#How do you know when to sell crypto?

[chewwytwee]

Hot take but Coffeezilla doesn’t make very good videos

[river-taxbird]

AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.

I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:

We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.

Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.

Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.

For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.

Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?

Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?

As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)

There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.

In summary:

Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.

There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.

Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.

[foggysilverfeathers]

Fake HC 10 dashboard mayhaps??

0 notes

☀️ pearlescent-post Follow

Reminder to love yourself! Smell the trees! Everything will be okay in the end 😊 ☀️

☀️ pearlescent-post Follow

nvm gem ran out of pickles im depressed again

🐟 gemstone Follow

I RESTOCKED THIS MORNING HOW HAVE YOU ALREADY SOLD ME OUT

☀️ pearlescent-post Follow

1,930 notes

🎣 mending-book-fanatic Follow

day 126 without a mending book

27 notes

🚂 scars-axasqottles Follow

uM hey @.hpo-official could i ask why you havent' received my messages?/? Every calsl Ive made just puts me on holdd

⬜️ hpo-official-948204deactivated

Sorry about that, sir. Admin error. I'll speak to my manager.

🚂 scars-axasqottles Follow

...hELLO?

🌸 joel-beans Follow

lmao they deactivated what a loser

🎣 mending-book-fanatic Follow

Remember there's a person behind every poor worker! I see you bullies in the notes

🐟 gemstone Follow

@/mending-book-fanatic is a hermit permit office spy confirmed??

2,441 notes

🌸 joel-beans Follow

Guys everyone agrees that purpur is cheap and beautiful and godlike and everyone should go buy it right now this second *sweats*

🌲 supreme-judge-bd Follow

I feel like I'm missing something...

🌸 joel-beans Follow

SHE HAS EYES EVERYWHERE BDUBS

☀️ pearlescent-post Follow

Joel!

🌸 joel-beans Follow

If I don’t respond within the hour assume she got me

133 notes

🎩 symmetrical-minister Follow

anyone know a good shop for ethically-sourced wood?? i normally shop at big wood but ive heard things about a mafia :/

🪓 big-salmon Follow

That is absolutely NOT true!! If anything you should be targeting the crypto scheme at Big Wood,,

⌛️ d0ctorm77 Follow

aaaand this is why you should never trust businessmen in red suits

🪓 big-salmon Follow

says the one compensating with a massive HOURGLASS of all things

🐍 puppet-master Follow

Actually @.big-salmon Xisuma_voyd made a really well-explained video here going into detail about all of the shady elements of Big Wood, it's worth a watch.

🐟 gemstone Follow

To answer the original question OP here are some safer (privately owned!) shops :)

Gem's Moss Shop (azaleas for sale which can be bonemealed)

Bdub's Bamboo Shop (bamboo wood is a good eco-friendly alternative to your typical spruce or oak)

The Purr-purr bus (if you're okay with having slightly more exotic trees, from the End)

Hope this helped! <3

⌛️ d0ctorm77 Follow

Why would you pay diamonds for less when you could just pay a few grains of sand for the best quality wood in the shopping district? You people confuse me

🌲 supreme-judge-bd Follow

actually the Purr-purr bus isn't ethical at all!! ive heard they blackmail people into giving them sails!!!

🐟 gemstone Follow

*sales

🌲 supreme-judge-bd Follow

SHUDDUP

☀️ pearlescent-post Follow

:(

2,750 notes

🎣 mending-book-fanatic Follow

day 131 without a mending book

34 notes

🎣 mending-book-fanatic Follow

day 164 without a mending book

🐍 puppet-master Follow

Grian you know you can get free mending books at the cat cafe right

🎣 mending-book-fanatic Follow

it's not the same

🎣 mending-book-fanatic Follow

I need to be able to smell the breath of the sea between its sodden pages

🎣 mending-book-fanatic Follow

continue along the same path and you'll soon be facing villager unions

2,316 notes

🔥 tongo-tak Follow

Friendly reminder that not everyone wakes up at 2am, so please tag your Pearldle spoilers for at least a few hours!!

☀️ pearlescent-post Follow

skill issue tbh

1,102 notes

🇸🇪 death2diorite85 Follow

hallo how flirt with pretty girl time sensitive question

🌺 git-gorgeous Follow

sell them something

🔥 tongo-tak Follow

bribe diamonds

🐍 puppet-master Follow

kill them

🇸🇪 death2diorite85 Follow

okay will do!!!!

🇸🇪 death2diorite85 Follow

wait

2,989 notes

🐍 puppet-master Follow

Happy pride month to lgbtqia+ people of all ages, genders and sexualities, you're all so valid and so loved <3 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ ❤🧡💛💚💙💜

🐟 gemstone Follow

<3

⌛️ d0ctorm77 Follow

I'm making a rainbow beacon for pride, come look for it! i'll be with it by my husband @ renthedog's hole all week

⌛️ d0ctorm77 Follow

*HOLE

⌛️ d0ctorm77 Follow

*HOME

⌛️ d0ctorm77 Follow

WAIT I ACCIDENTALLY TAGGED IT

🐾 renthedog Follow

um.

2,655 notes

🌸 joel-beans Follow

etho is just kakashi on maple syrup send post

🌸 joel-beans Follow

almost forgot to add important additional difference! etho is also obsessed with me

1,113 notes

[horse-head-farms]

🪼slime-kisser Follow

all these posts like “don’t shop at boatem they support cannibalism” “the evil empire is a crypto scam” “don’t buy at octagon they’re trying to destroy the fabric of the universe” where the FUCK else am I supposed to shop????

🐠xbcrafted Follow

may i recommend horse head farms? we sell a variety items for agreeable prices and have alternate payment plans which mean you don’t have to spend a single diamond! you can find us via the nether hub <3

🪲yeswingsforlife Follow

do NOT shop at Horse Head Farms! Their items are incredibly overpriced (you can find grass, logs, etc for better prices) and this “alternative payment scheme” is actually signing an IOU. If you don’t know what that is, IOU stands for “I Owe You” and is a legal document that, when possessed, someone can force you to do anything. Literally anything. LegalKnight does a great video going into detail about it. According to this article, Horse Head Farms have just invested in building an auction house, possibly to sell off the IOUs they’ve acquired, so scummy CEOs could force you to work at their companies. Not to mention, their owners are incredibly sketchy, xBCrafted regularly tweets conspiracy theories and Hypnotizd invests in crypto

😵‍💫hypnotizd Follow

youre wrong actually, i have had nothing but brilliant service at Horse Head Farms. IOUs arent sketchy theyre normal pieces of paper. #shoptoday

🪲yeswingsforlife Follow

… you’re literally one of the owners

🐸cottagecoreliving Follow

to answer the original question, here’s a list of more reputable businesses that you can support instead!

Tays Trees

HIVE-DR8

Joe Hills’ Flower Stalls

Big Eyes

🥚dragon-tegg Follow

hey not to derail this post or anything but is anyone going to mention how OP literally fetishises slime hybrids???

( 7,067 notes )

🌃elytramoments Follow

hate when i crashland in the lava biome

🐶renrobert Follow

you mean the nether

🌃elytramoments Follow

i do not

#i think it’s a national park or something #idk its like this for miles #its near boatem

( 15.4k notes )

👁️big-eyes Follow

This weekend at Big Eyes we are having a #SALE of up to 99% OFF! EVERY item has a discount! Don’t waste your diamonds, shop at Big Eyes!

😍sexy-papa-k Follow

sweetfaces! we are going into debt! please buy ❤️❤️💕❤️🍆😭😭😭❤️ -papa k

👁️big-eyes Follow

kerlais why woudl you reblog on that account

😍sexy-papa-k Follow

we need all the reach we can get bubbles! ❤️😝❤️❤️🍆💕 -papa k

( 14 notes )

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The largest campaign finance violation in US history

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Earlier this month, some of the richest men in Silicon Valley, led by Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (the billionaire VCs behind Andreesen-Horowitz) announced that they would be backing Trump with endorsements and millions of dollars:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/07/16/trump-lands-more-big-tech-backers-billionaire-venture-capitalist-andreessen-joins-wave-supporting-former-president/

Predictably, this drew a lot of ire, which Andreesen tried to diffuse by insisting that his support "doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations

In other words, the billionaires backing Trump weren't doing so because they supported the racism, the national abortion ban, the attacks on core human rights, etc. Those were merely tradeoffs that they were willing to make to get the parts of the Trump program they do support: more tax-cuts for the ultra-rich, and, of course, free rein to defraud normies with cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes.

