remember everyone...

thursday watch: the conditions for thursday are here, but a thursday incident has not yet been confirmed

So you basically have to make a choice between

a) working somewhere quiet and boiling hot

Or

b) working somewhere comfortable but loud and busy

Anything branded "AI" is automatically grift-adjacent. "Artificial intelligence" is a non specific term which truly means nothing. It can apply to basic statistical models, massive natural language models, image processing models, to prediction or categorization or input-output models. It's just completely non specific in a way that makes it useless. If something is called "AI" the first question should be "No but what is it actually? What math are you actually doing?"

Chatbot style input-output LLMs appear to be uniquely horrible for the human brain. We are very bad at interacting with something in natural language (even very broken natural language) and not projecting human intelligence on it. This is well know as the ELIZA effect and it appears to be pretty hard coded into human cognition. Humans have a strong tendency to hand over their critical thinking to these tools in a process known as cognitive offloading. This alone makes me believe that chat interfaces should be effectively banned from consumer facing products, and question if they have any use anywhere. It's unclear if this effect is unique to the chat interface or inherent to natural language models of all kinds, but regardless we should not be rolling these tools out in schools until we know.

"AI" companies have essentially exclusively behaved badly. They kicked off their products with the largest scale theft of intellectual property in history, one that's unlikely to ever be prosecuted. They peddle their products as tools to help people cheat, lie, and grift. They openly valorize men who say truly despicable things (one, two, three to start). They're rotting the US economy and betting the entire house on rolling snake eyes. They're using underhanded tactics to get their products into businesses and schools, and to spam their polluting energy hungry data centers across the globe. They're categorically untrustworthy.

I'm having a disagreement with my family, and it's turning into a whole Thing, so I turn to you, the fine people of tumblr

It's some shit that everyone thinks they can understand based on vibes but science just doesn't work that way. Real scientists have proved time and time again that it doesn't work how people assume. Many medical conditions where it's assumed weight is a "cause", something to blame the patient for, it's often actually a symptom.

Body size is based on so many individual possibilities. genetics, upbringing, wealth, what type of food you eat, what type of work you do, where you live, etc etc etc. it is impossible to control for all of these.

I was a child born to fat, impoverished, labourer parents, and I grew up doing farm labour, gaining muscle - I will never ever be thin. It's just how my body developed. And no matter how much weight I were to hypothetically lose, doctors would still push me to lose more. Family would push me to lose more. Society would push me to lose more. It will never ever ever be enough. You will never be thin enough, there is no bmi low enough to satisfy them, there is no "progress" that won't just make them pity or shame you even more. Your personal circumstances aren't important to a pseudo-scientific practice, the variables don't matter that much, it must be a one-size-fits-all solution.

Every weight loss pill, every low calorie shake or meal replacement, every weight watchers frozen meal, it all contributes to the pseudo-scientific cult of thinness. Every ad that says you're not good enough, it pushes you to drop your critical thinking skills. We have created a world where people think shitting themselves into thinness using potions with untested ingredients is healthier than having some fat on their bodies. But it's not! That's absurd! You're sending your body into a constant state of gastric shock!! And one day, when you get bored of eating tasteless nutrient paste and decide to eat something with some flavour in it, your body will react with a starvation response and store every little bit of fat that it can, because it's so used to being fucking starved. Which sends people into a panic response, buying up more pills and trying to crash-diet and lose their meagre protective layers.

Your body stores fat because that's your reserve energy. Fat is protective. I thank my body every day for storing so much energy for me, fuck knows I need it! That's your blubber!! You are a large mammal. Your body is designed to keep energy in reserve so you can sleep and stay warm and keep your brain alive. You should research the human metabolic process. You should research the cow metabolic process. You should research bear metabolic process. YOU NEED FAT!

And just like so many other pseudosciences, fatphobia and all that it entails is deeply rooted in racism and specifically antiblackness. It is not a mistake that the ozempic-chic era is coinciding with one of the biggest waves of open, globalised white supremacy we've seen in decades. Whiteness needs to perform & police whiteness constantly, maintaining appearances is THE way to stay part of the ingroup.