you can't tell, but I'm TH trash

Sir you are under arrest for being criminally tiny.

reminder that being against ai also means being against character.ai and not using character.ai and not interacting with character.ai

i've never talked to chatgpt i've never talked to character.ai i have no interest in talking to a chatbot even if it's fun or based on my comfort character. if we want companies to stop using ai we need to tell them we aren't going to interact with it - so don't.

I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us"

One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."

I asked one of my TAs in a math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"

A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When I asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He still insisted he was right when I pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.

A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the "computational" version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often". He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.

unfortunately, because she is also a ~100yr old green sea turtle, i legally cannot touch her. she’s a protected species, and a fairly prominent individual at that, and im not one of the aquarists who dives into that tank NOR am i a vet, so i’m not among the handful of people who are ALLOWED to give her scratchies. she knows all of the divers personally, and knows that i am not one of them. she doesn’t care. she wants attention and because she’s the specialest princess in the entire universe she will do anything in her power to get it.

she also throws a big ol tantrum when i end up not petting her. she’ll stick up her head to snort water at me, slap at the platform and ladder with her fins, and then swim under the dive platform and bump her shell against the bottom — she’s a 500lb turtle, which is a lot of weight for her to be throwing around. i usually have to move pretty quick to get off the platform and onto solid ground cuz there have been times where i’ve genuinely felt like i was about to lose my balance and REALLY didn’t want to end up falling into the tank.

tl;dr: it's my internal codename for a very ambitious project to fix all of the issues with primary and secondary blogs on tumblr. the project is not actually in flight right now, it's been on the shelf for years.

gs;wm:

as you probably know, and lots of tumblr users know, primary and secondary blogs are pretty confusing. you can only like/reply as your primary, you can only make a secondary/sideblog private or have more than one member, but you can reblog and post and send messages as your secondaries, etc etc. the logic table of what you can do per blog on your account is weird, to say the least. we get feedback about this all the time.

this is a holdover from how secondary blogs were originally built: they were just tacked on to the existing user model, via your primary blog, at a time when tumblr was growing super fast. behind the scenes, your secondary blogs are the same data model as your primary blog, but the actual relationship they hold is with your primary blog, not with your account. so it's like your secondary blogs are "children" of your primary blog, rather than being siblings, as one would probably build it today if we could do it all over.

and there's a lot, lot, lot of code and plumbing that relies on this assumption, so it's not as simple as just fixing that problem and magically having the ability to like/reply/follow/etc as a sideblog. this stuff is very very old, from the time when tumblr was a blogging network first and not a social network, so it made sense then. it doesn't make sense today, from a product point of view, if you consider tumblr a social network first.

the most basic "fix" for this could be a simple account switcher, like other platforms have, but this wouldn't solve the problem for existing users who have tons of sideblogs they may want to "swap" their primary for, or reply/like as, or whatever. you'd have to make a whole new account, and/or we'd have to do some magic on our end to detach all of your sideblogs and make them into separate accounts for you, which would be pretty jarring.

personally i think that account switcher option is pretty lame: we can do better.

instead of an account switcher, i think it'd be much more interesting to be able to "act as" any of your blogs within the same interface, kind of like how fast reblogging lets you quickly choose which blog you're reblogging to. messaging lets you pick which blog you're sending as when you start a new conversation. why not have the same option when long-pressing on the like button? or the follow button? or the block button? there's some discoverability to figure out here for sure, but it's surmountable.

and this leads to some other interesting potential changes to how someone could use tumblr via multiple proper blogs, like having a different dashboard per blog. different set of likes per blog. a more straightforward way to break apart how you curate your experience on tumblr. easy to just throw away your old blog when you wanna restart, without having to make a whole new account. hence, you'd be able to have "identities", rather than a primary blog and sideblogs.

sounds neat, right? i think so. but it's a fair amount of work to get this done. a lot of untangling has to happen. it's totally doable, it's just tedious. some of the pieces are already in place on the backend, we just haven't picked up the rest of the work. it's hard to prioritize this because, while it sounds neat, the number of people who would actually use it is probably pretty small -- but we'd never know until we try.