Crypto isn't "money" – it is far too volatile to be a store of value, a unit of account, or a medium of exchange. You'd have to be nuts to get a crypto mortgage when all it takes is Elon Musk tweeting a couple emoji to make your monthly mortgage payment double.

A thing becomes moneylike when it can be used to pay off a bill for something you either must pay for, or strongly desire to pay for. The US dollar's moneylike property comes from the fact that hundreds of millions of people need dollars to pay off the IRS and their state tax bills, which means that they will trade labor and goods for dollars. Even people who don't pay US taxes will accept dollars, because they know they can use them to buy things from people who do have a nondiscretionary bill that can only be paid in dollars.

Dollars are also valuable because there are many important commodities that can only – or primarily – be purchased with them, like much of the world's oil supply. The fact that anyone who wants to buy oil has a strong need for dollars makes dollars valuable, because they will sell labor and goods to get dollars, not because they need dollars, but because they need oil.

There's almost nothing that can only be purchased with crypto. You can procure illegal goods and services in the mistaken belief that this transaction will be durably anonymous, and you can pay off ransomware creeps who have hijacked your personal files or all of your business's data:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

Web3 was sold as a way to make the web more "decentralized," but it's best understood as an effort to make it impossible to use the web without paying crypto every time you click your mouse. If people need crypto to use the internet, then crypto whales will finally have a source of durable liquidity for the tokens they've hoarded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/16/nondiscretionary-liabilities/#quatloos

The Web3 bubble was almost entirely down to the vast hype machine mobilized by Andreesen-Horowitz, who bet billions of dollars on the idea and almost single-handedly created the illusion of demand for crypto. For example, they arranged a $100m bribe to Kickstarter shareholders in exchange for Kickstarter pretending to integrate "blockchain" into its crowdfunding platform:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/untold-story-kickstarter-crypto-hail-120000205.html

Kickstarter never ended up using the blockchain technology, because it was useless. Their shareholders just pocketed the $100m while the company weathered the waves of scorn from savvy tech users who understood that this was all a shuck.

Look hard enough at any crypto "success" and you'll discover a comparable scam. Remember NFTs, and the eye-popping sums that seemingly "everyone" was willing to pay for ugly JPEGs? That whole market was shot through with "wash-trading" – where you sell your asset to yourself and pretend that it was bought by a third party. It's a cheap – and illegal – way to convince people that something worthless is actually very valuable:

https://mailchi.mp/brianlivingston.com/034-2#free1

Even the books about crypto are scams. Chris Dixon's "bestseller" about the power of crypto, Read Write Own, got on the bestseller list through the publishing equivalent of wash-trading, where VCs with large investments in crypto bought up thousands of copies and shoved them on indifferent employees or just warehoused them:

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

The fact that crypto trades were mostly the same bunch of grifters buying shitcoins from each other, while spending big on Superbowl ads, bribes to Kickstarter shareholders, and bulk-buys of mediocre business-books was bound to come out someday. In the meantime, though, the system worked: it convinced normies to gamble their life's savings on crypto, which they promptly lost (if you can't spot the sucker at the table, you're the sucker).

There's a name for this: it's called a "bezzle." John Kenneth Galbraith defined a "bezzle" as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." All bezzles collapse eventually, but until they do, everyone feels better off. You think you're rich because you just bought a bunch of shitcoins after Matt Damon told you that "fortune favors the brave." Damon feels rich because he got a ton of cash to rope you into the con. Crypto.com feels rich because you took a bunch of your perfectly cromulent "fiat money" that can be used to buy anything and traded it in for shitcoins that can be used to buy nothing:

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/26/matt-damon-crypto-commercial/

Andreesen-Horowitz were masters of the bezzle. For them, the Web3 bet on an internet that you'd have to buy their shitcoins to use was always Plan B. Plan A was much more straightforward: they would back crypto companies and take part of their equity in huge quantities of shitcoins that they could sell to "unqualified investors" (normies) in an "initial coin offering." Normally, this would be illegal: a company can't offer stock to the general public until it's been through an SEC vetting process and "gone public" through an IPO. But (Andreesen-Horowitz argued) their companies' "initial coin offerings" existed in an unregulated grey zone where they could be traded for the life's savings of mom-and-pop investors who thought crypto was real because they heard that Kickstarter had adopted it, and there was a bestselling book about it, and Larry David and Matt Damon and Spike Lee told them it was the next big thing.

Crypto isn't so much a financial innovation as it is a financial obfuscation. "Fintech" is just a cynical synonym for "unregulated bank." Cryptocurrency enjoys a "byzantine premium" – that is, it's so larded with baffling technical nonsense that no one understands how it works, and they assume that anything they don't understand is probably incredibly sophisticated and great ("a pile of shit this big must have pony under it somewhere"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

There are two threats to the crypto bezzle: the first is that normies will wise up to the scam, and the second is that the government will put a stop to it. These are correlated risks: if the government treats crypto as a security (or worse, a scam), that will put severe limits on how shitcoins can be marketed to normies, which will staunch the influx of real money, so the sole liquidity will come from ransomware payments and transactions with tragically overconfident hitmen and drug dealers who think the blockchain is anonymous.

To keep the bezzle going, crypto scammers have spent the past two election cycles flooding both parties with cash. In the 2022 midterms, crypto money bankrolled primary challenges to Democrats by absolute cranks, like the "effective altruist" Carrick Flynn ("effective altruism" is a crypto-affiliated cult closely associated with the infamous scam-artist Sam Bankman-Fried). Sam Bankman-Fried's super PAC, "Protect Our Future," spent $10m on attack-ads against Flynn's primary opponent, the incumbent Andrea Salinas. Salinas trounced Flynn – who was an objectively very bad candidate who stood no chance of winning the general election – but only at the expense of most of the funds she raised from her grassroots, small-dollar donors.

Fighting off SBF's joke candidate meant that Salinas went into the general election with nearly empty coffers, and she barely squeaked out a win against a GOP nightmare candidate Mike Erickson – a millionaire Oxy trafficker, drunk driver, and philanderer who tricked his then-girlfriend by driving her to a fake abortion clinic and telling her that it was a real one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/14/competitors-critics-customers/#billionaire-dilletantes

SBF is in prison, but there's no shortage of crypto millions for this election cycle. According to Molly White's "Follow the Crypto" tracker, crypto-affiliated PACs have raised $185m to influence the 2024 election – more than the entire energy sector:

https://www.followthecrypto.org/

As with everything "crypto," the cryptocurrency election corruption slushfund is a bezzle. The "Stand With Crypto PAC" claims to have the backing of 1.3 million "crypto advocates," and Reuters claims they have 440,000 backers. But 99% of the money claimed by Stand With Crypto was actually donated to "Fairshake" – a different PAC – and 90% of Fairshake's money comes from a handful of corporate donors:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/

Stand With Crypto – minus the Fairshake money it falsely claimed – has raised $13,690 since April. That money came from just seven donors, four of whom are employed by Coinbase, for whom Stand With Crypto is a stalking horse. Stand With Crypto has an affiliated group (also called "Stand With Crypto" because that is an extremely normal and forthright way to run a nonprofit!), which has raised millions – $1.49m. Of that $1.49m, 90% came from just four donors: three cryptocurrency companies, and the CEO of Coinbase.

