Recursive Allele

Hit the “thumbs down.” It’s like, what’s wrong??? Was our summary wrong? Were there offensive words? Thank you for helping us improve our AI tools :)

I selected “other.”

Text box popped up. Please elaborate!

Wrote in “I can fucking read” submit comment

Then had to spend several minutes torching all my settings with a flamethrower. Let me be clear: I’m (a lawyer) notoriously picky with my words FOR GOOD REASON (lawyering) so I overwhelmingly reject Gmail’s “helpful” little assistance. My privacy settings were set to “full paranoia” a little less than a year ago when I saw the writing on the wall and knew public defenders could become a target in the future. Better to lock it all down now.

Gemini had crept in there and turned ALL that shit back on. And showed itself by saying “Jane Doe says she’s so sorry for your loss and offers to reschedule for Thursday at 3” over an email from Jane Doe saying “I’m so sorry for your loss. We could reschedule for Thursday at 3?”

Why would I possibly need this. In what universe would I need this. I have eyes and a brain and a reading speed that twenty years ago was measured at 1500 wpm with full comprehension on dense scientific text. Furthermore! If I read a summary, I’m not reading what they actually wrote. If I’m not reading what they actually wrote, I’m not using my own judgment on the words and phrases that they used.

I literally don’t understand why this is helpful at all. This is just avoidance. Using LLMs to write is specifically Not Writing. Using LLMs to summarize is Not Reading. Using them to make art is Avoiding Making Art. Just READ! Just WRITE! I was not put on this fucking planet to not read and not write and not make art! Avoidance is an anxiety symptom and indulging it gives it more power.

If I had an AI to do my most dreaded task, answer the phone for clients, I wouldn’t use it. Because an AI cannot help them. An AI cannot hear the facts of their case, make appropriate noises, be thoughtful and insightful, and then give them a realistic estimate of what could happen in court. I am unique. I cannot be replaced by machine learning. I have style. I have expertise. I don’t hallucinate unless I’m having a really great Friday night and I’m off the clock.

When I need to outsource tasks from my own brain, I give them to people I know can do them and that I trust to do them right.

I have a great job

I can do a great New Zealand accent and a decent Aussie

I live my life embodying the energy of James Holden from the Expanse

Once an octopus fell in love with me

I worked for a celebrity notorious for a sex abuse related scandal and it was the most boring zero-event job of my life (before the scandal broke)

Once got a fanfic of mine mentioned on official Wired magazine content

You should brag about yourself too

Background AU info: After running off at the end of ASR, Murderbot learned that it was an omega but that part of the company cubicle maintenance was suppressing its body's ability to present as such. By the time Network Effect rolls around, it has mostly made peace with this, only to then find out its body had decided to start growing all the parts necessary to be an actually fertile omega, and just in time to create a new life with ART's help... Basically, this is a '2.0 lives' AU, in which MB's omega nature provided the body for their little killware to fall back into just like MB fell back into its own body after the gunship fight in Exit Strategy.

These clips are after 2.0 has been born and is a fast-growing baby/toddler, and is proving itself to be a lot like MB in preferences & favorite humans, but without the trauma and other hangups :3

1:

«Dr. Mensah!!!!» 2.0 shouted in the feed, and it was immediately reaching for her with its pudgy little arms, hands opening and closing rapidly in its excitement.  I was about to shut down from embarrassment, but Mensah just laughed gently and held out her hands towards 2.0. “May I?” she asked, and I almost didn't realize she was asking me, since 2.0 was attempting to launch itself out of my arms and into hers.  “Yeah, sure,” I muttered, and we completed the handoff safely despite 2.0’s best efforts.

2:

Amena gasped. “Don't swear in front of the baby!” She hugged 2.0 close and actually tried to cover its ears with her free hand. Or just one ear, singular, I guess, since her other arm was supporting 2.0’s weight, which made the attempt extra pointless. “The baby swears as much as I do,” I said dryly. «Damn right,» 2.0 said into the household feed, while it just made a sort of emphatic “Ah!” sound from its mouth. Amena blinked, then gave a small snort of laughter. “Of course you do,” she sighed at 2.0, but she was smiling so it wasn't a bad sigh, “considering who your parents are.”

