#cost-effective tech learning

[virtualizationhowto]

What is a HomeLab and Why Build One?

What is a HomeLab and Why Build One? @vexpert #homelabsetup #homelab #vmwarecommunities #virtualmachinesinhomelab #buildingyourownserver #RaspberryPiexperiments #handsontechnologyexploration #opensourcevirtualizationsoftware #selfhosted

A home lab, or simply “lab,” is a personal space where technology enthusiasts, professionals, and hobbyists can experiment with various hardware and software. From virtual machines to your own server, a home lab offers endless possibilities. But what exactly is a home lab, and why should you consider building one? This article will explore these questions and more. What is a HomeLab? Home labs…

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[nasa]

What We Learned from Flying a Helicopter on Mars

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made history – not only as the first aircraft to perform powered, controlled flight on another world – but also for exceeding expectations, pushing the limits, and setting the stage for future NASA aerial exploration of other worlds.

Built as a technology demonstration designed to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, Ingenuity performed flight operations from the Martian surface for almost three years. The helicopter ended its mission on Jan. 25, 2024, after sustaining damage to its rotor blades during its 72nd flight.

So, what did we learn from this small but mighty helicopter?

We can fly rotorcraft in the thin atmosphere of other planets.

Ingenuity proved that powered, controlled flight is possible on other worlds when it took to the Martian skies for the first time on April 19, 2021.

Flying on planets like Mars is no easy feat: The Red Planet has a significantly lower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere, with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet. This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieve flight.

Ingenuity performed several flights dedicated to understanding key aerodynamic effects and how they interact with the structure and control system of the helicopter, providing us with a treasure-trove of data on how aircraft fly in the Martian atmosphere.

Now, we can use this knowledge to directly improve performance and reduce risk on future planetary aerial vehicles.

Creative solutions and “ingenuity” kept the helicopter flying longer than expected.

Over an extended mission that lasted for almost 1,000 Martian days (more than 33 times longer than originally planned), Ingenuity was upgraded with the ability to autonomously choose landing sites in treacherous terrain, dealt with a dead sensor, dusted itself off after dust storms, operated from 48 different airfields, performed three emergency landings, and survived a frigid Martian winter.

Fun fact: To keep costs low, the helicopter contained many off-the-shelf-commercial parts from the smartphone industry - parts that had never been tested in deep space. Those parts also surpassed expectations, proving durable throughout Ingenuity’s extended mission, and can inform future budget-conscious hardware solutions.

There is value in adding an aerial dimension to interplanetary surface missions.

Ingenuity traveled to Mars on the belly of the Perseverance rover, which served as the communications relay for Ingenuity and, therefore, was its constant companion. The helicopter also proved itself a helpful scout to the rover.

After its initial five flights in 2021, Ingenuity transitioned to an “operations demonstration,” serving as Perseverance’s eyes in the sky as it scouted science targets, potential rover routes, and inaccessible features, while also capturing stereo images for digital elevation maps.

Airborne assets like Ingenuity unlock a new dimension of exploration on Mars that we did not yet have – providing more pixels per meter of resolution for imaging than an orbiter and exploring locations a rover cannot reach.

Tech demos can pay off big time.

Ingenuity was flown as a technology demonstration payload on the Mars 2020 mission, and was a high risk, high reward, low-cost endeavor that paid off big. The data collected by the helicopter will be analyzed for years to come and will benefit future Mars and other planetary missions.

Just as the Sojourner rover led to the MER-class (Spirit and Opportunity) rovers, and the MSL-class (Curiosity and Perseverance) rovers, the team believes Ingenuity’s success will lead to future fleets of aircraft at Mars.

In general, NASA’s Technology Demonstration Missions test and advance new technologies, and then transition those capabilities to NASA missions, industry, and other government agencies. Chosen technologies are thoroughly ground- and flight-tested in relevant operating environments — reducing risks to future flight missions, gaining operational heritage and continuing NASA’s long history as a technological leader.

You can fall in love with robots on another planet.

Following in the tracks of beloved Martian rovers, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter built up a worldwide fanbase. The Ingenuity team and public awaited every single flight with anticipation, awe, humor, and hope.

Check out #ThanksIngenuity on social media to see what’s been said about the helicopter’s accomplishments.

Learn more about Ingenuity’s accomplishments here. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[river-taxbird]

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)

Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.

[jaythes1mp]

Hi can you please make a yandere batfam meeting a merfolk reader or what your headcanonns on how that would go especially if reader is willing to stay and maybe even help with the more aquatic stuff of vigilante work

Definitely! This is some general stuff, a link to the chapter once I’ve written it will be added at the end. If everyone could please cast votes for what you’d rather before I start writing it, would be great!

Anon, I know your initial ask wasn’t really a request, but I want to write this. Haha… hope you don’t mind.

Yandere Batfam x Merfolk Reader

In the early stages of your involvement with the BatFamily, when their obsessions with you are just beginning to form, they would seek out your assistance in their crime fighting endeavours. This is under the assumption that you’re already a well known vigilante of sorts. Their obsession growing after they encounter and become acquainted with you. Learning of your skills, and how your kind can help them if any villains were to take their fight to the water surrounding Gotham’s edges.

But once the Bat's obsession has matured into a deep, twisted fascination, they would never allow you near the battlefield. Their possessive nature would take over, and they would be unable to bear the thought of you being hurt or even fighting others. Even if you were incredibly powerful, their protective instincts would render it moot the moment they have their possessive grasp on you, effectively ending your crime fighting days.

However, if you were not affiliated with any vigilante work from the beginning, the BatFamily would never even entertain the idea. Their fixation would target you on a personal level, rather than the dynamic of needing crime fighting assistance.

They might encounter you under various circumstances, such as: (numbered 1,2,3,4.)

By chance along Gotham’s shores, accidentally stumbling upon you.

You were caught in a trap, leading to your capture and confinement at Wayne Enterprises research facility. <- my favourite

One of the Bat’s had suffered an injury that sent them plummeting deep into the waters of Gotham, but just as they’re about to loose consciousness you swim them up to the surface. Saving them.

Or you may take the initiative on your own accord, reeling in one of the batfamily for either help or sustenance. The rest of the family coming to the rescue only to learn that you’re non threatening, and that the chosen member is cuddling into your side.

They would grow unhealthily fixated on you. Attached. Every aspect of your appearance and your mysterious species would fascinate them. The thought alone that you could survive in the harsh dangerous waters of Gotham without Bruce’s high-tech equipment ever detecting your existence baffling them. This would spark a curiosity turned obsession that would drive them to uncover everything about you, no matter the cost. Their intrigue shifting into a deeper, twisted form of love.

Initially, they would design a high-tech enclosure for you at the Wayne Manor, meticulously crafted to provide everything you need to thrive and more. Which you willingly enter, unaware that you’re under their watchful eyes, who monitor your every move, their fascination growing.

Under the vigilante route, where you’ve allied yourself with the family, you would move to the manor to discuss and plan out operations aimed at capturing and stopping a villain who was terrorising the city. Your presence there would foster a bond between you, as they relied on your skills and knowledge to aid them.

Voluntarily travelling there to discuss plans and strategies to combat with the villain and future perpetrators who has target Gotham.

Versus the ‘found’ routes, where you’d go because you trust them.

