#the problem with twitter

[noegrets]

To be honest, I think this is part of a larger ongoing trend of these assholes making us distrust important words that didn't originally mean what they warped them into. I am not sure if it's some sort of intentional psyop to make us fear the computer science that might save us, or if it's them just trampling carelessly over anything and everything without there needing to be any additional maliciousness involved... but either way it sucks.

I think this trend started with "algorithm". What do you think of when I say "algorithm" in 2025? I bet a lot of people first think of the evil social media "algorithms" that impose censorship and oppression and try to keep us all trapped doomscrolling further down cultish piplines.

But algorithm simply means a set of defined steps for solving a problem, and the study of algorithms in computer science is about finding the most efficient techniques for finding the correct answers to common problems, things like how to sort a list alphabetically with the fewest number of swaps, or how to retrieve data based on a specific keyword in the least amount of time. The study of algorithms helps us measure which set of steps finds the correct answer in the most efficient way.

Social media algorithms don't really find the "correct" answer, and aren't really optimized for anything, not even really for evilness, honestly, so they sure aren't great algorithms. For example, while we were using Twitter, there was awhile when it started making recommendations for us as if trying to guess our zodiac signs. Each week, I'd get a recommendation of, would you like to follow...... Libra? Next week it would be, how about.... Sagittarius? Twitter somehow never managed to recommend either of our actual zodiac signs to follow, which is especially hilarious given that there are only twelve of them and Twitter knew our freakin' birthdays!!! "Algorithm", my left buttcheek!

But, yeah, well-made and well-optimized algorithms are necessary for solving all sorts of useful problems in energy-efficient ways! We shouldn't hate algorithms or think of them as being evil, just because the people behind the code of Twitter don't care if it is actively malicious! We need good algorithms! And poor Mr. al-Khwarizmi, brilliant namesake of the algorithm, did nothing to deserve this slander!!

Then there's "crypto". No, I don't mean cryptocurrency, which is essentially synonomous with "bullshit" and "scam". I mean cryptography! The study of cybersecurity and encryption, which is absolutely critical for us to have any privacy online! To be able to log into a website or to make an online transation by credit card or to not have outsiders snooping in on our web browsing. That was what "crypto" used to refer to, before that word got ruined. We shouldn't be doubting that the technology that is critical for our digital security is somehow a bullshit scam.

And yeah, now the trend is conflating generativeAI with everything and anything "artificial intelligence". Actually "artificial intelligence" is just a kinda overly-hopeful but kinda misnomer umbrella term for certain types of problem solving: a variety of techniques for finding a good enough answer to things that are really hard to solve - so hard to solve that we don't even really know where to begin to start making defined algorithms to solve them. A lot of AI techniques are about making semi-random guesses in such a way that they get closer and closer to better answers, and hopefully they find a decent-enough answer within the alloted amount of time and resources. This is so important in situations where a pretty good answer is damn good, since finding the optimally correct solution might take infinite time and resources. These AI techniques are critical for us to find solutions to really hard problems, like all sorts of questions in science and medicine!

GenerativeAI is only "artificial intelligence" in the sense that, based on all the text and images stolen from the internet, and given some letters, it uses artifical intelligence techniques to try to guess what the next letter might be. Or given some pixels, it tries to guess what color the next pixel would be. It's actually pretty good at solving that specific sort of hard problem. But solving that specific hard problem doesn't let it solve other problems like, knowing the correct spelling of a certain word. Or knowing the correct answer to a certain question.

We shouldn't be boycotting all "artificial intelligence" techniques, we should be boycotting generativeAI when it's based on theft and when it's being used in situations where it's completely inappropriate. GenerativeAI is getting shoved in places where it makes absolutely no sense. Especially when a well-honed algorithm already exists to efficiently and accurately solve a particular problem!

And I'd say, one of the biggest evils right now, is that some perfectly accurate and well-optimized algorithmic solutions are getting ripped out and thrown away to be replaced with hallucinating and resource-draining generativeAI, just for the sake of telling the stock market that the product has AI now. We are losing the hard work of generations of past computer scientists. And, after this stupid AI bubble finally bursts, it's going to take a lot of really hard and unnecessary work to redevelop those lost algorithms from scratch again... to the point that some past brilliance might wind up lost forever. And that makes me really sad.

[batfamhastwitter]

Part 44! Fun fact, I actually am a natural ginger, but I have been able to gaslight a specific few people into thinking that I'm blonde and just dye it. They've thought that for at least two years at this point. I want to see how long it can go lmao

Prev ~ Beginning ~ Next

[noegrets]

I know. It sucks. It sucks hard. And the only advice I have is that we have to decide what we want to exist even if no one else cares. If we want our big projects to exist, the only way it will ever exist is if we do the big project, with all the time and effort that entails.