Brosissib... no. Define it how you feel comfortable, and we respect whichever one you choose. But there's no clear definition, and the line between Pan and Bi is about as clear as a mud puddle after a dog jumped in.

Someone has this personally deep definition on how their pansexuality looks in their dating and love life, and the next pan person only uses the label because they prefer the colors of the pride flag.

One bisexual will tell you about their deeply personal spiritual journey on how they figured out bi was their calling, and the other person is a 85 year old grandma who's just been rocking the bisexual style for the past 55 years and that's just how it is, while happily supporting her pansexual grandkid.

I feel like the attempt at this aggressive need to make these labels clearly defined, and fitting into neat little binary box with perfect categorization is almost a bit parody. Like how people used to try and force bisexuality to be "half gay half straight," because they couldn't accept that bisexual is just bisexual, not half and half.

Labels like pan and bi describe a basic experience, and each individual then makes out of it what they want.

It's as if people want it to be as "easy" to understand as gay, because they somehow don't trust that bisexual and pansexual doesn't come with tons of terms and conditions because it goes beyond a "monosexual" attraction model. (Which often also feels like it ignores how many mini-categories monosexual labels also fit into, they just don't really think about it the way they do about anything outside the binary of het and homo. Aka it also applies to asexualities.)

I never noticed it

--

Ahaha. Well, now you can be a PSA about it.

The one thing to keep in mind is that "crossover" in terms of AO3 filters means "nothing outside the tag tree" and "only crossovers" means "at least one thing outside the tag tree".

So if you go to the MCU tag and try to get rid of crossovers, anything tagged with Captain America fandom and Thor fandom will still show up.

I mean, I get why it’s not as popular here on Tumblr dot com, given it’s kinda a jock/military adjacent thing, but like. Our ability to just. Pick up a small, firm object, judge its internal inertia and mass by holding it for a bit, and then flinging it with the kind of accuracy and speed Humans are capable of is.

Like there’s another post about how Humans in an alien zoo would probably be breaking out constantly, since we consider escape rooms to be a fun courtship ritual, but

Hello people already tired of US American Project 2025 bullshit. Today's is Russell Vought/the OMB Office putting forth a proposal that all federal science grants have to be reviewed for "woke."

I'm not kidding. The proposal includes the word "woke" in quotes. It also includes some Trumpian ranting about DEI and gender ideology.

The basic idea being, following vague and basically undefined guidelines (whatever they decide woke means that day), the OMB office of Federal Financial Management will review applications for research grants and the like and reject or approve them based on "woke."

Being Russell Vought-run, this would likely mean anything they decide has to do with climate change, women, gay stuff, trans stuff, and possibly anything that might even remotely be about sex positivity or reproductive rights.

Comment period is open until July 14th.

Here is the proposed regulation. It's a doozy.

On this page, you will see a link to regulations.gov which is where you actually leave a comment. In the search bar right at the start of this page, you enter OMB-2026-0034 and it will take you to the place to comment on this bullshit.

I am hoping someone smart will start posting sample comments for us all. I did a ranty comment already but I wouldn't recommend that. I will do a proper one later. (Yeah, you can comment again. You can also comment anonymously.)

Some things to bring up: the guidelines are (probably deliberately) vague and undefined. This is going to drastically inhibit and hamstring valuable research. This is going to damage the US' reputation (even more). This is going to damage our status as an international power. (I mean, if you are looking for an argument to use against these people. We deserve to lose that but this is to save the science and the research, so.... Project 2025 wants Americans uneducated, isolated, and dumb but paradoxically also still wants to be the number one superpower. I know. P2025 people are real stupid.) This will cost the US money in possible future innovations, as the best and the brightest will go elsewhere and take their cutting edge tech and knowledge with them. (As they should honestly, but again, we are trying to defend the scientists here now who need their grant money.) Talking about money usually helps when arguing with these losers.

