redtalksaboutstuffandthings

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

I'd like to add that a lot of bad actors use Discord servers for this precise purpose. The fact that it's difficult to sift through to gain useful information makes it so that information is harder to spread around. Plenty of people are at the helms of projects and communities that would fall apart at having to answer basic questions, and if those answers were easy to Google, every wannabe journalist with a YouTube channel can broadcast your flaws to the world.

With a Discord, now anyone who wants to poke holes in your completely legit venture has to step forward and ask, directly, in a forum you have complete control over. That's powerful: you know exactly when people are sniffing at your heels, whether coverage of your activity is about to drop publicly, and you oftentimes even know the exact name and handle of the person who's about to expose you. This allows you to play damage control, in real time, by getting ahead of any questions you know are coming and poisoning the well against your investigator.

Plus, if you restrict who gets an invite to your server, you can keep the rest of your users in line by threatening to revoke access if they do anything other than express unalloyed support. This gives you some degree of insulation from leaks and helps create the illusion that everything is going perfectly fine.

As a general rule, I wouldn't trust any company that uses Discord as their main PR platform. Companies with good news and faith that what they're doing will succeed generally want their news in front of as many eyeballs as humanly possible. Discord is only good for communities that already exist, and in the wrong hands is only good for insulating current stakeholders from the outside world and its (possibly legitimate) criticisms.

"want to learn more about this project? join our discord!" explode. "want to download this game? join our discord!" explode. "want to play this mod? join our discord!" explode. "need questions answered? join our discord!" EXPLODE.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

*Slaps roof of Hobbit*

Gandalf: You can get so much chicanery out of one of these bad boys.

i love how Gandalf invested in Hobbits in year one and has been pushing them ever since. Thorin, i hear you need help with a breaking and entering. Can I recommend one of these little cunts? Silent as fuck, trust me. Elrond my dude i know you're skeptical but these four chucklefucks just transported a weapon of mass destruction all the way here. Theoden, you've gotta get yourself a hobbit man, I've got a spare one here. Denathor you big prick, take a hobbit - literally this is the bottom of the range but listen to him sing. Beautiful little bastard.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

The only example of straight oppression is the fact that Amsterdam for straight people is associated with the red light district where generally straight men can pay for sex with beautiful European women. However, for gay people, Amsterdam has a legal gay cruising, clothing optional section of a park where gay men can have sex for free in public.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

I think it would be funny to write a historical or fantasy novel where you bring back an obscure spelling/usage just to prank the reader. Like… okay here’s my idea.

The word fillet, meaning “ribbon”, pops up in medieval texts now and then. Bring it in near the beginning of the text. One of several clothing words you’re tossing in for flavor. Keep using it, verging on a “this author has a favorite word” level of frequency. Trust that your reader will look it up.

Then, in like the last quarter of the book, have a character walk into a scene wearing a “headdress dripping with red filets”. The eye passes over it.

Maybe a page or two later, someone remarks, “I knew she was trouble as soon as she walked in here with a bunch of meat on her hat.” The confused reader flips back to the character’s entrance… oh goddammit.

This would be a lot of work for a questionable payoff, but i think it would be funny.

(And yes, fillet “ribbon or headband” and filet “boneless cut of meat” are very close cognates.)

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

✨🦄🐬🦖🌊 I JUST WANNA BE PART OF YOUR SYMPHONYYYYYYY✨🦄💖💕🐟🐬

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

I love the implication that nobody in the world has a name until the precise moment they meet @amtrak-official

I just found out that someone named a 10 year old girl, Charlotte, which is crazy to me because that name was custom made for 73 year old women

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

This has been a significant portion of my tumblr feed for the last week. Let's break it down:

User name is a generic string (bonus points for the random numbers at the end in order to guarantee the name isn't already claimed)

Tags are unrelated to the body of the post (this one is trying to get seen on the memes page. I've seen tags for Chicago and cooking on other posts)

Body is advertising a remote job opening (remote jobs are in high demand)

Company alleged to be hiring remote workers (Aldi, in this case) is famously not one traditionally associated with remote work opportunities

BONUS: The post author forgot to remove a mention of FedEx in the description. So this is apparently a remote working opportunity with both a grocery store chain and a postal delivery service. Very grindset.