And the current state of the internet and the world and everything makes it hard for anyone to even start to care about our big projects or to communicate to us that they do care about our big project, even if they would want to. And it's even hard for us as creators to have the passion for our big projects, what with being drained by everything and made to feel like nothing matters. Not even the studios and publishers and companies are daring to make actually big projects, and who the hell are we taking on big projects with so much fewer resources.

But when you are doing a big project, it's even more important to keep your motivation burning and to keep going forward despite all the time and the effort and the challenges and the lows... because it is BIG so it's not going to be quick and simple. We can make all the small and safe things that we want, and that can be fun too, but chances are, that won't sate a big project that's looming inside us. And if we dare to try to make it, we gotta find some way to keep ourselves motivated through the long haul.

I dunno, we gotta tell our close friends personally, and hear them tell us first-hand that they really do care, and accept their compliments. Or, failing that, we gotta get ourselves internally psyched up somehow all alone. And if we gotta keep it all a secret from the internet to keep ourselves from getting demotivated, then, hell, keep it offline. Do what we can, or else the projects will never happen. The corporate bastards want a world where everyone is too tired and simply consumes smaller and smaller things. And if we want a world where people do create big things, and if we want our big thing to exist, we can't let silence on social media suck out our souls.

And I say "silence" on social media, but we also gotta remember that, on social media, three notes feels like it might as well be crickets, but it means three real live human beings are to some degree excited for what we are making. Imagine those three notes as three humans clapping around you. In real life, that's a lot! They care!

Their care is getting compressed down into the same little heart icon as everything else, but that doesn't mean it's always a tiny insignificant amount of caring. It just means social media and everything has squished our ability as spectators to express our excitement down to clicking a heart. We might not always have the time or the energy to find the words and type out something more meaningful or vulnerable that captures and conveys how we more deeply feel about our friends' projects. But we also gotta try to give a confidence boost to our friends whenever and however we can! Because I don't want them to lose the passion for their big projects either!

So I know "make art for yourself" is too reductive and too naive and misunderstands half the point of a lot of creative endeavors, but how about: make it for yourself, and for your friends who care, and for the people leaving those three notes, and for everyone else in the world who is trying tooth and nail to make something big, and for everyone who wants to live in a world where big passion projects exist and are being made! Hang in there!!!

the thing with art online is that it feels genuinely hard to justify bigger projects when you know something like an animated short film or whatever is simply doomed by the way social media works to get next to no response in comparison to a 10 minute doodle

[corneliaedits]

taylor swift lyrics. all arts are made by me <3

[rabdoidal]

you can tell everyone still has a problem with non-sexual nudity because 28 years later is a movie about the beauty of the cycle of life and death, the dangers of forcing children into fighting wars, and the trauma of rage, but all anyone can talk about is that the infected were naked. guys i fear we're all cooked if u care that much about seeing 3 flacid penises

[velvettapeworm]

If I say "Israelis are human beings" and you hear "I think Palestinians are subhuman and should die," that's a problem you should work on.

[axiliern]

stoner tim drake shitpost number 6093749394

[helenvaughans]

[mustchespud]

the crushing weight of two very manageable tasks.

[osamudaisies]

the man the mess the legend

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[hamletthedane]

Love that Oppenheimer is a deeply disturbing horror movie about a man forced to accept that he is, in a person, the representative manifestation of mankind’s evil in committing one of the greatest horrors of human history - LITERALLY acting as the modern Prometheus, tormented by his sins for the remainder of time. Knowing that he will never be pitied and his actions will forever be utterly unforgivable because the blood of genocide and the potential of total human annihilation will eternally drip from his hands.

But also the simultaneous indictment by the film that to blame a single person for the Manhattan Project is to refuse to accept your own capacity for great evil if the ends ever seem to justify the means, and the culpability of every member of a species that lets itself create something so unspeakably terrible.

Hate that twitter’s take on such a nuanced and brilliantly handled examination of those issues is “movie bad because protagonist not evil enough.”

[mycptsdstory]

Found on twitter

[xxplastic-cubexx]

give me some whiskey and ill draw The Most Thing i can come up with

bonus:

[smokinghorse]

A quick sketch comic about Jean's recurring cluster headaches bc I get them also. I think it would definitely affect his ability to work considering how hard it is to function or even speak/see when these take hold for days at a time. (Also fun fact for those who aren't familiar with cluster headaches, often your eye will turn pink and swell up as it starts to water and you'll start to cry and sniffle and salivate for no reason. Hence why his eye looks like that.)

[cpericardium]