1 & 4 -> You would go to the Wayne Manor intrigued and fascinated to explore an entirely new place. Having only known of Gotham’s currents before, the thought of learning about human culture piques your interest. Contrary to the ominous warnings from the Elder Mers, these humans have been nothing but kind. They haven’t tried to harm you in any way, neither confining you in cages nor cutting you up to consume you, nor taking your scales. The Elder Mers must have misled you! The BatFamily is proving to be nothing but sweet and welcoming. What’s the harm in staying with them for a little while? You’re sure your clan won’t even realise that you’re gone.

2 -> You would either have no choice in the matter, as you were considered the Wayne’s property under the public’s eyes, Or you would leave under a negotiation with one of them. Desperate to escape from the constant scrutiny of the scientists who eye you as nothing more than a piece of meat. Their tests leaving you feeling exposed and vulnerable, had become unbearable, with the small transparent tank doing nothing to offer you comfort or refuge. A public spectacle being observed daily by prying eyes. You’d do anything to never have to become an experiment for these humans ever again.

3 -> They would invest months, devoting themselves to understanding your life, gradually winning you over with their kindness. Persuading you to reciprocate their efforts by visiting the enclosure they had meticulously designed specifically for you. You were fascinated by their accomplishment, having built a structure that seamlessly connected to every room within their manor. Slowly you visited more often, their efforts touching you deeply. They had created this for you. Maybe humans weren’t all bad…

Whichever route you take, the end result is the same; they become deeply, unhealthily obsessed with you. Having them hold you captive, their obsession transforming into an intense, lasting fixation. They would have no intention of ever letting you go, keeping you confined in their carefully crafted webs, for the rest of your life, never permitting you to escape their grasp. Their desire for you becoming all-consuming, forever entrapping you within their influence.

Please vote for which of them you’d like to see most!

Romantic or platonic? Tell me in the comments or anon asks, please.

[cy-cyborg]

Tips for wring amputees: its ok if your amputee can't repair their own prosthetics

There's a trope in fiction for amputees to always be these mechanical geniuses who can make and repair their own prosthetics, endlessly tinkering away and improving them. This isn't a particularly trope, and i dont think its harmful or anything, but in reality, prosthetics are REALLY, REALLY complicated, and a lot of amputees cant do their own repairs. And thats ok. Like, prosthetic creation and repair is way, way harder than I think people expect. Well outside the skillset of your standard mechanic, handy man or craftsperson.

People who make and repair prosthetics are called prosthetists. To become a prosthetist, most countries around the world today require you to have completed a bachelor's degree in specifically in prosthetics and orthotics, which covers not only how to make a prosthetics (and orthodics) but a great deal of medical knowledge, physics, how different forces impact "non-standard" bodies, the additional biological wear-and-tear that comes with being an amputee and so much more. This will qualify you to do the job of fitting/making the prosthetic socket (the part that attaches to your body) and putting premade components together to make a functioning device. On top of this, many prosthetists are also expected to have artistic skills, sewing skills, good physical strength and dexterity, IT skills, and more recently, knowledge of 3D modelling and printing.

You want to make all the high-tech components the prosthetists put together to make the full prosthetic? The requirements for that vary country to country, but most will require at least some level study in the field of engineering and/or medicine, on top of what was already required for the prosthetics course.

The reason for all this is because even "basic" prosthetics are extremely finicky, and messing up one thing will have a domino effect on the rest of the body, especially in more complicated prosthetics. It can also result in people getting severally injured if anything is even slightly off. many leg amputees for example end up with spinal issues due to extremely minor issues with their prosthetic that weren't caught until years later, and by then the damage had been done.

Some amputees do learn to do basic repairs. This is most common in places like the US, where a visit to the prosthetist can cost hundred to thousands of dollars (depending on your insurance), but it's also quite common in rural parts of countries like Australia, where cost isn't an issue but access is due to vast distances between major cities. I was personally in this category; as a kid, my nearest prosthetist was 6 hours away. My prosthetist was able to teach my dad, who later taught me, how to do some of the simple repairs, but we still needed to go in every few weeks for the more complex stuff (Kids prosthetic need more adjusting than adults because they're still growing. Also I was rough on my prosthetics and broke them a lot lol).

But even after being taught how to do repairs and having my prosthetics for 20+ years, I only ever did these sorts of repairs to my below-knee prosthetic. I will not do any repairs of any kind to my above knee leg, which is much more technologically complex. Every time I tried, I made it worse to the point where the leg was unusable. I just leave those repairs to the guy who went to university to learn how to do it, and sometimes even he needs to send it off to someone with even more specialist knowledge when it's really badly messed up lol. Last time that happened Australia post lost the package. Not really relevant to this post, I just find the idea of it being sent to the wrong place by accident hilarious, it was one of my more realistic legs too so someone probably had a heart attack when they opened that package lmao.

Anyway, back on track lol.

This isn't even touching on the fact that on some more advanced prosthetics, many features are actually locked behind a security barrier only prosthetists can access. My prosthetic knee has an app on my phone I can pair it to, that allows me to change certain settings and swap between certain modes for different activities that tell the leg to change its behaviour depending on what I'm doing (e.g. a mode for running, a mode for cycling etc). but most of the more in-depth settings I can't access, only my prosthetist can, and he can only gain access to those settings with a security key given to him by the manufacturing company that requires him to provide proof of his credentials to receive it. I don't really agree with this btw, something about being locked out of my own leg's settings makes me feel a bit of an ick, but it's set up like this because people used to be able to access these settings and they would mess with things to the point their leg was virtually unusable. Because altering one setting had a domino effect on all the others, and a lot of folks weren't really paying attention to what they were messing with, all their prosthetists could do was factory reset the whole leg, which causes some issues too. Prosthetic arms are often similarly complex, as I understand it and have similar security barriers in place for more advanced arms. I don't know for sure though, so take that with a grain of salt.

All this to say these are incredibly delicate, finicky and complex pieces of equipment. There's nothing wrong with having a techy amputee character who can do their own repairs, but in reality, that is pretty rare, and its ok to have your character need to see a prosthetist or someone more knowledgeable than them. It's a part of the amputee experience I don't see reflected very often in media. In fact, the only examples I can think of in fiction (meaning not stories based on real people) where this is reflected are Full metal alchemist.

technically I think Subnautica Below Zero also mentions prosthetists are a thing in that world, but its a very "blink and you'll miss it" kind of thing...in fact I did miss it until my last playthrough lol.

[so-i-did-this-thing]

Hey Nicholas! I have a lot of trans friends in the States that depend on HRT, and hearing the OBBB passed through the House and off to Senate has me very worried for you all. I'm trying to gather resources on stockpiling and informed consent HRT right now to help my friends navigate the situation, but I don't know enough about the political systems in the US to fully understand what the full consequences of OBBB passing would be/how much of that is still helpful then. Can you give me a rough idea of what OBBB passing would mean for HRT access in the States? Can it still be prevented? Do you have any sort of battle plan for that case for yourself?

Also I faintly remember that you made a guide or something similar on how to stockpile HRT in the past, but Tumblr search wasn't very helpful in finding it again sadly. Would you be okay with reblogging/linking it if you happen to know where to find it?

All the best

The immediate effect would be that gender affirming care, including HRT, would no longer be covered by Medicaid. It will also likely further embolden private insurance agencies to continue to drop care as well. This all directly clashes with some state laws that mandate insurance coverage for gender-affirming care.