Hovering over the "More Details" link reveals that it goes to a Google Site page. Not FedEx. Not Aldi. Not even the page of the alleged talent agency that would be responsible for handling recruitment to large companies like these two.

This is so blatantly a scam that it hurts. And it just keeps happening. I now get fake banner ads for Amazon every tenth post, all from generic named accounts with the randomly generated default Tumblr shape.

Idk what the point of this was. I guess it's a PSA? Keep your eyes open, while you're scrolling, is I guess the point of this post.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

This is my two cents on the Nanowrimo "saying that using gen AI to write is bad is ableism because disabled people need gen AI", as a multiply disabled person. For context, I write as a hobby - I write original fiction for fun, it's probably never going to see the light of day.

I have never once taken part in Nano because writing 50k of original fiction in a month of a quality that I'd be any bit proud of or happy with even as just a first draft simply isn't feasible for me. 50k words in a month isn't feasible for a lot of disabled or chronically ill people with low energy or processing difficulties. However, I'm sure as hell not going to use an AI to "write" for me just to complete a challenge of some sort. In doing so I won't have written or actually achieved anything. I love writing. Just because I can't churn out 50k of a single piece of work in a month doesn't mean I can't write myself or need the help of an AI.

Nano isn't the be all end all of writing. Not being able to churn out 50k a month doesn't mean a person needs AI to write for them. I'm perfectly capable of continuing to write for the other 11 months of the year too. Insinuating that me pulling some crap out of a generative AI to complete a meaningless challenge and get some discounts is equivalent to me actually using time and energy to write is frankly insulting. The insinuation that disabled people's writing needs AI help to be good is the real ableism here. Disabled people who can't write 50k words in a month are still writers, and we don't need help from a plagiarism machine. 50k words does not a writer make.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

NaNoWriMo's reasoning for encouraging AI:

1. Some people don't have a community to help them write.

- So we think stealing other people's work and using that to get horrible suggestions for your own work is fine.

2. Some people don't have the talent/practice) ability to write like they want to.

- So instead of encouraging practice (which is the only way to get better), we think just filling in the blanks with a literal bullshit machine is just as good.

3. Some people have problems accessing tools to write properly.

- Yes, accessing an AI generator is much easier than opening Notepad on your PC.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

The argument, at least for me, was never about spellcheck or grammar check. I don't think that's what the people were thinking when they asked what NaNo's stance on "AI" is. Spellcheck has been a thing in writing programs for decades. Autocomplete and autocorrect have been around for years. These things are far from controversial; they are invaluable accessibility aids that gave professional editing capabilities to ordinary people and are a large part of why self-publishing is more open now than it was a half-century ago.

The thing everyone was asking about was the use of LLMs. The concern is that people are signing up for a long-form writing challenge and pressing a couple of buttons to make ChatGPT churn out 50k words, for them. The concern is not about using tools to make writing easier and more accessible for people with disadvantages, it's about using AI tools to bypass the challenge, altogether. There is already precedent for people using AI submissions to flood competitive markets, and even though NaNo has no tangible reward, it is inevitable that some portion of the participants are going to be doing the exact same thing. The public wanted to know what the foundation's stance was, on that, and it turns out their stance was bad.

Comparing spellcheck to LLMs is not even comparable. The most elemental spellchecks (which, I remind you, we've been using for decades) are just a large dictionary of acceptable character strings, a visual indicator when you make something that doesn't match, and an option to add more words to the program's dictionary. Nowadays, companies are falling over themselves to add "AI" to these services, but that's either a case of overengineering (adding LLMs to a service that never needed it) or companies lying about adding LLMs to court investors.

Nobody is mad about accessibility tools. What you (and the people who wrote the NaNo "classist and ableist" statement) are doing is like if there was a person in a wheelchair who wanted to participate in a marathon. This was never about the person in the wheelchair, and it's honestly insulting to suggest it was. It's about the person idling on the starting line in a Ford F-150 and bragging on social media about how they're totally an athlete.

People losing their mind over NaNoWriMo? Now is probably a good time to mention that pretty much every single spell check and grammar check app, program, and function available right now is in some way AI-enabled and functions off machine learning and scraping.

