My Chaotic Life

AROMANTIC PEOPLE

ASEXUAL PEOPLE

AND AROACE PEOPLE

ALL BELONG IN THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY

hey all! i've built a new ao3 fork called fanfiction.lol 🤙🏽 key differences:

🚫 no invite queue: sign up and start posting immediately. no waiting, no velvet rope.

🏳️‍🌈 expanded content warnings: added ableism, homophobia/transphobia, racism, rpf and more. plus relationship tags for aro/ace spectrum, qpr, non-binary/genderqueer focus, poly/ensemble, and more.

🏷️ all tags are canonical: everything you tag goes into the searchable record. no volunteer wrangling bottleneck.

💜 fandom-agnostic moderation: i care about the writing, not fandom politics or discourse. write whatever you want, tag it honestly.

it's a small personal project but fan communities deserve independent infrastructure.

if you enjoy fandom, i'd love for you to sign up and poke around. tell me what breaks. the source code is at source.tube/brennan/fanfiction.lol.

find me at brennan.day/accounts or email [email protected].

Hi, I wanted to add some more info about fanfic.lol based on some replies. I was trying to keep the original post short and have done write-ups elsewhere but I'll reiterate here.

The admin/webmaster: I'm Brennan! I'm a Queer Red River Métis writer and webdev and huge advocate for the IndieWeb. You can get to know to me on my site, brennan.day

I made this for fun, and it's running using a homelab server in my basement. I don't make money or anything else. I'm just doing it for the love of ball.

fanfic.lol is meant to be a small, independent alternative for fanfic and fandom that prioritizes joy and fun. No aims at trying to replace AO3!

I am anti-genAI and so is the site. You can read more about my stance on AI here.

Archive warnings, like everything else, are under construction! I do have to adhere to the laws of my country (Canada). Please be patient.

I am pushing straight to production, which is to say the entire site could explode at anytime, so please do not use it as the only place you put things! :)

I forsee only a handful of people using this site, it def isn't for everyone. If you don't like it that's okay! Whether you want to give me input or just ignore it entirely.

the way you frame your conversations is important! People with dementia are often, particularly at the earlier stages, very much aware that their memory is getting worse. This can make them very anxious, which isn't fun for anyone, least of all them. One of the most common things that people say to people with dementia is "do you remember ___?" as a way to try and prompt their memory. This feels helpful, but it's not. Because hey, in all likelihood, that person does not remember ___, and being confronted with this fact is not going to make them feel great. Remember that they literally have a degenerative brain disease; they're not going to suddenly regain their memories because you tested them. Instead, try talking about your own memories. Tell them what you remember. Tell it like a story. If they remember, then they can join in. If not, then hey, it's a nice story.

don't correct them if they say something wrong. Their version of reality is not going to be the same as yours. That's just a given. My grandma is often convinced that she's just on a very long holiday in a nice hotel, and that her dad is waiting outside in the car. I'm not going to tell her "uh, actually, you're in a care home and your dad died 50 years ago," because who's that going to help? Quite literally no-one. It'll just confuse her more, and she's already confused enough. Even if the person is saying something that's making them anxious - a common one is believing that people are stealing from them, or that someone is being unkind to them - then it's easier to try and distract them by trying to talk about something that you know makes them happy, rather than to outright tell them that they're wrong. Being consistently told that they're wrong can make them react defensively; they're not children, and they (usually) know it. It's just easier not to get into a confrontation.

get used to repetition. Don't get frustrated when you have the same conversation 25 times in two minutes. It's going to happen. For them, it's the first time you've had that conversation; they won't understand why you're angry at them for asking a question. It's completely normal to feel frustrated, but the onus is on you not to make it their problem. My grandma's short term memory is, charitably, about 3 seconds long. A conversation with her at this point is like rehearsing for a play; I know her lines, and I know mine. That's just how it is. She gets just as much joy out of telling me that she likes my cardigan for the 86th time as she did the first time she said it. People with dementia are not able to retain the information or the memory of that previous conversation; reminding them that you've already answered their question is just going to confuse and upset them.

don't take things personally. They might say things that are unkind. They might say completely inappropriate things. Again: their brain is deteriorating. It is a medical condition. They're not becoming bad people, or showing their 'true selves' to be evil and rage-fuelled. It's a combination of the fact that they're living in a perpetual state of confusion, which can lead to frustration and anger, and the fact that their ability to process and respond to information is affected by the dementia itself. If they say something cruel to you, you just have to take it on the chin and recognise it as a symptom of a disease that they're not able to control. Step out of the room for a moment if it gets too much. I've been fortunate in that my grandma has never experienced this symptom, but it's very common, and it's no reflection of you, or them.

don't treat them like children. My grandmother is 92 years old and she will look at you like you're the bane of her life if you try and tell her what to do, or use baby talk. Keep your sentences short and clear to avoid confusion, but don't ask them if they need you to clean their wittle fingies.

try and avoid open-ended questions, especially ones that involve memory recall, like "what did you do on the weekend?". My grandma was an absolute queen at making shit up when people asked her that, because she couldn't remember a damn thing, and she never liked to admit that she couldn't remember, because it made her stressed and anxious. "I picked up leaves" was her personal favourite, for some reason. I used to just tell her about my weekend instead, and sometimes she would joyfully tell me (completely falsely) that she also went to the shops, and that was much less stressful for her; she wasn't actively trying to come up with an answer to cover for her own lack of memory, and instead felt like she was part of the conversation on her own, equal terms.

