#Crypto Blog Today | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lua-magic · 6 months

Text

Mercury and your buisness Mind .

This blog is for those specially who wants to get into business or are confused between job and buisness or what kind of business would suit them.

Mercury is our logical mind, we also call it our business mind.

Which ever house Mercury sits in your chart that house related work or buisness you can easily get into.

Mercury in ancendent.

Native is made for business, he/she can get into any business and be successful. Such native has got strong business mind

Mercury in second houses

Mercury is exalted here, it makes you great speaker here, however this house is of family, so native can get into family Buisness or run buisness with family.

This house is alsovforbfood, so if moon is exalted then native can go into food related or kitchen or cloud kitchen business as well.

Mercury in third House.

Native would be great in communication, media, tours and travel and commission related work or business. If Mars is exalted then native can work with his siblings as well.

Mercury here decreases your courage, so native would be unwilling to take initiative, but if Mercury is not afflicted then person could work with his friends and would get support from his friends as well.

Mercury in fourth house.

There are two placement of Mercury which is tricky, one is fourth and second is in ninth house.

Whenever Mercury sits with moon or in cancer, Mercury make native obsessive and disturbs the mental peace of native.

It gives native OCD, especially if moon is afflicted then it causes anxiety, fear and overthinking.

As Mercury is fast moving planet so it makes moon highly disturbed 😧.

Remedy.

Remedy is to actually, decrease the strength of Mercury, ie, Mercury is your friend and social circle, such native should sit in isolation and should have minimum friends, Quality over quantity.

For gains and Money this placement is excellent.

Well, such natives are good in real estate, and with land related work or business.

They can also go for home related buisness like home decoration, or selling home decoration, furniture, luxury furniture, especially if their Venus is also exalted.

Mercury fifth House.

Best placement for Mercury, native is fast learner and life long Lerner and teacher.

Native would be successful due to his own intelligence, and learning.

Native could be author and writer as well.

Native could also opt for teaching and counseling.

Native can also do books related buisness.

Native is great with children and could get into buisness that is for kids, like, children book, teaching, selling toys or even writing children novel.

Mercury in sixth house.

This is the only placement where Mercury is comfortable doing job as it loves to solve day today problems, it is great problem solver here

But, you can go into service related buisness like, food service, taxi services any buisness that provides service to its customers.

Mercury is seventh house.

Relationship wise this is problematic placement, as Mercury is asexual planet and also fast moving planet, so it creates problems in relationship but buisness wise it is an excellent placement.

Native can get into retail buisness, or go for branding, networking, even make themselves as big brand.

Mercury in eitgth House.

Native thinks alot about money and gains, and money wise it is good only when native is involved in eighth house related work like Bank, insurance, CA, occult, auditing, digital marketing , crypto currency such person could also become great detective, they can go into Research and development as well.

Native is great when it comes to dealing with other's money 🤑, they make good salesman as well.

Mercury ninth house

Here, placement is challenging as Mercury damages the Jupiter, Mercury is selfish, while Jupiter is divine and loves to give that is why Jupiter rules twelfth house which house is house of giving.

Jupiter also rules ninth house, which house of Dharma, religion and rules, and Mercury being prince doesn't like to follow rules

So, when you have this placement then it is better you get into business where religion is involved like selling religious books so, you can save your Jupiter and Mercury is also happy.

But, be careful never go against morality in business because you will block all your blessings.

Native can sell, religious ornaments, things or books.

Mercury in tenth house 🏠.

Such people are great sales person and excellent at marketing and PR, these are the person who would sell comb to a bald person.

So, they make great salesman and marketing.

Such native could also work with government,or collaborate with government like government tender and work with them.

Mercury in eleventh house.

Such natives are great with masses, friends and are good in dealing with large number of people.

They should get into work that involves large numbers of people like forming corporative society, NGO, even they make great speaker, counsellor and teachers. People love to follow them, hence, they make great influencers as well

Mercury in twelfth House.