We can continue to push back with the Senate, and if this passes, hope that the states pick up the baton. Because we all know this is also going to apply to abortion and contraceptive care.

The real writing on the wall, however, is the language around "federal funds" not being used for gender affirming care. As most hospitals receive federal funding in some way, we should expect to see overstretch here, or - once again - healthcare facilities and professionals capitulating in advance.

Also, very telling, is the quick escalation from banning care for minors to banning care for adults. The GOP is done with the ramp up and has waged total war on trans people.

That's not to say it's a lost cause. A friend in healthcare has brought up the fact that trans people do bring in money to Big Pharma, and we tend to be reliable customers. I feel like we'll be returning to a worse version of the Harry Benjamin days (when I started HRT there was no Informed Consent model) -- everything self-pay, with very strict gatekeeping.

Trans folks need to have conversations with their providers about continuation of care. If you only get your HRT from an Nurse Practitioner (like at Planned Parenthood), ask your clinic if they plan to bring on the staff to prescribe HRT under stricter regulations, should the nation follow Florida's model (what made me flee).

There may also be options to save costs if you suddenly find yourself uninsured, plus other benefits. For example, my local clinic does its own compounding, which means I don't have to deal with at-the-counter bigotry from a pharmacist or tech who doesn't want to issue me my T. My clinic also recommended sources for me to buy my own injection supplies.

Trans people absolutely need to learn how hormones work and the different forms they can take. I, myself, am looking into longer lasting administration, such as the super big shot or pellets, in case I need to travel for my care.

It sucks and there is a lot of uncertainty. Research your options. Save information to a thumb drive - if federal obscenity laws pass, we might lose access to a lot of online resources. Understand the laws where you live (testosterone is a controlled substance in the US). Be as smart and safe as you can.

[strangebiology]

You've heard that cultured meat is on its way. Whatever happened with that?

This investigation shows that it doesn't seem to be working--and the author of this suggests that they put the cart before the horse in terms of building facilities before even having a proven product.

As a science journalist, I've seen and been asked to cover so many things like "scientists discover cure for X," but it was like (hyperbolically) 20% effective in a trial of 10 mice, and the "cure" never happened for people. Or "in the future we'll have Y," but that's just based on a picture of an idea that someone drew, that anyone with more knowledge of the topic would immediately clock as impractical or even impossible.

Life in rural America seems to be an endless stream of "they're gonna build a big business there, it will revitalize the town!" and then the person who was planning that business goes to jail and sage grows over the plot.

Of course, that's just how businesses and tech and innovation and medical breakthroughs are! You start with some research and some hope and you fail and learn and run into unexpected problems, and frankly it's only a small percentage of the time that it works.

So, no hate to cultured meat, I'm not calling it a scam, just a business idea that, like most business ideas, isn't working as well as people might have hoped, and it may never have the impact that was suggested. It's not shocking.

Beyond and Impossible Meat, which are vegetarian but not cultured, seem fairly widely available and similar in taste to regular meat, though!

[askagamedev]

What is your current opinion on Unreal Engine 5? Between Digital Foundry, content creators, and people on social media, everyone appears to be constantly attacking UE5 for performance issues (stuttering, frame rate, etc.). Is this criticism warranted, or is it more a case of developers still getting used to UE5 and its complexities (meaning it will likely improve in time)?

Everything improves with time as the engineers learn the details and optimize their work. This is true of every tech platform ever and won't be any more different with Unreal Engine 5 than it has been with UE4, 3, or anything else. That said... after having very recently worked with UE5 for enough time to get used to some of its foibles and having looked into some core engineering issues in a project utilizing some of the new tech introduced in UE5 (and the caveats and side effects of using that tech), I can say with fair confidence that (some) complaints about the performance issues are definitely warranted. These aren't global to all UE5 projects, but they are major performance issues we ran into and had to solve.

One major issue we ran into was with Nanite. Nanite is the new tech that allows incredibly detailed high poly models, a sort of [LOD system] on steroids. The Entity Component System of the Unreal Engine (every actor is a bag of individual components) allows developers to glom nanite meshes onto just about anything and everything including characters, making it very powerful and quick to stand up various different visuals. However, this also requires significant time spent optimizing that geometry for lighting and for use in game - interpenetrating bits and pieces that don't necessarily need to calculate lighting or normals or shadows unnecessarily add to the performance cost must be purged from those nanite models. Nanite looks great, but has issues that need to be ironed out and the documentation on those issues isn't fully formed because they're still being discovered (and Epic is still working on fixing them). We had major performance issues on any characters we built using nanite, which meant that our long-term goal for performance was actually to de-nanite our characters completely.

Another major issue I ran into was with the new UE5 World Partition system. World Partition is essentially their replacement for their old World Composition system, it's a means of handling level streaming for large contiguous world spaces. In any large open world, you're going to have to have individual tiles that get streamed in as the player approaches them - there's no reason to fit the entire visible world into memory at any given time with all the bells and whistles when the player can only see a small part of it. The World Partition system is supposed to stream in the necessary bits piecemeal and allow for seamless play. Unfortunately, there are a lot of issues with it that are just not documented and/or not fixed yet. I personally ran into issues with navmesh generation (the map layer used for AI pathfinding) using the World Partition that I had to ask Epic about, and their engineers responded with "Thanks for finding this bug. We'll fix it eventually, likely not in the next patch."

Most of these issues will eventually get ironed out, documented, and/or fixed as they come to light. That's pretty normal for any major piece of technology - things improve and mature as more people use it and the dev team has the time and bandwidth to fix bugs, document things better, and add quality of life features. Because this tech is still fairly new, all of the expected bleeding edge problems are showing up. You're seeing those results - the games that are forced to use the new less-tested systems are uncovering the issues (performance, bugs, missing functionality, etc.) as they go. Epic is making fixes and improvements, but us third-party game devs must still ship our games and this kind of issue is par for the course.

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[mariacallous]

For decades, allies of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.

And right about now, they’re probably wishing they hadn’t.

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.

For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. Not in a world where President Trump threatens to annex Canada, vows to acquire Greenland from Denmark, and announces that foreign officials may be banned from entering the United States if they “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies.”

Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.”

So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network. And like the countless startups that have attempted to create an alternative to Twitter or Facebook over the years—most now forgotten, a few successful—other allies are now desperately scrambling to figure out how to build a network of their own.

Infrastructure tends to be invisible until it starts being used against you. Back in 2020, the United States imposed sanctions on Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, for repressing democracy protests on China’s behalf. All at once, Lam became uniquely acquainted with the power of the dollar clearing system—a layer of the world’s financial machinery that most people have never heard of.

Here’s how it works: Global banks convert currencies to and from US dollars so their customers can sell goods internationally. When a Japanese firm sells semiconductors to a tech company in Mexico, they’ll likely conduct the transaction in dollars—because they want a universal currency that can quickly be used with other trading partners. So these firms may directly ask for payment in dollars, or else their banks may turn pesos into dollars and then use those dollars to buy yen, shuffling money through accounts in US-regulated banks like Citibank or J.P. Morgan, which “clear” the transaction.

