Reblogged naamahdarling
"we need a slur for-" Why are you trying to roleplay being racist and ableist
to everyone in the tags mentioning "clanker": you understood the post thank you thats exactly what im talking about
Reblogged
I used to get a lot of hate for using the word "queer" in the title of this project. One of the justifications I gave was that LGBT+ was too easy to take apart. Just drop whatever letter you don't like and go on with your day.
My posts have gotten tagged LGB more and more often lately. Usually accompanied by the worst additions imaginable. People are starting to whittle down and choose who they think of as disposable, so let me say this:
Queer as in trans people
Queer as in asexual people
Queer as in aromantic people
Queer as in nonbinary people
Queer as in bisexual people
Queer as in unlabled people
Queer as in anyone who counts themselves as queer.
Queer as in no questions asked, just an open door and a place to stay.
Reblogged spacelazarwolf
"goddess" "matriarchy" "female wisdom" girl your civic rights
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Reblogged pro-sipper
the way people seem to genuinely conflate brain damage with fascism drives me up the wall. maybe it's the lead in paint/gas/vapes. maybe it's ai. maybe their brains just don't work right. maybe something they didn't have control over made them dumb to us and thus ontologically evil. what are you on
every single day millions of people are poisoned by the actions of rich people trying to save a dollar by ignoring public safety. nobody has ever chosen to get brain damage. implying people with it are predisposed to conservatism is flatly awful. you yourself are not safe from getting brain damage because you are leftist. you are not special. you are just as likely to fall victim to it as anyone else is.
your mental ability does not, has not, and will never determine your political leanings. it's just plain ableism.
Reblogged kaen-ace-of-diamonds
While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.
It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.
One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.
Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??
Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?
Why must the future suck SO much?
A good rundown on what each brand of TV is up to and which settings you should turn off.
Reblogged ivorydice
I think one of the best things I learned from my last therapist was the idea that when there's a box in your mind you need to open, you don't have to open it all the way on the first try.
what I mean is that she said "you didn't deserve <bad thing that happened to you>" and I said, "I feel like I know that intellectually, but I don't really believe it deep down". and she said, "do you think you can try to believe it just a little bit, as an experiment?" and I started crying lmao
trying to change a core belief entirely all at once is scary, especially when it exists as a protective measure. try giving yourself a cheeky bit of plausible deniability! you're just dipping your toes in the water of self-esteem, you're just having a little wade! you don't have to go swimming right away, and you can always step out if you want. (but the longer you spend in the water, the more you start to understand you're actually safe there...hm, who could have predicted this...)
so that's my advice: if there's something real and true you can't seem to believe, take some time to try and really believe it just a little bit, even if you're only pretending at first. climb the staircase one step at a time instead of trying to put one foot all the way at the top!
Reblogged punkitt-is-here
"Gooner game!" "Gooner show!" "Gooner behaviour!"
There's literally nothing wrong with media containing sexual content, appealing to sexual fantasies, or ppl finding aspects sexually appealing.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying sexual fantasies, getting off to media, speaking about finding characters attractive, etc.
And whilst theres nothing wrong with it, a piece of media covering sexual topics or having attractive characters doesn't necessarily mean it's just a "gooner" media either. Things can have emotional depth and be beautifully written, and still have sexual content. You sound like a Puritan.
Reblogged
For-profit healthcare is the problem, not (just) private equity
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Cardiff (TONIGHT!), London and Oxford! Full schedule here.
When are at to the library, you are a patron, not a customer. When you are at school, you're a student, not a customer. When you get health care, you are a patient, not a customer.
Property rights are America's state religion, and so market-oriented language is the holy catechism. But the things we value most highly aren't property, they cannot be bought or sold in markets, and describing them as property grossly devalues them. Think of human beings: murder isn't "theft of life" and kidnapping isn't "theft of children":
When we use markets and property relations to organize these non-market matters, horrors abound. Just look at the private equity takeover of American health-care. PE bosses have spent more than a trillion dollars cornering regional markets on various parts of the health system:
The PE playbook is plunder. After PE buys a business, it borrows heavily against it (with the loan going straight into the PE investors' pockets), and then, to service that debt, the new owners cut, and cut, and cut. PE-owned hospitals are literally filled with bats because the owners stiff the exterminators:
Needless to say, a hospital that is full of bats has other problems. All of the high-tech medical devices are broken and no one will fix them because the PE bosses have stiffed all the repair companies and contractors. There are blood shortages, saline shortages, PPE shortages. Doctors and nurses go weeks or months without pay. The elevators don't work. Black mold climbs the walls.
