caitas-cooing:

as-catolica:

mariaalenkoshepard:

sadhoc:

there is a very real tendency of teenagers with anxiety disorders self diagnosing with considerably more stigmatized and impairing mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia, DID, personality disorders), but the best response to that isn’t to get angry with them for “appropriating” lol. instead you show them coping resources for the problems they’re actually having and deemphasize diagnostic categories in general. if an 18 year old is claiming to have alzheimer’s, they’re probably making an innocent mistake and are in genuine distress. be kind.

Also I think this trend comes, at least in part, from how brushed aside anxiety disorders can be. If your parents and teachers dismiss you with ‘oh everyone feels anxious’, then inevitably you’re going to start thinking that there must be something else going on with you

”You must feel very scared right now; let’s talk about how to help you personally, tailored to your symptoms” will always be more helpful than “stop faking (X) for attention”. If theyre that desperate for attention or an explanation, something is wrong.

And like, at least some of them are probably right. Yeah these disorders are less common than things like anxiety disorders, but they are more common than you think they are. Like, they probably shouldn’t self diagnose without doing a reasonable amount of research and talking to a professional if possible, but not every single one of them is wrong, and being wrong about something is not the same thing as lying about having something you don’t. Be nice to teenagers they’re still learning

centrally-unplanned:

athingbynatureprodigal:

centrally-unplanned:

oligetcetera:

centrally-unplanned:

Now for one of the *worst* parts of the new ai discourse: the ridic language appropriation:

image

Caryn Marjorie created an AI version of herself, which was designed to be a virtual girlfriend.

But the voice-based chatbot has engaged in sexual explicit conversations with subscribers.

Marjorie said she and her team are working “around the clock” to prevent it from happening again

Imagine trying to put in explicit words how an ai chatbot version of a women whose chosen profession is to create soft core porn fantasy content online for her followers, for the purpose of being a virtual girlfriend to those followers, is ‘going rouge’ by generating said porn for said followers.

'Around the clock’ indeed, holding that level of contradiction in your head would be a full time job!

I mean, there’s nothing too AI-specific in the language misuse here, it’s just ad copy. “Oooh this might be dangerous, watch out kids for the sex and violence you definitely don’t want to see ;)” that’s not cognitive dissonance it’s just a familiar, albeit kind of eyerolly, form of rhetoric.

That said, you know, I don’t expect it will be very hard to select a random person with example camera footage, including nothing sexy, and to make a sexy chatbot version of them, and I don’t feel great about that. When it’s just one person doing it on their computer it’s mostly isomorphic to normal human fantasizing but when it’s passed around I think it has the capacity to be extremely humiliating (but maybe I’m relying too much on my own intuitions here? And the former feels incredibly icky to do, even if I can reconcile myself to others doing it.)

The other thing of course is the consumer side, all of this will be very cheap and eventually free, and I’m guessing (for many people) at least as much a leap in addictiveness from 2022-era pornography as (for many people) going from natural fantasizing to 2022-era pornography is. Not great!

I think that might be a product of being into the discourse too deep (just a guess ofc) - “AI going rogue” is very explicitly a phrase born of the AI alignment and wider doomer scenarios. Absent that thread of discourse this article would not describe an AI going rogue in that way, its not the natural way to put this. I get that “going rogue” is a normal phrase, but its not how outsiders would view a computer program (they would describe it has going haywire, for example). Its been codified in AI very strongly by these debates.

And the dissonance I was referring to is not in the writer of the article, its in the creator (and her team). Like its a metaphorical dissonance of course, I do not in fact think they are experiencing intellectual turmoil. I am instead commenting on the societal silliness of a digital sex worker (a term she would never use for herself but is almost certainly accurate) drawing these kinds of lines around what is sexual and what is not. And the idea that an LLM would be told to be a virtual girlfriend and then be scolded for engaging in sexual content. Its exposing, to see that - to see that society has made the idea of a simulated girlfriend who is perfectly chaste make sense enough to them that it would appropriate the idea of a misaligned AI to explain a tool deviating from that concept.

But yeah on a very different thread, it is at current tech extremely easy to create a sexual avatar of existing people based on available photos, those tools exist as we speak. I tend to be pretty radically open on these topics but its certainly going to get ethically complicated when people start selling the tools, hosting 'modding platforms’ w/ user-generated training algs, etc. Which is probably not going to be stopped! Definitely an area the market is going to outpace the norms on for a while…

Clarification on a historical note: The phrase “AI going rogue” predates AI alignment discourse by (at least) decades. You’ve mostly heard it from “AI alignment and doomer” people on the internet, but those people got it from stories that were written before they were born. They didn’t invent it, and they’re not the only place people could have gotten it from, because the place they got it from is still there.