So dollar clearing is an expedient. It’s also the chief enforcement mechanism of US financial policy across the globe. If foreign banks don’t implement US financial sanctions and other measures, they risk losing access to US dollar clearing and going under. This threat is so existentially dire that, when Lam was placed under US sanctions, even Chinese banks refused to have anything to do with her. She had to keep piles of cash scattered around her mansion to pay her bills.

That maneuver against Lam was, at least on its face, about standing up for democracy. But in his second term, Trump has wasted no time in weaponizing the dollar clearing system against any target of his choosing. In February, for example, the administration imposed sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court after he indicted Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes. Now, like Lam in Hong Kong, the official has become a financial and political pariah: Reportedly, his UK bank has frozen his accounts, and Microsoft has shut down his email address.

Another platform that Trump is weaponizing? Weapons systems. Over the past couple of decades, a host of allies built and planned their air power around the F-35 stealth fighter jet, built by Lockheed Martin. In March, a rumor erupted online—in Reddit posts and X threads—that F-35s come with a “kill switch” that would allow the US to shut them down at will.

Sources tell us that there is no such kill switch on the F-35, per se. But the underlying anxiety is not unfounded. There is, as one former US defense official described it, a “kill chain” that is “essentially controlled by the United States.” Complex weapons platforms require constant maintenance and software updates, and they rely on real-time, proprietary intelligence streams for mapping and targeting. All that “flows back through the United States,” the former official said, and can be blocked or turned off. Cases in point: When the UK wanted to allow Ukraine to use British missiles against Russia last November, it reportedly had to get US sign-off on the mapping data that allowed the missiles to hit their targets. Then, after Trump’s disastrous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in late February, the US temporarily cut off intelligence streams to Ukraine, including the encrypted GPS feeds that are integral to certain precision-guided missile systems. Such a shutoff would essentially brick a whole weapons platform.

Communication systems are, if anything, even more vulnerable to enshittification. In a few short years, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites—which now make up about 65 percent of all active satellites in orbit—have become an indispensable source of internet access across the world. On the eve of Trump’s second inaugural, Canada was planning to use Starlink to bring broadband to its vast rural hinterlands, Italy was eyeing it for secure diplomatic communications, and Ukraine had already become dependent on it for military operations. But as Musk joined the Trump administration’s inner circle, a dependence on Starlink came to seem increasingly dangerous.

In late February, the Trump administration reportedly threatened to withdraw Starlink access to Ukraine unless the country handed over rights to exploit its mineral reserves to the US. In a March confrontation on X, Musk boasted that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse” if he turned off Starlink. In response, Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, tried to stand up for an ally. He tweeted that Poland was paying for Ukraine’s access to the service. Musk’s reply? “Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”

It isn’t just big US defense contractors that might enforce the administration’s line. European governments and banks often run on cloud computing provided by big US multinationals like Amazon and Microsoft, and leaders on the continent have begun to fear that Trump could choke off EU governments’ access to their own databases. Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, has claimed this scenario is “exceedingly unlikely” and has offered Europeans a “binding commitment” that Microsoft will vigorously contest any efforts by the Trump administration to cut off cloud access, using “all legal avenues available.” But Microsoft has failed to publicly explain its reported denial of email access to the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor. And Smith’s promise may not be enough to ward off Europeans’ fears, to say nothing of the Trump administration’s advances. The European Commission is now in advanced negotiations with a European provider to replace Microsoft’s cloud services, and the Danish government is moving from Microsoft Office to an open source alternative.

Of course, the American tech industry has famously cozied up to Trump this year, with CEOs attending his inauguration, changing content moderation policies, and rewriting editorial missions in ways that are friendlier to administration priorities. And as always, what Trump can’t gain through loyalty, he’ll extract through coercion. Either way, the traditional platform economy is being reshaped as commercial platforms and government institutions merge into a monstrous hybrid of business monopoly and state authority.

In the face of all these affronts to their sovereignty, a chorus of world leaders has woken from its daze and started to talk seriously about the once-unthinkable: breaking up with the United States. In February, the center-right German politician Friedrich Merz—upon learning that he’d won his country’s federal election—declared on live TV that his priority as chancellor would be to “achieve independence” from the US. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” he added.

In March, French president Emmanuel Macron echoed that sentiment in a national address to his people: “We must reinforce our independence,” he said. Later that month, Carney, the new Canadian prime minister, said that his country’s old relationship with the US was “over.”

“The West as we knew it no longer exists,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the EU Commission, in April. “Our next great unifying project must come from an independent Europe.”

But the reality is that, for many allies, simply declaring independence isn’t really a viable option. Japan and South Korea, which depend on the US to protect them against China, can do little more than pray that the bully in the White House leaves them alone.

For now, Denmark and Canada are the other US allies most directly at risk from enshittification. Not only has Trump put Greenland (a protectorate of Denmark) and Canada at the top of his menu for territorial acquisition, but both countries have militaries that are unusually closely integrated into US structures. The “transatlantic idea” has been the “cornerstone of everything we do,” explains one technology adviser to the Danish government, who asked to remain anonymous due to the political sensitivity of the subject. Denmark spent years pushing back against arguments from other allies that Europe needed “strategic autonomy.” And according to a former adviser on Canadian national security, the “soft wiring” binding the US and Canadian military systems to each other makes them nearly impossible to disentangle.

That explains why both countries have been slow to move away from US platforms. In March, the outspoken head of Denmark’s parliamentary defense committee grabbed attention on X by declaring that his country’s purchase of F-35s was a mistake: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse,” he tweeted. But in reality, the Danish government is even now considering purchasing more F-35s.

Canada, too, has already built its air-strike capacities on top of the F-35 platform; switching to another would, at best, require vast amounts of retooling and redundancy. “We’re going to look at alternatives, because we can’t make ourselves vulnerable,” says the Canadian adviser. “But we would then have a non-interoperable air force in our own country.”

If allies keep building atop US platforms, they render themselves even more vulnerable to American coercion. But if they strike out on their own, they may pay a steeper, more immediate price. In March, the Canadian province of Ontario canceled its deal with Starlink to bring satellite internet to its poorer rural areas. Now, Canada will have to pay much more money to build physical internet connections or else wait for its own satellite constellations to come online.

If other governments followed suit in other domains—breaking their deep interconnections with US weapons systems, or finding alternative cloud platforms for vital government and economic services—it would mean years of economic hardship. Everyone would be poorer. But that’s exactly what some world leaders have been banding together to contemplate.

In Europe, discussions are coalescing around an ambitious idea called EuroStack, an EU-led “digital supply chain” that would give Europe technological sovereignty independent from the US and other countries.

The idea gathered steam a couple of months before Trump’s reelection, when a group of business leaders, European politicians, and technologists—including Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former minister of digital affairs—met at the European Parliament to discuss “European Digital Independence.” According to Cristina Caffarra, an economist who helped organize the meeting, the takeaway was stark: “US tech giants own not only the services we engage with but also everything below, from chips to connectivity to cables under the sea to compute to cloud. If that infrastructure turns off, we have nowhere to go.”

The feeling of urgency has only grown since Trump retook office. The German and French governments have embraced EuroStack, while major EU aircraft manufacturers and military suppliers like Airbus and Dassault have signed on to a public letter advocating its approach to “sovereign digital infrastructure.” In all the European capitals, the Danish government adviser says, teams of people are calculating what elements should be folded into the effort and what it would cost.