When PE rolls up all the dialysis clinics in your neighborhood, the new owners fire all the skilled staff and hire untrained replacements. They dispense with expensive fripperies like sterilizing their needles:
When PE rolls up your regional nursing homes, they turn into slaughterhouses. To date, PE-owned nursing homes have stolen at least 160,000 lost life years:
Then there's hospices, the last medical care you will ever receive. Once your doctor declares that you have less than six months or less to live, Medicare will pay a hospice $243-$1,462/day to take care of you as you die. At the top end of that rate, hospices have to satisfy a lot of conditions, but if the hospice is willing to take $243/day, they effectively have no duties to you – they don't even have to continue providing you with your regular medication or painkillers for your final days:
Setting up a hospice is cheap as hell. Pay a $3,000 filing fee, fill in some paperwork (which no one ever checks) and hang out a shingle. Nominally, a doctor has to oversee the operation, but PE-backed hospices save money here by having a single doctor "oversee" dozens of hospices:
Once you rope a patient into this system, you can keep billing the government for them up to a total of $32,000, then you have to kick them out. Why would a patient with only six months to live survive to be kicked out? Because PE companies pay bounties to doctors to refer patients who aren't dying to hospices. 51% of patients in the PE-cornered hospices of Van Nuys are "live discharged":
However, once you're admitted to a hospice, Medicare expects you to die – so "live discharged" patients face a thick bureaucratic process to get back into the system so they can start seeing a doctor again.
Reblogged naomiknight-17
"This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”
The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”
“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”
An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas."
Reblogged kaen-ace-of-diamonds
Beware of scammers! The government of Jamaica has set up an official donation page.
The Embassy of Jamaica in Washington DC is coordinating disaster relief in the U.S. They have asked people to contact them at [email protected] to coordinate support.
Please donate if you can and spread the word if you’re not able to do so at this time.
P. S. Thanks to those of you who have been boosting my posts on Hurricane Melissa donations. I appreciate you and your support.
Reblogged
Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Toronto, New York City and Miami! Full schedule here (New dates just added in San Diego and Denver!).
Shake Shack has changed the terms of service for its app, adding a "binding arbitration" clause that bans you from suing the company or joining a class action suit against it:
As Luke Goldstein writes for Jacobin, the ToS update is part of a wave of companies, including fast-food companies, that are taking away their customers' right to seek redress in the courts, forcing them to pursue justice with a private "arbitrator" who works for the company that harmed them:
Now, obviously you don't have to agree to terms of service just to walk into a Shake Shack and order a burger (yet), but Shake Shack, like other fast food companies, is on a full-court press to corral you into using its app to order your food, even if you're picking up that food from the counter and eating it in the restaurant. This is an easy trick to pull off – all Shake Shack needs to do is starve its cash-registers of personnel, creating untenably long lines for people attempting to order from a human.
Forcing diners to use an app has other advantages as well. Remember, an app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it, which means that whenever you use an app instead of a website, you are vulnerable to deep and ongoing commercial surveillance and can be bombarded with ads without you having any recourse:
That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through "surveillance pricing," which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50:
But beyond surveillance and price-gouging, app-based ordering offers corporations another way to screw you: they can force you into binding arbitration. Under binding arbitration, you "voluntarily" waive your right to have your grievances heard by a judge. Instead, the corporation hires a fake judge, called an "arbitrator," who hears your case and then a rebuttal from the company that signs their paycheck and decides who is guilty. It will not surprise you to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of their employers and even when they rule in favor of a wronged customer, the penalties they impose on their bosses add up to little more than a wrist-slap:
This binding arbitration bullshit was illegal until the 2010s, when Antonin Scalia authored a string of binding arbitration decisions for the Supreme Court, opening the hellmouth for the mass imposition of arbitration on anyone that a business could stick an "I agree" button in front of:
A fundamental tenet of conservative doctrine is "incentives matter" – that's why they say we can't have universal healthcare (if going to the doctor is free, you will schedule frivolous doctor's visits) or food or housing assistance (unless your boss can threaten you with homelessness and starvation, you won't go to work anymore). However, this is a highly selective bit of dogma, because incentives never seem to matter to rich people or corporations, whom conservatives are on an endless quest to immunize from any consequences for harming their workers or customers, which somehow won't incentivize them to hurt their workers and/or customers:
At this point, we should probably ask, "Why would anyone sue a Shake Shack?" To answer that, you just need to look at why people sue other fast-food restaurants, like McDonald's and Chipotle. The short answer? Because those restaurants had defective food-handling and sourcing procedures, and this resulted in their customers contracting life-threatening food-borne illnesses:
By immunizing itself from legal consequences for the most common sources of liability for fast-food restaurants, Shake Shack is reserving the right to make you shit yourself to death. Combine this immunity with Trump's unscheduled rapid midair disassembly of all federal regulations (AKA "Project 2025") and you get a situation where Shake Shack can just make up its own money-saving hygiene shortcuts, and face no consequences if these result in your shitting yourself to death. This is both literal and figurative enshittification.
