Ontological Synaesthesia

It takes a while for him to properly meet with you two, makes sense he's very busy. Eventually you get your audience, and hes a very nice young man, gets a bit flustered at you maybe, but hes very polite and everything seems great. Then he refuses to have any audience with your husband for ages, and gives him a relatively minor post UNDER your husband's hated enemy that prevents him from currying any Imperial favor. Then, your husbands enemy launches a full blown coup against the Emperor, and your husband is arrested due to working for him, not great, but Erdrehasivar almost certainly knows that your honorable husband would refuse to join with Chavar, not just for personal spite, but also for moral considerations. Heck, its a rough patch, but perhaps with Chavar out of the way Setheris has a shot at some more influential office again?

SO LIKE!!!! first of all talk to me more about hesero nelaran generally for all of the above reasons, holy shit. but SECOND OF ALL. CONSIDER.

i feel like the first couple months setheris was back, hesero was sort of... it's been a long time since the last time she saw him, she knows they've both changed, she's trying to help him find his footing at court again and trying to find her own footing in their marriage again, and she's hoping that she'll be able to see more of the man he used to be as time goes on until she learns. All That.

and she barely even has time to process any of it before setheris is packed off to The Ass End Of Nowhere 2: Not Official Banishment Boogaloo and you KNOW that he's not handling it gracefully and like.

There's A Divorce, is the thing.

(csevet experiences a euphoric rush of spite handing hesero's petition to His Serenity to be signed. serves the bastard right.)

she comes back to court and maia really had nothing against her before the whole clusterfuck but this time she sees something almost like vindication in his eyes, swaddled by weariness and pity - an unspoken sense of you see it now. you get it. i'm sorry that you had to, but i'm glad someone else understands. it burns, but she can't deny it, either.

and i'd like to think that some time after that, she gets a letter in the very carefully tidy handwriting of lieutenant telimezh.

he hadn't particularly wanted to insert himself into that whole... Situation... especially when it seemed like hesero was settling in as well as could be expected in the wake of the multiple consecutive scandals she'd so recently weathered. but he also thinks that maybe it would have been easier, after dazhis, to have had someone to talk to. someone who understood the disorienting wrench of having a person you were meant to spend the rest of either your life or theirs working together towards a common goal, and realizing that you never knew them well enough to suspect their now-demonstrated capacity for ill.

it's not the same, he knows it's not the same at all, and he doesn't even expect a reply, but he thinks it might have haunted him a little if he hadn't at least made the effort.

Star Trek - Strange New Dumb Comics #77

Anyway, I will be sharing things, but the first thing is that upon meeting Three,

Ratthi calls Three kimi きみ

（バリッシューエストランザ社には、きみは死んだと伝いる）

Amena calls Three anata あなた

（あなた、名前はあるの？）

And ART calls Three omae おまえ

（この人間たちに害意を待っているなら、おまえを分解して）＊

That's like...

You (friendly!)

You (textbook)

(FUCK) You

Back with another gorgeous cover by Ondrej Hrdina, the Czech illustrator for the DCC books! This one is for Book 2, Carl's Doomsday Scenario. Just LOOK at the details!! Carl's sparkly feet, the Shield dome, the Molotov cocktail... *chef's kiss*

worf (has barely been on qo’nos): ”the targ is a beautiful and honorable animal.” end of interview. 0/10.

jadzia: in-depth and quite disgusting explanation about how the symbiont works, including the transplantation process. way too many medical details are included but molly seems to like it. 5/10.

garak: in-depth explanation about the different animals and plants on prime with a long detour into what types of poetry have been written about each one. he goes home and drinks himself to sleep afterwards. alcohol poisoning/10.

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.