Im pretty sure we are all on the same page on this front, but yeah, in case others didnt know, the current ai alignment doomers are the latest gen of an idea with a very long history.

corrodedbisexual:
“Completely obsessed with him tbh
”
corrodedbisexual:
“Completely obsessed with him tbh
”
corrodedbisexual:
“Completely obsessed with him tbh
”
corrodedbisexual:
“Completely obsessed with him tbh
”

soul-hammer:

antifainternational:

https://gomag.com/article/biker-butches-save-drag-queen-story-hour

PARKHILL,CANADA REPORTBACK

A library in Ontario hosted a drag queen story hour last weekend, and like homophobic clockwork, there were the anti-LGBTQ+ protesters. Only this time, they were met by the strongest force on earth: Butches.

ceekari:

this-world-of-beautiful-monsters:

girlcaligula:

girlcaligula:

god I just. love ruthlessness as a character trait so much. sexy sexy sexy

image

this one. absolutely in love with this definition. give me a character who thinks like this and I’ll love them to pieces

Katherine Applegate is fucking hardcore, man.

KA wrote some beautifully ruthless characters, man

nap-hime:

toodotnil:

image

please enjoy Poki as he found the meat I’m defrosting

Oh defrosting meat, we’re really in it now

politijohn:

image
image

Source

Interesting to call this “confiscating” when it’s just making the rich pay their fair share, especially considering all the stolen wealth from the bottom 99% and historic tax evasion.

coldalbion:

avita-creator:

odinsblog:

contemplatingoutlander:

saywhat-politics:

image

The law allows any medical provider or insurer to deny care based on “ethical, moral, or religious beliefs.”

There is NOTHING “ethical” or “moral” about a medical practitioner letting someone die because they don’t approve of the LGBTQ+ community.

Even doctors who work on battlefields know it is the ethically and morally correct thing to do to care for enemy soldiers who are wounded.

The Florida legislature appears to be enacting laws that are about as hateful and corrupt as Southern legislatures enacted during Jim Crow.

They are turning Florida into a dystopian society.

We cannot let DeSantis anywhere near the Oval Office or he will turn the entire nation into a far right dystopian nightmare.

“The Florida legislature appears to be enacting laws that are about as hateful and corrupt as Southern legislatures enacted during Jim Crow.”

image

The Republican “culture wars” focus on every hateful thing except whatever could actually help people

From the article [emphasis mine]:

The newly signed law says denial of care can’t be based on a patient’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, but it provides no protections on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Additionally, the law also allows healthcare employers to discriminate in hiring and bars medical boards from disciplining doctors for spreading misinformation, essentially forcing employers to keep workers who refuse to do their jobs, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) noted.

In a statement, the HRC said the newly signed law “creates a license to discriminate by allowing healthcare employers to discriminate in hiring, and it bars medical Boards from disciplining doctors for spreading misinformation.”

You would have to be willfully ignorant and aggressively naive to believe that Republicans won’t change any of the qualifiers at some future date. Clarence Thomas already implied that he thinks Marriage Equality should be overturned. If they’re coming for the “T” and the “Q” in LGBTQ today, you better believe they’ll be coming for the “LGB” tomorrow. And they won’t stop there.

Which is why I always find it wild when all the TERFs out there side with conservatives (knowingly or otherwise), foolishly thinking that they’re safe.

image

If you aren’t a wealthy, white, heterosexual, “Christian” male, then you’re fair game for Republican ChristoFascists—you are not safe.

Anyway,…

👉🏿 https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/05/florida-gov-ron-desantis-signs-bill-legalizing-anti-lgbtq-medical-discrimination/

Republicans want us dead. There’s no two ways about it, and nothing they can justify this level of cruelty and evil with. We do not fit into their idea of a perfect world, therefore we must be exterminated.

This is a war for our survival now. Do not be so foolish as to think it is anything but.

This doesn’t just affect trans folks, btw. A doctor who doesn’t believe it’s “ethical” to say, treat a disabled person because they “have poor quality of life already” could easily kill folks.

They did it, and are still doing it, throughout the COVID pandemic and before

fox-bright:

writing-prompt-s:

You work in a factory that builds intelligent war machines, built and forced to fight in a constant war. Out of either sympathy or habit, you head-pat every machine after every inspection. A seemingly harmless gesture… until men in suits pulled you from work and interrogated you about it.

