Here, Queer, Full o' Fear

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and then, for reasons usually at least slightly less arbitrary, fucks off again.

> book Lestats wanted the vampire apocalypse, but in the show it's actually Gabriella's manipulation (he is now the victim)

> Lestat is abusive to Louis and Claudia, oh it's the fault of Akasha's blood actually (absolves him of guilt)

> Lestat never threatened Claudia, she was lying (absolves him of guilt)

> In the book every vampire hates Lestat's music and wanted him to stop, now they're all pro great conversion and wants him to make more music (but Gabriella has to forced him to make music which again makes him the victim)

> He never left Nicki and was there all the time as a caring partner and never abandoned Nicki for Armand to care for at all. Nicki totally just chopped his own hands off because he's crazyyyy and this was not exacerbated by Lestat abandoning him like in the book.

> In the book he hears Armand's story about Marius and decided he was a great guy and wanted to seek him out. In the show Marius was actually the one who found him and took him in which erases the whole "Lestat heard about Marius being a pedo white supremacist and thought he was a cool guy" problem.

> in the book Lestat started the band to take away the attention from Louis book so that he would be safe from danger. In the show Lestat starts the band out of ANGER at Louis???? Where did all the love go!? And also placing the blame on Louis AGAIN, for not telling Lestat about the book and making him angry...

> Lestat also states that with the band he wants EVERYONE to know that vampires are real, yes even his human fans. But in the show they have Jarda to hide his identity.....

> in the book Lestat sneaked into the crypt of Akasha and Enkil and secretly played the violin for them while Marius is away, Akasha wakes up and attacked him. In the show Akasha just seemingly wakes up due to nothing rebellious that Lestat seemed to have done as he did exactly as Marius told him.....so like now what, Lestat isn't even responsible for waking Akasha anymore?

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

(To clarify, this is a genuine question, I want to learn and be better, but I don't understand [yet] :>)

I’m willing to believe you’re being genuine here and I’m even willing to believe you might actually listen to what I have to say but I do need you to understand how bone fucking tired I am of explaining why white vegans should care about anti-Indigenous racism at this point.

I’ll start with what’s probably the simplest to understand. There are some Indigenous communities, particularly in the Subarctic but across the continent really, that do not have access to reliable and affordable food sources outside of hunting. To suggest that these communities need to give up meat to truly respect animals is to ask them to starve. This is anti-Indigenous.

Beyond that, though, is the general air of white saviorism throughout all of it. You (not you specifically, the hypothetical white vegan in this scenario) are speaking to communities who have been engaging in respectful and mutual relationships with nature and our animal relatives for generations. Not in some sort of abstract and mystical way, but like materially speaking. We tend to the land and the land tends to us. It is true that not every single Native person is living this relationship all the time, a lot of us have faced disconnection and assimilation. And across indigenous cultures these relationships are going to look different. But it is presumptuous and racist to tell us that the relationships to the land and animals our people have been cultivating since before the present white understanding of veganism ever existed is now unethical.

I don’t think this is a full comprehensive picture of the entire issue, there’s plenty more I could get into, but as I’ve said: I’m tired. There’s definitely more nuance here, for example I of course know many Indigenous people who are vegan themselves, and this exists in tandem to our culture and traditions rather than as a contrast to it. As I’ve stated over and over, I don’t believe all veganism—or even all white veganism—is inherently anti-Indigenous. Where you lose me is when you start to sever humans from animals and from nature as a system and speak in absolutes as though this is the only correct and moral way to view the world. I agree that humans often find themselves in a position as stewards of nature, I just think what those responsibilities look like in practice are far more complex than the “eating meat is always evil and wrong no matter what” crowd is making room for.