This is not good placement for Mercury and Mercury is uncomfortable here, Piesces is deep ocean and Mercury being prince doesn't like to go in dark, Mercury is also selfish so it doesn't like the idea of unconditional giving and charity which is also twelfth house.

But, twelfth house is also of, foreign land, meditation, spirituality, yoga, charity, and investment.

So, person could either work outside their motherland or get into import and export business.

They can also do business related to meditation, yoga, and spirituality.

They can also go for investment.

Now, Mercury also your speaking skills, If Mercury is afflicted by malefics then person would be extremely rude with thier words and would hurt lot of people.

When Mercury is with Mars native can go for automobiles or even in technical line.

#spirituality #occult #vedic astrology #astro community #astro observations #astro notes #astrology

713 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak��:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

2K notes · View notes

agro-carnist · 5 months

Note

I occasionally go on terf and radfem block sprees on reblog chains I block a handful at a time until I start feeling gross having to scroll to see which ones are terfs and which ones are just unlucky enough to be getting reblogged by terfs. Making progress though because I went on a block adventure today on one of your posts and one of the people I clicked on I'd already actually blocked

Here's a good post on how you can block a bunch of terfs without having to go on their blogs

34 notes · View notes

art-monsters · 4 months

Text

art monsters of the world, unite and take over.

not a safe place for pablo picasso enthusiasts (blue period excluded), people who use the word 'duchampian' unironically, sol lewitt haters, crypto advocates, those who are too afraid to kill the angel in the house, AI apologists, larry gagosian, van gogh conspiracy theorists, and apathetic viewers.

this is a side blog. and a place for freaks who like art and/or those who are terrified by the enormity of their desires. join the art spiral at your own risk. become an art monster today.

#🌀🌀🌀

30 notes · View notes

canmom · 7 months

Text

since this seems to be my topic of obsession for today...

turns out Bluesky internally uses content-based addressing and IPFS. I don't have a lot of use for it since it's a Twitter clone, and I've never got on very well with Twitter. Bluesky hides most of that from the user - it looks just like any old web app backed by a central server. i need to look into this more, Bluesky is taking inspiration from IPFS but it's using its own protocol, and it is doing some good things. I think its protocols could be used for something more Tumblr-like.

there's a protocol called PubSub which sounds like it does a lot of what I want, or rather gives you the low-level framework to broadcast info across a decentralised network. you could build a social network on top of that. IPFS uses it as one way of handling mutable data, like 'my website just updated'.

there's an absolute plethora of ideas, protocols, and tools for decentralised file sharing, decentralised messaging, decentralised social networks. this broad idea space is very much the hot new thing at the moment. some of them seem like they're growing. a lot of them have glossy websites with animations and stock photos of smiling people. it's hard to know in advance what's worth paying attention to. the whole field is dense with acronyms and rather abstruse concepts. which unfortunately means the current audience tends to be limited to tech nerds (c'est moi) and crypto cultists (ce n'est pas moi. merde!).

Briar is a protocol I find personally very appealing. it's security-oriented, designed to be crazy resilient, creating a mesh network through whatever protocols are available. you use it for E2E-encrypted messaging, but also you can use it for threaded discussions and blogs. right now it's only available for phones but they're working on a desktop version. the primary use case seems to be like "you're at a protest and the gov shuts off the internet", but it would be a very sexy place to put your blog. that said, I expect it would not be very fast at all.

the major encryptable, decentralised Discord/IRC alternative is Matrix. I broadly like the look of it, but we have the same problem of inertia getting people to switch from Discord, and there's still some jank I encountered when I tried it.

there's a lot of cryptocurrency in this whole area. (not surprising since the underlying tech of crypto is also hash-based, and there's ideological overlap between crypto and torrent people, because 'decentralised').

notably, there's a companion project to IPFS, a complicated scheme called FileCoin which is designed to encourage people to host data for a certain period in return for FileCoin tokens. you get FileCoins for consistently holding onto the data, and you lose a stake of FileCoins if you delete it prematurely. these FileCoins can then be used mainly to pay other people to host data for you: you pay FileCoins to a host, and pay them again to fetch your data(!). or you can trade them for other cryptocurrencies.

