Dr. Wizard

Me: "well it's kinda--uh, you know, like--"

But then obviously you have the problems of genAI with privacy breaches and stolen datasets, and jobs doing mass layoffs and just every single tech now having an "ai assistant" that just fucks up stuff and so obviously you are like "woah this sucks hey we shouldnt use ai like this this is baaaaaad"

And from this point on you will interface with 2 kinds of people:

The pro AI people who are so dependent on it that they cant form a single thought on their own and who think youre trying to say all technology is bad and "you are trying to bring us back years and years in the past cos you hate progress" and shit

It can genuinely be a phenomenal tool for science and research, but everybody just wants to maximize labor efficiency by cutting out training and education. Once again, it is the greed of our capitalist institutions that is causing the AI bubble and everything that goes along with it, not the tool itself.

And theres people who are supposed to be my colleagues who are learning physics and genuinely cant answer a physics question without consulting with an ai "chatbot" and theres people who cant answer email without using gen ai and holy shit that sucks so bad and it does kinda "atrophize" your brain because youre not using it anymore to do the stuff you need to do but you cant give in on the "all ai is bad" brainworm

But then the other problem is you cant talk abt all of this and be taken seriously cos of those two groups i was talking abt. Group number 1 will not take you seriously for two reasons, the first is because theyre too dependent on chat-ai and the second reason is because group number 2 exists and is the loudest

"AI is superior to all of us and is going to take over all human labor!!!"

Uh, no it fucking isn't, it isn't even good at faking being an office worker, and there will always be a need for some technician to crawl into some godawful hole and fix something.

"AI is useless and consumes 99% of the world's energy!"

But in all the outrage about Neeleman, I haven't seen anyone compare her to the original tradwife liar, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I'm not referring to the Little House on the Prairie children's book series, which were actually pretty open about how poor the Ingalls family was and how many times they almost died through illness/extreme weather/starvation on that homestead stolen from Native Americans. Those novels include plenty of nostalgia and manifest destiny and libertarianism, but Ma Ingalls clearly hates being out on the homestead isolated from their neighbors. That's not trad-wife content. Maybe trad-child content.

No, long before Wilder published her first children's in 1932, she had a regular column in papers like the Missouri Ruralist and Farmer's Week in the 1910s/20s, where she would write 500-word pieces such as:

"The March of Progress"

"Classed as Illiterates"

"The Wanton Destruction of Trees"

"Kinfolks or Mere Relations?"

"Let's Not Depend on Experts"

"When Proverbs Quarrel"

"The Hidden Cost of Getting What We Want"

"Don't Call on The Government All of the Time"

"The Armor of a Smile"

Those are all real essay titles -- I've read them; you can too -- and the content is exactly what you'd expect: folksy, gently humorous, self-effacing, lite-Christian inspirational, suspicious of city life, glorifying backbreaking physical labor, full of housekeeping tips. Any single one of them could be easily repurposed into a Ballerina Farm IG caption or a TikTok voiceover with a quick edit: nothing new under the sun.

And just like Neeleman lies by omission about how their farm books are balanced, Wilder lied by omission about her own account books. Her husband Almanzo Wilder was partially paralyzed by diphtheria after their marriage and couldn't physically manage a farm alone. Caroline Fraser notes that Almanzo's parents (themselves wealthy farmers) had to pay off the mortgage on the Missouri farm or Laura and Almanzo would not have kept the property. Even with that financial help, they had a lot of rough years and it was Laura's side hustles -- selling eggs, clerking, writing columns lying about the rewarding joy of farming -- that kept them afloat. Eventually she started publishing full-length novels and their success finally put them in the black.

Tuesday, Wednesday tread through muck

Thursday maybe eat a duck

It’s Friday, Flat as Fuck

—Did you know that Juneteenth is also celebrated in a part of Mexico? Nacimiento Mexico was once home to thousands who escaped slavery in the US. As many as 10,000 slaves followed a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. —To date, many Black Mexicans from the Texas area retrace a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery. —Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions in the village of Nacimiento. —Slave hunters would patrol the southern border for escapees, led by the Texas Rangers but the Mexican army would be there waiting for them (the slave hunters) to turn them away.

plus, pride flags are meant to not only be readable as a unit, but also readable when much of the original symbol (flag design) becomes garbled or lost. a homemade flag may not have the exact colors that would match a commercially-produced asexual pride flag, for example, or even the horizontal stripes. but if your pride piece (shirt, flag, sticker, etc.) has some black, gray, white, and purple, it communicates the intended message.

basically: it's got signal strength*.

you can take a single line of pixels and color them roygbv in any order and it looks like a rainbow -- a pride flag. this is a feature, not a bug!!