Love that buton with the funny arrows

CW: Suicidal Ideation

BONUS:

On top of this they don't have sexual organs. This is the one that really fucked everyone up. The ancient Greeks said mad shit, one old timey English(?) guy spent years dissecting thousands and thousands of eels and never found their sexual organs.

Anyway, what happens is, when they're done fucking around in europe they say "right. Time for fuck!" and then fuck off out into the ocean and spend months swimming across the god damn Atlantic to over near the Americas. Then their digestive systems fully dissolve and THEN they develop sexual organs.

Why? You ask? Why do these sentient noodles swim half way accross the god damn world to fuck? Well the answer is easy really.

Pangaea.

Yea. Turns out when they first started off, all the contenants were right beside each other so it wasn't that far a trip. Over millions of years as the contenants spread out they just kinda went 'wow, it feels like this trip gets a little bit longer every time'. They weren't wrong and they sure as shit didn't stop.

So, yea, turns out that not only are the slippy guys in the Themes the same as the slippy guys the Mediterranean, but they're also statistically older than you and at the end of their life they fuck off over the ocean for about 5000 miles so they can loose their guts to grow dicks and pussys.

but I'm hearing there's a NSFW-friendly ko-fi alternative built on atproto that's actively in the works, and being vetted by lawyers right now. as torrent-princess (OP) says, you should be able to swap out payment processors while keeping your account intact. this matters since even if stripe removes support, you'll still have a shop and all of your links intact. (ATproto is an infrastructure that bsky is built on, but is far bigger than bsky with far more opportunities.)

additionally, the Free Speech Coalition is working on a credit union specifically for adult work (including kink art) - here's the link so you can add your interest & support. Since this will be built by sex workers, there'll be far less risk of being debanked for spurious and puritanical reasons.

on a domain TLD level, there's an initiative here for a .furry domain built from the ground up by seasoned furries; it's unclear whether they'll support NSFW, but it's yet another promising turn of events for a group that's been similarly affected by censorship.

Diné Weaver Venancio Aragón

"From researching historic twill patterns in museum collections to dyeing wool with Kool-Aid, Diné (Navajo) weaver and instructor Venancio Aragón interlocks research and experimentation to expand the visual and technical vocabularies of Diné weaving. Working on the Diné upright loom, Aragón is part of a generation of Diné weavers who reinterpret ancestral knowledge through experimentation, carrying the medium forward on their own terms. As he stated in our interview with him, “I am not a purist.”

Based in Farmington, New Mexico, Aragón is trained in cultural anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies, currently teaching at Diné College, the Navajo Nation’s tribal college. Before transitioning to full-time weaving and teaching, Aragón worked as an interpretive park ranger at the Mesa Verde, Aztec Ruins, Bandelier, and Petroglyph National Monuments, where he led tours and developed public education initiatives. He was born to the Tó’aheedlíinii (The Water Flow Together People) clan and born for the Naakaii (Mexican people). His maternal grandfather is of the Tsénahabiłnii (Sleeping Rock) clan, and his paternal grandfather is of the Naakaii (Mexican people)."

*you hit the talk button again* "Perhaps I should remain as a cisgender ally, for cis men have such privilege that could be used to protect the vulnerable, and voices that can be heard when transfems are ignored..."

*you hit the talk button again* "Perhaps I should transition as well! No truer help than bolstering one's ranks, haha!"

*you hit the talk button again* "But then again, regardless of my feelings on the matter, that would deprive the trans community of an ally in my position, which could be dire..."

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.