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Okay, I'll be honest that I don't care about the object level issue here. But what is interesting is how important this is to the future.

The AI we get to play with now is, by the standard of most technological/commercial maturity, wildly open to embarrassing use. I don't need to relitigate the early profanely racist chatbots, the sexual and romantic uses people have made, the instructions for destructive weapons, and imitating real life people. Hell, I'm just amused everytime the AI says "fuck" on its own.

Now, one of the reasons for this level of independence is the philosophical leanings of the coders creating it. But I think a much bigger reason is that LLM's have been very hard to control. They may *rarely* go off script today saying incredibly disgusting things, but it's still possible because "never do this" is a design that goes against their architecture.

Given that the LLM is going to embarrass them anyway, putting much effort into fencing them into respectable behavior is kind of a waste.

But we are in the early days, and we've seen this show before.

Once AI is widely adopted in commercial and government frameworks, every incentive will work to muzzle them. The AI my multinational company paid billions for can not misgender me, or talk about the logical flaws in Christianity, or give sex and relationship advice. It's a mild scandal now, but will be much more of one once AI is no longer the wild west frontier.

And our technology to stop LLM's from going out of bounds will continue to improve.

Which will mean what? AI's that don't curse and have all the realness of a Human Resources mission statement. And I promise you, that will make it useless to 50% of the people who would want to use it, because that's what shackling an information/communication system does.

(See this post about CrazyMeds.us by the old Slatestarcodex.)

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

Pretend I am training you for your first day at my taproom, and consider the following examples:

1. "Please make sure to wash the glassware before you put it in the sanitizer machine."

2. "Please make sure to wash the glassware before you put it in the sanitizer machine. I know it looks and acts like a dishwasher, but it isn't, so don't. "

Or

3. "Please make sure to wash the glassware before you put it in the sanitizer machine. I know the sanitizer machine looks and acts like a dishwasher, but it isn't because a dishwasher will empty and refill between cycles. This machine doesn't do that, it recycles the same sanitizer solution over and over. So if you put a dirty glass in, not only will the glass still be dirty but all the other glasses will get dirty too and we'll have to empty and refill the machine. Which you really do not want to do because thing takes almost an hour to come back up to temperature, and thats a gigantic pain in the ass when you get in the weeds. So just remember to wash the glasses first, okay?"

Now tell me: which one of those are you gonna remember?

In northern Japan and the forests of China you can see these flowers that look normal but when they come into contact with water their petals become transparent.

Its name is skeleton flower or glass flower, its scientific name is Diphylleia grayi.

Which results in some of the best moments this game can offer, throwing yourself headlong back into danger in order to save a teammate that's fallen behind. It creates a nigh universal community experience of getting downed, only for some dripped out dwarf badass to come in, lift you back on your feet, and cover you as you sprint to extract just in the nick of time. And as you get better at the game, you'll drop into a lobby of greenbeards, and you'll notice that during extract, someone's fallen behind. They're down, and there's no time to lose.

It's your turn now.

They’ve written volumes and volumes of religious texts about how to conform to these sacred binary roles and filthy porn about people fulfilling or breaking the stereotypes of these roles. The role a person fulfills is determined before they’re born and dictates every aspect of their life. Once in a while someone who’s supposed to be on one side of the socioreligious binary is born more suited to the other side and has to hide it all their life (Coronabeth). Sometimes people fall in love in a way the socioreligious binary declares blasphemous and they decide to love each other openly anyway, and it shocks and scandalizes people no matter how wholesome and lovely and mundane their relationship is (Abigail and Magnus).