And since we can all agree on the fact that "You can't censor some topics on AO3 because then everything would be censored" I find it hard to understand why an albeit HORRIBLY worded message with deceptive reasons from NaNo isn't having a single person come to the same conclusion of "Shit, if they ban all AI from NaNoWriMo, then that means by definition they have to ban all spell grammar check functions."

And if you are sitting behind your computer ready to tell me stuff like "No Beta We Die Like Men" or "Just let your writing be rough around the edges, it's fine", I'd love to introduce you to my friend who is too anxiety riddled to send so much as a text because his dyslexia means he doesn't know if what he sends people is gonna get him laughed at or not. They neither condemn nor support any specific writing approach That's right in the header. The rest of the message is bullshit but that opening statement is important. That's their official stance. How you choose to write is how you get to write, and trust me, the solution isn't to say stuff like "Well, AI scrapes work so it's all bad". Yeah, we know. But punishing people who use proofreading tools, again, AI-driven tools now, is like saying that "Climate change is awful, we should stop letting people use plastic straws." Well, no, the problem is infinitely bigger than the tools that AI has become attached to, and stopping people from using ones they DO need isn't gonna change squat. Everyone right now could delete their NaNoWriMo account and I PROMISE you it won't stop AI Scraping. I'm not saying don't delete the account because, here's the thing, you do you. You can choose to delete your account just as someone else can choose to use an AI-proofreading app. That's free will baby. And no writing or fiction hosting website has EVER done well with the concept of taking away the creators' or readers' free will. Just a few things to think about tonight when people are grabbing the torches and pitchforks over this one and realize that, if you have sent a text even once in the past year or two that you permitted a word to be autocorrected on, you too have used an AI enabled tool for your writing.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

It took me a hot minute, but I finally got around to reading the reasons why the NaNo foundation declared AI condemnation to have "classist and ableist overtones." Ignoring the litany of legitimate complaints one can have about AI (the environmental impact and the rampant artist plagiarism being among them) that NaNo only vaguely touched on in their statement (in an after-the-fact revision), I have several questions about their statement:

Is it NaNo's official stance that AI models are a suitable, or even a workable, alternative to professional editors? If the complaint is that disadvantaged people cannot readily get access to the same resources as successful trad-publishers, can LLM's even come close to leveling the field, in that regard? I am personally skeptical, given AI's propensity to "hallucinate" and general inability to understand the subject matter fed to it.

If there is any utility to point number 1, in my opinion, it would be the fact that many AI models are currently cheap or free (at least, to the end user). Does NaNo believe that such tools will continue to be viable alternatives to traditional publishing infrastructure, if these companies survive long enough to make the inevitable push to profit-capture?

Is NaNoWriMo's primary goal the facilitation of professional book publishing? Couldn't the goal be more accurately described as a general campaign of improvement in the craft, irrespective of future market ambitions?

If the answer to the previous is true, why is that NaNo only seems to be concerned with writing as a form of commerce?

What about communities?

I repeat, what about communities?

If the complaint is that poor, disadvantaged and disabled writers lack the resources of more privileged authors, wouldn't having a community of writers in one spot serve as a way to help those people? If you were-just for the sake of example-an organization that proudly boasts having over half a million participants, wouldn't you want those participants to talk amongst each other? Share tips and resources? Maybe provide some of that infrastructure, however they're able?

If yes, how does NaNo compare the utility of a half-million strong community of people helping each other and cheering each other on to a suite of expensive technological applications fed off of stolen work?

There is no shot that NaNo gets a hold of these questions, so they remain problems for me to work through. I will be frank: I find this explanation by NaNo to be supremely disappointing. I enjoyed participating in the challenge, every year. I still intend to do so, purely for my own benefit, though not with NaNo's assistance. Seeing the organization that inspired this challenge repeatedly alienate their community in order to chase venture capital dollars is a tremendous loss. I guarantee that whatever hardships the organization suffers from this breach of trust is nothing, compared to the damage done to young authors that comes from seeing their community dismantled.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

Novelvember?

So has anyone suggested something like #Writevember where we all try to write a 50k novel in November, and just don't associate ourselves with Nanowrimo since they think an AI writing 50k words counts as "writing" a novel?