There are plenty of crypto dollars for politicians to fight over, but there are virtually no crypto voters. 69-75% of Americans "view crypto negatively or distrust it":

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/

When Trump keynotes the Bitcoin 2024 conference and promises to use public funds to buy $1b worth of cryptocoins, he isn't wooing voters, he's wooing dollars:

https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-strategic-bitcoin-stockpile-bitcoin-2024/

Wooing dollars, not crypto. Politicians aren't raising funds in crypto, because you can't buy ads or pay campaign staff with shitcoins. Remember: unless Andreesen-Horowitz manages to install Web3 crypto tollbooths all over the internet, the industries that accept crypto are ransomware, and technologically overconfident hit-men and drug-dealers. To win elections, you need dollars, which crypto hustlers get by convincing normies to give them real money in exchange for shitcoins, and they are only funding politicians who will make it easier to do that.

As a political matter, "crypto" is a shorthand for "allowing scammers to steal from working people," which makes it a very Republican issue. As Hamilton Nolan writes, "If the Republicans want to position themselves as the Party of Crypto, let them. It is similar to how they position themselves as The Party of Racism and the Party of Religious Zealots and the Party of Telling Lies about Election Fraud. These things actually reflect poorly on them, the Republicans":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/crypto-as-a-political-characteristic

But the Democrats – who are riding high on the news that Kamala Harris will be their candidate this fall – have decided that they want some of that crypto money, too. Even as crypto-skeptical Dems like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester see millions from crypto PACs flooding in to support their primary challengers and GOP opponents, a group of Dem politicians are promising to give the crypto industry whatever it wants, if they will only bribe Democratic candidates as well:

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/f/?id=00000190-f475-d94b-a79f-fc77c9400000

Kamala Harris – a genuinely popular candidate who has raised record-shattering sums from small-dollar donors representing millions of Americans – herself has called for a "reset" of the relationship between the crypto sector and the Dems:

https://archive.is/iYd1C

As Luke Goldstein writes in The American Prospect, sucking up to crypto scammers so they stop giving your opponents millions of dollars to run attack ads against you is a strategy with no end – you have to keep sucking up to the scam, otherwise the attack ads come out:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-31-crypto-cash-affecting-democratic-races/

There's a whole menagerie of crypto billionaires behind this year's attempt to buy the American government – Andreesen and Horowitz, of course, but also the Winklevoss twins, and this guy, who says we're in the midst of a "civil war" and "anyone that votes against Trump can die in a fucking fire":

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1813952816840597712/photo/1

But the real whale that's backstopping the crypto campaign spending is Coinbase, through its Fairshake crypto PAC. Coinbase has donated $45,500,000 to Fairshake, which is a lot:

https://www.coinbase.com/blog/how-to-get-regulatory-clarity-for-crypto

But $45.5m isn't merely a large campaign contribution: it appears that $25m of that is the largest the largest illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor in history, "by far," a fact that was sleuthed out by Molly White:

https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/

At issue is the fact that Coinbase is bidding to be a US federal contractor: specifically, they want to manage the crypto wallets that US federal cops keep seizing from crime kingpins. Once Coinbase threw its hat into the federal contracting ring, it disqualified itself from donating to politicians or funding PACs:

Campaign finance law prohibits federal government contractors from making contributions, or promising to make contributions, to political entities including super PACs like Fairshake.

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/federal-government-contractors/

Previous to this, the largest ever illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor appears to be Marathon Petroleum Company's 2022 bribe to GOP House and Senate super PACs, a mere $1m, only 4% of Coinbase's bribe.

I'm with Nolan on this one. Let the GOP chase millions from billionaires everyone hates who expect them to promote a scam that everyone mistrusts. The Dems have finally found a candidate that people are excited about, and they're awash in money thanks to small amounts contributed by everyday Americans. As AOC put it:

They've got money, but we've got people. Dollar bills don't vote. People vote.

https://www.popsugar.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dnc-headquarters-climate-speech-47986992

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/07/31/greater-fools/#coinbased

[iaminsideyourwalls]

I'm opening commissions for the summer, so get 'em while they're hot! 3 slots open at a time, check my ko-fi or bio for openings.

ko-fi.com/wallsartcommissions

Terms below the cut, read before buying

Please let me know the kind of style, composition, and content you want in your piece! Reference images are greatly appreciated, and are required if you want me to draw your OC.

What I won't draw:

anything NSFW: explicit nudity, porn, or fetish art (nothing against these types of commissions, I just can't accept money for them when I can't verify ages online)

anime anything

NFTs

If you're not sure if I'll draw something, ask first. I accept direct messages on ko-fi and tumblr!

Yes, I will draw your OCs. Send a full body reference of your character. If you want a colored piece, please send a colored reference. OC commissions may take longer because I am working from a new reference.

The process: 1) Once you buy a commission from my listings and describe the commission you want, I will give you an estimate of how long you can expect the commission to take. Depending on how large and complex the piece, wait times may vary. 2) I will send you process images for your approval. If you want major edits, I may need to change the price. Once I get your approval for the final piece, I will not make any further edits. If I do not get any responses from you, I may cancel the commission without refund. 3) I will send you a png of the finished piece.

Payment: - I need payment in full up front through ko-fi - I don’t negotiate my listed prices, but I can work with you to price something not listed. - Prices are in USD. I don't accept crypto.

Refund policy: - I don't refund finished pieces. - For WIPs I can only refund the total cost minus the cost of the work I have already done.

Rights: - You own the finished piece for personal use, including profile pics on personal accounts. If you use/post it on your social media I require artist credit. - You do NOT own it for commercial use (you can't make money off of it in any way, make ad revenue off of it, use it to promote your products or brand, use it in a youtube thumbnail, use it as an NFT, sell it, sell it on a product, etc). I do not grant permission to use my artwork in any AI programs. - I may post your commission on my tumblr.

[0w0tsuki]

Hey Ive seen Baeddel used in a lot of your posts but like,, other than a definition of the word I cant really find much on what it means like discourse-wise.

I know its something relating to transfems but other than that im lost x.x sorry for the bother

Basically it started out as an old timey slur for trans women. The word "bad" is rooted from it. In the early 2010s a group of trans women adopted the term and had a community for a very short time before it collapsed and not much information is left over.

Some say that had abusive dynamics. Some say they were just talking about transfeminism like they do now. My sibling swears up and down from their personal experiences with the initial group that they were a group of grifters using queer politics to fundraise for tumblers first big scam, The ARK(C?) Project.

A bunch of anti-transfeminists in their efforts to create the magical word that will allow them to terf-jacket trans women without having it called out as such happened upon the term and used the lack of concrete history/the fact that most of the subjective history isn't too charitable to this original group to fabricate a conspiracy theory that these original Beaddels were an evil cabal of bigoted trans women who never really went away and now operate and sow intracommunity discourse from the shadows for the explicit purpose of weakening the holy divinity of TransUnity.

And while some of them moved on to other terms like "TIRF" and "Neo Radfem" a good portion of TransUnity/Transandro anti-transfeminists have latched onto the term and have doubled down on their intent to use it to create a category of trans women that it's ok to exclude. Out of all of the anti-transfeminists that have come out of this new wave, the ones who build their politics around "Anti-Beaddelism" are some of the most mask-off exclusionists of the bunch. Like look at how they talk about Beadels

They will list how these groups have a bunch of ties to nearly every anti-queer group they could think of. And then they warn White™(Because everytime they attack trans women they have to pretend like it's a race thing to distract from the transmisogyny) that they mean to need to maintain a sense of hypervigilance around their transfem sisters and read into every laugh, every joke, and every word for the possibility of finding Beaddel rhetoric. This is a manipulative abusive tactic to keep the transfems within their sphere of influence to reach other to other transfems and rely on TME people to tell them what's right and provide community.

I remember on sailorportia's "Anti-Egg discoursers sound just like my conversation therapist" post I saw one of these people referring to the notes section as "full of beaddel dogwhistles" and inviting people to "take a look and educate themselves". Not specifying what the dogwhistles are or how they are dogwhistles. Just vaguely gesturing at the notes section and inviting you to regard anything a vocal trans woman as a crypto-beaddel and anything they say as "beaddel dogwhistles"

These communities cultivate a sense of paranoia. They encourage constant scrutiny regarding anything a trans woman says. Their leaders sell themselves as protectors of the community whose exclusion is a necessary evil to keep online trans communities safe. They are incentivized to keep the term Beaddel definition murky but representative of all the evils they attribute to trans women.

