN build custom feeds - basically your very own algorithm, built by you, controlled by you and monetized by fucking no one - but you need a certain threshold of technical knowledge to do it. And unfortunately, as BlueSky has grown, and with it, brought growth to the ATmosphere as a whole, the average technical skillset of the population has gone down.

Listen, Britney who works at Starbucks and just wants a place to see pictures of cute dogs is working for minimum wage during Current Events. Britney does not have time to learn how to fucking code in order to build a personalized feed of ONLY cute dogs. Even though having such a feed would materially impact her overall mental health in a very positive way.

There are hundreds of thousands of Britneys all over the ATmosphere.

Feeds have been a goddamn pain in the ass for everyone involved.

Enter the ATmosphere conference of 2026. In it, BlueSky showcased Attie, an AI feed builder, designed to break down the barrier of access to feeds. Here's what you need to know about Attie:

It is NOT part of BlueSky.

It is a SEPARATE app for the ATmosphere.

It was built BY the team at BlueSky, and it is OWNED by BlueSky, but it is not integrated INTO BlueSky. There are currently no plans or any intention to integrate Attie into BlueSky.

The AI bit of Attie is this: It uses a version of Claude Code to interpret instructions given in Natural Language and converts them into the code required to build a feed. The feed is now matched to your user, owned by you, and therefore it will follow you, persistently, across the ATmosphere, regardless of which platform or service you're using, ready for deployment.

The mostly tech illiterate userbase from Bluesky lost its mind and then immediately spiraled into fearmongering about AI.

And here I want to talk and describe why fearomngering about AI is effectively useless:

The most important one is that fearmongering is not tethered to reality. Therefore, it cannot effectively interact WITH reality. Rie, what the fuck does that mean? It means that people started having meltdowns in the comments and quotes of the announcement, and landed on things like "block the BlueSky profile for the app, that way they can't use your content in their feeds!" being passed on as secret wisdom to fight against the AI overtaking the space!

This is veritable nonsense. This is like saying "if you block the twitter profile of the IRS, you don't have to pay taxes anymore!" Or something equally asinine. This is pure mythologizing as a way to cope with a reality you don't understand. And fearmongering makes that anxiety worse. It actively prevents people from doing things that would actually further their goals, by allowing them to wallow in distraction and feel satisfied that they've Done Something About, even though they really haven't.

It's also actively doing harm to people who don't know better on how to parse the fearmongering. I saw no less than five people having meltdowns in the quotes of the announcement about having to leave the site because, to their understanding (fueled by fearmongering in their feeds), Attie is basically Grok but Woke. So BlueSky is the same as X/Twitter and they might as well leave before all their stuff is stolen and fed into an AI.

Also, let's not leave it implied: this kind of fearmongering makes you look stupid. It just does. Anyone who knows anything about the tech is squinting at this reaction and mentally dismissing anything you have to say on the matter because you clearly don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Fearmongering makes you look and sound hysterical and irrational, and therefore a lost cause as far as actual productive conversation goes. Any real, valid concerns you might have are now buried beneath the histrionics of everything you're yelling about that is not in fact happening in reality.

And that's my key point: fearmongering disconnects you from reality. It presents to you an easily understandable yet profoundly distressing window into the world and tells you "that's how it is!" and if you do not have any other access point into reality, but the fearmongering space you're stuck in? There's virtually no distinction between you and anyone else who is fully removed from reality and being loud about it.

Fearmongering puts you in a state where no solutions are available to you. No mitigation is acceptable. No compromise is possible. This is by design: fearmongering does not trade in reality, it trades on feelings and the imaginary evil will always be bigger and stronger and grander than anything reality can offer to make it better. Nothing will ever be good enough to stop the crimes of the evil that exists solely in your head.

The kicker is that this reduces you to a loud, irrational minority that can safely be ignored, because the louder you get, the more obvious it is you're not engaging with reality. And if you're not engaging with reality, why would anyone bother engaging with you? And thus the vicious cycle around this: the less reality engages with you, the less you have an incentive to actually engage with it. Fearmongering doesn't feel GOOD in the traditional sense: it fills you with paranoia against impossible adversaries that are coming at you from all angles. But it is comforting in the same way as finally having a diagnostic after years of fighting to have your pain be taken seriously: you KNEW something was wrong, and you finally have an me for it! Even though you don't understand and are discouraged from discussing and better grasping what it means. It leaves you unable to parse reality or make any meaningful commentary about it, because you have so many assumptions based on nothing, that most people just refuse to engage. Trying to dismantle the web of stupidity feels like an impossible task that only someone who truly loves you will see the point in doing: in rescuing you from ignorance and suffering and let you grasp reality again, because they care about YOU and what you have to say.

