viscerally evergreen

Autistic. Pro-freedom in my politics, pro-myself always.

[janmisali]

the thing about copyright abolition is that. what makes theft bad is that something is taken away from its rightful owner. in this sense, copyright infringement is literally not theft, because making a copy of something doesn't tangibly cause the original owner to lose anything that they would otherwise have. copyright enforcement, on the other hand, does take away people's access to what should be theirs. anyone who makes art while employed by a corporation and is unable to sell their work because it does not belong to them, anyone who's been sued by a pop musician for making music that sounds vaguely similar if you don't allow the jury to listen to the actual songs, these people have far more in common with victims of theft than anyone whose copyright has been infringed

[janmisali]

legalize copyright infringement

[janmisali]

to be clear this is a fully sincere political belief that I have. I am pro copyright infringement and in fact anti "asking for permission to make derivative art"

[lady-of-vitreous-sight]

we can actually solve a lot of problems related to "the inherent imprecision of language" by just getting rid of everyone who finds overexplaining annoying.

[communistkenobi]

I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting

[communistkenobi]

everyone rightfully complains about how the r word is back in vogue now but I think the people talking about how using ChatGPT makes you a small brained lazy degenerate are getting off way too easy

[communistkenobi]

“hey don’t use eugenics language to describe a thing you don’t like”

“wow I can’t believe you’re defending the thing I don’t like”

[visgrapplinghooks]

i think there is something very reactionary and fascistic about you if your only depictions of a minority or marginalized group caring about their oppression and wanting liberations are when they're evil violent radicals who take things too far and only care about power while the (aesthetically framed as) good marginalized people shut up about it. you should perhaps question why you always jump to talk about the people you think are evil and are totally uninvested in the path forward for their well-being or liberation.

you're not saying anything unique if you say "well yeah discrimination is bad but you shouldn't be like those evil angry minorities that take things too far". you are just reinforcing a status quo where oppression is the default.

this is a post about avatar aang: the last airbender and legend of korra. and also the marvel cinematic universe's handling of wakanda. and rwby. and also about some x-men writers but not all of them because x-men as a whole is far more competent at this than the aforementioned.

this is also a post about the people who will only talk about feminism in order to criticize the feminists they don't like. and about anti-semitism. and about palestine. and ukraine. and classism. and casteism. and saneism.

[visgrapplinghooks]

hyperscale data centers are in fact more energy-efficient and carbon-efficient than if you had all the equivalent compute spread across on-premise devices. or even personal devices. people who are like "I would support local AI because it uses less energy" haven't looked into the astronomical economy of scale gains. however, this is only true in a macro-level understanding of the earth.

"the environment" is an abstraction of the real thing we actually care about: the thousands of ecosystems across the planet that need stability and trillions of plants and animals adapted to particular ecological conditions. the environment only matters to us as animals insofar as it correlates with ecological sustainability and habitability. this is why we're concerned about invasive species. the environment itself doesn't actually matter.

an underrated thing capitalism does is it leads to corpos going for the cheapest/most available solution instead of the best one. hyperscale data centers are being built in water-vulnerable places, dumping warm water at high volumes also just kills local aquatic life. they're building hyperscales in places where land is dirt cheap. we'd save so much without the perverse incentives of capitalism. we could have compute and minimize ecological damage. if you live in water-vulnerable areas or places with delicate ecosystems, fight tooth and nail to keep hyperscales the fuck away.

[visgrapplinghooks]

I forgot to mention on this post that the current rate at which hyperscalers are building out data centers is disproportionately bad for carbon emissions as well as ecological damage due to the incensed mining of rare earth metals since they default to highly destructive and unsustainable techniques used in the mining process. There's that too. We should also be fighting tooth and nail to get them to stop in general. Even if you're the most pro-AI person to ever pro-AI, literally all the buildouts right now are based on speculative future use of compute and not actual compute demand. We do not need to sacrifice ecosystems in vulnerable regions of the world for the hope that we may someday maybe have a use for all those fucking computers.

[visgrapplinghooks]

just because you can handwrite and prefer handwriting does not mean I am lazy or worth less than you for typing. it just means I'm worse at handwriting than you, and that's okay. handwriting isn't the only thing that matters.

[visgrapplinghooks]

hyperscale data centers are in fact more energy-efficient and carbon-efficient than if you had all the equivalent compute spread across on-premise devices. or even personal devices. people who are like "I would support local AI because it uses less energy" haven't looked into the astronomical economy of scale gains. however, this is only true in a macro-level understanding of the earth.

