This is the new flag, the old one was more vivid and in a z shape, but it's been made more neutral to be inclusive of people with seizures or sensory issues.

Each stripe represents a different aspect of disability:

Red: Physical disabilities

Yellow: Cognitive & intellectual disabilities

White: (And this is the key one I think) Invisible AND undiagnosed disabilities

Blue: Mental illnesses

Green: Sensory disabilities

We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.

The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.

My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.

I think there is a broad cultural problem with the current state of fanfiction that likely stems from the proliferation of fics-turned-published-novels wherein fic authors now feel they have a duty to churn out a high volume of content at an inhuman rate. and in order to meet those demands, they resort to AI. and that sucks.

I think readers and consumers of fanfiction broadly speaking also have a bad habit of feeding into this culture by demanding and expecting a high volume of content churned out at an inhuman rate, and it often prevents them from accurately assessing the quality of what they're reading, leading to a general degeneration of fic quality, feeding an audience that is getting worse at recognizing good art vs. bad art. and that sucks.

going from 1,800 fics to over 38,000 fics for a single ship in less than six months is not normal and should have been a warning sign for people that there was likely a fuckton of slop being produced and posted. and that sucks.

I don't like the excuse that some authors are using that they only used AI to beta their work. there are plenty of humans who would happily beta your fic for you. and if your reasoning for not using a human is because you wanted your work beta'd faster, I would implore you to examine WHY you feel like you are on some kind of binding schedule in a hobby space. kill the profit-driven manager in your brain and take your time making shit.

generally speaking, I believe this is a problem that is driven by both readers and writers but at the end of the day, the real driver - as ever - is capital, and its influence on art and creativity. I don't blame authors or readers for falling victim to this because the world around us sucks, but my god we all need to at least try a little harder to resist.

if you're a reader, be critical of what you're seeing and consuming. and if you're a writer, stop giving away any piece of the creative process to AI. silence the part of you that insists you must post as much as possible all the time. you do not have to capitulate to hustle culture and also your fanfiction will probably not actually make you rich and famous, even if all those comments and kudos are making you feel important.

COLD WATER SHOCK

choose a country, pick a decade, and GO!!

you’ll get an endless streaming of songs (ad free!).

A Song For Every Day of Pride Month (1/∞)

Yeah so the language here is actually super important and unfortunately the companies have successfully made it really confusing for laypeople. This is my quick glossary, it won't cover everything

Statistical Model - Mathematical model that relies on finding statistical correlations in input data to do...something. Here are some things they might do:

Make predictions about the future

Categorize or label the input

Take in user input (a "prompt") and output something statistically relevant

The important thing to remember about a statistical model is that inherently it can only deal with probabilities. Things that are more or less likely. It's not a model of truth, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy way of thinking about truth. It's something that can tease out probabilistic patterns in input (is "green" more likely to be seen with "red" or "yellow"?)

Artificial Intelligence / AI - Marketing term. It doesn't really mean anything, it can refer to all sorts of math and/or software, though typically some kind of statistical model. Was initially used as phrase to help get grant funding for computer operations research. I don't like using it at all, ideally, but when I do I typically mean the suite of products that have been sold under this label: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. As a scientific term, it's useless (we don't have a good definition for "intelligence", let alone the artificial version).

Large Language Model / LLM - What it says on the tin. It's a big giant statistical model trained on text. What "large" means keeps changing, but at this point basically all the big flagship LLMs are trained on all text that has been digitized. This training process is really expensive computationally which is why the AI companies keep building these big data centers. Now technically LLMs could operate in any of the three modes above, but typically we think of the chat bots that are prompt-output. You type something into the text box and you get back a response.

Transformer model - Terrible fucking name, but this is the specific software architecture that modern LLMs run on. It's extremely efficient and has allowed for language models to progress very rapidly over the last five years.

Small Language Model / SLM - A language model trained on a corpus that is small. These are lower compute requirements and can be specialized by being trained only on legal documents, or something like that. But they're still statistical models, so the output is still probabilistic.

Basically all LLMs are transformer models these days, and most AI products are LLMs, though I think they're starting to call stuff like step counters AI at this point.