crowslastcall

[crowslastcall]

[crowslastcall]

asexual sex workers are braver than any US marine

[crowslastcall]

A king who doesn't really want to and isn't able to run the kingdom properly catches wind of a noble woman who wants to kill him to take over and he realizes she is extremely competent so he decides to propose to her to save everyone the hassle and they have a surprisingly healthy relationship.

[crowslastcall]

my friends and i do an annual camping trip to freedive and spearfish on one of the outer islands like Tl’x’óy7ten or Lhéwqemeng, but last year we decided on a smaller island where we don't usually stay overnight. I was the only one with Friday off and it was going to storm Saturday so I went out a day before everyone else to set up camp before the rain hit. that night i was the only person on the entire island, along with my dog. we slept in a hammock in the woods by the sea, and everyone else joined me in the morning.

that second night, we hiked the entire island, and found we were still the only ones there at all. not unusual because of the weather.

well on the second morning, I got up and saw raccoons had gotten into Little Bird's dog food and all of my snacks. I assumed raccoons, anyway. I was bummed and confused because I kept all of the food in bear/raccoon proof containers that had never failed.

my friend, a fun but very no-nonsense outdoorsman, said "are you sure you didn't leave it unlatched last night?" I said, "I didn't get into it last night." He said, "Late last night. You did." I was confused, and he told me that he woke up to pee at 2 AM, at which time he saw me, sitting at the camp table, eating something. I said, "That wasn't me," and he said it was dark so he'd actually only seen a silhouette that he assumed was me because it couldn't have been our other friend, who was asleep beside him in his tent. It was also too dark to see that I was still in my hammock, with Little Bird.

At this point I became visibly alarmed because not only was I not awake and eating in the middle of the night, but my hammock was hung directly above the table, so anyone sitting there would be just a few inches below me while I slept.

What also bothered me was that I trained Little Bird specifically for solo backcountry work and that includes alerting to approaching wildlife so I'm not caught off-guard by bears in camp. I'm a feather-light sleeper as it is, but I sleep better knowing she'll hear something before I do. But she didn't alert to whatever got into our food, just inches below us.

We decided to let it go, because what was there to do or say? But that night I couldn't sleep until I moved my hammock to another spot. Sometimes I think about this and I'm just like well, what the hell

[crowslastcall]

actually can we have Tim not being adopted into the batfamily and instead after his parents go broke and then die leaving him with nothing he just decides ‘well i know where the batcave is’ and starts living in the tunnels underneath Wayne manor because of the logic that he can’t get kicked out bcs 1. squatters rights and 2. whats Bruce gonna do? call the police and say ‘this guy won’t leave my secret lair. no im not Batman wdym’? and he manages to go unnoticed for like. a good fucking while. not even Alfred realises bcs wtf would he be snooping around down there for?

even better is this happens after Jason dies so Tim still becomes Robin and Bruce is so overwhelmed with grief that he literally never realises that Tim has never once used the front door to come over. he just kinda sneaks up from somewhere in the cave. he assumes that Alfred’s letting the kid in without telling him. Alfred assumes Bruce is doing the same.

Damian finds out first because that’s so much funnier. he gets to Gotham to 1. gain his birthright and meet his father and 2. do some reconnaissance/avenging of this replacement Robin that’s been the centre of Jason’s angry rants at the league for the past 6 months. he follows Tim ‘home’ and finds him fucking. golluming it up a 15 minute hike through the cave system and he’s like. wait what.

Damian, reporting back to Jason: Drake is a mole.

Jason, vindicated: like he’s working for the enemy?!

Damian, standing in front of an indignant Tim in the middle of his ‘camp’, phone pressed to his ear: no like he lives in a fucking tunnel.

Jason:

Tim, mumbling: slightly harsh,

Damian, angling his face away from the phone momentarily: i watched you dig a hole to unearth the protein bars you’d buried there.