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

I simultaneously do and do not understand this decision on the part of the NaNo team. NaNoWriMo has always been pretty quality-agnostic; the goal of the challenge is to get 50k worth of anything out onto the page. The team doesn't really verify that what you wrote is good, or coherent, or even yours. The point is that you make something, and wrangling an AI model to produce 50k words of rambling, repetitive prose that can't reference earlier information effectively is, I suppose, of a minimum threshold of effort to qualify.

But at the same time, why would you do that? You could get an AI to crack out all fifty-thousand words in the time it takes for a traditional writer to meet their first day's quota, and all you would have done was mash a button or throw some vague encouragement at the model. What are you going to do with the other 29 days? What are you going to do with the giant block of text that your computer wrote for you? Why did you even join a challenge like this if you did not want to... you know, experience a challenge?

I mean, if all you wanted was to speedrun NaNoWriMo, it would legitimately be faster to Google the "Lorem Ipsum" text block, copy that, and spam-paste it into a word processor. I can guarantee that the resulting text will be as complete and worthy of sitting on a bookshelf. It'd be faster to just submit a text file containing the whole of the Canterbury Tales. You'd only be plagiarizing from one person, that way, and it's a long dead author in the public domain.

I think... what the NaNo committee is thinking about (if you'll allow me to steel-man their position) is using AI models as a support element. You've got a point in your WIP or whatever where you're like "Idk what the characters should do, now, and I've got all this word count I need to fill." So you put in a synopsis of what you've got, so far, and see if ChatGPT or w/e can throw an idea at you. And like, yeah, that's kind of a good use for it. But, if I could drill down the point of my long ramble, it'd be this:

This isn't the point of the exercise.

The point of NaNo is not "make 50k words appear," it's to "write 50k words." You don't know how to make your story ideas go for 50k words? You don't have enough ideas? Make some more. Do it like everyone else before you did, when they ran out of ideas. Steal from stuff you like. Dig in to your characters and setting. Describe everything. Throw in some ninjas! Maybe the story didn't have ninjas in it before, but it sure as hell does now. Super crazy! How did this happen?

Writing, as a craft, is long and tedious. A visual artist like a painter can crack out a high quality image in a time-frame measured in hours. A musician can make a song happen over the course of minutes. A writer often needs days and days to get out prose. A novel could take weeks, months, or even years of writing and revision, before it ever reaches a point where it can go out on store shelves. The biggest difficulty, in this craft, is just having the discipline to do the same thing, day in and day out. Pressing the letter buttons to combine squiggles into strings of squiggles, and those strings of squiggles into strings of strings of squiggles, arranged in just the right order as to trick people's brains into receiving information. I won't delude myself into thinking it requires more discipline to master than other artistic mediums, but it does require discipline.

To those of you who write, who are trying to actually learn your craft, AI is a shortcut. You could use it, if you lack confidence in your own ability to make things. If you ask me, however, the world has far more room for poorly made stuff made with intent, than it does mediocre stuff hallucinated by a machine.

So it looks like NaNoWriMo are happy to have AI as part of their community. Miss me with that bullshit. Generative artificial intelligence is an active threat to creativity and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people in creative fields.

Please signal boost this so writers can make an informed choice about whether to continue to take part in such a community.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

There is a recording of Jordan Peterson right on the cusp of when he really lost it. He talks about seeing the Ramones in concert, standing at the back, dwarfed by the stadium speakers, watching down into the pit where sweaty punks churn and dance and beat against one another.

There is such reverence in his voice, yearning befitting an anchorite, in how he describes the sense of meaning these young people find in dance despite their nihilism. There is jealousy, I think.

I think he has long since given up attempting to understand the mechanisms of the world, and so he has consigned himself to a miasma of signs and portents. Every blue haired and be-pronouned college student is another ill omen, another three of swords, another thumb on the astral scales. Simply put: he thinks everything is fucked and all you can do is look out for number one.

I think he has convinced himself that there is no reason to dance. I would say I can't imagine a worse hell, but I can. Clown suit alt right dollar store Kermit voice bitch should die of another meat and benzo coma. Cunt.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

What if the reason that AI still sucks at abstract thought is because of the medium all the data has to go through?