And EuroStack is just one part of the response to enshittification. The European Union is also putting together a joint defense fund to help EU countries buy weapons—but not from the US. The EU’s executive agency, the European Commission, is patching together a network of satellites that could eventually provide Ukraine and Europe with their own home-baked alternative to Starlink. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, has also started talking pointedly about how Europe needs its own infrastructure for payments, credit, and debit, “just in case.”

Robin Berjon, a French computer scientist who spoke at the first EuroStack meeting, acknowledges that the project has yet “to get proper financing and institutional backing” and is “more a social movement than anything else.” If these projects succeed, they will be expensive and slow to bring online—and most will almost certainly underperform cutting-edge US equivalents. But Europe’s issues with American platforms are no longer just about ads and cookies; they’re about the very future of its democracies and national security. And in the longer term, the US itself faces a disquieting question. If it no longer provides platforms that the rest of the world wants to use, who will be left—and whose interests will be served—on American networks?

After Doctorow’s platform monopolists enshittified the user experience, they turned on the businesses that were their actual paying customers and started to abuse them too. US citizens are, ostensibly, the true customers of the US government. But as difficult and expensive as it will be for US allies to escape the enshittification of American power—it will be much harder for Americans to do so, as that power is increasingly turned against them. As WIRED has documented, the Trump administration has weaponized federal payments systems against disfavored domestic nonprofits, businesses, and even US states. Contractors such as Palantir are merging disparate federal databases, potentially creating radical new surveillance capabilities that can be exploited at the touch of a button.

In time, US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled. De-enshittifying the platforms of American power isn’t just an urgent priority for allies, then. It’s an imperative for Americans too.

[lacunammmm]

Hate how the manga kept trying to seem like it was criticizing sacrificing yourself/pushing yourself too hard as a heroic act wasn’t actually a good thing but it constantly went back to the opposite.

Aizawa and Nighteye criticizing Midoriya about rushing in without a plan? Not a problem, he’s a true hero when he saved Eri!

Pushing limits/getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing to help grow, but the manga never found a healthy balance of that theme.

Nothing encapsulates the phenomenon you described more than Iron Might. The reason Iron Might was bad, besides him absorbing the hero kid's potential fights/contributions vs AFO, the implausibility of this tech and All Might getting access to it in time, and the fact that he kept it a secret, is because it tramples all over All Might's arc for the sake of a "cool" fight We have a whole series teaching us that All Might's brand of self sacrificing heroics is bad and these actions destroy your life and the lives of the people around you. Toshinori has what, three close friends when we meet him? Nezu, Recovery Girl, and Naomasa. He hasn't spoken to Torino or Night Eye in years. Night Eye left him explicitly because of his desire to keep being All Might even if it killed him. He's forgone any sort of close relationships. He doesn't have any family. Everything has been dedicated to being the hero that society needs to the cost of his life. He's fully willing to die to ensure other people are okay. His mentality changes when he meets Izuku because he wants to live to raise him right. Great! So, he loses his powers and then he has to navigate being a mentor and teacher for the next generation. So far, so good. He sees with Deku what a lone gun mentality does. The story even has Bakugo blame all of Izuku's mental problems on All Might's teachings and behavior. Perfect. We've fully established this is bad. And then we learn that, no, actually, he had a super suit designed months ago that would let him 1 vs 1 the quirk devil and he was keeping it a complete secret from everyone. Just so he could don some ironman armor and have one last hoorah as a hero. He doesn't join Endeavor or Deku in their respective battles. No, the guy keeps this to himself so he can pull it out at the most dramatic moment possible. He let himself be swayed by Stain, a notable crazy man and All Might zealot fanboy that no, actually, All Might was perfect and he totally had the right idea about things. I wish this series would allow characters to suffer for their mistakes and arrogance. Do you know what should have happened, if we're going to allow the insanity of a super suit that can fight high level opponents like this? AFO sees Iron Might, then activates his Radio Waves quirk. You know, the quirk that has the effect of releasing an EMP wave if the user desires it? The same one he and Tomura used to bust out of Tartarus? All Might's super suit becomes an immobile metal coffin and he needs to be rescued. He actively put more people in danger because of a selfish decision he made so he could relive his hero days.

Instead of All Might stealing the spotlight from Class A, all of these students have to scramble to get hits in on AFO to save HIM! Because the story isn't going to allow a guy to go against its themes in a selfish, suicidal gambit that All Might should have grown past by now...and get away with it! It's absolutely ridiculous that a story allegedly about the next generation turned into two old men fighting. But this is an issue with MHA: it wants to have its cake and eat it too. Self sacrifice is bad, except when it works out and it's cool.

[toyourstations]

I need every nerd to get on the xbox boycott train with me because the more pressure we apply, the sooner microsoft takes action to address their complicity in the Palestinian Genocide and the sooner they do that the sooner i can not feel sick about wanting to play minecraft*

*obviously me playing minecraft is much much less important than the lives of Palestinians, which is why I'm not doing it right now. As part of the boycott. But damn if I don't wanna play minecraft.

But seriously. The more traction this builds, the more effective it'll be. I highly encourage you to bring it to the attention of your fave minecrafters, your friends you play with, whoever.

Some Minecraft influencers literally make a living off Minecraft. I'm not going to begrudge them, especially those who are disabled or otherwise disadvantaged, their money. However, if anyone is in a position to maybe stream other games or take a break from Minecraft content, that'll be a big deal. Imagine if Minecrafters with millions of subscribers joined this boycott. What impact could we have then?

Also explicitly called out in this boycott are Candy Crush and Call Of Duty, as well as subsidiary companies Blizzard, Bethesda, and Activision.

Many of the priority targets of BDS have been on big ticket items like computers or shoes. Not buying a Dell or HP computer isn't a big ask for a lot of people. If you felt like you couldn't really participate in those boycotts, here. You can do this one.

Actionable steps that don't cost money:

cancel game pass if you have it.

Don't use your xbox console if you have one.

Uninstall COD, Candy Crush, and/or Minecraft.

Let people know you're doing this, and give them the links to learn more.

Ask your favourite minecrafter if they're considering joining the boycott.

Sign this petition about the incident that kicked off this boycott and learn about the unjust firing of Abdo Mohamed and Hossam Nasr from Microsoft.

I've seen a lot of people talk about "well I already own Minecraft and have for years so it doesn't matter if I play because I'm not giving Microsoft money".

Player retention matters a lot in live service games. With the Minecraft movie just released they'll be expecting a spike in players, not a drop. Furthermore, if everyone I saw say "It won't make a difference if I don't take part" did take part, it might make a difference.

If you're a bedrock player (console, etc), there are microtransactions available in game. Not playing means not even seeing those, or the brand tie-ins they include. A drop in bedrock players will reduce the amount of brands paying to put their content in bedrock.

I personally was quite torn about joining this boycott because Minecraft is practically a part of my personality these days. It's a special interest for me, and it's something i spend probably 10-20 hours playing each week, without exaggerating. I've decided that therefore i'm going to do my damndest to make sure this boycott succeeds and can end. Because playing while the boycott is ongoing just isn't something I feel right doing, even though a part of me is genuinely itching to play.

