Okay. It's Time For An AI Rant.

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

What if this pride month you all stop telling intersex people that you've always heard how we don't want to be included in the queer community, how you're too afraid to include us because terfs have told you that we're not queer (a rare time yall love to listen to and obey terfs lmao), how you won't stand in our defense because terfs will attack you if you do, and how you've never heard anything about us ever in your life

Stop telling us to our faces that you've never heard of us when as much as 7% of the population could be intersex. Do you know how devastating that is? To know we are THAT oppressed and silenced that even the 1% people say is out there barely exists in community due to intentional oppression and violence? Stop parroting that bullshit redheads and intersex people statistic, there are so much more of us than that. People say this so proudly and excitedly to me like they're the first and I'm not even a real fucking redhead

Stop participating in breaking our community by obeying terfs

Would y'all think it's reasonable and excusable if a cis person said they didn't include or speak about trans people in their activism because terfs have attacked them? Why is it fine that its such a normal thing for perisex queer people, including trans people, to say this shit to me? Why is this so common? Why are yall cowards when it comes to us?

Because I was now a man, I could not speak about what it was like to be a woman. Because I had been a woman, I could never really speak about what it was like to be a man. Do the math: I could not speak. It was a double erasure, a double bind, in which every experience I had was false, and so nothing I said was credible. I could no longer derive authority from my experiences before transition, and shouldn’t even cite them — I had never “really” been a woman, so those things hadn’t happened — but those experiences could always be weaponized against me to prove I wasn’t “really” the man I claimed to be. They call it erasure, when this happens. I wasn’t prepared for how literal the term was. Every day, I could feel myself disappear.

— Eraserhead: On writer's block and being a gender traitor by Jude Doyle

i don’t have the wiki open but i have a biome map with predator & leviathan spawn points labeled so i don’t give myself a panic attack going into the sparse reef :-)

Shout out to games that require me to constantly have the wiki open in another window 🫶

my favorite actual chimera moonpaw designs are the ones where one part is black and one part is orange.

because of the way inheritance of the orange gene works, a 100% biologically female chimera can’t be orange and black.

with an orange mother and an orange father, all kittens in the litter would be orange.

with an orange mother and a black father, all male kittens would be orange and all female kittens would be tortoiseshell.

with a tortoiseshell mother and an orange father, a female kitten could be (with a 1 in 4 chance) orange or, more likely, tortoiseshell. half of all female kittens will be orange and half of all female kittens will be tortoiseshell, meaning 1 in 4 kittens will be orange mollies. male kittens could be black or orange.

with a black mother and an orange father, female kittens would be tortoiseshell and male kittens would be black.

(with a black mother and a black father, no kittens would be orange, obviously.)

the black/orange chimera moonpaw designs are intersex, trans, or both!

you do understand that people convert to judaism right. you do understand that people who convert become ethnically jewish right. that they are spiritually adopted by the first jews, abraham and sarah, right. that king david (AND JESUS, for the christians in the audience) were descended from a woman who converted. right.

in fact it’s considered a SIN (or at least very rude!) for jews to remind converts that they’re converts or imply that they’re not “real jews” because of it so while it’s not technically against any rules for goyim to do it (judaism isn’t like christianity, most of the rules don’t apply to everyone) it’s still shitty