Ehhhhh

they/them // This blog contains untagged cr spoilers. Safe until monday/tuesday. This blog aint safe for minors

[hisojuice]

i don't like hisoka

[imnotaplate]

@willskerweek Day 4 - Last Kiss

This is what actually happened in RE0. If you don’t believe me, play the game and you’ll see.

[red-garden]

MAGA boomers SHOCKED by 20y/o commie speaking fluent hog

[red-garden]

Hog 201 for anyone interested in trying this:

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

The vast majority of conservatives think of themselves as underdogs being repressed by the government/the elite, and they value personal freedom (specifically their personal freedom, they don’t care about other people). The will almost always agree with leftist points if you can find a way to blame the problem on their vague enemies (useful, since rich people are the root of most problems), and tie it back to their ability to say fuck everyone else. NEVER appeal to science, theory, logic, or human goodness. Make it seem as if you are a paranoid lunatic who trusts no one. They love it.

[findmeinthealps]

guy on a work call just accidentally said “have a nice freak-end” instead of weekend and now i desperately want that to be the new meme. have a nice freakend everybody

[goodluckdetective]

So Hank Green got caught using AI and it’s a whole huge blow up, and I really don’t have much interest in adding to the pile on.

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Anyway, my main thought here is you are not smart enough to outwit the dopamine machine. It wants your attention and nothing more. Do not assume you can resist just because you know what’s under the hood.

[goodluckdetective]

Whenever you decide to use a tool, you should consider “what is this tool designed to do” and for LLM’s that answer is “maximize user engagement.” Anything else is in service to that goal.

[goodluckdetective]

My read of this came from Hank’s own response to the situation which you can find here. I’ve screenshotted the part in particular that drew my attention and spawned this post below:

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.

4. I have book recs on this topic. As you can guess, this is an academic interest of mine. But that’s another post if folks are interested.

[homunculus-argument]

As my "I am aware that this is insane and irrational and therefore nobody can criticise me" of the day, I get irrationally pissed off by people who suck at eating.

"uguuu waah why am I feeling so yucky ;____; no I did eat today, I ate a slice of dry toast 15 hours ago, that's solid so that counts as a meal" bitch shut the fuck up if you hate chewing and swallowing that much get yourself a goddamn feeding tube. actually no I know your address, I'm coming over and I'm grabbing a garden hose from the hardware store on the way. I've never installed one before but we're about to learn together.

[homunculus-argument]

You know those things you were taught at some point, where you're 90% sure that it's bullshit, also above zero chance that it was simply made up on the spot, and you can't even remember who taught you that, but you still remember nonetheless?

I vaguely recall at some point being taught about the "terrier test", where you can determine whether a mixed dog that's part terrier breed counts as a terrier, or whether a whole breed you're unfamiliar with are terriers or not. You hould up a rope toy or something similar that the dog can safely and comfortably bite into, at your own shoulder level.

If the dog - unprompted, not encouraged or forbidden from doing so, fully voluntarily - jumps at the toy, reaches it, and dangles on by their teeth, supporting their entire body weight with jaw force and stubbornness alone, and seems to enjoy doing so, that's a terrier.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I had a friend a while back who was an old guy who worked for the city of Austin and one time I brought up all the billboards in town and he told me that actually there was a law against building new billboards in the city limits but the billboard companies found a loophole by buying old billboards and moving them into the city so they weren’t technically building new ones.

Anyways I think they ought to really run local ordinances by a business major genie or something first before they vote on them.

[carpe-mamilia]

One million pounds to the writer of this caption in the Guardian please

[datsderbunnyblog]

3rd place in a 1v1 🥀

[hotvampireadjacent]

[sgt-cookie-2]

Me (A time traveler visiting 20-year old Mozart): OK, so, this is called an electric guitar, basically instead of the body functioning as a resonance chamber, it produces music by harnessing the power of lightning. Do you have any other questions?

Mozart (Currently shredding Violin Concerto No. 1 on the guitar, having figured it out within 30 seconds): What other music can be made from harnessed lightning?

Me (Loading up some heavy dubstep): Oh, we're just getting started.

[bisexualhunterbiden]

Something that annoys me is the constant whining about "more queer spaces, more queer communities" but then they're immediately like "yeah! And we need ones that don't cost money or require a purchase!"

Girl that's exactly why they close down after a year. You NEED money to keep these places open. There's no magic Gay Money Pot with endless cash to keep these places open. It requires YOU to put your money where your values are!!

[cyberpunkpavlichenko]

Speaking as a childhood Harry Potter fan, the enduring persistence of its popularity including amongst adults is 100% because it is slop without substance.

It flirts with the idea of rebellion and emancipation from slavery but ultimately discredits those notions by having the rebel leader become a lead cop in the institution that was repressing him and by making emancipation seem silly.

It reflects the chauvinisms of a British aristocrat who offers an impossible narrative of an abused child escaping abuse through the purity of their Aryan magic blood. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t even pretend to offer catharsis or self-actualization, merely hundreds of pages of occasionally racist drivel about a special little boy who joins the SS after reforming them from the inside.

That’s why it has maintained such reverence - because it doesn’t actually offer a subversive story but the aesthetic of one while reflecting the conservative biases of the author. It speaks to a certain liberal perspective that is progressive only so far as the oppressed don’t hurt their feelings.

[soramame7]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

[hotvampireadjacent]