Here's the kicker: the fearmongering about AI smothered a different conversation that weekend. A much more grounded, more realistic conversation, criticizing BlueSky for bringing AI into the mix.

Because there are teams currently working on solving the feeds issue, without fancy AI. Because feeds are a design issue for the ATmosphere and fixing them is priority to bring in better quality of service across the entire ecosystem.

But those teams got horrifically shafted and pushed aside by the introduction of Attie. It doesn't matter whether Attie works or not: because of BlueSky's size and presence in the ATmosphere, they wield very real power in the space. And their venture capital funding and fancy AI tools are actively pushing out real developers trying to provide solutions that aren't built on ethically dubious technology that is also currently subject of a bubble and all the uncertainty and instability that comes with that bubble.

And those are real, valid criticisms that BlueSky had to actually acknowledge and respond to, as opposed to a nondescript "wow, you guys are upset about AI, we heard you, lol" that amounts to nothing.

We're at the point where the bubble is starting to collapse. More and more people are calling bullshit on it. There are real risks associated to the technology that aren't the same three broken telephone complaints that people parrot out without really understanding what they mean: AI is bad at what it does! AI is bad for the environment! AI is built on stealing!

Here's the thing: I'm not saying those statements are not true, but they're nuanced. And this is a nuanced conversation. What happens now is going to be the result of a nuanced conversation. If you don't open yourself to nuance about this, you're not going to have a seat at the conversation.

If all you are willing to do is parrot talking points you don't understand and partake in the fearmongering, regardless of who it hurts and how ineffective it is: at this point, I don't think you're anti-AI or AI critical.

At this point, I think you're either an idiot or a plant.

We desperately need to have nuanced, difficult conversations about the datasets that exist today. We need to talk about usage and privacy rights and the way AI has gotten actually really good at the one thing it was built to do: code. We need to talk about how early failure is not permanent: the same way we told you that "six fingers is the mark of AI" was not going to work forever, you need to learn how to actually parse current failures and what those publicized failures are actually feeding into, as a general discourse.

We need to talk about AI.

AI is not magic or the devil. It's a tool. It's like a CNC. It's big, industrial, expensive and technically niche. Sure, your average Joe might do some silly or cool shit with it, and if you try to bring your CNC stuff into a handcrafts market and take up a stall, there's going to be problems. But you need to be able to parse it. You need to be able to understand what KIND of AI you're dealing with. You need to be able to handle distinctions and nuances and texture.

Because only by understanding that will you be able to advocate appropriately. If AI is stealing your data but not creating gen AI content, for example. Knowing that difference fucking matters! You cannot demand regulation and policy to be built, if you're not able to engage and describe reality as it is.

We need to be able to talk about AI.

And it starts with you, doing the reading, putting in the time and the effort. Listening to experts. ACTUAL experts, not just randos in the internet. People who understand how the tech works and what the impacts are. People who are actively working to prevent erosion to our rights. People who know what the fuck they're talking about.

They're out there! So maybe next time you hear the dreaded "AI", take the plunge and look for the experts and their opinions, instead of the screeching asshole trying to give you a fucking heart attack.

Sources:

AT Protocol

Attie

Agentic environment for the Atmosphere

ATmosphereConf 2026 VOD Rooms

Browse AtmosphereConf 2026 VODs by room, with schedule-first navigation and Streamplace playback.

The Marshmallow Test - Bluesky signals it's willing to eat its young

At AtmosphereConf, Bluesky celebrated its community, then signaled it's willing to eat them alive. No context. No acknowledgment. I was in t

Exploring the Frontier of Feeds - The Open Garden

Reorienting distribution and monetization in the attention economy.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Redirecting-the-Focus-of-the-Agenda%3A-Testing-the-of-Jang-Park/d1ee83cfc223bd502d1ad40c196797c754f9b81e

[curlicuecal]

[Quoted:] The most important one is that fearmongering is not tethered to reality. Therefore, it cannot effectively interact WITH reality. Rie, what the fuck does that mean? It means that people started having meltdowns in the comments and quotes of the announcement, and landed on things like "block the BlueSky profile for the app, that way they can't use your content in their feeds!" being passed on as secret wisdom to fight against the AI overtaking the space!