Reblogged
"i don't care if they make their whole way though uni with chatgpt" i think you guys are so internetpilled that you have forgotten there are actual jobs out there that require people to know what they are doing in any way possible or else people die
i know a lot of people study just to get paid well but girl this is engineering be for fucking real take this seriously
114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.
I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.
Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.
There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:
1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.
2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.
3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.
The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.
Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.
A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.
We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.
Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:
"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."
The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.
I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.
So if you're going to blindly trust the AI to do critical work tasks, I hope you're prepared to be making an apology tour for the rest of your life if it all goes wrong.
I've been thinking about this post since I first saw it, bc I think, like...
It is important not to walk away from it thinking "but I'm not going to be an engineer, so that's fine."
In my adult life, I have (among other things) run a small business, I have managed a bank branch, and I have been a mortgage processor. In any one of those three jobs, not knowing the exact correct laws and procedures for what I'm doing could really fuck up someone else's life.
If I don't set up payroll correctly, I could create a huge disaster for myself and employees, either immediately or come tax time. QuickBooks keeps trying to get me to let AI manage my payroll and I would rather stab myself in the hand.
If I didn't handle deposits and Fincen reporting correctly in my branch banking days, I could end up accidentally committing many many crimes and making it harder for people to catch some of the really big, really terrible crimes. (Hint: this was important to uncovering all the Epstein shit!) That's not even counting all the actual cash I was responsible for. (It makes me want to throw up thinking about the fact that I literally handled about a million dollars in cash every week for 2 years.)
If I didn't handle my mortgage processing exactly right, people could lose their homes. I cannot stress enough how easy it is for shit to get REALLY FUCKED UP if deeds and mortgages are not filed exactly right. People get their homes (legally!) stolen from them every year.
Yes, it's important for engineers to learn how to do their jobs, but man... our lives are so interconnected, and so many things matter much more than you know. If the shit you do matters at all, in any way, to anyone, ever, you fucking need to do it right, because someone is counting on you doing exactly that.
I previously worked for a program in disability employment services and there were two things I was constantly at war with within practices by others:
1. My seriousness for protection of minors in all fonts regardless of how the company wanted me to handle it, I was very serious about meeting my states legal requirements.
2. The amount of Ai being used in disability services to cut corners on everything from emails to reports. Including people using it to write the meant to be personalised notes.
And at this point in time, despite being new and plenty of people saying that it was not a reliable or good idea and was absolutely a privacy risk; multiple companies and fields around us were having it become not just common office practice but written in to the company meetings that it was allowed and encouraged in some ways. (Despite absolutely not making writing an email any shorter than my own personal method of keeping a word document for it so I could copy paste whatever I needed into an email and have it available).
This has lead to constant issues; people's claims getting rejected because instead of local law it was being written to an American 'standard' (who knows if it even met any state disability laws there either), information leaks and privacy breaches, constant bad advice that's not relevant for clients needs bc Ai writes generic file notes that aren't actually relevant to the clients conditions, etc.
Ai is dangerous for everyone, especially the most vulnerable and those who will be brushed off when they voice concerns.
And the thing about people who try to make a fuss about it within a workplace by calling out its mistakes and refusing to use it; is we just become ignored and moved out of and away from projects.
Which means you have less oversight from those who'd pick it up, or it'll take longer to pick up because Ai constantly makes small mistakes that are ignored and need to be corrected so it takes longer for the larger ones to be seen. If it's something that even actually gets multiple layers of checkpoints, which a lot of things aren't.
People are lazy with checking Ai.