Tim:

Jason, rapidly changing his opinion on this kid: ok actually lets not kill him because thats fucking hysterical and i want to know more-

Tim really likes living alone in the tunnels because he’s a weird little guy and he’s gotten used to the independence and lack of sun, and Damian grew up in the league where ‘wilderness training’ was monthly, mandatory, and from the age of three. so he really doesn’t see the issue in it. he just kinda shrugs and accepts his brother lives in the cave system. Jason is so delighted and amused by the vibes these two kids have going on over in Gotham (he gets video calls from Damian just. in Tim’s camp while they hang out together sometimes. Damian brings him water bottles and various sustenance offerings like he’s appealing so some ancient deity living under their house. Jason thinks it’s incredible) that he decides fuck the league, he needs to see this in person. killing the Joker is a side quest he did on the way; he really only came to see what his idiot little brothers had going on under Bruce, Dick and Alfreds nose. he visits Tim’s little cave home while waiting for his new Crime Alley apartment to be ready.

eventually Bruce and Dick are working on a case and they’re following a lead to do with a criminal escaping via cave systems that they theorise may connect to the batcave, so after Damian’s gone to bed they suit up and start searching around. they come across Damian, Tim, and the fucking Red Hood chilling around a small fire just casually eating leftovers Damian snuck down from the kitchen, just quietly enjoying each others presence in this clearly years old campsite, quietly discussing whether or not the weather will be clear enough next week to go to the new art museum together. Dick shines a flashlight at them and they all snap to attention like that scene in ratatouille where the human comes in the kitchen and the rats all freeze and look up. nobody says anything for a solid three minutes.

eventually Tim is just like “I have squatters rights. you can’t evict me.” and Red Hood nods and points at him.

Bruce, desperate to gain some kind of thread of understanding here: “Damian, you’re supposed to be in bed. …Tim, I’m actually not sure where you’re supposed to be, come to think of it, but I don’t think it’s here.”

“He just said he has squatters rights, father.” Damian responds instantly. “Keep up.”

Dick: “And does the Red Hood have squatters rights?”

“I have a gun,” Jason points out cheerfully. “Same thing, ain’t it?”

Dick and Bruce are so confused they become convinced that they’ve been dosed with something and only figure out whats going on after putting on gas masks and testing everybody’s blood.

[crowslastcall]

i feel strongly about this

[crowslastcall]

lovebirds <3

happy pride month to them 🥺

bonus timelapse, plus watch me struggle find colors for Alena her new outfit lol...

[crowslastcall]

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

[crowslastcall]

[crowslastcall]

six fanarts 5/6: faramir and éowyn

[crowslastcall]

Dude, people from Portland are so weird. You'll meet a guy and he'll say his name is "Gnar Slabdash," and then, with a straight face, tell you "the 'N' is mostly silent." I hate it there.

[crowslastcall]

been playing through the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time this year, so here's my Shepard: she's got a martyr complex, permanent eye-bags, and a low tolerance for bullshit.

[crowslastcall]

There’s a new (unreviewed draft of a) scientific article out, examining the relationship between Large Language Model (LLM) use and brain functionality, which many reporters are incorrectly claiming shows proof that ChatGPT is damaging people’s brains.

As an educator and writer, I am concerned by the growing popularity of so-called AI writing programs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, which when used injudiciously can take all of the struggle and reward out of writing, and lead to carefully written work becoming undervalued. But as a psychologist and lifelong skeptic, I am forever dismayed by sloppy, sensationalistic reporting on neuroscience, and how eager the public is to believe any claim that sounds scary or comes paired with a grainy image of a brain scan.

So I wanted to take a moment today to unpack exactly what the study authors did, what they actually found, and what the results of their work might mean for anyone concerned about the rise of AI — or the ongoing problem of irresponsible science reporting.

If you don’t have time for 4,000 lovingly crafted words, here’s the tl;dr.

The major caveats with this study are:

This paper has not been peer-reviewed, which is generally seen as an essential part of ensuring research quality in academia.

The researchers chose to get this paper into the public eye as quickly as possible because they are concerned about the use of LLMs, so their biases & professional motivations ought to be taken into account.

Its subject pool is incredibly small (N=54 total).

Subjects had no reason to care about the quality of the essays they wrote, so it’s hardly surprising the ones who were allowed to use AI tools didn’t try.

EEG scans only monitored brain function while writing the essays, not subjects’ overall cognitive abilities, or effort at tasks they actually cared about.

Google users were also found to utilize fewer cognitive resources and engage in less memory retrieval while writing their essays in this study, but nobody seems to hand-wring about search engines being used to augment writing anymore.

Cognitive ability & motivation were not measured in this study.

Changes in cognitive ability & motivation over time were not measured.

This was a laboratory study that cannot tell us how individuals actually use LLMs in their daily life, what the long-term effects of LLM use are, and if there are any differences in those who choose to use LLMs frequently and those who do not.

The researchers themselves used an AI model to analyze their data, so staunch anti-AI users don’t have support for there views here.