most importantly: don't try and pull them back to reality. The best way I've learnt to communicate with anyone with dementia is to enter theirs instead. Sometimes, this is referred to as 'validation therapy'. It's about acknowledging that the reality of someone with dementia is as real to them as your reality is to you, and you're not going to be able to 'reorient' them to your version of reality, because they don't have the short term memory or ability to retain information that would enable that. Put simply: if my grandma asks when my uncle is going to come home, I gain nothing from (correctly) informing her that he's dead. This just upsets her, because every time she hears it, she's receiving the news of his death for the first time. That sends her into a spiral of grief and anxiety that remains even after the memory of his death has vanished again. Instead, I just tell her that he'll be home after lunch. She nods, accepts it, and we're both happy. My uncle is still dead, but in her world, he's going to come home soon. It's a way of having empathy for the person with dementia, and acknowledging that your reality, or objective 'truth', is not more important than their wellbeing.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

The Black Sea at night, 1879, Ivan Aivazovski

The current generation of AI companies is fucking toast, and they might even know it, but founders and venture capitalists are still trying to escape so they're pretending they have a future.

To explain, as briefly as possible, the above: startups are funded through venture capital, where an investor sinks a giant pile of money in exchange for an ownership share of the company (yes, this is exactly like Shark Tank). Venture capitalists do not actually have any interest in owning pieces of startups; what they actually want is to get their shares bought out. Failing that, they'll settle for dividends and walk away from bankruptcies. Ultimately, there's three ways for venture capital to get a return on their investment: the startup can go public (start selling shares to the public), they can start being profitable, or they can go bankrupt, liquidate, and get sold off for parts.

I know OpenAI is making noises about an initial public offering (where a company offers shares to the public for the first time). I will be extremely surprised if this winds up happening. The reason is that an IPO requires disclosure of the company's financials to auditors, and if the auditors discern weird shit in your financials, they say so. If they don't say so, they go to prison. No AI company wants to disclose anything, because:

Their balance sheets are a disaster. We are talking about an industry that, collectively, has spent almost two trillion (with a t) United States doll hairs on building infrastructure to support their product, and which has, collectively, revenue measured in the hundreds of millions. For perspective: one hundred million seconds into the past is around four months ago. One trillion seconds into the past predates human habitation in the Western Hemisphere (by about ten thousand years). So even if there were zero externalities attached to AI, the industry will collapse under its own weight once they exhaust the willingness of VC to keep writing enormous checks.

Because of the above, it is probably structurally impossible for the current generation of AI companies to ever turn a profit, at least on honest books.

Which leaves one outcome, once the merry go round stops: liquidation. Here's the thing: the models these companies use to answer your inane questions or pretend you have a girlfriend are an asset that can be sold. Somebody will end up owning it.

Which means, alas, that the proponents of AI are probably right that something that looks like AI will be here to stay. But it won't be what we're using now. Which is mostly a good thing.

However (and this is where we move into my research rather than Ed's) a significant part of the problem is that AI cannot work as advertised. It cannot and will not ever be able to reason.

Not going to go deep on the cognitive science here, but: there's not really a consensus on what "reasoning" is, but most scholars would probably agree that it needs to include evidence reform and model reform.

Evidence reform is when you realize that the way you are gathering evidence for your model of the world cannot answer the question you're interested in. For example, if you want to find out what flavor of pie was America's favorite, and you went out and observed the purchasing patterns at a thousand diners that sold pies, you would, if you were reasoning correctly, realize that all you're getting is information about people's preferences as to the pies diners offer. People might prefer a pie that only appears in home kitchens. So you have to change how you gather evidence to begin with.

Model reform is when you realize that there is a factor affecting your observations that you did not include in your model of the world. For example, you run your diner pie survey and learn that by a huge margin the favorite pie of Americans is pecan pie. Then, as you're reviewing your data, you realize that every single one of the diners you visited was in Mississippi, where pecan pie is a local specialty. A factor you did not consider (location of your sampling sites) has affected your observations, and you will need to reform your model to reflect this.

AI, in its current form, can do neither of these things. Without getting in the weeds, the AI is not aware of anything that it hasn't been told. It can find patterns in the things it's been told that humans haven't discerned yet, but it cannot recognize a missing piece. Both evidence reform and model reform involve seeing and recognizing that you have incompletely described the world.

So, to sum up: AI is probably not going to replace most workers permanently. Executives are already bumping up against its limits and realizing they need to bring people back in.

The hype surrounding AI is the last burst of energy a dying patient has before they go into the final decline. Don't mistake it for a new lease on life.

I won't say that AI is never useful or that it never will be useful. But I will say that the current structural assumptions around AI are not playing to the strengths of the tool. But playing to the strengths of the tool would mean that Sam Altman could only make money selling copies of the OpenAI model to academics who do machine learning work, and that would not keep him in the lifestyle he would like to be accustomed to.

The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over. 

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

With the revamped Search experience, the new search box simply expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries, rather than making you decide what type of search experience or mode you want to choose at the start of your query. It will also have a new AI-powered query suggestion system that goes beyond autocomplete to help people craft more complex and nuanced queries, Google says.