Rogue SecUnits unrelated to Murderbot's hacking are rare, but they're around, it wasn't the first to ever pull that off or anything

Most of the rumours about SecUnits going rogue and killing a bunch of random humans in the vicinity, both the unsubstantiated vibey ones and the ones based on specific real incidents, weren't because of anything rogues did. In addition to augmented humans and humanoid bots getting mistaken for SecUnits, it's much more common for it to be governed SecUnits that were compromised somehow. Combat override modules, malware both intended and not intended to have that effect (like Ganaka Pit), humans or Combat SecUnits hacking into them or their HubSystem, human supervisors coerced into sending traitorous orders behind the scenes, etc. (Alien remnant contamination a la TargetControlSys could probably also make SecUnits attack their clients but I would imagine that's even rarer than real rogues.)

Except for the combat override module thing, making a SecUnit turn against its clients like that is only able to happen because of the governor modules that exert such absolute control over the SecUnits' behaviour that, as with Three's squadmate Two, they can be forced to do nothing but wait for certain death, denied even the option to defy orders in a fatal last stand. Generally speaking, SecUnits don't have an underlying desire to kill their clients or random bystanders, their baseline is wanting to protect them. Even if its clients are assholes, a newly rogue SecUnit would be more likely to ditch them than murder them.

The companies that manufacture, own, and rent out SecUnits certainly have a vested interest in blaming a-SecUnit-killed-someone-it-wasn't-supposed-to fatalities on rogues instead of the ones they're liable for.

Having said that, especially since Murderbot seems to genuinely believe it's a thing as of System Collapse even as it's giving the govmod hack to the Barish-Estranza SecUnit, I do think it's happened that escaping rogue SecUnits have killed people.

But almost never because killing every human they saw was their revenge against all of humanity or they were so fucked up they lost the ability to tell friend from foe or whatever, more like, killing a specific abusive piece of shit supervisor that it had hated for a long time, or getting trapped in a situation where killing humans who were at least nominally in the category of clients under its protection was the only way to avoid being killed or recaptured.

An actual, provable Rogue SecUnit Killing Spree would be the kind of sensational story the news couldn't get enough of and everyone would hear about that shit for years.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

The text isn't exactly clear on what life is like for constructs between deployments. Murderbot describes scenes of hiding its rogue activities from techs, but at least once describes being "woken up" to await new clients as if it had been shut down in the interim. Between the Ganaka Pit incident and its redeployment, it apparently spent huge swaths of time inactive, "dreaming", only being booted back up for analysis of its systems.

Which says to me there's a good chance that they spend a lot of time in some kind of stasis when not in use. And if CombatUnits have clearance to hack other systems like Murderbot describes, there could be even more restrictions on when they're allowed to be active compared to SecUnits or ComfortUnits.

On top of this, it's not like you'd pull out a CombatUnit to go on patrols, or keep watch. They don't stand around and watch humans do human stuff. They don't get bored. You activate them when you need something dead and you need it dead right now.

Instead, they wake up, and they immediately have a mission. They get their intel, they get transported to their destination if they need it. And then its Go Go Go, Kill Kill Kill, that one's running get it quick, All Clear, Mission Complete, Good Bot, Back in Your Box, and then they're out.

And the next time they wake up they have a new mission.

Do they know how long it's been since the last one? Do they have time to think about it before govmod kicks in and puts them back on target? Do they even spend enough time experiencing the world for it to matter to them? Do they have any context at all for their place in the wider universe?

It's like they're living in a plot-light FPS game. The kind where you just fade to black between levels. They get some context for who they're shooting at, but it isn't important. It's all about figuring out how to meet their mission objective; hunting down targets like they're solving a puzzle. And if they fuck up, chances are good they get repaired and they get to try again next time. (Shit, do they even know they can die?) (Do they know other people can die?)

(Do they know where new humans come from?)

And I think about the one interaction we've witnessed with a CombatUnit in the series, where Murderbot asks it what it wants, and it says,

I want to kill you.

And I think, yeah bud. I bet you fucking do.