The term in the modern day is largely prescriptive and moreso defined by the reactionary "Anti-Beadelism" movement than it is defined by its history. Only a few trans women have reclaimed the term. When anti-transfeminists talk about Beaddelism they aren't talking about an organized group or community, they are referring to a bunch of individual trans women they have branded with the beaddel slur.

Currently I don't think reclaiming the word is a good move. Not that I disagree with it or think trans women shouldn't reclaim it. It's just that it will do more harm than good for as long as exclusionists control the narrative on its definition. I've seen mutuals have their posts on general transfeminism get completely discarded out of hand because they had Beaddel in their profile name or bio.

Because like it or not the current definition of Beaddels that gets passed around was written by current ex-terfs/transandro nothorses bro and cites TERF resources in their definition. This is the same dude who's responsible for the foundation or the current TransUnity echo chamber and used the influence from creating that community to try and redefine TERF to include trans women for the purpose of TERF-jacketing.

It's why me and some other trans women have been picking up the words trasfeminism to refer to discussions of transfem issues and anti-transfeminist to refer to these new wave of transfem exclusionist. It denies the exclusionists the ability to define our politics for us to outsiders. Also note: If the term trasfeminism picks up in use your going to see a lot of these people switch from "Beaddel" to "Radical Transfeminist" as their go-to anti-transfeminist TERF-jacketing slur

[doodlemancy]

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhh

so here's the deal re: this fucking horseshit. god i hate this.

i, personally, have mostly given up on trying to dodge inclusion in AI datasets. the stuff i make generally isn't what they're looking for anyway and there's no real way to 100% avoid being scraped short of becoming entirely invisible online, which would um, lead to me having no money and dying. that's part of the cruelty of all this, but also, in a way, it's the same risk artists online have always taken; if you want people to see your work, you have to post it knowing that some of those people are fucking lowlife piece of shit scumbags who will try to resell it on redbubble or something for a quick buck. AI is just a new and exhausting way for garbagey people to stink worse. i am not in any way excusing that behavior or trying to imply people should not be mad about it or that we shouldn't condemn this move and fight back. "if you don't want your work stolen, don't put it online" is the kind of shitty Internet Tough Guy talk i've always hated since my dA days. it's as useless and heartless as telling people that if they don't want their bikes stolen, they shouldn't leave them at the bike rack. i'm saying that i, personally, will not let a bunch of soulless thieving shitheads drive me offline. i belong here. they belong in a wifi-proof dumpster.

nightshade and glaze eat my artwork alive. they make it look terrible. when you have to sell things on the basis that they look nice, it's a big problem when protective measures make them look like dogshit. my work is not a good candidate for these processes. even if that weren't the case, i don't have the stamina, especially right now while my chronic pain is flaring for the third month in a row and my adhd meds are scarce, to go back and shade/glaze everything, and it wouldn't work on reblogs anyway. given the way midjourney and its equally stinky siblings have already scraped years and terabytes' worth of image data from popular websites, it doesn't seem worth my time. if you think it is worth yours i am not going to like, yell at you. i am just one person. but i want to be clear about the kind of situations some of us are being forced into.

i think some of the doomsaying about AI and what it will do to us has been overblown-- they need you, for marketing purposes, to believe that someday their shitty robot will be as good at "drawing" and as practical to work with as a human-- but the consequences of "AI" (which is not even actually AI) are already real and visible and obvious to anyone paying attention. i unfortunately am not infinitely wise and powerful and therefore do not have an ideal all-encompassing solution to this deeply stupid problem that the Most Unlikeable Manbabies On Earth have imposed on us after NFTs fizzled out.

what i do have is a very large repository of nice anime and game screenshots i've taken, knowledge of many archives of nice public domain images, a computer that can run nightshade overnight or while i'm off doing other things, and, most importantly, near-infinite capacity for pettiness. i do kinda feel like the jury is still out on how well nightshade/glaze will work in the long run, but in the meantime, i suppose it wouldn't cost me a lot to... perhaps... every time i get Mad About AI™, channel that anger into dumping some thoroughly-but-not-spammily-tagged, high-quality, inconspicuous poison onto this godforsaken hellsite via a secret side blog. i could make a batch of poison ahead of time, keep it on my phone, use my Toilet Scrolling Time or my Public Transit Time to post and tag up an image here and there. it could be a fun challenge to try to make some pretty robot poison that some humans will still enjoy.

the other thing we need to poison at this point, IMO, is the word "AI" itself, by being loudly and mercilessly critical of any company that dabbles in it, the same way we all clowned on any company that pushed their luck with NFT/crypto shit a couple of years ago. we need to have every corporation terrified that association with AI will tank their sales and hurt their brand. AI must = number go down and lots of people screaming at you. companies will fuck around. we must provide the finding-out. we shouldn't have to. but we can!

so make sure to let tumblr know you hate this. maybe you could include this interesting link (tw child abuse) about how Stable Diffusion was trained on some extremely serious crime. or these screenshots of Midjourney devs just sort of admitting what their whole thing is, which i got here but which have kinda been spread all over since January.

spite and anger can be forms of hope. that's all i have to say, or at least all i'm willing to type with my left hand tonight.

[knightfuryvawannabee]

Safely navigating DIY T – acquisition and health

A lot of the safety tips in terms of navigating online will come from this video, which is actually about safely navigating reproductive procedures post the overturning of Roe v Wade, but the safety advice works especially well here. If any questions are not answered here please feel free to shoot me an ask. Google Doc for easier navigation, says all the same stuff as here.

First off if you haven't already, check the transmasc guide on the DIY HRT Wiki, this post is made with the assumption you have already read that. -      General internet safety

When searching for and purchasing DIY T (especially injections), use the TOR browser with a VPN. This will keep your internet privacy as secure as possible, and the VPN will change your IP enough to make it look like it was accessed from a different location.

I personally use Proton, it’s a free VPN with an optional paid upgrade. The free version will connect you to either the US, Netherlands, or Japan.

Proton also has its own email service. Some of the sources where you can receive DIY T from may require you to make an account. I recommend using an email through Proton for this because it is end-to-end encrypted. If the site asks for a phone number just put in a repeating order of 0 to 9. 

-      Safety when purchasing T

Some sites where you can get DIY T will only allow the purchase through use of bitcoin or other forms of cryptocurrency. I know and understand we all have our thoughts on crypto and it’s use in the modern day, but unfortunately this is just how things are when navigating this.

The least scam-possible way I have seen when purchasing bitcoin, is to go through CashApp. They have an option to purchase and sell bitcoin in the app. I personally used this when buying DIY T to stock up in the case shit hits the fan. It’s pretty direct in purchasing and selling, sending is where it may get a bit tricky.

The source for DIY T listed on the DIY HRT Wiki will send you an email once you confirm your order, and you will be prompted to send the bitcoin through either a QR code or directly to a bitcoin address. I had a bit of trouble with the QR code, so what I had to do was type in the direct address. This will not bring up the company’s name, it will just allow the option when the address is fully typed.

If you are able to use a credit/debit card, what I recommend is using cash to purchase a prepaid visa and using that to order your T or otherwise online. This will make sure the transaction is not attached to your bank account.

-      Receiving T safely

I highly recommend getting your DIY T sent to a PO Box, and not your home address. The United States Postal Service is in personal experience – really secure and discrete. And even if your package does not fit in your box, you will be given a slip to take to the counter, and they will give you your package there.

When ordering, try to order from a warehouse based in your country. This is to avoid the hassle of it going through customs. But if you must order abroad, it is still very unlikely that your order will be stopped in customs. They do not open packages to check them, instead they use an x-ray machine. If your order does get stuck in customs, it’s likely because there’s an issue with paperwork, and not the order itself.

-      Administering T safely

When performing a T injection, make sure your supplies are sterile. Not just clean, sterile. Inspect the packaging of your syringes, needles, etc. If there is a tear or hole, do not use it.

