The Ability And Right To Choose Is Not Exclusive To You.

The ability and right to choose is not exclusive to you.

If you think abortions are tantamount to murder, do not get one. But that is your choice. Other people have the ability and right to choose otherwise.

If you do not like piercings and tattoos, do not get them. But other people have the ability and right to decide what to do to their own bodies.

If you want to believe in a higher guiding authority and follow regulations by which to live under a religion, that is your choice. But other people are not obligated to comply with the regulations you have imposed upon yourself. Other people have the ability and right to choose how to live.

The ability and right to choose is for ourselves. It gives us the right to say I have made this choice for myself. Not I have made this choice and everyone else must comply.

Cripple is a slur. Please don't use it if you're able bodied

I have repeatedly stated that I am disabled.

What’s your opinion on c.ai roleplay, ai art and generative ai in general?

My opinion is that AI should make peoples' lives easier, rather than stealing peoples' creations and spewing out butchered replicas so it can "replace them."

All current creative accessible AI is modelled on the stolen content of hundreds of thousands of people. Character AI? Stolen fanfiction. ChatGPT? Stolen essays, novels, fanfiction, images. Generative AI? Same thing.

And once its in, its impossible to remove entirely. And the techbros making tens of thousands off your stolen content don't want to remove it anyway. When Glaze first came out they threw fits and tried to get Glaze legally destroyed so they could keep stealing and profiting off of content theft.

And its so fucking easy for people to mine content off of websites and steal your content without you ever even knowing! And if or when you do find out, its too late. Your content is part of that code forever. Its been absorbed, butchered, regurgitated.

AI in creative spaces does have a place, but it needs to be so, so carefully controlled and used. The widespread ability to just mangle together other people's creations and claim ownership of whatever it churns out is... Horrifying at best.

I vomit every time I see "made with ChatGPT!" on AO3.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Good News Network

This Startup Is Using Dead Leaves to Make Paper Without Cutting Trees

The company already produces 3 million paper carrier bags per year from 5,000 metric tons of leaves from their headquarters in Paris.

"Businesses like to talk about the concept of a closed loop or circular economy, but often they’re trying to close small loops. Releaf Paper takes dead leaves from city trees and turns them into paper for bags, office supplies, and more—which is to say they are striving to close one heck of a big loop.

How big? Six billion trees are cut down every year for paper products according to the WWF, producing everything from toilet paper to Amazon boxes to the latest best-selling novels. Meanwhile, the average city produces 8,000 metric tons of leaves every year which clog gutters and sewers, and have to be collected, composted, burned, or dumped in landfills.

In other words, huge supply and huge demand, but Releaf Paper is making cracking progress. They already produce 3 million paper carrier bags per year from 5,000 metric tons of leaves from their headquarters in Paris.

Joining forces with landscapers in sites across Europe, thousands of tonnes of leaves arrive at their facility where a low-water, zero-sulfur/chlorine production process sees the company create paper with much smaller water and carbon footprints...

“In a city, it’s a green waste that should be collected. Really, it’s a good solution because we are keeping the balance—we get fiber for making paper and return lignin as a semi-fertilizer for the cities to fertilize the gardens or the trees. So it’s like a win-win model,” [Valentyn] Frechka, co-founder and CTO of Releaf Paper, told Euronews.

Releaf is already selling products to LVMH, BNP Paribas, Logitech, Samsung, and various other big companies. In the coming years, Frechka and Sobolenka also plan to further increase their production capacity by opening more plants in other countries. If the process is cost-efficient, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be a paper mill of this kind in every city.

“We want to expand this idea all around the world. At the end, our vision is that the technology of making paper from fallen leaves should be accessible on all continents,” Sobolenka notes, according to ZME Science."

-via Goodd News Network, August 15, 2024