[simpforpeterp]

bucky barnes x oc

True Blue

Chapter 1: Stay Open

series masterlist

summary: Post-Endgame, everything’s fractured, worlds, teams, people. Bucky Barnes is trying to figure out what freedom even means, and Bianca Delgado, the most powerful Avenger no one really talks about, is hiding from the fallout of her past. She’s sunshine and sharp edges, a walking contradiction with too many secrets behind her smile. He’s quiet and coiled, still fighting ghosts in every shadow. Neither of them is looking for someone. But they keep finding each other anyway.

Featuring: late-night training sessions, reluctant vulnerability, Thunderbolts playing chaos matchmakers, and two tired people learning how to be a little less alone. takes place post thunderbolts pre thunderbolts post credit scene

warnings: none

word count: 3k

It was dark in Bianca’s apartment. That’s quickly become the new normal, her rotting away with nothing but old sitcoms on the TV. She sat on the couch, knees to her chest and her chin resting on her knees.

This wasn’t her initial reaction to everything. She had spent months parading around the world, traveling everywhere. She saw both sets of the Seven Wonders: ancient and new. She saw the Rio Grande, the Nile, the Rhine, and the Seine. All while ignoring calls from her friends, old family, and people she barely knew who needed her help.

She ignored Doctor Strange’s call when something apparently really important was happening, Thor’s voicemails filled her machine, and Shuri tried every means of communication to reach her but she was too busy surfing mid-breakdown in Oahu. Then there was Scott’s whole thing, the Guardians, something Carol needed her for, Sam was spam calling and texting for help while in DC and most recently, Bucky.

She took all of this as a sign to stop being publicly seen as a tourist. Being the current most powerful Avenger didn’t do much for discreetness. Especially when she couldn’t even ask someone to take a picture of her next to the pyramids without them posting it everywhere.

Ever since everything happened, after Nat, Tony, and Steve were gone, she hasn’t felt okay. She pretends as well as she can but it’s not always easy. Especially when the people who took her in at 17, the people who helped her find her footing, aren’t here anymore.

Bianca Delgado was born a normal girl. Her parents were addicts but that is nowhere near the wildest part. Most people don’t know about her biological parents but everyone knows about her adopted father. Especially after one snap of his fingers caused half of the world to disappear.

During one of his missions or conquests near Earth scouting for candidates or potential warriors to bolster his forces, he saw her suffering the consequences of her parents’ addiction. Thanos intervened, taking her from that life.

Unlike Gamora or Nebula, who were abducted as children and subjected to cybernetic enhancements, Bianca’s transformation was different. Thanos, fascinated by her human resilience, brought her aboard his ship and offered her a chance at survival and strength but at a cost.

He performed experimental enhancements, not full cybernetic conversion, but genetic modifications and energy infusions influenced by the Power Stone or his advanced tech. This granted her unstable and raw abilities. These changes also came with side effects, like uncertainty about her limits and the cost to her humanity.

Bianca was always the favorite because she was uniquely human in a sea of alien warriors and enhanced beings.

When there’s a knock at the door, she doesn’t get up to answer it at first. Not until ten more spaced-out knocks.

“Bianca, I know you’re in there. For god's sake, the TV is on.” A voice calls and she knows that it won’t kill her to answer.

“Come in!” She calls and instantly puts a smile on her face to hide the brooding.

“Ugh, your floor just has to be the highest and the elevators aren’t working,” Bucky complains.

“Well, that’s for a reason. Everyone who can fly has the higher-up floors just in case of that. And anyway, I thought supersoldiers could handle a few flights of stairs.” Bianca teases but Bucky doesn’t smoke.

“A few? Try thirty flights. Anyway, I just wanted to warn you, everyone’s moved in. I told them not to even go near your floor and not to bother you. Same for whenever the others are here but you know, you’re here more.” He clears his throat.

“They don’t have to avoid me like the plague. I just don’t want to be all buddy-buddy. What would Sam think?” She asks.

“Bianca-“

“I’m not trying to get in the middle of it. But the people want to know what I think. And honestly? If I have to pick a side, I think you know whose side I’m on,” She tells him. “This was the Avengers Tower. Before that, it was Tony’s. I don’t want to be mean to anyone but this whole ‘New Avengers’ thing is-“

“You’re just as opinionated as I remember,” He sighs and begins to pace. “Sam is suing us. Did you know about this?”

“Yeah, but I’m not getting involved in legal stuff. I don’t even want to be involved at all but I have to be. This is all getting too political for me.” She tells him.

Bucky doesn’t say anything for a moment. He just stands there, the quiet between them stretching long enough that the sitcom laugh track on the TV hits another punchline without either of them noticing. Bianca clears her throat and reaches over to hit a button, muting it.

“So. What’s the verdict? You coming all the way up here just to scold me about staircases and politics, or is there something else?”

Bucky crosses his arms, then uncrosses them, then sighs like it physically hurts him to be here.

“You know, for someone who claims she doesn’t want to be involved, you sure seem to have a lot of opinions.”

“I’m a woman. With trauma. And powers I don’t fully understand. Opinions are all I have,” she says brightly, with that too-big smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

He doesn’t laugh, but the edge of his mouth quirks like he’s fighting one.

“I just don’t get how you can sit here when everything’s on fire out there.” He tells her.

“Maybe because the last time I tried to help, I ended up almost splitting a continent. And before that, I lit a Kree warship on fire with my hands. So forgive me if I’m trying the whole ‘non-combustible lifestyle’ for a bit.” She shrugs.

“That wasn’t your fault.”

“Right. It’s never my fault. It’s just always my mess.” Her smile falters, but she recovers fast. “Anyway, why are you really here? You could’ve just sent a raven or a threatening email like a normal assassin.”

“I missed your cooking.”

“Oh, please. You eat like a Victorian ghost.” She waves it off.

“You made that soup once. It was decent.” He shrugs.

“Oh my god. Was that a compliment?” Bianca perks up.

“Don’t push it.”

“Too late. It’s going in the memory bank, right between ‘thanks for saving my life’ and ‘you’re not the worst.’” She grins and stands up, stretching like a cat. “I have some stuff in the fridge. You staying for dinner or just here to warm my heart and leave?”

“I can stay.”

“Really?” She freezes, surprised for a beat too long.

“Yeah. If you’ve got that stew.” He nods.

“Wow. I must be really good at hiding my breakdowns if I’ve tricked you into thinking I’m mentally stable enough to cook.” She hums.

“You’re doing better than most of us.”

“That’s the saddest compliment I’ve ever gotten.” Bianca looks at him for a second, softer now.

“Still a compliment.”

And she laughs, genuine and loud, her head tilting back as she does. The silence between them now feels a little lighter.

“What soup are you talking about? The lasagna one?” She asks.

“Yeah, the one you made for Natasha that one time. Though, it’s hardly soup. More like watery lasagna. And that’s not an insult, it’s to the dish itself, not you.” He clarifies quickly.

“Well, you just called it a soup. And also you can say that about anything. Baked potato soup is just watery baked potato.” She shrugs.

“Why would you say that to me?” He says, deadpan.

“You’re more talkative than I remember.” Bianca turns to face him more.

“You’re the only person in this tower I’ve known for longer than a week.” He says quietly.

“Yeah…you too.” She nods.

He sits on a stool in her kitchen along the little bar-looking thing. She begins to move around grabbing stuff and he sits and thinks about how much she’s changed. She used to seem more young and naive. She still kind of does but not nearly as much.

