I ran into this post years ago and to be honest, it has completely reoriented the way I engage with food.
Like. I’ve always sorta understood that things grow moldy or stale or sour or such if left out, but I never really internalized it in a meaningful way.
But now I’m just like.
Yeah. The hungering dust. There exists omnivorous dust in the air that will eat my food if I don’t.
Those bagels have been sitting there for a week. Are we going to eat them soon or are we leaving them for the hungering dust?
Pizza’s been sitting out on the counter for an hour. Everyone’s enjoying the pizza, but if we don’t want “everyone” to include the hungering dust then we should probably put it away soon.
That’s just. That’s how food works to me now. There exists an invisible predator in the air that hungers for your yummies, and it will not hesitate to eat your food if you don’t make the effort to protect and preserve it. And eat what can’t be preserved before the dust can.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
This actually stumped me for a bit because musically I’m a real ~vibes~ person. Or as I pretentiously used to call it growing up “emotional resonance.”
Which was a fancy way of saying that half the music I listened to was in a language I don’t speak and I just liked the way it sounded.
Anyway, lyrically my two favorite things are narrative songs like The mariner’s revenge song by the Decemberists (short fiction in song format)
Or that have really visceral imagery like Will Wood’s Skeleton Appreciation Day In Vestal, NY
This is a comment I got on a post about my students getting flagged for false AI detection.
This comment caught me off guard for a few reasons. And while it's probably just rage bait, it's a useful jumping-off point for some thoughts I've had regardless.
First, I find the assumption that I would performatively do anything on this site kind of funny.
This is Tumblr.
The numbers here have less value than the arcade tickets you trade in for a plastic slide whistle. We are screaming into a kaleidoscope of fandoms, inside jokes, and posts about Victorian sewer systems. The idea that I would carefully construct a public performance here feels absurd.
But the bigger point is the claim that there's no meaningful difference between using AI to help write a paper and using the internet or a computer in general.
Because there is a difference.
If I had to put it poetically, it's the difference between writing your thoughts in a notebook and releasing a parrot into a crowded dinner party, letting it listen to six hundred conversations at once, and then treating the resulting word salad as though it possesses intention.
The internet is a library.
A tool.
A search engine helps you locate information.
None of those things are attempting to generate the answer for you.
You still have to read.
You still have to evaluate.
You still have to decide whether a source is trustworthy, whether an argument makes sense, whether a claim can be substantiated.
You still have to do the thinking.
A large language model does something fundamentally different.
It takes an input and generates an output based on patterns found in its training data. It does not know whether the answer is true. It does not understand the argument it is making. It cannot distinguish between a correct statement and an incorrect one in the way a reasoning mind can.
What it does is predict what a convincing answer would probably look like.
Fact checking matters.
Source verification matters.
Understanding where information comes from matters.
Knowing how an argument was constructed matters.
Because if your process for writing becomes "generate paragraph, accept paragraph," then you've skipped the very thing writing is supposed to cultivate.
And that's the part that concerns me.
Not because I hate the concept of machine learning.
I don't.
What people commonly call AI is, at its core, a method of processing and generating information through pattern recognition. As a concept, it's morally neutral. It's also not particularly new.
The problem is that a lot of the public conversation around it treats these systems as though they are intelligent in the way people are intelligent, and many companies are more than happy to encourage that perception through the way they're marketed and sold.
But the systems currently available are not reasoning minds. They do not understand what they're saying. They do not possess intent, beliefs, or comprehension. They do not think through problems the way humans do. They generate outputs based on patterns found in data.
My issue isn't with the existence of the technology.
My issue is with the way large language models are currently marketed, presented, and trained.
They're sold as tools that can help you write, help you think, help you learn.
But those are three very different things.
Helping someone write should mean supporting the writing process.
Helping someone think should mean encouraging critical engagement.
Helping someone learn should mean deepening understanding.
What these systems often do instead is produce something that resembles those outcomes from the outside.
Without necessarily requiring the process that creates them.
Writing is not merely the act of producing words.
Writing is thinking made visible.
"AI", and by that I mean large language models using machine learning, are not performing independent thought. They are not reasoning in the way people do. They are taking the data they have been trained on, remixing patterns from that dataset, and generating a response that statistically resembles the kinds of answers that would fit the input.
THAT is the difference.
Writing the process of wrestling with an idea long enough to discover what you actually believe about it.
If you outsource that process entirely, you end up with text, but you've skipped the part where the writing was supposed to happen.
There's also the question of the source of the training data.
These systems are built on a staggering amount of stolen human work.
Entire lifetimes of creative and intellectual labor compressed into datasets, gathered without consent from the people who created them.
And even if someone doesn't find that ethically troubling, and I would argue there's very good reason to, it still creates an enormous tangle of copyright, ownership, attribution, and compensation issues that society is currently scrambling to understand in real time.
The technology arrived before the rules.
And we're all now living in the consequences of that.
In the original post I ended by saying:
"I spent so much of my life learning how to write. I shouldn't have to unlearn that because some computer algorithm learned from me."
I stand by that.
Because at the end of the day, my issue isn't that a machine can generate sentences.
It's that somewhere along the line we've started treating the generation of sentences as interchangeable with the act of having something to say.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
ADHD affects how I experience time, not how I experience attachment. I love you. I miss you. I just don't realize how long it’s been since I last said that, let alone messaged.
I understand that most normal functioning brains need regular engagement to maintain a bond. Absence doesn’t diminish my affection. My silence isn’t neglect or disinterest. It’s time blindness and object impermanence. The contact gap is purely neurological, not emotional. Thank you for being patient with my inconsistency and holding a seat in your heart for me.
yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.
I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
They had to replace pumpkin’s catheter at like 5 am. They said he had a moderate amount of blood in his urine from the irritation of the bladder by the catheter. And he wasn’t eating which isn’t surprising.
Absolutely destroyed my ability to do anything at work today. I’m an anxious mess.
Might leave early to go to visitor hours and try to feed him.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