I'll acknowledge it doesn't seem as intrinsically environmentally corrosive as proof-of-work crypto, or even as simply 'the rich get richer' as proof-of-stake crypto. it's not filling up HDDs with random crap either. though it does sound like it requires quite a bit of CPU work to be done in all the hashing for the 'sealing' process.

I'm still not entirely convinced of the benefit this scheme brings. crypto stuff has a tendency to go belly-up very abruptly when speculative bubbles pop, so I wouldn't be super excited to rely on FileCoin for archiving some valuable bit of data. of course any offsite backup carries risk, e.g. Dropbox could go bankrupt one day. but I'm way less convinced of the benefits of something like FileCoin than IPFS. I guess it remains to be seen if this takes off.

#computer science #ipfs

25 notes · View notes

vaspider · 4 months

Note

Hi Spider,

I hope you're having a lovely day. I got new pyjamas with cartoon jungle animals and well sewn seams today so I am very happy.

If you have the mental space for it, would you mind giving your input on a quandary I'm increasingly finding myself in?

So, if I see some blatant TERF rhetoric in the notes or, more often, the replies but the blog has nothing in the trans, gender crit or radfem tags, I'm happy to block them as a crypto TERF. But sometimes I see something that sets of those subtle alarms of "might be a TERF, might be poor wording choice" and then when I go to their blog they have all the leftist politics I would approve of around universal healthcare or UBI etc BUT absolutely nothing in the trans, gender crit, or radfem tags and that in and of itself makes me suspicious of them? Like, that their blog just has a complete absence of anything about gender at all and that reads as crypto to me but... I guess I don't want to in some way isolate someone who is just still a bit clumsy and new to talking about gender in a nuanced fashion?

So, as you are one of the people I think of first when I find myself in a thought loop like this I was wondering if you wouldn't mind giving your opinion on how to spot a crypto in this kind of situation?

Thank you in advance, and I hope you have a dope ass day.

P.S. and thank you so much for your policy of answering asks. I know it's a boundary thing for you but it is also comforting to know there is someone I can reliably reach out to when I am stuck in my head.

I don't have the mental energy for this one and it's old so I'm going to open it up to others for advice.

12 notes · View notes

7grandmel · 4 months

Text

Todays rip: 15/02/2024

Corridors of Vine

Season 6 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume FF

Ripped by Heboyi

youtube

Right, okay, we've had a good streak recently of covering more "traditionally good" rips for the blog - arrangements and remixes like NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2), genuinely good arrangements like mlp racism anthem (comix zone arrange), even the premiere of a new Season with the Joke-Explainer™ 7000 Fusion Collab. I think its about high time we change the clock to something "stupider" - the kind of rip that reminds you just how much SiIva is driven by the wild imagination, skill, and commitment-to-the-bit of its contributors. Only within a community like SiIvaGunner's will you get something like Corridors of Vine.

With memes as a whole, there seems to exist some sort of...invisible hierarchy that defines their public perception, that I've always found really fascinating. It's not impossible to understand why this hierarchy exists: Memes like the Hampsterdance in Wario's Hampster Mine, the Sparta Remix in THIS. IS. SOLEANNA. and more call back to a different, more innocent time in internet history, wheras memes like Despacito in Plains of Des-passing-to and It's Everyday Bro in It's Everyday Lake are oft met with comments like "I hate that I love this", or other similar sentiments. Memes generally follow a trend where, once one has worn out its period of inferred relevance - typically once it stops being a niche internet activity and spreads to marketing teams and unfunny people in general - its labeled as "dead" and unwanted, left as a relic of a smaller period of internet activity. That is, of course, unless it gets brought back into fashion by virtue of nostalgia and given some sort of new spin, as we've seen happen with Doge as of late - until that then too becomes co-opted by unfunny people (this time crypto-grifters) and the cycle begins anew. Yet part of what makes SiIvaGunner as a channel so great, is that very few of the memes it uses ever reach that state of abandonment: the team is so good at finding new, inventive ways to use memes as old as from Season 1, to where they rarely feel stale. And if they do feel stale - well, then that can ironically become part of the joke, playing into just how samey and played-out the joke is for a sort of ironic appeal.

