A Genuine IRL Refrigerator

as for the way it affected my view of grace, it honestly made me like him more. when i assumed he volunteered himself, he read more as someone who stepped up in impossible circumstances and then got (understandably) scared/maybe regretted it when faced with the reality. in retrospect, realizing he was *always* scared and was never actually prepared to die (“i didn’t mean any of that. it’s just something you say”) it makes every risk he took after meeting rocky feel so much more meaningful. especially the last one, when he turns around and actually chooses another life over his own with his eyes wide open.

YESSS you get me. and here’s the thing right. if he had said yes, is that really a choice? is ‘get in this ship and die or the world ends’ actually that much *less* coercive than knocking him unconscious and putting him in there anyway?

I'm also looking for the brave anti-ai people who follow me (thanks for hanging with me). What are Your Reasons for being anti ai. Also if you saw this in the anti AI tag hi this is your chance to stretch your argument legs!!

AI has massively lowered the barrier to entry to orchestrate political psyops or scams - things that previously took dedicated troll farms or scam call centers can now be orchestrated by a single person with sufficient knowhow and enough money/compute.

While attempts to do so have been very clumsy thus far (grok lol), AI labs can influence the outputs of their models in ways that cannot be undone and may be challenging for the average user to detect. This puts them in a position of immense power that I believe they will try to exploit.

Over the past few years, there has been a massive increase in AI-generated content - to use the term du jour, slop - which is low-quality and drowns out higher-quality human content. I expect this to continue to accelerate if strong barriers are not put into place.

AI is currently sweeping the legs of the education system as everyone scrambles to adapt. I think this will eventually be solved to a reasonable degree, but in the meantime it has the potential to create a deficit for a full cohort that will ripple through their entire lives.

AI is currently reducing the value of entry-level white collar employees while leaving mid and senior level openings mostly untouched. In the short run, this means economic prospects for young college grads are worse than they ever have been, which will have all sorts of unpleasant ripple effects. In the long run, you can't get new mid and senior level employees without a pipeline, and if that pipeline collapses, it will be difficult or impossible to rebuild.

A small but visible portion of the population (1 in 10000, maybe?) are susceptible to what is starting to be called LLM psychosis, where interaction with an LLM and their naturally sycophantic natures reinforces delusions and pulls the person into a dangerous fantasy. These people were almost always mentally ill in some sense prior to the LLM, but the LLM triggers an episode in a specific way that has to be quite harmful.

To restrain things like LLM psychosis, LLMs are increasingly monitored and have the capacity to take more and more actions. I think it's likely that, with attempts to hold AI companies liable for people who killed themselves after talking to an LLM, LLMs will be equipped with the capacity to call the cops if your chat messages to them meet some arbitrary bar that triggers a "mandatory reporting" behavior, and that this is only the beginning. In the long run, I suspect this will represent a massive expansion of the surveillance state, where any internet-connected model is a snitch.

Related to the previous, LLMs enable processing of an immense amount of information in a reasonably humanlike, intelligent way. While I doubt we'll hear about it for a while, this almost certainly enables widespread surveillance in a way that used to be impossible, enabling isolation of signal from noise at a scale that would be prohibitively expensive if you were relying on human analysts.

The US stock market performance (the largest market in the world) is increasingly concentrated in companies that are making huge bets on AI. If AI does not end up being profitable enough to justify this level of investment and those valuations, this is a systemic risk for the US economy and risks plunging us into a recession that will make 2008 look like a cakewalk.

If AI does pan out, the most likely way it could do so would be by being "AGI" - sufficiently intelligent and reliable to replace a massive chunk of white-collar workers in the US. This would cause a different kind of economic (and political) crisis that could potentially be an even worse outcome than the recession (to say nothing of tail concerns about AI risk). The line where some kind of major economic upheaval due to AI doesn't happen in the next ten years is pretty thin.

I can give you a chance to prove them all wrong. Joke's on them because I don't even care.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

A ban on international collaboration with a list of the "scary" countries (like China, one of the US's strongest research partners despite It All), and a presumptive ban on ALL OTHER international collab.

An end to any binding peer review process in funding. All review will be by Trump stooges, deciding what has scientific merit. This isn't the top headline evil thing about this rule change, but it means that even well-meaning, very careful scientific review boards can't try to evade censorship. JD Vance is essentially in charge of deciding whether your metabolic enzyme computational model can exist or not.

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I continue to maintain that the Australian combination of compulsory voting with ranked choice voting, is the greatest advancement in democracy in centuries.

Compulsory voting shifts the onus ensuring your access to the ballot box to the government. One Citizen, One Vote, No Matter How Remote.

It's hard to restrict the vote when everyone has to vote by law, and compulsory ranked choice voting gives a better median representation of national opinion.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

Over 90% of parents of visibly intersex children opt for cosmetic surgery on their infants.

The ones that don't experience medical violence then, likely experience it as a teenager.

I didn't.

I am very rare in that I did not experience medical violence.

Why? Because I learned what intersexuality was as a young age, and I actively fought against what doctors wanted to do to me. All the way down to legal research on what medical care minors can be forced into. I remember walking into that doctor's appointment with the state law written down that proved that if I did not consent they could not do surgery.

BUT

if you just grab a random book off the shelf and read it as is, what are you going to get? what if you're not on tumblr or twitter or tiktok or whatever. what if you don't look up interviews. what if you're not in fandom or don't know where to look for that extra information? what if you experience this creation in the most casual way possible?

what you experience in the finished product is the only thing everyone who picks it up will know. not what the cast members said, not what the writers said, not what the creator said wherever they said it whenever they said it. if you were in a vacuum with that thing, all you would have is the canonical text, not the bonuses