“How old are you now?” He asks.

“Twenty-seven,” She tells him as she places a cutting board in front of him and a knife that looks like it’s part of a child’s play set with its pink handle. “You’re gonna help cut stuff.”

“I had a feeling,” He sighs as she puts a tomato in front of him. “Dicing?”

“Yeah.”

It’s quiet again for a moment as he does it. So she’s more of an adult than she was eight years ago, obviously. He remembers the way it felt like everyone was trying to take care of her as if she was some shared project. Especially Tony, acting like she was his daughter and also an angel sent from Heaven.

During the whole Civil War thing, she stood with him. That’s the only side of her he really knew until Thanos came. He knew parts of her backstory from Steve. Knew that she was one of three daughters Thanos had. That was the final crack in the glass and he didn’t trust her.

But now, after she fought against her own father and reconciled with Steve before he went back in time, Bucky feels bad not trusting her. And he feels bad for his team of “New Avengers” because he trusts this twenty-something-year-old woman more than them.

He’d trust her more than them to cover his back at least and not just because she’s more powerful than any of them. When they fought against Thanos for the first time, she had his back for real. She literally watched his back and fought beside him because he didn’t have any magic powers the way she did.

“So…are you gonna tell me about this new team you have going on? I’ve heard from Sam. He’s told me a lot. A lot of…not so good things. Is that your side too?” She asks.

“Well, you remember John Walker?”

“Blegh, the ‘New Captain America’ you told me about that one time you and Sam needed help?” She makes a face, her nose and eyes scrunching.

“Yeah, so there’s him because- because I’ve gone crazy or something. And then there’s…this Ghost girl-“

“The one Scott was talking about?”

“Yeah, her. And this new face, Bob. You haven’t been watching the news have you?” He asks, pushing the fully diced tomato towards her. And he knows she must trust him too because she handed a super soldier a knife in her apartment and then didn’t flinch when he pushed it and the cutting board back to her.

“Why would I do that? All the news ever does is give bad…news. Mostly about me or my friends or dead people or my friends who are now dead people but used to not be.” She rambles.

“You used to be a lot happier.”

“I am happy. But I don’t have a reason to act like sunshine the way I usually do when you’ll know it’s bullshit. I mean, it’s not always. I am naturally a really happy person, I’m easy to please. But I’ve just had a really hard time lately.” She shrugs.

Bucky doesn’t say anything right away. He watches her for a moment as she stirs something in a pot on the stove, her hair pulled back haphazardly, a mismatched pair of socks on her feet. She’s so…human. And somehow, that makes her seem more powerful than anything else.

“And then there’s Yelena and Alexei-“

“No fucking shit!” She gasps, her jaw dropping as she turns to look at him. “They’re here? Right now? Oh, god, Nat told me all about her old family. Especially about Yelena when we were talking about our sisters. And- huh, I guess me and Yelena have more in common now.”

“What do you mean? Because you know me?” Bucky can hardly follow her train of thought.

“No because…you know, my sister. Gamora. And her sister, Nat.” She can’t really bring herself to say it.

Bucky nods once. Not a big, dramatic gesture. Just enough to show he heard her. That he understands.

“I didn’t know you two talked about that kind of stuff,” he says after a beat.

“We didn’t, really. Not much. But when we did, it was…real,” She doesn’t look at him as she stirs. “She made me feel like it was okay to not be okay. Like…I wasn’t the only one with weird family trauma and impossible guilt.”

“You weren’t.”

Bianca lets out a soft breath that could almost be a laugh, but it’s too flat around the edges.

“Yeah, well. She made me feel like I could still be good. Even with everything I came from.” She continues.

“You are good,” he says, simple and steady.

“You don’t know that.” She finally turns to look at him again.

“I do.”

There’s a pause. Long enough that the bubbling of the stew fills the room. Long enough that Bianca’s eyes flicker. Bucky leans forward a little, resting his arms on the counter again.

“You ever think about coming back? Working with a team again?” He asks carefully.

She doesn’t answer right away. Just keeps stirring, slow and steady. And that’s when it hits her that maybe he had ulterior motives in coming up here. And she just got worked the way targets do.

“She sent you, didn’t she?” She says with no hint of emotion in her voice.

“Who?”

“Don’t play dumb, I just heard your voice shift like it does when you’re closing a deal.” She steps closer to him.

“I- look, Bianca, we’re a good team. But we aren’t great. All we have, minus Bob, is hand-to-hand combat and guns. That’s it. If there was a real Avengers level threat, you know as well as I do-“

“You must be fucking with me if you think I’d ever work for Valentina. If you think I’d ever- you- you don’t know me at all, Bucky. And it’s not like I thought you did but you are just so- ugh. I thought you understood what I was talking to you about for a second.” She presses her hands into the counter.

Bucky doesn’t flinch. But he doesn’t argue, either.

“I didn’t come on her direct orders,” he says quietly. “I didn’t even tell her I was coming here now. She had a different plan, wanted me to corner you and pressure you into joining. But fuck, Bianca, I’m not a cult leader.”

Bianca looks at him, eyes sharp, searching. She doesn’t believe him yet. Not fully.

“So what? You just dropped in because you missed my lasagna soup and thought I might like to be guilted into superheroing again?” Her voice is bitter, but under it is something closer to hurt.

“I’m not trying to manipulate you,” He says it firmly, clearly. “You think I wanted to bring this up? I didn’t. I was gonna eat soup and sit with someone who doesn’t look at me like I’m broken glass. That was the plan. But then you asked. And I told the truth.”

Bianca lets the silence sit between them again, heavy and pulsing. Her jaw clenches, like she’s trying to keep everything in. Finally, she shakes her head and pushes herself back from the counter.

“I am broken glass,” she says, but it’s quiet this time. “And every time someone asks me to come back, to help out, to join a team, to fight, they act like I’m just a weapon they can un-shelve. Like I’m not someone who’s barely holding her shit together.”

“I don’t think you’re a weapon,” Bucky says.

“Well, maybe not right now. But ask yourself if you’d still say that if another war broke out tomorrow.” She says with a certain bite in her voice.

He doesn’t answer. That silence is enough. She exhales, tired now more than angry.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles, brushing her hair back. “I didn’t mean to bite your head off. But you don’t get to act like I’m just this missing puzzle piece you can plug into your messed-up team. I’ve earned more than that.”

“I know,” he says. And he does. Really.

“I don’t want to be someone’s secret ace or liability or symbol of redemption,” Her voice softens now, finally cracking. “I just want to be allowed to be Bianca. And right now, Bianca can barely cook dinner without feeling like she’s going to fall apart.”

Bucky stands up from the stool, but slowly. Carefully. He crosses to where she’s still half-defensively planted near the stove, and without touching her, he speaks.

“Then be Bianca. I didn’t come here to fix you. I came here because I know you better than I know those guys and I needed a minute to not put up as strong of a front. Don’t you think I- of all peso pls, know exactly what you’re feeling? I was literally a weapon on and off a shelf for DECADES. And I don’t want to make anyone feel like that but Valentina would have my head if I didn’t try,” He shrugs. “There’s a microphone on my sleeve, they all voted me to come talk to you sometime this week.

That hits her like a slow-moving train. She closes her eyes, just for a second.

“Fucking- come on!” She rolls her eyes.“I’m still not joining your shitty team, though.”