All of this is to say, that I always find it immensely funny whenever the team decides - seemingly at the drop of a hat - to begin using memes that have been thoroughly labeled as dead for years by that point. A meme like the Harlem Shake didn't have so much as a pulse by the time Season 6 rolled around even past its sole revival to relevancy a few years back from being attached to Ajit Pai - yet The Harlem Shakeover of that very season was one containing over THREE HUNDRED rips utilizing the joke, next to none of which were made with the intention of sounding bad. Funny enough, then, that one of the first events we'd see during that same Season would be doing the exact same thing to a meme that's likely far more loathed than the Harlem Shake ever was - Damn Daniel, the core joke to Corridors of Vine.

Damn Daniel is perhaps the closest we've ever gotten to having a meme that felt like a social experiment - a complete non-sequitor of a joke starring an average, marketable teen and his immaculate footwear. At the peak of Vine's age of randomness humor, the series of various videos on Daniel's Vans absolutely blew up - and immediately, there were cynics from outside of Vine, older internet dwellers mainly, who made a big point about how lacking-in-funny the videos were. Yet the guy, Daniel, made it onto the damn Ellen Show of all things within mere weeks after his debut, and in a way it kind of made Damn Daniel a symbol for everything considered wrong about Vine: its mainstream appeal and focus on short, memeable videos had created a form of shitposting that...no longer felt like they were part of a community.

That is, of course, just my summary of the opinions I gathered from all the way back in 2016 - back when SiIvaGunner itself was first revving up into gear. And I find it so incredibly befitting that it was during Season 6 that the Damn Daniel event occurred on SiIvaGunner - the Season all about letting go of the past. To have it begin with SiIvaGunner, itself a 2016 meme, acknowledging its near polar opposite made around the same time: A meme that was, for a solid while, one of the most wanted-dead memes of all, one that the internet as a whole frankly felt a kind of hatred toward during what would come to be a rather cynical, hateful year in general.

There's definitely an overarching aura of irony applied to the anniversary celebration's rips regardless, of course - part of the joke with Corridors of Vine is that its using a song otherwise so closely enveloped in emotion and vulnerability (one SiIva itself used to similar effect with 時の回廊＜ver. CCC＞), alongside a joke that's so bitterly remembered that its mere inclusion makes it difficult to take seriously. Yet Corridors of Vine takes itself as seriously as the concept could be, it is a genuinely fantastic YTPMV using several of the famous Damn Daniel Vines in conjunction with one another, resulting in an infectiously catchy combination of lead- and backing melody instrumentation. I do think the commitment to the bit worked excellently, and the comments of the video itself appear to agree with me - despite how beloathed Damn Daniel itself was, the time to properly acknowledge and accept it had arrived, and we were for once actually...enjoying the meme?

To circle back to the point made in the second paragraph here - the truth is, there are very few memes that wind up actually full-on dead for long. Dead memes as a concept are a label we put upon jokes we feel have ran their course, yet especially in the world of YTPMV there will always be people out there able to prove the naysayers wrong, even if the intentions are purely ironic. Ironic or affectionate, the end result is the same, isn't it? You've got a smile out of your audience through your work in adapting the meme! And through all the comments expressing their concerns over returning to the hellscape that was 2016s meme culture, those smiles - even through the barrier of the internet, felt as if they were shared by all of us. The entire event - and Corridors of Vine in particular - showed Damn Daniel a sense of affection it likely hasn't had since the days when the SiIvaGunner channel's name began with a G.