Brain-imaging research is seductive and authoritative-seeming to the public, making it more likely to get picked up (and misrepresented) by reporters.

Educators have multiple reasons to feel professionally and emotionally threatened by widespread LLM use, which influences the studies we design and the conclusions that we draw on the subject.

Students have very little reason to care about writing well right now, given the state of higher ed; if we want that to change, we have to reward slow, painstaking effort.

The stories we tell about our abilities matter. When individuals falsely believe they are “brain damaged” by using a technological tool, they will expect less of themselves and find it harder to adapt.

Head author Nataliya Kosmyna and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab set out to study how the use of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT affects students’ critical engagement with writing tasks, using electroencephalogram scans to monitor their brains’ electrical activity as they were writing. They also evaluated the quality of participants’ papers on several dimensions, and questioned them after the fact about what they remembered of their essays.

Each of the study’s 54 research subjects were brought in for four separate writing sessions over a period of four months. It was only during these writing tasks that students’ brain activity was monitored.

Prior research has shown that when individuals rely upon an LLM to complete a cognitively demanding task, they devote fewer of their own cognitive resources to that task, and use less critical thinking in their approach to that task. Researchers call this process of handing over the burden of intellectually demanding activities to a large language model cognitive offloading, and there is a concern voiced frequently in the literature that repeated cognitive offloading could diminish a person’s actual cognitive abilities over time or create AI dependence.

Now, there is a big difference between deciding not to work very hard on an activity because technology has streamlined it, and actually losing the ability to engage in deeper thought, particularly since the tasks that people tend to offload to LLMs are repetitive, tedious, or unfulfilling ones that they’re required to complete for work and school and don’t otherwise value for themselves. It would be foolhardy to assume that simply because a person uses ChatGPT to summarize an assigned reading for a class that they have lost the ability to read, just as it would be wrong to assume that a person can’t add or subtract because they have used a calculator.

However, it’s unquestionable that LLM use has exploded across college campuses in recent years and rendered a great many introductory writing assignments irrelevant, and that educators are feeling the dread that their profession is no longer seen as important. I have written about this dread before — though I trace it back to government disinvestment in higher education and commodification of university degrees that dates back to Reagan, not to ChatGPT.

College educators have been treated like underpaid quiz-graders and degrees have been sold with very low barriers to completion for decades now, I have argued, and the rise of students submitting ChatGPT-written essays to be graded using ChatGPT-generated rubrics is really just a logical consequence of the profit motive that has already ravaged higher education. But I can’t say any of these longstanding economic developments have been positive for the quality of the education that we professors give out (or that it’s helped students remain motivated in their own learning process), so I do think it is fair that so many academics are concerned that widespread LLM use could lead to some kind of mental atrophy over time.

This study, however, is not evidence that any lasting cognitive atrophy has happened. It would take a far more robust, long-term study design tracking subjects’ cognitive engagement against a variety of tasks that they actually care about in order to test that.

Rather, Kosmyna and colleagues brought their 54 study participants into the lab four separate times, and assigned them SAT-style essays to write, in exchange for a $100 stipend. The study participants did not earn any grade, and having a high-quality essay did not earn them any additional compensation. There was, therefore, very little personal incentive to try very hard at the essay-writing task, beyond whatever the participant already found gratifying about it.

I wrote all about the viral study supposedly linking AI use to cognitive decline, and the problem of irresponsible, fear-mongering science reporting. You can read the full piece for free on my Substack.

[crowslastcall]

artfight finally got me to make a ref sheet for Cassidy yay

[crowslastcall]

I think a surprising amount of writers don’t realize that tragedies are supposed to be cathartic. They’re intended to result in a purging of emotion, a luxurious cry; the sorrow caused by a great tragedy is akin to fear caused by a good horror movie – it’s a “safe” sorrow, one that is actually satisfying to the audience. It can still be beautiful! It’s isn’t supposed to just be salting the earth so nothing can grow.

But that’s how you get grimdark: writers who don’t realize that they’re supposed to be doing something with the audience instead of to the audience.

[crowslastcall]

It’s so fucked up how tiktok culture has made clout-poisoned people turn the public into content, every day I see people minding their business have their entire faces put online for thousands of likes, a couple kissing on the train, a lady dancing across a cross walk, a guy nodding his head to the music at a club, a lady buying a banana at the store, ring camera footage of the neighbors kids being stupid. Just let people live jfc

[crowslastcall]

y'all's reactions to Maya are so sweet and made me crack up thank you. Garrus likes her arms too.