“That’s fair.” Bucky lets out a breath of something close to a laugh as he covers where she assumes the microphone is.

She turns the heat down on the stove, eyes still a little glassy but her smirk returning.

“But I will feed you because I’m actually starving too.” She sighs.

[reasonsforhope]

Determined to use her skills to fight inequality, South African computer scientist Raesetje Sefala set to work to build algorithms flagging poverty hotspots - developing datasets she hopes will help target aid, new housing, or clinics.

From crop analysis to medical diagnostics, artificial intelligence (AI) is already used in essential tasks worldwide, but Sefala and a growing number of fellow African developers are pioneering it to tackle their continent's particular challenges.

Local knowledge is vital for designing AI-driven solutions that work, Sefala said.

"If you don't have people with diverse experiences doing the research, it's easy to interpret the data in ways that will marginalise others," the 26-year old said from her home in Johannesburg.

Africa is the world's youngest and fastest-growing continent, and tech experts say young, home-grown AI developers have a vital role to play in designing applications to address local problems.

"For Africa to get out of poverty, it will take innovation and this can be revolutionary, because it's Africans doing things for Africa on their own," said Cina Lawson, Togo's minister of digital economy and transformation.

"We need to use cutting-edge solutions to our problems, because you don't solve problems in 2022 using methods of 20 years ago," Lawson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video interview from the West African country.

Digital rights groups warn about AI's use in surveillance and the risk of discrimination, but Sefala said it can also be used to "serve the people behind the data points". ...

'Delivering Health'

As COVID-19 spread around the world in early 2020, government officials in Togo realized urgent action was needed to support informal workers who account for about 80% of the country's workforce, Lawson said.

"If you decide that everybody stays home, it means that this particular person isn't going to eat that day, it's as simple as that," she said.

In 10 days, the government built a mobile payment platform - called Novissi - to distribute cash to the vulnerable.

The government paired up with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) think tank and the University of California, Berkeley, to build a poverty map of Togo using satellite imagery.

Using algorithms with the support of GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that uses AI to distribute cash transfers, the recipients earning less than $1.25 per day and living in the poorest districts were identified for a direct cash transfer.

"We texted them saying if you need financial help, please register," Lawson said, adding that beneficiaries' consent and data privacy had been prioritized.

The entire program reached 920,000 beneficiaries in need.

"Machine learning has the advantage of reaching so many people in a very short time and delivering help when people need it most," said Caroline Teti, a Kenya-based GiveDirectly director.

'Zero Representation'

Aiming to boost discussion about AI in Africa, computer scientists Benjamin Rosman and Ulrich Paquet co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba - a week-long gathering that started in South Africa - together with other colleagues in 2017.

"You used to get to the top AI conferences and there was zero representation from Africa, both in terms of papers and people, so we're all about finding cost effective ways to build a community," Paquet said in a video call.

In 2019, 27 smaller Indabas - called IndabaX - were rolled out across the continent, with some events hosting as many as 300 participants.

One of these offshoots was IndabaX Uganda, where founder Bruno Ssekiwere said participants shared information on using AI for social issues such as improving agriculture and treating malaria.

Another outcome from the South African Indaba was Masakhane - an organization that uses open-source, machine learning to translate African languages not typically found in online programs such as Google Translate.

On their site, the founders speak about the South African philosophy of "Ubuntu" - a term generally meaning "humanity" - as part of their organization's values.

"This philosophy calls for collaboration and participation and community," reads their site, a philosophy that Ssekiwere, Paquet, and Rosman said has now become the driving value for AI research in Africa.

Inclusion

Now that Sefala has built a dataset of South Africa's suburbs and townships, she plans to collaborate with domain experts and communities to refine it, deepen inequality research and improve the algorithms.

"Making datasets easily available opens the door for new mechanisms and techniques for policy-making around desegregation, housing, and access to economic opportunity," she said.

African AI leaders say building more complete datasets will also help tackle biases baked into algorithms.

"Imagine rolling out Novissi in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast ... then the algorithm will be trained with understanding poverty in West Africa," Lawson said.

"If there are ever ways to fight bias in tech, it's by increasing diverse datasets ... we need to contribute more," she said.

But contributing more will require increased funding for African projects and wider access to computer science education and technology in general, Sefala said.

Despite such obstacles, Lawson said "technology will be Africa's savior".

"Let's use what is cutting edge and apply it straight away or as a continent we will never get out of poverty," she said. "It's really as simple as that."

-via Good Good Good, February 16, 2022

[tim-official]

people lump NFTs / the cryptocurrency craze of 2021 in with AI as "just another thing that tech grifters are excited about," and people love posting gifs of people cheering under news stories about OpenAI hemorrhaging money. this is a naive read on the situation, i think NFTs didn't work and never could. a ponzi scheme by definition cannot last. chatGPT, DALL·E, etc are things that sometimes work, and which work marginally better every month. this is infinitely more useful than NFTs, which are useless to everyone. as a result, some people actually want them - or, at least, people with capital think people will want them, which is just as good. also unlike NFTs, there is nothing about AI that means it inherently has to take huge amounts of electricity and clean water. the environmental cost of NFTs effectively gave them value; meanwhile, there are thousands of papers published and thousands of careers laser-focused on reducing the compute cost of machine learning. this is good, but keep in mind they're doing it because they want to put machine learning crap in all the fridges they crammed WiFi into five years ago, not because they care that much if the oceans boil

The people making NFTs were no-names trying to give everyone else FOMO for a quick buck. OpenAI is pouring cement mixers of Microsoft money into trying to generate a new market, and judging by the sheer number of people who have incorporated ChatGPT into their everyday routines, they are succeeding, and attracting insane amounts of investment in the process. When you have as much capital and market share as Microsoft you are freed from the obligation to ever make anything profitable. this is late capitalism: "supply" and "demand" are completely uncoupled, society is organized around production solely based on fictions and superstitions in the heads of private equity goons anyway. this is not an "AI is evil" or "AI is good" post. just don't compare the situation to NFTs or crypto and assume it's all the work of "techbros" or whatever. it's not comparable, by orders of magnitude

[spindabi-ramblings]

candlepunk spindabi tho

candlepunk, for those who don't know, is:

"CandlePunk depicts a society, which in this case is one of a medieval nature, riddled with a given amount of futuristic - futuristic in this case meaning post-medieval - technology and ideals."

them in medieval japan with more modern tech, but instead of quirks they have magic. dabi/toya being born with magic that physically destroys his body and wanting to push himself by the set in, oppressive standards by his father to be the best. spinner's magic of him being depicted as a mutant, being outcasted for something he can't control.

dabi's fire magic explodes, almost costing his life. spinner is on the road, finds a stable apartment for awhile, but stays inside due to the oppressive society. spinner is good at mechanics, though. due to the burns dabi inflicted, he's in extensive hospital care under afo for awhile. spinner developed these skills since childhood. dabi steals a pair of crutches so he can walk to see what his family has made of him.

spindabi duo living life as duo villains trying to gain awareness of how society fucked them up in their own ways, and them both bickering and learning from each other. spinner building technology to help with dabi's disabilities and help to use his fire powers, while dabi teaches spinner how to fight more effectively and even some magic of his own. them staying on abandoned buildings, looking over the entirety of japan.