For your T vials, yes, it is okay to draw from them multiple times. You can sterilize the vial by using isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) or an alcohol swab. You’re likely to not use the entire vial in one injection, so just keep it in a safe place, many even recommend keeping it refrigerated between doses.

Most if not all T vials will say to administer only via intramuscular, but you can still administer this subcutaneously. Even the vials I get through my doctor say For IM Use Only. It’s okay to administer it SubQ.

If you have trouble administering injections like I did for a while, I recommend this auto injector. You load the syringe into the device and press a button. The needle will go in and you just push the plunger down. This device is technically intended for insulin injections, but it works just fine for other injections.

My recommendation is to use an 18g needle to draw, and a 1/2in 25g needle to inject. This has left me with the least discomfort and uneasiness with injecting.

-      Blood work

If you’re on T, it’s recommended you get your labwork done at least every 3 months.

As someone who’s been given the run around in the medical field for reasons unrelated to my transition, I forever recommend ordering labs from Request a Test. This is something that is very common to do, I even ordered my own ANA test when I had to get other labs done for my work. Request a Test does not take insurance unless it’s through an HSA card. When ordering from RaQ, you will be prompted to select which LabCorp or QuestDirect facility you want the order sent to. I personally recommend LabCorp, especially considering the QuestDirect Testosterone test is only available for males. 

You will want to order at a minimum, a T level total test or a T level free test, and a CBC and CMP. The CBC is to help check for polycythemia, and CMP is to help check your liver function.

If you are worried about you ordering your T levels and that being found out, you can also order an at home testosterone test kit. The blood samples are collected through lancets similar to what is used by diabetic patients.

-      Acquiring T gel

Unfortunately there are not a whole lot of sources to get T gel from. But that does not mean they do not exist.

I personally have been using this brand called Androgenesis in between my injections, and it has been working really well. I take 50mg of T every two weeks, and when I got my bloodwork done recently my levels were >400, even when it’s really close to my next shot day.

You can order Androgenesis either directly from their site, or you can order it off of amazon. NOTE, that the standard formula on amazon can not be sent to a PO Box or amazon locker, because the site classifies it as a “potentially dangerous substance”. However the enhanced formula can be sent to a PO box or amazon locker and it works the exact same way.

Another site is Predator Nutrition (odd name but bear with me).

I am still waiting for my order, but I’d recommend either their EpiAndrogel or their Alpha Gel depending on which one is in stock at time of purchasing.

I also recommend keeping an eye out on Need2BuildMuscle. Their gel is currently out of stock, but from what I’ve seen it works quite similarly to AndroGel.

As of 08/02/2024 (Aug. 2nd), I did find sources for packets of 1% Androgel, which you can find here and here

Please note the brand name Androgel sources are ones I unfortunately have not been able to verify personally so please proceed at your own discretion, but the sources *are* listed on hrtcafe.net.

-      Who to tell?

No one *. If you doctor doesn’t know you’re on DIY T, do not bring it up. Don’t go talking about it all willy-nilly in the grocery store or whatnot.

*The exception is paramedics. If you are having a medical emergency, it’s probably a good idea to tell any emergency medical provider that you’re on testosterone so they can treat you properly. Remember, tell the cops nothing, tell the ambulance everything. The people on the ambulance are there to save your life, and I can guarantee they’ve dealt with circumstances far more severe than someone self-administering a specific hormonal medication. I say this as someone who’s on first aid at their place of work – and had to patch someone's hand after they were injured when I worked retail. 

tagging @mythical-moonlight

[morpheus-somnium]

Thieves Guild [modern au]

[masterlist]

Informations

Location: Ragged Flagon, Ratway, Riften

Leader: Mercer Frey

Headcanons

The Ratway in my modern au is a street or scummy neighborhood that most people avoid. The Ragged Flagon is an internet cafe.

I mean, I can see Delvin doxing someone while eating instant noodles, tbh.

From the outside, it looks so bad, but from the inside, it really is. JK. Inside it’s pretty cool; you can buy different foods, there is an electric kettle, and maybe you can even get some drinks from Vekel if you are old enough.

In fact, a lot of people come here to actually play online games, and no one cares when a shady figure in the back of the cafe is on Facebook, writing a letter to an unknown Orc grandmother and convincing her that he is her missing grandson and let him have her inheritance.

The Thieves Guild, as a faction, is very diverse. They scam, they dox, they plan and do actual heists, they hack bank accounts, they pickpocket people (if they ever get out of bed or the internet café), they steal, they start a “devious lick” trend on social media…

Ragged Flagon is more of a meeting point for them.

On a larger-caliber mission, the members wear mainly techwear.

Brynjolf? You will find it in every city. He’s always in shopping centers where he scams people. Not in the underpass, but in the building itself. For example, he sells “nano-magic” and “high-tech” phone protector screens that were stolen from a one-dollar store (or from a delivery van).

Delvin works with technology; he is the one hacking bank accounts, and I think he might invest in crypto 😭 He is also kind of like a walking lexicon?

Even though Mercer says that there aren’t any places that the Guild protects, every other member thinks otherwise. For example, the members never still from orphanages, and they never steal from those places that certain members visit (in a non-criminal way). For example, I think Vex likes hot springs, jacuzzis, saunas, etc., so no one steals from the local spa that she visits (not even her, unless there is a rude customer).

They organize family game nights!! They play Mario Kart and similar games.

And they also place dozens of bets on the people they know, not just guild members. They made bets on when Talen-Jei would propose to Keerava, for example.

How does Mercer subdue the Thieves Guild? He keeps the prices so high for everyone. He charges almost 3-5 times more for internet and electricity. And the members don’t question it. Like they are one (1) Google search away from finding out that the average price for using the computers and wifi should be around 12 septim and not 40 septim.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hi folks, it’s Mint.

I’m on a mini-vacation this week so I’m going to be releasing some recommendation posts for things that aren’t related to requests (easy to queue), and I’ll be back to doing regular rec posts when I get back!

THEME: Cryptids

Whether you’re tracking them down in order to give them your heart or running as fast as you can in the opposite direction, these games are all about mysterious creatures (that usually live in the woods).

OKCryptid, by Tadhg Lyon.

You’ll never forget that night.

You had heard the legends before, of course, everyone had.  Now that you know the creature is real, one thought keeps playing through your mind:

Their eyes were… beautiful. You want to see them again.

Okcryptid is a tarot-based, GMless roleplaying game about finding mysterious, secretive, beautiful creatures, and hopefully, dating them. It can be played by 2-5 players, or as a solo journaling experience.

Regardless of whether you play this game solo or in a group, you will be investigating a single creature or cryptid. You can create a cryptid of your own, or roll from a provided table to make a completely new cryptid. You use a deck of tarot cards to represent facts about the Creature, bring you closer to the final Meeting, or provide prompts for each investigative scene of the game. Characters also have personal scales that will measure how much the Creature either wants to kiss them or kill them, which will affect how the final Meeting goes. If you want a game with a mix of romance and creepy thrills, you might want to check out OKCryptid!

Cryptid TV, by yanahn.

A plague of Reality TV stars has descended upon the sleepy town of Mountain Lake ready to hunt down (and capture on camera) anything that looks even remotely like a cryptid - your crew is among them to cause drama, fake hoaxes, and enact sabotage beyond all reckoning.

The catch? You have only a passing familiarity with eldritch world of Showbiz, also you are all SPOOKY CRYPTIDS.

Cryptid TV is a truly charming hack of Honey Heist that pits your characters against the world of reality TV. You can choose whatever Cryptid you like, although there are six recommended cryptos that come with special powers to make situations really interesting. Will you unveil yourself as a Cryptid and lose all sense of peace and quiet? Will you sell out and move to Hollywood to seek out fame and fortune? Or will you succeed in driving the producers away without blowing your cover?

If you like goofy situations and you want a chill one-shot for the cryptid - lovers in your life, you’ll want to check out Cryptid TV.

Cryptid Rescue, by Renasdoodles.

One of your own has been captured and you’ve taken it upon yourselves to rescue them! One problem: you’re all cryptids and need to keep from being discovered or you too will be captured!

