Yesterday I saw a mother with a baby carriage, being followed by a girl of about 4-6 years old on a bicycle. The kid started ringing her bike bell like RING RING RING RING RING RING RING, and the mother turned to look behind them to see whether they were being followed by a cyclist who desperately needs to pass them for the sake of everyone's safety.
And the little girl - who just rang the goddamn bell herself 5 seconds ago - also turned to look.
Kids are confused by everything at all times. They don't know jack shit. About anything.
i remember being like 8 or 9 and being told that my dad’s ex-wife was no longer diane and we were to address her as daniel now. my reaction: “ok.”
me and my brother later had a small discussion about whether that could happen randomly (conclusion: no, he probably had to file papers or something) and whether daniel should now be referred to as dad’s ex-husband (conclusion: yes but only to see the face he’ll make) but at no point did we find it like... alarming? the world is big and weird. we were used to it.
finding out a sorta-relative could just change genders off camera, as it were, was a whole lot less head-splodey than finding out there were no squirrels in australia!
"Won't they be confused by all the--" So what if they are? Life is often confusing. That's part of how we learn. Part of the job of an adult is to help confused kids learn and understand things. There's no obligation to protect the kids from the confusing things. Quite the reverse.
In my experience anyone using this BS excuse isn't worried about a child's potential confusion, but their own, which they don't want to admit to having.
Aussie here, I DIDN'T KNOW SQUIRRELS WERE ACTUALLY REAL FOR THE FIRST EIGHT YEARS OF MY LIFE NO JOKE I THOUGHT THEY WERE A MYTHICAL ANIMAL LIKE UNICORNS
Also kids are far less likely to be confused by something the younger they learn about it. Kiddo had queer people in his life and casual references to queerness before he could even talk. It was never confusing for him. It was normal.
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The recent hot VS cold polls have made me realise that a lot of people have no idea how to cool down.
As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:
WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!
Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.
In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.
Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.
Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.
Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.
Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.
If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.
Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.
Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.
Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.
Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.
If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.
Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.
Also keep in mind that the skinnier you are, the faster these will work. More fat means more insulation, means more heat, so you may need to be more patient with some of these or use them in combination.
TOMORROW (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they're in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable:
A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as "humans in the loop" can stop to pee! Isn't there some way we can make that their problem, not ours?
With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss's. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired ("because AI will do their jobs"), you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck.
Even better is when the "human in the loop" can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI's labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers' conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job "like magic."
The "magic"? A human being stuck in AI Omelas, tormented by an algorithm that sets an inhuman pace, demands inhuman perfection, and metes out pitiless punishments for any misstep – or perceived misstep – without appeal or explanation. So often, "AI" stands for "Absent Indians": low-waged call-center workers pretending to be robots:
There are many differences between jobs performed by machines and jobs performed by people, of course. But the biggest difference between a machine and a person is moral consideration. A person deserves and demands moral consideration: for their wellbeing, their feelings, even their bladders. A machine gets none of this: you can curse at it, kick it, snap out orders without a "please" or "thank you."
There's only one kind of person you get to treat like this: a slave.
Slavery is labor without even the pretense of moral consideration.
AI, then, isn't just the fantasy of a world without people – it's the fantasy of a world without people…except for slaves. It's the fantasy of a world where the skilled workers who tell you your ideas are stupid are replaced with pliable chatbots who tell you they're brilliant, and then uncomplainingly do the job to your specifications.
It's a world where the cab driver who has all kinds of shit going on in their life – health problems, family problems, (especially) money problems – is replaced by a "robo-taxi" that is being overseen and (often) driven by a remote worker you can't talk to or see, whose problems you therefore never need consider.
The "AI safety" world is a key piece of the AI hype machine, pulling focus away from the idea that AI has shitty economics, produces substandard goods, and fails to do the jobs it takes from human workers, and shifting that focus to the idea that AI is so powerful that it constitutes an existential risk to the human race. The idea that teaching too many words to the word-guessing program risks creating a "superintelligence" that awakens and converts all into paperclips is absurd, a silly idea akin to the notion that if we breed horses to run ever faster, one of our mares will foal a locomotive. Nevertheless, the elevation of "AI takeoff" from a thought-experiment to an "existential risk" is a powerful marketing tool, because any technology that is indistinguishable from god is also going to be extremely valuable (at least, up to the moment that it turns us all into paperclips):
Once the superintelligence thought-experiment is upgraded to an X-risk, lots of other thought experiments are sucked along in its wake. That's where "rights for robots" comes in, the idea that we should spend time thinking about whether chatbots should have human rights.
The best argument for this is that every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world, we end up treating each other better. Movements to extend moral consideration to animals raised uncomfortable questions about the treatment of humans: slaves, workers, poor people, women, children. The Rights for Nature movement, which seeks to extend legal and moral personhood to watersheds and forests, has been key to winning legal and moral victories to protect the environment, and thus the animals and people who depend on it.
But while extending rights to natural things produces positive spillovers for human thriving and rights, the opposite happened when we extended personhood to artificial constructs. Corporate personhood has been a catastrophe for human thriving, conjuring into existence a new race of immortal, pluripotent colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations" that use us as disposable, inconvenient gut flora even as they consume our environment, our political system, and our lives:
There's every reason to think that extending personhood to AI will produce the same outcome as "rights for corporations," which is the opposite of the outcome of "Rights for Nature." Rights for nature come at the expense of corporations. Rights for corporations come at the expense of nature. Humans are part of nature, so we benefit from the former, and suffer under the latter:
But here's the kicker: as soon as you start arguing about whether chatbots have rights, you elevate them to personhood, which means that all those chatbots your boss just bought are people. And because they're the kind of people who don't warrant moral consideration (let alone a please or thank you), they are slaves (hence "rights for robots").
The AI sales pitch relies on convincing bosses that we've invented a new kind of slave – a worker who neither deserves nor demands rights or consideration. "Rights for robots" affirms that sales pitch. "Rights for robots" implies that robots are slaves. Wittingly or unwittingly, the transformation of "rights for robots" from a thought experiment to a campaign is a massive convincer for any AI salesman who's hunting for would-be slavers to sell chatbots to.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.
I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!
From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!
I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.
Edit: Yes, this also works on mobile!
The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.
(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)
If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.
The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.
insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box
add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box
delete -> self explanatory
on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic
The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.
Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.
trying to explain to dumbass tumblr users that saying they benefit from systemic oppression on a certain axis is not the same as invalidating every struggle theyve ever had in their entire life
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"
"rickrolling is mean" rickrolling is the gentle, kind, prosocial descendant of what we used to do on the internet, which was putting a redirect to goatse in every possible misspelling of a url
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You are never late to a fandom. Your fic is never "invalid" for being "late". Your fic doesn't need a high word limit. Your fic does not need a high standard. Your fic does not need to be highly popular. Your fic isn't less valid than a popular author's fic. Your fic isn't inheritly bad. Your fic is amazing. Your fic is valid. The only thing that matters is that you're having fun. Fandom is not consumption and consumerism. Fandom is fun, free and for the people. Fandom is not a popularity contest. We're all nerds at the end of the day.
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