"the environment" is an abstraction of the real thing we actually care about: the thousands of ecosystems across the planet that need stability and trillions of plants and animals adapted to particular ecological conditions. the environment only matters to us as animals insofar as it correlates with ecological sustainability and habitability. this is why we're concerned about invasive species. the environment itself doesn't actually matter.

an underrated thing capitalism does is it leads to corpos going for the cheapest/most available solution instead of the best one. hyperscale data centers are being built in water-vulnerable places, dumping warm water at high volumes also just kills local aquatic life. they're building hyperscales in places where land is dirt cheap. we'd save so much without the perverse incentives of capitalism. we could have compute and minimize ecological damage. if you live in water-vulnerable areas or places with delicate ecosystems, fight tooth and nail to keep hyperscales the fuck away.

[visgrapplinghooks]

Just as I was falling asleep, something startled me out of bed. Several tiny legs scuttling over my face.

[visgrapplinghooks]

social exclusion is a form of violence. part of making the world safer for disabled folks, even if you are disabled/neurodivergent, means going out of your way to socially include people whose behavior and manner of conducting themselves is 'off-putting' or 'annoying'. you cannot hide behind social preference to gatekeep access to community while pretending you care about disabled people, even if you are disabled. neurotypicals and abled folks have been doing this to us for forever and you are socially conditioned by their preferences whether you want to be or not. we can't build safer communities without pushing back against that.

the person who literally cannot talk about anything except one particular interest and keeps interrupting people to talk about it? include them.

the person who makes vocalizations and flaps their arms in public who doesn't seem to notice the stains or their shirt? include them, too.

the person who remains silent and seems like they have no interest in social activities? they still need support, too.

I have literally been all of these people. I have been loud, disruptive, a public nuisance, a source of discomfort, and totally disconnected and dissociated from others. I would not have the support I do if my disabled friends didn't try their damndest to include me.

[visgrapplinghooks]

inclusion means accessibility and accommodation. it means shaping your community building and socializing around those people. it's not just tolerating them. we can tell when you're tolerating us. I have had so many periods in my life where I was "nobody's person". do not consign us to lives where we cannot experience social and emotional intimacy just because we trigger an ableist disgust response.

[visgrapplinghooks]

social exclusion is a form of violence. part of making the world safer for disabled folks, even if you are disabled/neurodivergent, means going out of your way to socially include people whose behavior and manner of conducting themselves is 'off-putting' or 'annoying'. you cannot hide behind social preference to gatekeep access to community while pretending you care about disabled people, even if you are disabled. neurotypicals and abled folks have been doing this to us for forever and you are socially conditioned by their preferences whether you want to be or not. we can't build safer communities without pushing back against that.

the person who literally cannot talk about anything except one particular interest and keeps interrupting people to talk about it? include them.

the person who makes vocalizations and flaps their arms in public who doesn't seem to notice the stains or their shirt? include them, too.

the person who remains silent and seems like they have no interest in social activities? they still need support, too.

I have literally been all of these people. I have been loud, disruptive, a public nuisance, a source of discomfort, and totally disconnected and dissociated from others. I would not have the support I do if my disabled friends didn't try their damndest to include me.

[visgrapplinghooks]

fandom's historical whiteness is nothing new to us brown folks but I was talking to my friend about fandom perceptions of severus snape versus james potter and I ended up making two points:

the historical woobification of snape and the villification of james potter is because white folks can't forgive bullying but they'll always forgive neo-nazis.

this ain't just about the fans, it's not entirely the fandom's fault - jkr spent considerable time trying to make you sympathize with the fascist who only reformed when he realized wizard hitler would personally kill one specific person he happened to like. because jkr has more sympathy with fascists than I think any of the fandom realized at the time.

[visgrapplinghooks]

it's no surprise how many liberals came to her defense when she went public as a transphobe because she spent her entire career cultivating a following of people who were willing to overlook bigotry but weren't willing to overlook people being mean, socially transgressive, or just being narratively framed as unlikeable

[visgrapplinghooks]

fandom's historical whiteness is nothing new to us brown folks but I was talking to my friend about fandom perceptions of severus snape versus james potter and I ended up making two points:

the historical woobification of snape and the villification of james potter is because white folks can't forgive bullying but they'll always forgive neo-nazis.

this ain't just about the fans, it's not entirely the fandom's fault - jkr spent considerable time trying to make you sympathize with the fascist who only reformed when he realized wizard hitler would personally kill one specific person he happened to like. because jkr has more sympathy with fascists than I think any of the fandom realized at the time.

[visgrapplinghooks]

i don't know who needs to hear this but it is way, way cheaper to send a letter both domestically and internationally than you think it is. you can go to the post office or ask someone else to help you with getting stamps and send some letters to your long distance friends and relationships.

[visgrapplinghooks]

normalize being a good friend and being fun and reaching out and having fun and caring about people and loving people

[visgrapplinghooks]

one of the most infuriating things about arguing with people who have major cognitive dissonance is their "mental reset".

you can temporarily get them to adopt any position, agree with you, accept the data after painstakingly convincing them it's real, only for them to somehow forget the entire conversation the next day. they hold all the same pre-argument positions the next time you speak to them.