They assume because they've 'given the correct parameters' that the task has been met to a standard they want.
And then because it's done in a shorter amount of time than actually writing and proofreading a report would take, companies up the workload and demand more of employees, meaning even more mistakes get missed.
Ai in basic admin jobs will lead to people being harmed because anything that requires reporting has a layer of impact, whether legal, financial, medical or other.
Especially in the medical field, Ai is going to hurt people. Not just because of bad Ai google summaries, but because inaccurate reports written by a machine that misrepresents information will absolutely get people killed.
It's been a problem experienced due to dismissive doctors and nurses, what happens when someone already dismissive decides to use Ai and not even re-read their prompt let alone the answer they receive?
I've already seen people not receive care from the NDIS and Centerlink due to Ai being used when it shouldn't have been, and this is absolutely going to be a reoccurring issue.
I am an engineer. Even if you try to avoid ai, it is being integrated into everything. Engineers use very expensive and incredibly niche software programs. I can do some coding myself to check the numbers and the whole point of training is being able to look at numbers and say: there's something wrong here.
But I'm terrified about when the software starts hallucinating numbers. I can catch some things, but it is going to be decades before we really realize the impact of these issues.
And for any engineering student who makes it this far. Don't use chatgpt for numbers you fool. Use wolfram alpha like us old timers 6 years ago did.
Reblogged punkitt-is-here
"The nonbinary afab who goes by she/her, dresses femininely, and uses a push-up bra when I—" when you what? What's wrong with her?
Is she not nonbinary enough for you? Is the way she experiences her queerness and how she presents not perfect enough for you? Nonbinary people don't owe you androgyny, right? So why is she the exception? Why does she have to hate herself to appeal to your standards? Why is she any less trans—any less worthy of respect—cause it's "not visible"? Queer solidarity my ass. Don't spout this bullshit on Pride, man.
This, but also for enby amabs going by he/him and with hairy chests and beards
Reblogged
Is it bad that I feel slightly bad that I keep coming to the library to use its quietness and its desk space and its pleasant atmosphere for writing but I never check out books?
Why would you feel bad? You’re using the library for one of its intended purposes. The desks, WiFi, space etc are LITERALLY there for you to do exactly what you’re doing AND each time you go in you add to the foot traffic numbers that prove hey people are coming in to use our stuff mr. government so keep funding us.
Confirmed by another public librarian. One of the stats we track is "WiFi usages"
That is, we track number of sessions/devices using it over time.
The library is not about snooping on what you're doing with that WiFi. Libraries respect privacy.
We literally have a door counter at my library. Congratulations, you just added to our statistics.
I think it's a bit sad that with more and more public spaces vanishing, people are feeling bad about not "buying" stuff to "earn" their time at a library.
A library is like a park, you're allowed to just. Exist in it.
I check out books every 4 weeks, when the learning period from my current books is up, but I go much more frequently with my kid to just sit there and read to them, and that's okay. In my school days, we'd go and do our research for presentations there, just reading, never checking out.
A library is a space to just exist.
So a year or so ago, we added some new desklets at our library, in areas where we noticed that people gravitated to but didn't have the right furnishing to use them in the way they wanted to.
The first few weeks of having the new furniture were absolutely filled with excited librarians whispering to each other, "Look! Someone's using the desklet in the back corner!" and "casually" walking by to enjoy the sight like wildlife researchers who had successfully baited a particularly elusive rare bird. Nobody cared if those people checked anything out or not. There was a need! We saw the need! We filled the need! Hooray!
WE PUT THE THING THERE TO BE USED. USE THE THING.
And you literally pay for the thing! You pay taxes! I’m sure they would want you there regardless and I understand you feel like you have to pay for rent but you very much did already pay for it, that was a thing that happened!
You're also encouraging more people to use the space! People are more likely to enter and do things when they see other people already there
Reblogged snowsisterskiss
puppypalice-deactivated20251211
Listen it sucks that transfems are getting purged off tumblr but you do realize that “love every trans women before it’s to late” isn’t talking about transmisogynistic social media bannings.
puppypalice-deactivated20251211
I’ve been getting really frustrated recently with people using that post to refer to transfems they follow that have been banned off tumblr. It’s not about people who get nuked, it’s about our sisters who have died, and frankly I feel so offended whenever someone uses it to refer to anything less.
Love every trans women before it’s to late, because if you don’t, a wonderful life may be lost without ever being loved at all.