Cryptid Rescue is a one-page RPG that can be played through within a few hours. 

This is a cute little game with two main stats: Stealth and Fright. Each cryptid also has an Attention bar that leads to your capture should you fill it all the way. You fill this bar a little when you successfully frighten someone or fail at stealth, and you empty it a little when you fail to frighten someone or successfully sneak somewhere. The game also comes with a few small roll-tables for the GM to figure out who was captured, where they are now, and what kinds of obstacles will stand in the way between our adventurous little monsters and their friend. If you want a cute, free game with a simple premise, you might want to check out Cryptid Rescue.

The Mystery Creature of Claytonsville, PA, by Nick Wedig.

That summer, our small town deep in rural Pennsylvania was abuzz with strange tales of the supernatural creature.  No two stories of the creature entirely agreed with each other. Everyone who encountered the creature seemed to see what they needed to see. 

Some who found the creature were terrified. Others were spurred out of their stifling, mundane lives. In the end, the creature left the town with more questions than answers. But the lives of the each witness would each be changed forever.

Once the stories started, they came in more and more frequently throughout the year. Then just as they reached a crescendo, the encounters suddenly stopped.

This game can be played in a group as large as 7, or as small as one - just by yourself. You use a deck of playing cards as an oracle for answering questions, both about the town that you live in and the protagonist that the group will be telling the story about. No matter the group size, there will only be one protagonist! After you set the scene and define your main character, the deck of cards is used to determine what obstacles show up, whether the character succeeds or fails, and what aspects of the story come to the forefront in each scene.

This game feels like a cross between a narrative storytelling exercise and a card game, so if you want to introduce storytelling to a group that likes that tactile sensations of board-games, you might find some luck with The Mystery Creature of Claytonsville, PA.

Expedition: Incredizoology, by Imagined Chaos Games.

Explore the Wyldes, pockets of our World where fantastical and mythical creatures roam freely. Trap, train, hunt and co-exist with these creatures and explore the incredible lands they inhabit. 

Incredizoology can be played solo, cooperative or with an 'Expedition Leader' leading the expedition. The Imagined Chaos System utilises the full gamut of your polyhedral dice, moment cards to resolve combat and encounters as well as extensive roll tables for exploration. 

I don’t think this necessarily needs to be focused on cryptids, but there certainly seems to be room for it. The focus is not just on the creatures that you’re exploring, but also the environment they live in: you’ll have to navigate the natural environment, account for the weather, and interact with strange plants as well! There’s also room to explore how people make themselves at home in wild places, although the fact that the default setting is in a colonial period may be a bit of a downside for some players.

I wonder if you could alter the setting to allow for expeditions in different times and places. For example, if you are explorers in a sci-fi setting or a space setting, what changes might you make to make exploration challenging? I’m also curious if you could combine this game with a creature creation game, such as Exquisite Biome, a creature generator that also considers the ecosystems of various fantastic creatures.

You can download free character sheets if you want to take a look at a few bits and pieces, and look at a review for this game on The Gaming Table’s Youtube channel!

MOTH//MAN, by Witch & Craft Games.

A night in the woods…a light in the darkness…an unearthly transformation…

Can you survive the MOTHMAN?

Armed with nothing but your wits, tools, and the clothes on your back, you must brave the forest that this mysterious creature calls home. Your reasons for walking this perilous path are your own…as are those of everyone around you. Every bump in the road is a potential danger, an irresistible call drawing the beast ever closer. One wrong move, and you might find that it had been lurking closer than you ever thought possible.

When the monster finally reveals itself, the night really begins, and only one question remains:

Who is MOTH, and who is MAN?

This game looks to be more suited for fans who like to mix a bit more horror into their Cryptid mix. Moth-Man is likely a real threat - especially since it looks like some party members might actually turn into a MothMan! If you want a game of suspense, surprise, and perhaps even a little PVP, you might like MOTH//MAN.

Loveland, by JD.

Hundreds of years after climate change killed humanity, the cryptids inherited the Earth. Living in the area once known as Loveland, Ohio are the Frogfolk. Not as strong or sophisticated as other new societies, their success can be attributed to their teamwork. Within their village each Frog is a member of a guild. Some are craftsmen, others provide services, but all are equally important in the survival of the village.

You are a member of the Gatherers Guild. It’s your job to venture out of the village, gather supplies, explore ancient ruins, and communicate with other factions.

I find the idea of playing Frogfolk very charming, and I also like the fact that there are various Cryptid factions in this world, including goat-men, moth-men, and green-furred Grasskin. The game seems to revolve around gathering items that various guild factions can use to craft items for you, which will in turn help you venture farther and farther afield. Magic exists in items called Wands, and can only be used once per day before it needs to re-charge. The game is very well suited for dungeon-crawls, pointcrawls, hex-crawls… name a crawl and you can probably do it in this game. If you’re a bit of an OSR fan and you like exploration, you might be interested in Loveland.

Other Games You Might Want To Check Out

Sleepaway, by Jay Dragon.

Apocalypse Roadtrip, by Mina Lenahan.

Cryptozoologist by riseofpanic.

Camp Cryptid, by Certified Milkboy Games.

[ckret2]

I need to know: how you think bill would be in chat if he ever got the priviledge to get a phone or use a PC?What social networks would he use?

Types in all caps at all times. Punctuation optional. If someone asks him to turn off caps he instead doubles the font size. He can do this even on sites/apps that don't allow you to change the size. He won't say how.

Considering this is 2013? He's probably a pioneer in spreading misinformation and bullshit on twitter. He's one of those "MANIFEST LOVE and $$$ get your DREAM JOB through the POWER of the LAW OF ATTRACTION" cultish New Age grifters making money off a website selling self help PDFs. He's building an internet cult.

Anyone who knows him IRL gets to hear him laughing about how stupid his followers are. However it sounds like he kind of buys some of his own New Age BS to a degree that worries people.

He gets in stupid drama and then spends all night digging up something to cancel his opponent over and sic his followers on them, not because he thinks he's justified, but sheerly for the thrill of the hunt. It makes him feel powerful. His twitter has been banned four times. People run webpages dedicated to documenting his heinous bullshit. He reads them regularly.

He's waiting til 2014 when bitcoin prices drop to like $50, buying as much as he can, spending six years waiting, and selling them in 2020 for like $69,000. He runs a blog telling people to buy crypto. He can actually foresee when the prices are going to peak and fall. He doesn't share this info. He makes bank himself and gleefully ruins everyone else's finances with no regrets. (He would encourage Mabel to buy and tell her exactly what day to sell.) (He would not tell Dipper when to sell.)

He hangs out in doomsday prepper forums so that he can make up new conspiracies and see if he can make everyone even more paranoid.

He's got a youtube channel that's a mix of all of the above BS. New Age self-help buy-crypto buy-gold our-universe-isn't-real access-the-higher-planes doomsday conspiracy mishmash. You can imagine the viewers he attracts. He disdains them all and tries to make them worse on purpose. Never shows his face, every video is a slideshow of psychedelic & pseudo-religious art (mostly stolen) with a voiceover and mystical-sounding music.

Mabel gets him on tumblr, because if Mabel has any social media of course it'd be 2013 tumblr, and probably a deviantart. She's posting her art and really badly photoshopped gif edits of her favorite cartoons and musicians, and generally acts like a normal person online.

Bill's tumblr is completely divorced from all his other horrible online activity. All he posts is cryptic rhyming couplets and terrible local photos of things that fascinate him. The photos could be anything from a car with a really sweet flaming paint job to a stunningly beautiful double rainbow over pine-covered mountains to a literal pile of dog shit because he thought it was interesting how it was drying out unevenly. Once he gets investigated for arson because he posted a picture of the house in flames within three hours of the crime. (He was, in fact, guilty, but he wheedled an alibi out of friends before they knew what he was being investigated for.)

He has like eight followers. The only content he reblogs is Eye of Providence images and pyramid images, which he tags #LITERALLY ME and thinks he's hilarious for; and also every single thing Mabel posts without exception until the end of time.