This is veritable nonsense. This is like saying "if you block the twitter profile of the IRS, you don't have to pay taxes anymore!" Or something equally asinine. This is pure mythologizing as a way to cope with a reality you don't understand. And fearmongering makes that anxiety worse. It actively prevents people from doing things that would actually further their goals

[ceescedasticity]

It's easy to point at a movie or TV show or book or fic and say "head injuries don't work like that" or "they would be dead of blood loss" and so on and so forth.

But when we're talking fantasy/sci-fi/something else where we are already making some counter-to-reality assumptions—

Canon has clearly established that in-universe, head injuries (for example) do work like that.

In most cases canon has not clearly stated that in-universe human biology is the same as real-world human biology.

So, given the ways in which injuries/medicine/illnesses have been seen to work in canon, what can we conclude about the unseen biological differences there must be?

[ekingston]

sometimes i say things on twitter and then make a little graph about it

[ceescedasticity]

Well, I mean. Originally "fan" came from "fanatic", and that doesn't have to be positive.

For that matter a lot of sports fans appear to spend a lot of time complaining about everything too, so I think it's safe to say "fan" has multiple definitions — one is liking something, but the other is caring very much.

[majestictortoise]

today in pedantry born of extreme annoyance and doesn't-anybody-go-to-school-anymore grumpiness:

the term "sound barrier" has absolutely nothing to do with how loud something is.

a powerful singer does not break the sound barrier. a loud crowd does not break the sound barrier. if you hear an opera soprano belt out an aria and you say she broke the sound barrier you sound like a fucking idiot. that is not what it means.

"but it's just a joke why should i car--"

no. sit down. THAT IS NOT WHAT IT MEANS.

"sound barrier" refers to the increase in aerodynamic drag that occurs as a moving object approaches the speed of sound.

it's called a "barrier" because when the first aircraft starting reaching high enough speeds, they would shake so much pilots were afraid they would get torn apart. it was perceived as a real physical limit, but that perception was false. there is no actual barrier. there is only engineering; it was the drag on the aircraft making them feel like they were shaking apart. turns out if planes are built well enough and go fast enough, they can break the sound barrier just fine without falling apart. the first time this happened was in 1947, in a plane flown by US Air Force pilot Chuck Yaeger.

this means that "breaking the sound barrier" applies to things that are moving very fast, not to things that are very loud.

please read that sentence again to make sure it sinks in. fast, not loud. read it again because tiktok has been lying to you and you need to unlearn what you have learned.

(that also means it applies only where there is a speed of sound, which is not everywhere in the universe. but let's not complicate things by thinking about a pure vacuums or the extreme low density of space.)

the speed of sound varies depending on the density of what it's moving through, but at sea level on Earth it's about 770 miles per hour. once an object is going faster than the speed of sound, it is supersonic--and, again, that refers to speed, not volume. bullets break the sound barrier even if they are muffled at firing. a bullwhip can be snapped fast enough that the very end breaks the sound barrier, even if the noise they make is a sharp crack and not unusually loud.

but people standing still and shouting or singing do not, because nothing that is standing still can break the sound barrier. so unless unless you are sharing a cool vid of a soprano getting yeeted out of an operatic cannon at >770 mph, she has not broken the sound barrier. and if that is what you are sharing, she breaks the sound barrier whether or not she's singing her aria.

there can be a very loud noise associated with objects moving so fast they have broken the sound barrier. that noise is called a sonic boom, and it happens because the object is generating shock waves as it travels. it's not a single boom; it only sounds like that because when you hear it you are listening at a single point. it is in fact a continuous, traveling shock wave that happens as long as the object is moving faster than the speed of sound. it's just that you only hear it when the shock wave passes directly over you, so it sounds like a finite noise. it's also not necessarily a boom. it can be a crack or a snap or a clap or whatever. it's just called a sonic boom because the ones generated by supersonic aircraft are big fucking booms.

in conclusion please stop saying loud noises break the sound barrier.

🚫 wrong kind of hyperbole: "wow that man shouted loud enough to break the sound barrier!"

✔ right kind of hyperbole: "wow that man ran fast enough to break the sound barrier!"