“I’m sorry. Could you repeat that, please? I must have misheard you.” I was raised to be polite, and I’m not about to stop now (there are so many guns in this room) so I resist adding “because that is the fucking stupidest thing I have ever heard” to the end of the sentence.
I may as well have spared myself the trouble. The cold face of the high-ranking military man on the other side of the table only gets, if this is possible, colder. His lips are pressed flat, and I think there might be some sort of undiagnosed blood pressure problem, because he’s turning a very unnatural purple.
“Every. Goddamn. One. Of the units that have come through your maintenance line in the last six months are now showing signs of instability. If you can’t identify the problem for me in the next five minutes, you and everyone you know are going to spend the rest of your lives in high-security pris
on.”

I might be turning a funny color now myself.

Keep reading

brennatwohy:
““Forgive Me My Salt,” Brenna Twohy.
”

skeleton-monarch:

mindblowingscience:

In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.

Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.

Continue Reading

image
image

From the article! For anyone struggling, the placements go 1’s, 20’s, 400’s, 8,000’s, 160,000’s, etc. Take each placement and multiply it by 20 to get the next one! (The Hindu-Arabic system goes 1’s, 10’s, 100’s, 1,000’s, 10,000’s, 100,000’s, for reference)

How they got 24,516 from here really confused me until I broke it down, so I’ll do the same for others!

image

The first numeral represents 4, and it’s in the 8,000’s place, which means it represents 24,000. This system doesn’t have a dedicated 10,000’s place, which means the amount of individual numerals will be smaller. Next we have the numeral representing 1, and it’s in the 400’s place, meaning it represents 400.

This means so far we have 24,400, meaning we still have 116 left to write. We can’t put 400 into 100 without using fractions, which we don’t want in our integer system by definition, so we instead look to the 20’s place. The most amount of 20’s we can fit into 116 without fractions is 5, which is why the symbol for 5 is there. This just leaves 16 for the 1’s position!

We can look at it in terms of “number we write”(place value). 24,516 = 3(8,000) + 1(400) + 5(20) + 16(1)!

I highly encourage everyone to read the article and look into this, this is revolutionary.

comrade-is-gender-neutral:

kelvintimeline:

Broad criticisms of sex inclusion in media are always gonna just be laughed out of the room for me. Like, if you have specific criticisms (sexualization of minors, uneven sexualization that ends up hypersexualizing or desexualizing marginalized groups, sexualization of abuse without any deeper commentary against said abuse) I will absolutely listen but shit that’s just like “Media/society is too horny” or “Sex doesn’t add anything to the plot” or “Sex scenes are awkward to watch” are absolutely meritless when we live in society that demonizes sex so heavily.

I’d rather have a dozen “unnecessary” sex scenes than live in a sexless media landscape when media is such an important vector of sexual experimentation and realization for people. I’d rather have MORE sex in (adult centric) media tbh because there are still so many groups that haven’t rly had healthy, consensual, JOYFUL, and non-fetishized sexuality on display. I want everyone to be able to see people like themselves enjoying sex with people who look like their partners. I want all (consensual, age appropriate) sex to be destigmatized.

And I think showing more sex can even be a way of combatting fetishization because it no longer lets groups of people be a “niche” sexual object but rather the subject of mutual desire that is normalized and broadly accepted. Like, for example, I don’t think fat fetishization would be as much of a thing if fat characters were more common, more fleshed out, and were regularly shown as having their own sexual agency (as opposed to just being objects of “taboo” desires).

Obviously, there is a time and place for sex and a lot of media DOES clumsily employ sexuality but I embrace that clumsiness again and again over sterile, sexless works. I’d rather have sexual moments to criticize and contrast to well implemented scenes than nothing at all.

I can’t remember where I originally saw this pointed out, but someone mentioned how we are so much more comfortable with displays of violence than sexual intimacy, and that includes what people are willing to expose kids to.

If you think sex scenes are unnecessary or if they make you uncomfortable but you enjoy graphically violent media, you need to have a talk with yourself about why.

what-even-is-thiss:

dsudis:

penrosesun:

image

For the details with no paywall:

The article says that the guidelines have been updated. Instead of asking if you’re a man that’s had sex with another man in the past 3 months it asks everyone regardless of gender if they’ve had anal sex with a new partner or if they’ve had anal sex with multiple partners in the past 3 months.

This both opens up blood donation to msm in exclusive relationships or who don’t have anal sex and more accurately identifies hiv risk from people who aren’t msm. This is exactly the sort of guidelines we’ve been fighting for for years. This is a major win for both gay rights and blood donation in the US. Now a bunch of people who couldn’t donate before can donate now.

science70:
“Greek singer Vicky Leandros after winning the 1972 Eurovision Song Contest, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 1972.
”

science70:

Greek singer Vicky Leandros after winning the 1972 Eurovision Song Contest, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 1972.

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