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Do you know what this site thought of Elon Musk before he started supporting Trump and gave that Nazi Salute?

Going how far back? Ten years ago, we didn't talk about him and nobody cared. He was not in the wider public consciousness. Those who knew who he was mostly thought "oh yeah he's that rich guy who wants to look smart" and nothing much else was said. I think his first bump in popularity was when he married Grimes, and then he was just the weird rich dude Grimes married. I did not know who Grimes was and still kinda don't. She had a Tumblr blog and then made some music and had a baby with a weird name and then vanished kinda post-divorce afaik.

Then I think maybe five years ago ish he sort of started showing up more as a sort of weaboo man-baby deal? Pictures of him in Les Mis cosplay, dressed as a furby, and showing off empty Diet Coke cans and a fake replica gun on his nightstand circulated.

My impression was that he was just like. If that creepy awkward guy in class who unironically does the Naruto run and thinks katanas are magic was spawned out of the ether with infinite money.

And then I think maybe after that was how stupid he is? That became public knowledge shortly after-like how the safety vests in some of his factories are in washed-out neutral colours cause he doesn't like neons. Or like... how he seemed to be giving off the impression that he was a genius inventor, despite not actually making anything or having any kind of education se can speak of? All I know is like. He was an owner with PayPal and then bought Tesla?

And simultaneously if I remember correctly he was kind of always about "if we don't let the nazis talk on twitter then we're basically á dictatorship" or whatever, banging on the free speech drum and going on about how jokes used to be funny, then bluffed about buying twitter and somehow got legally shoehorned into ponying up and actually doing it for WAY more than it was worth, almost immediately making it worse and tanking its value.

Now it seems kind of like an Emporer's clothes situation where everyone knows the Emporer is naked, but instead of getting embarrassed and covering up, the emperor just keeps doubling down harder. Meanwhile his whole entire ass is just. Out

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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.

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its been about 6 months

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most funniest sudden deviation from a youtuber’s typical video lineup i’ve seen in recent memory

like bro imagine being SO pissed at the direction a show had taken that you have to momentarily quit spongeposting in order to talk about it for two whole hours. king shit

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We need MORE things/characters that are supposed to be gender neutral with characteristics that are considered to be for women. Pedestrian traffic signs with skirts. Unisex shirts with room for boobs. Hell, unisex dresses. Nonbinary characters with pink bows in long braids.

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This made me bust out laughing

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My favorite banned terms on this site are "suicide prevention" and "safe sex"

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\_/ <= glass of (pink) lemonade

( <= green bean

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myths about sinking britain

“there is no historical precedent for sinking britain!” doggerland, which connected britain to the european mainland, was submerged by water in 6500BC. there is precedent for sinking britain.

“it is unfeasible to sink britain!” britain is strategically located to allow many nations to co-operate in its sinking

“sinking britain would raise sea levels!” the netherlands already has dams

“sinking britain would cause more problems geopolitically than it would solve!” we simply won’t know this until we sink britain

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if you're in Europe PLEASE consider signing the Stop Destroying Games initiative. the deadline is July 31st 2025. i've posted about it before; it aims to create legislation for publishers to stop killing the games you pay for and to provide an end-of-life plan for live-service products. thank you!!!

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The American consumer doesn’t actually want trucks and cars that are huge enough that you can’t see a six foot tall person over the hood. They make vehicles that big now to avoid environmental regulations related to engine efficiency

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Remember "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ? I feel like there's been a distancing from the "reduce" and "reuse" part and a favoritism towards "recycle" by corporate American.

Capitalism can still thrive with recycling in the mix. You buy Plastic Thing 1, throw it away after one use, and they take that and recycle it into Plastic Thing 2 and sell it back to you. All while continuing to harm the environment.

Reusing puts a damper on things. They can't sell you Plastic Thing 2 when you're still using Plastic Thing 1. Plastic forks, for example- there is literally no reason why you can't reuse plastic forks more than once (aside from maybe microplastics, but it's too late for that)

Reducing is the one everyone wants to ignore. Just don't buy Plastic Thing 1. You don't need Plastic Thing 1. Pick up a set of metal forks and use those for years. Convenience is killing the planet

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NATASHA LYONNE and CLEA DUVALL

for OUT Magazine (July 2000) — photographed by Lynn Goldsmith

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"the 5th celebrity you have saved on your phone -" you and i live in vastly different worlds

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to be honest

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STOP CENSORING YOURSELF ON THIS WEBSITE. FUCK SHIT SEX MURDER ALCOHOL DRUGS FAGGOT DYKE QUEER TRANS BITCH SLUT WHORE SEX SEX SEX SEX!!!!!!!!!!!

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The closest experience I've ever had to discovering "the vitamin" was buying a 100% wool outfit and wearing it in the winter.

Not only was I not freezing anymore, I was not sweating and overheating either. The horrible sensory nightmare of winter clothes disappeared.

In particular, I bought a pair of wool pants. They were a thrifted pair of fancy dress pants like you would wear at an important office job, and they were easily the most comfortable pair of winter-appropriate pants i'd ever worn. I wore them Every Single Day.

From that point on I realized a lot of my clothes were making me feel bad, and the common thread was polyester. Especially polyester blends.

It's a trap because the polyester clothes are the ones that always feel sooooo silky soft when they are in the store, whereas cotton, linen and wool can feel comparatively rough and scratchy. But when actually wearing them for hours throughout the day, it's the natural fibers that feel more comfortable.

Maybe the secret to sensory comfort is not about the presence of softness, but the absence of overloading sensations. Or maybe the sensory stress and agony is not triggered by texture of the fabric, but by how it breathes and regulates temperature.

Then there's the problem of clothing life span: polyester blends, no matter how soft they seem at first, become rough and scratchy and covered in hard, itchy pills after wearing them 10 or 20 times, whether or not they have been tumble-dried or even washed at all. (I tested it!) Linen and cotton become softer and more comfy the more you wear them, polyester but ESPECIALLY polyester blends become a constant stressor. Polyester blend t-shirts I used to love for their softness now feel bristly and irritating.

So now I'm trying to change my wardrobe to as many natural fibers as possible, and the more natural fiber clothes i have the more I realize that the plastic fibers stress me out. It's so easy to overheat or freeze in them and they're always degrading and becoming less comfortable and it sucks.