[gecko-plushie]

You walk out of the health food store with your breakfast burrito, it has cinder rocks in it and the tortilla is horribly burned and made out of a flour you can't describe, it cost $10 and is a little smaller than your hand. Outside the store is where you see her. She's holding papers in her paws. You try to avoid eye contact but she locks on to you like a rabbit in the snow. "Aloha!!" she says as she approaches you. "I'm collecting signatures for my petition to ban vaccinations for keiki"

You politely wave your paw, no thank you. "Just take a flyer! Think about it, there's a QR code at the bottom that will take you to my website!" She pushes it into your paws like a bullet from a gun. "My given name is Lisa but I changed it to Leilani when I moved to the islands"

You try to explain that you have a headache and get into your Animal Jam Red Sports Car but she physically blocks the door. "A Headache?" she reaches into her fur. she pulls out a small vial. It is a DoTERRA Lavender Essential Oil bottle. "I sell these, they're great for headache! This one is $80." You jump on top of the car and swing inside through the passenger side door but she is already sitting inside your car. "I noticed you bought carrots, do you know how much sugar is in carrots?" she starts the car. You don't know how she got your keys. She hands you a brownie made from butternut squash, sesame seeds, cashews and DoTERRA Hawaiian Sandalwood Essential Oil.

She explains that yesterday she had to call the cops because a family tried to come to the park near her house at 6:30 when the park closes at 6:00, although she thinks the police still discriminate against her for being being an arctic wolf. She hit everyone at her subdivision board meeting with her car last week and got banned from the facebook group so she's started a new one. She has her lawyer at the top of her contacts list. She wants to put a fence around the park to stop people from picking up the liliko'i that falls on the ground. She's worried that her neighbor's chickens are going to bring down the value of her 5 vacation rentals.

"Have you heard of Crypto?"

[sybaritick]

Do you expect this video to be relevant to the things I usually post about here? Not really, and it mostly isn't, so you certainly don't have to watch it because while interesting, most of it isn't relevant.

But when he explains why a celebrity who is already extremely wealthy would bother trying to start a coffee brand (really just rebranding coffee somebody else is making) the answer "that's the peak of the mountain [...] it's not fame any more, somehow… being good at business is the ultimate competency" it is indeed relevant to my posts!

being "good at business," and being an entrepreneur, a founder, is such an obsessed-over element of "success" that you can easily see countless people who aren't an "entrepreneur" by any stretch of the definition still calling themselves one, from people getting scammed by crypto pyramid schemes to Elon Musk. it's the competency, and it's also masculinity-- while it's certainly marketed to women, it's not usually in the same language and with the same emphasis that it's marketed to men. The entrepreneur! The ultimate free-marketeer, beholden to no one! (Never mind that successful entrepreneurship requires being the opposite of some kind of lone-wolf and far better relationship skills than being employed by someone else!)

honestly I am surprised that more trans men don't get caught up in it considering it's such an obvious thing, maybe they are smarter than me about avoiding the folly of traditional masculinity and/or more immune to propaganda than i am. but my dream for suuuuuch a long time (long before i transitioned) was to be A Startup Founder, A Small Business Owner, etc, that's true freedom and genuine "success" to me! it's about being able to control the means by which you earn money. you live and die by your luck and efforts but not by somebody else's whims or by forcing yourself into the mold of a convoluted, overcomplicated massive business where it's not even clear how your labor is producing value. it's the opposite of a "do-nothing" job because if you did nothing you would earn no money.

so like, no wonder it gets mythologized so much, no wonder parasites like Musk want to be seen as An Entrepreneur-- someone who is self-evidently providing value to the world and getting rich off it.

it means that plenty of companies will market Being An Entrepreneur to you (see: every MLM scheme) because everyone wants to see themselves as one. I have no doubt that a lot of people do genuinely believe they are "entrepreneurs." But it's the sort of self-soothing belief you should watch yourself for.

Basically just... do not fall for the things The Rock or whomever else falls for in wanting the image of ownership more than the reality of it. Wanting to be seen a certain way (as successful, as masculine, as interesting) is human, but be honest with yourself about when that is your motivator and then know to watch out for the people trying to sell you an identity. It can be very profitable to sell people an identity! Maybe better to get involved in that yourself?

[blazehedgehog]

What do you think of AI stuff like DAll-E or Midjourney?

It's not as useful as some people want you to believe. A lot of people pushing for the acceptance of this kind of software are the same tech bros that invested in crypto currency and were trying to sell you NFTs, which should tell you enough.

All of this "it's democratizing art!" and "finally, people can make art even if they don't have natural talent!" is snake oil.

You know where my "natural talent" came from? I started drawing when I was 4 or 5 years old. I drew at least one thing per day for over 20 years. I earned the ability to crank out dumb doodles on a whim.

You can't just show up one day and think you deserve to make artwork without putting in the work to learn and get good at it. Art's importance comes from the length of time needed to learn to master it. And I don't just mean drawings, I mean music, film, food, everything. No matter what it is, effort is value.

Financial value, sentimental value, it doesn't matter. All value is derived from the effort required to make it.

If you can just push a button and churn out artwork en masse, that devalues the importance of art. I mentioned this back with the Martin Scorsese ask, but it's like, which has more value? An original hand-made piece of artwork, or a print of that artwork? Prints are easy to mass produce. You can get a nice, high quality, glossy print of the Mona Lisa almost for free at this point. But the actual Mona Lisa, the original product, is actually valuable beyond value.

Art prints are literally just replicating a single file over and over and over again, but the original is one-of-a-kind and where all the effort is most evident. All the layers of paint can be felt as DaVinci sought perfection in his work. That's what makes it special. That's what makes it important.

My uncle does woodworking. He's so good at it, he gave my Mom an end table that looks like it came from a high-tier furniture store. A mass-produced end table like that would be at least $100. He made it by hand. It is beautiful. I will treasure that end table forever.

Effort is value.

If you spend any length of time looking at art websites where AI art is allowed (such as deviantart or pixiv), what you'll often find is these AI art chumps submitting massive amounts of artwork. They'll submit 10, 20, 40+ images a day, all from the same prompt, all with slight differences, because to them, every single thing the generator produces is worth submitting.

Even when I was drawing regularly, I could only really do maybe one finished piece per day. Two if you were lucky. Not only because sketching, inking, coloring and shading would take so long, but because after I was done the tank was empty. I'd used up all my effort for the day and had no more creativity left to give.

All the claims of "letting people without artistic talent generate art" are bogus because it throws the whole signal-to-noise ratio out of wack. Too much signal in itself becomes noise. And it devalues the effort that real artwork takes, because real artwork is now part of that noise, instead of rising above it.

When anyone can vomit out hundreds or even thousands of AI generated images that are of decent-to-good quality, a lot of what would be considered "b-tier" artwork ceases to be important anymore.

In a world where AI generated images are normalized, only the top 0.1% of artwork (your Mona Lisas) are considered to have real value. And who benefits the most from that kind of stuff? Rich people. Rich people who can afford to drop a million dollars on a historic piece of hand-crafted artwork. And just to be clear: these are exactly the same people who are trying to sell you on how important AI generator software is going to be going forward.

Or to simplify it even more: the people who stand to profit the most from AI "art" are the ones trying the hardest to sell you on its benefits. Because it benefits them more than it will ever benefit you.

Because, full disclosure, over this last week, a friend of mine has been having a lot of fun with Bing's new image generator feature, and I couldn't help but also play with the toy. The quality of images it can generate is shocking.

Microsoft, in their endless desperation to get anyone to use Bing on purpose, is clearly playing with fire here.

When effort is value and value is effortless, nothing has any value anymore.

I understand how, if you aren't an artist, this is all probably incredibly difficult to comprehend. The lure of fast and easy artwork from a simple line of text is a net gain to you, and nothing else really matters to your perspective. But imagine all of the up-and-coming artists who get completely pushed out of the conversation because of how easy it is to crap out endless AI generator output. I spent 20 years drawing every day for results that can be beaten in 20 seconds.

