machineofreality

[machineofreality]

i had a dream that time travel was invented and too many people choose to travel back in time to save the titanic from sinking (the question of whether unsinking of the titanic deserved so much attention in the face of human history was the subject of both heavy academic and online discourse), which caused a rift in the space-time-continuum that led to the titanic showing up indiscriminately all over the world’s oceans and sea in various states of sinking.

this caused a lot of issues both in terms of fixing said space-time-continuum and in terms of nautical navigation, and after a long and heavy battle in the international maritime organization it was decided that the bureaucratic burden of dealing with this was to be upon Ireland, much to their dismay. the Irish Government then released an app for all sailors and seafarers so they could report titanic sightings during their journeys, even though they heavily dissuaded you from reporting them given the paperwork it caused.

anyway i woke up with a clear image of the app in my head and needed to recreate it for all of you:

[machineofreality]

As a general rule: for any human activity, there is some disability that prevents you from engaging in it. This does not mean that no human activities are valuable. It means that being disabled sucks. To say that some human activity is valuable — ennobling, or morally good, or (clutch your pearls) nourishing for the soul — is not to say that a life without it is worthless.

[machineofreality]

My former boss and coworkers are not really talking to me like a person anymore, so I assume they've been threatened by HR to stay quiet. This is all very normal and proportional to my heinous crime of asking why we needed an AI chatbot to do database searches. I'm tired. AI hucksters are sad.

[machineofreality]

I asked UF's amazing brilliant agentic LLM chatbot iChatBio how many kinds of bees are in Florida, and it says there are zero. genAI is the future guys, trust me

[machineofreality]

legally I don't think UF has to prove anything about why I was fired. they can do anything they want unless I have some kind of absurdly obviously evidence that it was motivated by my race or sex. I asked for written reasoning, but they haven't replied, and I don't think they ever will. the only reason I could get that info from the government is because they're legally required to retain and disclose it as a matter of public record

[machineofreality]

iDigBio's amazing new chatbot starts lying literally immediately

it took one (1) question for the amazing new agentic LLM iChatBio to start fabricating information out of nothing. I asked for a list of clam shrimp in Florida, and it skipped a whole genus. when I told it that it was missing one, it confidently replied that Cyzicus also lives in Florida (it doesn't).

Here also is the GBIF listing for a specimen of Paralimnetis, the genus it skipped. There are no exact coordinates, which is probably why the robot skipped it, but I would hope a person could properly interpret "Florida" to mean Florida:

I sent these screenshots to the team, I wonder if they will respond?

[machineofreality]

cat riding sheep

[machineofreality]

Jesus Christ just say you hate innocent people

No idea what prompted this, but sure, why not. I hate innocent people.

[machineofreality]

I’m the world’s worse advocate for wasps. Everytime I see people repeating bees=nice good pollinators wasps=bad stinging meanies, I face a deep internal struggle trying to explain how they are important to the environment without explaining wasp facts that freak them out in ways they never even thought

[machineofreality]

Moldy/unmoldy doomed yaoi or yuri?

you got it boss, here’s your doomed strawberry yuri

[machineofreality]

your kingdom honestly sucks. your princess replaced all of the knights with animated suits of armor :/

[machineofreality]

When I was early on in my transition I got in a Lyft, and the driver was this big country guy. I was a little nervous so I just sat quietly in the back.

After a moment he changed the music on his phone to what sounded like a Hatsune Miku song. Curiosity got the better of me, so I finally spoke up and said “is this Hatsune Miku?”

And he said “Yep. You looked uncomfortable, and I know Transgender women like Hatsune Miku, so I thought it might help.”

I think about that interaction a lot.

[machineofreality]

When a small kid decks their shit and starts screaming, it's apparently useful to ask them "are you more scared or more hurt?" because they might actually pause the shrieking to understand that adults might not automatically know what they are feeling, and that they can and should use words to communicate whether they need emotional support or medical attention.

I wonder if it could be applied to tumblr. Asking shrieking people "are you disagreeing with what OP said, or are you mad about the way they worded it?"

[machineofreality]

look. it is true that things associated with femininity and womanhood have been socially positioned as "less than" things associated with masculinity and manhood. but it is also possible to talk about this without concluding any of the following:

this is biological (it's not!)

femininity is actually superior to masculinity (why does anything have to be better than anything else?)

appealing to gender socialisation theory (please read some transfeminism. please.)

women are therefore rewarded for proximity to manliness, or can always get ahead by taking on manhood (talk to one butch. or woman of colour. or trans woman. or any number of other socially masculinised women in your life I beg of you)

every single instance of someone criticising something targeted at women is inherently due to misogyny (taylor's private jet isn't gonna fuck you)

it is in fact possible to talk about misogyny without reinforcing ideas rooted in oppositional sexism and without talking about femininity as if it's an inherently magical mystical thing that is held in the beautiful womb or whatever

[machineofreality]

went to the gallery today but the best art I saw today was on this electrical box outside

[machineofreality]

Immigrant moms who didn't teach their kids how to speak their native language love complaining to their kids about how they don't have anyone to talk to in their native language

[machineofreality]

As an aroace person I actually never had that feeling of being broken. I thought everyone was the same way and some people were just dramatic 😭