Here's to 8 years, Daniel.

...Stussy man, Damn.

#todays siivagunner #season 6 #siivagunner #siiva #Heboyi #damn daniel #chrono trigger #chrono cross #corridors of time #snes rpg #snes music #vine #vines #Youtube #Bandcamp

10 notes · View notes

searmountain159 · 7 months

Text

About me:

Mid 20's, female, bi, radfem since about 2016, been a crypto the whole time and am just now getting comfortable enough to make a side blog dedicated to learning.

Survivor of a long-term toxic relationship with a TIM, I used to support all of the gender ideology and just blindly follow it without thinking until I saw and experienced the horrible misogyny that goes with it. I remember wanting to learn more about radical feminism to better debate against it, and having my world view turned upside-down because what I was reading made so much more sense, and had an actual basis in reality (as opposed to just repeating to myself "TWAW" and moving on).

Medical school has really opened my eyes to how dangerous and ineffective transition truly is, and how much misinformation is regarded as "fact". This movement is failing girls and women.

I want to be better for myself and the women around me. I want to learn, I want to see the truth for what it is. I'm thankful for all of the women who have helped me peak and gotten me to where I am today.

19 notes · View notes

wrongend · 7 months

Text

pinned post

my name is majora but don't ever call me that. It is a curse

this is my mmd sideblog. idk how much i will be posting on here. i also don't know how anything on this website works sorry. i just like my gay ass ocs

ai “artists” Do Not Interact ai art supporters Do Not Interact nft/crypto bros Do Not Interact is(not)real supporters Do Not Interact. free palestine

tags:

#renders (for renders) #models (for model previews) #myocs (stuff with my ocs in it) #majorial (tutorials if i ever am assed to do it) i also tag by oc/character name in case u care about seeing a particular one. but i only really give a shit about my oc karma. Sorry not sorry

my main tumblr: https://cherubclaws.tumblr.com my carrd in case u want to find me elsewhere: https://cherubclaws.carrd.co/

faq:

Q: why is your username wrongend A: because it reminds me of corpse party and also is funny if your mind is in the gutters Q: why don;t u post under ur main blog A: oiguguhgghggghhh. clean slate i guess????? My main blog is for my silly reblogs not my art

Q: are u ok A: now you may be wondering. of course elks are real. but, im sure, if they were, real, how come all of their photos are fake, or come with "saw a real elk today" ? im here to discuss if elks are real, and if anyone would like to help me, then please free free to just add some more information, im really worried if elks are real, because theres some noises im caertain is an elk, not sure if its harmless or not, elks have been said to be really small, but they might have pointy claws.

#pinned #about me #mmd #txt #mikumikudance #renders #models #myocs #majorial

11 notes · View notes

atmosphericradar · 5 months

Text

Found another odd tag — keyed off the word "hiding" — and this time it's a long one!

So, the full tag is:

#blac chyna is hiding true feelings about her ‘rebirth’ makeover – her ‘lip clamps & droops’ are the proof

This sounds like a celebrity gossip headline! And sure enough, this tag is full-to-bursting with this article exclusively.

I got this from the desktop site, because it's wild to see. It's just a wall of the same article, all the way down, for multiple pages.

They're all from early November 2023, and all from blogs with names that end in *-polycom, *-mag, or *news. It seems fairly self-evident that this is the work of some kind of tabloid, but I'm a curious cat. I want to dig deeper.

Digging Deeper

Most of these posts tell you (they don't provide links!) to go read the full article on POLYCOM. Ok, what is a POLYCOM? I don't think it's Poly Inc., maker of video- and teleconferencing appliances, but a few cursory Google and DuckDuckGo searches yield no evidence of anything else.