[ceescedasticity]

Adding on: "Terminal velocity" is not the speed at which falling will kill you!

"Terminal velocity" is the maximum speed an object can reach when falling — the speed at which force up due to air resistance cancels out force down due to gravity+object's mass.

Objects have different terminal velocities depending on their surface area/shape/surface characteristics and their mass. A human will hit different terminal velocities depending on what position they're in.

Impact at and abrupt deceleration from a human's terminal velocity are likely to be fatal. But that's not what it means.

[alexanderwales]

Spells are a non-renewable resource. One a spell has been cast, it can never be cast again.

But thankfully, what counts as a unique spell is permissive, and very early on in the history of wizardry, wizards found many ways to use the arcane language to specify a similar effect even if the wording was different.

And still, spells were a non-renewable resource.

There are only so many ways to call forth a beam of lancing light, only a limited number of methods of purifying food to make it safe to eat. Soon it became necessary for the wizards to start casting spells that weren't quite what they wanted: a beam of light that arced to the left, a purifying spell that added a bitter taste, some changes cosmetic and others very functional.

And still, spells were a non-renewable resource.

Wizardry was divided into ages by the historiographers. The First Age was the age of plenty, when wizards could make minor tweaks to the spells and cast as much as they liked. The Second Age was the age of modification, when wizards were jumping through hoops and using methods with side effects. But the Third Age was the age of decay, when so many spells had been used that only the oddballs were left. It was impossible to cast anything even remotely resembling a fireball, not even one that hooked to the left and exploded with sharp green shards.

