or what you will

From ancient to abstract, this one sure got around.

yes I said addicts

I know a lot of people say on here 'if you use c.ai unfollow me' and 'AI doesn't belong in fandom' which I agree with, but I think the anger is directed to the wrong place

As a recovered c.ai addict/over user and as someone who has many friends who are deep in their own, c.ai is like a rabbithole.

It targets teenagers/young people, and most users I find are dealing with some kind of loneliness.

Now some of you are probably thinking this is ridiculous. How could someone get addicted to an AI chat bot? But I want you to put yourself in these kids shoes.

You know how hard being a teenager is, especially if you're dealing with a mental illness of some kind. Maybe you experienced it yourself, maybe not, but imagine dealing with all that, having a deep sense of loneliness and finding this place where you're promised an escape where you can talk to characters and people that bring you so much comfort, where you can get the social interaction you crave without having to worry about being judged or messing up.

Sounds enticing, right?

To them, it's harmless fun. it's like a interactive fanfic, where they get to play a role in the story and dictate the outcome, but for them it's taking a place in their lives where friends and human interaction should. I know multiple people who have told me that if they're not doing school or using c.ai, they're dead.

Again, these are kids. They don't see it as an addiction. They see it as an iconic, silly thing they do. It's not drugs or alcohol, so it can't be an addiction, right?

There's hundred's of thousands, if not millions, of kids with that mentality using c.ai, and c.ai isn't stupid. They're a business. There's ads on the app, they sell these kids chats to google to train gemini, and there's a goddamn subscription you can buy. $15aud a month. To get more c.ai features.

this is dangerous because the last thing a lonely teenager with a still-developing brain, social skills, sense of self, etc. needs is something that blindly yes-man's them. the AI will never truly understand the nuance of human emotion and reasoning no matter how much it might 'claim' to. it doesn't understand it at all actually, it can only regurgitate the dialogue it expects you to want to see, based on its previous training and system prompts.

this isn't something i've personally experienced but have seen many times, both in people i know and online. i once asked my younger brother, when he was telling me about how much he loved using google gemini on his schoolwork reports, "don't you find it sycophantic? don't you think it only validates your ideas blindly?" "no, not at all. it's very logical and analytical." i looked over his conversation with the chatbot out of curiosity. it was the most blatant sycophantism i've ever seen. my brother is incredibly intelligent and socially aware, and one of the most mentally sound and neurotypical people i know.

Im.. Soft 🥺🥺🥺

"I don't want to be a burden anymore", your hat answers. "You are always carrying me around, and I can't carry you. That's not fair."

"I don't mind carrying you, little idiot", you tell your hat, "you hardly weight anything at all, and you shelter me from the sun."

"But that's different", your hat protests. "I don't mind the sun scorching on me. That happens anyway. It's literally no trouble for me to shade you too."

go out and fuck someone you aren’t attracted to because a stranger on tumblr said to

go out and date someone you aren’t attracted to because a stranger on tumblr said to

You’re Not Allowed To Be Gay Anymore

what this post DOES mean

if you just ‘prefer’ to avoid majority black areas of your city

if you just ‘prefer’ to read, write, think, and talk about men

if you just ‘prefer’ to socialize with people you (perceive as) your assigned birth sex

if you just ‘prefer’ to exclusively watch white-directed movies, read white-written books, listen to white-authored music

if you just unconsciously perceive men as more authoritative/competent and ‘prefer’ to be spoken to by them

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.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.