The most recent post tells us to go track down the article ourselves on "IN TREND", but provides no URL or link. Searching around for "IN TREND" on the web is fairly difficult, returning results for well-known fashion publications, trend analytics, and a brand of clothing called "Intrend". Searching for "In Trend Today" returned more interesting results, including an InTrendToday YouTube Channel and Facebook page. The Facebook page seems to have stopped posting in late 2018, but the YouTube Channel last posted a video on Dec 18, 2023. I'll talk more about the YouTube Channel under the cut at the end of this post.

Some of these posts do have "read more" links pointing to posts on Wordpress, all of which claim to be "on MAG NEWS". Each *-mag blog links out to a separate Wordpress account which seems to be re-uploading the same story. All of these Wordpress Accounts are deleted (for violating Wordpress ToS), and all of these linked posts are gone (here are two examples):

Somehow, I doubt this is some covert arm of the Maricopa Association of Governments newsroom.

Digging down into the results on Tumblr, I found a copy of this post made by the blog vouxsportsnews. They link a Wordpress article from another dead Wordpress account:

BUT, their most recent post on their blog (a gossip article about Zendaya posted on Jan 5, 2024) does have a working Wordpress link, to vouxsportsnews.wordpress.com (clever 🙄):

This is an archetypal internet-based gossip rag. I didn't know these still existed! I guess Wordpress is hunting them down for sport?

The "Read More ..." link in the article goes to a website called top.neotrends.today, which is a sketchy link I will not be clicking on. The "full article" is apparently hosted on www.primesky.media, which I also will not be directly navigating to. I did manage to get a screenshot of the front page of primesky today (Jan 8, 2024) using a webtool:

I blurred the article shown on this page to preserve the privacy of the person it featured.

Primesky is hosted on a Cloudflare virtual private server, and no public info is available on who owns the primesky URL. A search for "redroads amag" on DuckDuckGo leads back to primesky. A search of the same on Google leads to a website at www.clickhere.world, which is immensely sketchy and looks identical to primesky. At this point, I'm going to end my search for a culprit.

Conclusion

I thought I could find the tabloid hydra's body, but I just found more heads. I'm not surprised the operators of a gossip rag bot network on Tumblr are also playing dirty on Wordpress, and covering their digital tracks well. Sometimes it's best to just report spam and go on with your day.

It should go without saying, but DO NOT NAVIGATE to these websites! At worst, they will give you every virus. At best, they will mine crypto in the background of your browser (and rot your brain).

The YouTube Channel Digression

The YouTube channel intrendtoday was created on Oct 4, 2017, and it has more than 53,000 subscribers as of my posting this post (Jan 8, 2024). However, the earliest video on the channel was posted on Nov 7, 2023. That is suspiciously close to when all of these Blac Chyna spam articles went up.

Given that the videos posted get less than 50 views on average, I think the grossly-out-of-proportion subscriber count is evidence of bot subscribers. Maybe the channel re-branded and deleted a prior back-catalog? Archive.org has no snapshots of this YouTube channel, but SocialBlade claims they lost nearly 3.5 million video views in early September of 2023 (indicating they deleted a lot of videos).

SocialBlade also indexes this channel under the name "demattradinginfo", not "intrendtoday". Archive.org doesn't have records of a YouTube URL for the channel demattradinginfo, but a Google search of that name shows results for Demat Accounts, which are a type of financial account commonly used in India to hold securities and trade stocks.

It's possible that whomever is behind the gossip news spam is also in control of this YouTube channel. I wouldn't be surprised, given how frequently people offering financial advice on social media are either scammers or spammers (and sometimes both!). However, I have no proof that the people behind this YouTube channel are the same people behind this social media gossip spamming.

#adventures in tagging #tumblr #search #google search #duckduckgo #tabloids #spam #blogging #wordpress #subterfuge #internet safety #youtube #fintech bros #social media

9 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 18 days

Text

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

153 notes · View notes