It came to be that few wizards could produce a spell on their first attempt. They would try, only to discover that someone else had already taken their idea and the spell does not work. They would try again, only to discover that their second idea had also been taken. Wizard battles, which had once been glorious light shows, were reduced to two wizards standing in a field trying to be the first one to stumble upon a spell that had never been cast before.

~~~~

Here are some plot hooks:

Wizards jealously guard their knowledge, fearful that someone will learn of a "seam" of untapped spells, but they also write down every spell they know to have been cast, to reduce their search space. Obviously this trove of knowledge is highly valuable.

The existence of spell "seams", which are really just collections of spells that work off the same cluster of discrete variations, mean that wizards tend to be very specialized. The Sheep Wizard knows eight hundred ways of turning someone into a sheep, because he's studied that area of the arcane language extensively, as well as historical precedents that have been ruled out. The natural enemy of a Sheep Wizard is, of course, another Sheep Wizard.

During the Second Age, a group of wizards get together to deliberately reduce the spell-space, largely in the hopes of reducing the capacity of wizard-kind for making war. Their work largely consists of sitting around casting as many fireballs as they can, depleting all options for everyone else.

During the Third Age, a group of wizards gets together and in the spirit of mutual cooperation begins to define "spell blocks", a collection of spells that a single wizard is entitled to and all other wizards agree not to use. When you become a wizard, you're given a thousand spells which are thought to still be valid, and will lose your license to practice wizardry if you cast any spells that are outside your block. This is difficult to enforce, rife with accusations and suspicion, but is thought to be better than nothing.

During the Fourth Age, a group of "wizards" (none of whom have ever actually cast a spell) are working on the arcane language in the hopes of a revival. As the age of hoarded knowledge has mostly passed, they're able to get their hands on many books that weren't previously available. One day, they invent a new form of specification that allows hundreds of thousands of new spells, re-igniting wizardry.

[ceescedasticity]

I don't know, you specify a fireball with a temperature of x degrees. Then a fireball with a temperature of x+.1 degrees. Then x+.01 degrees. You'll of course run out of variations that are obvious and easily/quickly described, but there are literally uncountably infinite options for anything with any non-discrete parameter. (X+(pi*z)-floor(pi*z) degrees…)

[unicornhorse160]

I feel like you could tack on increasingly complex tasks. fireball that turns into a horse to kick all my enemies in the head before flying away and having babies with the sun

[ceescedasticity]

I don't want to reblog the actual video but I'm pretty sure that supposed Walmart ad with the "tennis ball throw it against the wall" and random cancer mention is fake.

I checked on Snopes; it's not even there. I tried searching for 'walmart tennis ball cancer ad'; the relevant hits were the same video in several places on youtube and several reddit posts featuring the video, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/hwe5hp/tennis_ball_throw_it_against_a_wall/, which included the exchange:

As for the youtube hits, I think this is the version in the TikTok (and the reddit posts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOEQLqt2HFc It doesn't give any explanation or attribution, so it's understandable people might think it's real.

This one is older, more than twice as long, contains additional content (giving a low price for tennis balls specifically), and attributes the video to the same person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1RM2naaW-8

Why does this matter?

Mixing up parodies with real things is bad practice.

Technically the thirty-second version is probably art theft?

If this were an actual commercial it'd be funny because of how outrageous it is. If it's something made by a guy who -- it sounds like -- does shock humor, I don't really find it that funny. Matter of taste, but it makes a difference in how the video comes across, to me.

[egophiliac]

another doodle that got out of control...I don't know if I want to do the others or not, so leaving it as just Rids for now :Y

[egophiliac]

Hi Ego! How’s life going? I hope you’re doing well!

I wanted to ask you something because you’re one of the artists I really look up to.

Lately I’ve been struggling a lot with drawing. I have so many ideas I want to bring to life, but every time I try to draw a pose or a full body, I get frustrated when the proportions don’t look right — even though I didn’t used to have this problem before. I usually end up erasing everything, giving up, and then feeling guilty for spending time on TikTok instead of drawing.

It feels like I’m stuck in the same cycle over and over again: I draw something, it doesn’t look right, I erase it, I try again, erase it again, get frustrated, and end up procrastinating instead. Then, a little later, I feel the urge to draw again… and the whole cycle repeats.

I was wondering if you’ve ever gone through a phase like this — when nothing seems to turn out the way you want, or drawing just feels frustrating for a while. If you have, how did you get through it?

There’s no pressure to reply — I was just curious about your experience, knowing I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. There are so many artists out there, both small and big, who probably go through similar things.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you have a wonderful day! ❤️

thank you! :> I think that's something we all go through to some degree or another; I have...a whole bunch of half-finished drawings and comics and paintings just kinda languishing because I got so mad at them not looking Right and I needed to put them aside for a while. one of the curses of the creative gamut! personally I try to keep in mind:

-> it's a phase. this too shall pass. it's something most artists go through in some fashion and, from my own experience anyway, it's one of those things that just kinda...goes in and out. it sucks to be in it, but it's not permanent, there is another side and you will get past it and back into the drawing groove eventually. 👍👍

-> it's often a sign of improvement! one of the reasons why we get into these 'I swear I used to be able to draw, why does everything suddenly look bad' modes is because we've actually gotten better at art -- it sounds backwards, but chances are that what's actually happening is that your understanding and eye for proportions has improved, and so you're better able to recognize when it isn't right. your technical ability just needs some time to catch up with your mental understanding! (with proportions in particular, if they're feeling off to me but I can't really figure out why, then I try to really hunker down and figure out exactly what the issue is. if I can identify the specific mistakes I'm making, I know what to keep an eye out for going forward.)

-> it is absolutely okay to take breaks. despite what our brains want to tell us, there's no crime in not constantly Being Productive. if something just isn't working, it's totally fine to put it down and not think about it for a while. whether that means going on to something else, or taking a break and not drawing at all for a couple days, or whatever! (the caveat being unless it's paid work that has a deadline, but the solution there tends to be more dependent on the situation...though in my experience most people tend to be pretty understanding and will try to work with you as long as you communicate! "I need a bit more time, can I get back to you by (estimated date)?" goes a long way. ⭐️)

some of this might sound pretty obvious, but I find even just reminding myself of it kinda helps? literally just thinking "actually, I need to put this down and take a break and until this phase passes" does a lot for the ol' mental state! so I hope this helps at least a little; just keep on truckin' (and remember to take breaks) and you'll be on the other side of it soon enough. ❤️❤️❤️

[kiriashini]

TWST X OBEY ME!!

I edited sprites to make them into obey me characters!! (Idia as Levi, Cater as Asmo, Crewel as Lucifer, Jade as Barbatos, Leona as Mammon and Malleus as Satan!!!)

[kiriashini]

Part two!!!! Now all the brothers are done !!! ( silver as Belphi, Vargas as Beel, Jack as Diavolo, Minajael as Simeon and azul as solomon) Next will be in myplans: Mephisto, Luke, Raphael and Thirteen!!!

[faustique]

i love friendships that influence me to be kinder, smarter and healthier. i love when people have a positive impact on me.