Like, okay. I know basically dick about computers, but it's my understanding that computers are a collection of metal rectangles that electricity gets blasted through at specific frequencies and down specific channels. All that electricity has to be managed with wires or like those metal plate groove things, and it's all basically the same idea. You got a substance that conducts electricity, and it's surrounded by stuff that doesn't conduct electricity.

It's real important for the health and safety of everyone involved that all the conductive stuff is surrounded by not-conductive stuff. If electricity went all willy-nilly around in the computer box, that'd be bad. The computer couldn't function. It'd start a house fire in seconds. You'd basically invent a bomb that plugs into a wall socket. Computers are machines, and machines only function when everything works in its proper sequence.

Now, compare that to the human brain. I also know basically dick about brains, but it's my understanding that a brain is... electrical impulses flowing through a giant mass of wet meat. Wet meat is, as far as I can tell, really bad at insulating electricity. You want that bit of head-lightning to go through that tiny synapse over there? Well, tough toenails, because there's like a zillion little brain wires all around that shit, and they're all suspended in meat. The current's gonna leak, and it's gonna light up stuff you weren't planning on lighting.

With all that being said, what is abstract thought? Abstract thought is the ability to make connections between things. You see a thing and your brain thinks of another thing. Computers can't do that. The electrons go wherever the transistors force them to go, and (ideally) nowhere else. There's no room for some random pathway on the chip to get lit up, for the computer to have off-topic thoughts vaguely inspired by the chaos of inputs that is the human sensory apparatus. If we programmed it to do so, all that would happen would be random glitches, not actual data synthesis.

So, yeah. I think computer programmers should look into making PCBs out of meat. Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

Minor traffic problems really hit different when you're driving to the place you just got fired from to return your work uniform because they're holding your paycheck hostage and you desperately need that money even though you just spent $3.53 to launder those uniforms because, again, they're holding your paycheck hostage and you desperately need that money.

[redtalksaboutstuffandthings]

The fact that the Republican party is so tied up in Trump worship is the kind of thing that I call funny, for a lack of a better word. Like, Trump lost the popular vote. Just straight up lost. The only reason he won the presidency is because the electoral college is weird and fucky. His only term in office was so abhorrently bad that, despite the advantages that come both from being an incumbent and serving during an active crisis (namely, the COVID pandemic), he lost his bid for re-election.

Actually lost, this time.

He lost the vote to Joe Biden, a man who (even at the time) Trump was calling old and unfit for office. Even if that was true (at the time or now) doesn't matter. The American people decided to put literally anybody else in the White House.

But because he won one election-on a technicality-the entire Republican party decided to pivot their entire campaign strategy. Now, the thing that got you votes was walking in the footsteps of a failed business man who thought injecting bleach was sound medical advice, who responded to a potential market collapsing pandemic by cutting everyone a check for a few hundred dollars, and who (allegedly) stored secret government documents in a golf course bathroom. A man who made his own social media website so he could continue spending all day writing short form fanfiction about Joe Biden, even as Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

Harris and Walz are not just "literally anybody else," at this stage. They are capable statespeople and have gone to great lengths to show people that they're just ordinary folks. Voters are now going to have to choose between "The Vice President who oversaw the war in Ukraine" and "the Ivermectin Guy."

Like, what was the plan in the Republican party? I'll admit, riding the Crazy Train for a few years seems to have given them some gains. There's a lot you can do, when the voter base is unmobilized and you can keep repeating the phrase "woke" like a prayer against the Fae. But-and I can't stress this enough-there's only so long you can keep yourself in power by being crazy at your constituents. I still remember reading headlines about how Donald Trump was suggesting people take horse medicine, while at the same time he was forcing states to engage in bidding wars over life-saving medical equipment. It was madness.

Now the voter base is starting to mobilize. Registrations to vote are up, and they spiked hard after Harris entered the race. A lot of people are gonna be going to the ballots, and they're apparently all hoping for a candidate who's fucking normal. Republicans, who've spent the last eight years trying to gaslight people into getting upset about drag queens or wtfever they're spitting about, now have to deal with the fact their front-runner for the presidency thinks Jeffrey Dahmer endorses him, and their vice president is a known (alleged) couch-fucker.

So, yeah. "Funny" is the word I would use, to describe this election cycle.