thaisha choosing not to stay quiet, demanding “redemption against what? redemption from what?”,,, that’s our girl!!!!!!!!!!

studying history is like. here's to another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be. thank you women who fight for abortion and contraception and independance from men for another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be

Thinking about how Thjazi not breaking the glyph was a snap decision. He didn't plan his own execution in advance as part of a masterstroke play, based on how he was joking with Hal he clearly expected to escape using the glyph. And then he saw that falcon, presumably Mara the Wing. Others have mentioned that he likely chose to die because what he was doing with the blood from the River Gavzidra required someone be in the Tenebral Reaches, and him seeing Mara signaled to him that her passage had been blocked, and he realized he had an express if one way ticket to exactly where his plans needed someone to be. So Thjazi chose to allow his own execution to proceed, and rushed out his last words to Hal in the scant few seconds he had. Circumstances very suddenly required him to willingly sacrifice himself for his cause, and he made that choice very decisively even as he was clearly scared to die. Thjazi was certainly a lot of things, but one of those things was that he was a man who was willing to give up everything if it meant living out his ideals.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve spent too much time as a society wondering if computers can be people

Yeah wondering where humanity begins and computers end is an interesting thought but people think that ChatGPT knows them. That thing is not a person by like any measurement we know of. It doesn’t have opinions. It regurgitates statistically likely word salad and scrapes answers wholesale from Reddit.

Questions about the potential personhood of machines feel kinda stupid now? Like these large language models clearly aren’t people. And to a certain extent, why would you want to make a computer that’s a person with feelings and personal opinions? You’ve made something and trapped it inside of a computer at the whims of programmers. Why? Why do that to something? Even if it was possible. It doesn’t fully seem like it is yet.

The guys who don’t think that computers can be people are usually the unenlightened ones in these stories but frankly I think that my cats are closer to being people than a chatbot is.

I’d die on the hill that “stranger danger” is a deeply unhelpful mentality to have. “Ooooh everyone is out to get me they’re all gonna perpetrate harm that’s actually more likely to come from someone I already know. I better never talk to anyone in my community who I don’t already know, just to be safe. I’m sure there are no other biases interwoven with this mentality” like oh my god human traffickers do not just randomly spawn in every parking lot. You don’t have to go solo hitchhiking across the country but you also don’t have to live in fear that every guy on the street is the knife man who’s gonna get you. Like have situational awareness, yeah. But most of the time the guy on the street is not knife man he’s actually just a guy on the street and he’s probably pretty chill, and you’re driving yourself crazy by living in a constant state of unnecessary fear.

Like always safety comes first, especially if you’re in a marginalized group more likely to be targeted by random people around you. But that’s different from stranger danger. I might even say that stranger danger is something that contributes to marginalized groups getting targeted by random people. Which strangers do you find distrust worthy? Why? Does vague distrust justify harmful actions in the name of self defense? Stranger danger draws everyone away from more important issues of safety (underlying bigotries, systemic injustices, abuse in the home, etc) and towards an amorphous boogeyman that has no solution, because it’s not the real cause or culprit.

Happy pride month to him