How many future artists is that going to discourage? There's a lot of buzz, now more than ever, about "late stage capitalism" and the way that's manifesting in our lives. When AI generated images are "good enough", how is that going to change the world around us?

You can't just think, "we'll figure something out" because the people trying to control this narrative do not have your best interests in mind. The people trying to control this narrative think they still don't have enough money yet even though there's not much money left to give them.

Their solution is to stop paying people to do work that they can get a computer to do for free, even if it means destroying the entire foundation of human culture. Long term destruction for short term gain. The same old story.

Are they going to get away with it?

(Another good ask along this line is over here, from February.)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Algorithmic feeds are a twiddler’s playground

Next TUESDAY (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on WEDNESDAY (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD with HARRY SHEARER for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.

Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a "Ulysses pact." That's when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:

https://archive.org/details/decentralizedwebsummit2016-corydoctorow

Famously, Ulysses did this before he sailed into the Sea of Sirens. Rather than stopping his ears with wax to prevent his hearing the sirens' song, which would lure him to his drowning, Ulysses has his sailors tie him to the mast, leaving his ears unplugged. Ulysses became the first person to hear the sirens' song and live to tell the tale.

Ulysses was strong enough to know that he would someday be weak. He expressed his strength by guarding against his weakness. Our modern lives are filled with less epic versions of the Ulysses pact: the day you go on a diet, it's a good idea to throw away all your Oreos. That way, when your blood sugar sings its siren song at 2AM, it will be drowned out by the rest of your body's unwillingness to get dressed, find your keys and drive half an hour to the all-night grocery store.

Note that this Ulysses pact isn't perfect. You might drive to the grocery store. It's rare that a Ulysses pact is unbreakable – we bind ourselves to the mast, but we don't chain ourselves to it and slap on a pair of handcuffs for good measure.

People who run institutions can – and should – create Ulysses pacts, too. A company that holds the kind of sensitive data that might be subjected to "sneak-and-peek" warrants by cops or spies can set up a "warrant canary":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

This isn't perfect. A company that stops publishing regular transparency reports might have been compromised by the NSA, but it's also possible that they've had a change in management and the new boss just doesn't give a shit about his users' privacy:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90853794/twitters-transparency-reporting-has-tanked-under-elon-musk

Likewise, a company making software it wants users to trust can release that code under an irrevocable free/open software license, thus guaranteeing that each release under that license will be free and open forever. This is good, but not perfect: the new boss can take that free/open code down a proprietary fork and try to orphan the free version:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562

A company can structure itself as a public benefit corporation and make a binding promise to elevate its stakeholders' interests over its shareholders' – but the CEO can still take a secret $100m bribe from cryptocurrency creeps and try to lure those stakeholders into a shitcoin Ponzi scheme:

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/11/kickstarter-blockchain-a16z-crypto-secret-investment-chris-dixon/

A key resource can be entrusted to a nonprofit with a board of directors who are charged with stewarding it for the benefit of a broad community, but when a private equity fund dangles billions before that board, they can talk themselves into a belief that selling out is the right thing to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Ulysses pacts aren't perfect, but they are very important. At the very least, creating a Ulysses pact starts with acknowledging that you are fallible. That you can be tempted, and rationalize your way into taking bad action, even when you know better. Becoming an adult is a process of learning that your strength comes from seeing your weaknesses and protecting yourself and the people who trust you from them.

Which brings me to enshittification. Enshittification is the process by which platforms betray their users and their customers by siphoning value away from each until the platform is a pile of shit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Enshittification is a spectrum that can be applied to many companies' decay, but in its purest form, enshittification requires:

a) A platform: a two-sided market with business customers and end users who can be played off against each other; b) A digital back-end: a market that can be easily, rapidly and undetectably manipulated by its owners, who can alter search-rankings, prices and costs on a per-user, per-query basis; and c) A lack of constraint: the platform's owners must not fear a consequence for this cheating, be it from competitors, regulators, workforce resignations or rival technologists who use mods, alternative clients, blockers or other "adversarial interoperability" tools to disenshittify your product and sever your relationship with your users.

he founders of tech platforms don't generally set out to enshittify them. Rather, they are constantly seeking some equilibrium between delivering value to their shareholders and turning value over to end users, business customers, and their own workers. Founders are consummate rationalizers; like parenting, founding a company requires continuous, low-grade self-deception about the amount of work involved and the chances of success. A founder, confronted with the likelihood of failure, is absolutely capable of talking themselves into believing that nearly any compromise is superior to shuttering the business: "I'm one of the good guys, so the most important thing is for me to live to fight another day. Thus I can do any number of immoral things to my users, business customers or workers, because I can make it up to them when we survive this crisis. It's for their own good, even if they don't know it. Indeed, I'm doubly moral here, because I'm volunteering to look like the bad guy, just so I can save this business, which will make the world over for the better":

https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/

(En)shit(tification) flows downhill, so tech workers grapple with their own version of this dilemma. Faced with constant pressure to increase the value flowing from their division to the company, they have to balance different, conflicting tactics, like "increasing the number of users or business customers, possibly by shifting value from the company to these stakeholders in the hopes of making it up in volume"; or "locking in my existing stakeholders and squeezing them harder, safe in the knowledge that they can't easily leave the service provided the abuse is subtle enough." The bigger a company gets, the harder it is for it to grow, so the biggest companies realize their gains by locking in and squeezing their users, not by improving their service::

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

That's where "twiddling" comes in. Digital platforms are extremely flexible, which comes with the territory: computers are the most flexible tools we have. This means that companies can automate high-speed, deceptive changes to the "business logic" of their platforms – what end users pay, how much of that goes to business customers, and how offers are presented to both:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

This kind of fraud isn't particularly sophisticated, but it doesn't have to be – it just has to be fast. In any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Under normal circumstances, this twiddling would be constrained by counterforces in society. Changing the business rules like this is fraud, so you'd hope that a regulator would step in and extinguish the conduct, fining the company that engaged in it so hard that they saw a net loss from the conduct. But when a sector gets very concentrated, its mega-firms capture their regulators, becoming "too big to jail":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Thus the tendency among the giant tech companies to practice the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: dismissing your stakeholders' outrage by saying, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Where regulators fail, technology can step in. The flexibility of digital platforms cuts both ways: when the company enshittifies its products, you can disenshittify it with your own countertwiddling: third-party ink-cartridges, alternative app stores and clients, scrapers, browser automation and other forms of high-tech guerrilla warfare:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

But tech giants' regulatory capture have allowed them to expand "IP rights" to prevent this self-help. By carefully layering overlapping IP rights around their products, they can criminalize the technology that lets you wrestle back the value they've claimed for themselves, creating a new offense of "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A world where users must defer to platforms' moment-to-moment decisions about how the service operates, without the protection of rival technology or regulatory oversight is a world where companies face a powerful temptation to enshittify.

That's why we've seen so much enshittification in platforms that algorithmically rank their feeds, from Google and Amazon search to Facebook and Twitter feeds. A search engine is always going to be making a judgment call about what the best result for your search should be. If a search engine is generally good at predicting which results will please you best, you'll return to it, automatically clicking the first result ("I'm feeling lucky").

This means that if a search engine slips in the odd paid result at the top of the results, they can exploit your trusting habits to shift value from you to their investors. The congifurability of a digital service means that they can sprinkle these frauds into their services on a random schedule, making them hard to detect and easy to dismiss as lapses. Gradually, this acquires its own momentum, and the platform becomes addicted to lowering its own quality to raise its profits, and you get modern Google, which cynically lowered search quality to increase search volume:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

And you get Amazon, which makes $38 billion every year, accepting bribes to replace its best search results with paid results for products that cost more and are of lower quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Social media's enshittification followed a different path. In the beginning, social media presented a deterministic feed: after you told the platform who you wanted to follow, the platform simply gathered up the posts those users made and presented them to you, in reverse-chronological order.

This presented few opportunities for enshittification, but it wasn't perfect. For users who were well-established on a platform, a reverse-chrono feed was an ungovernable torrent, where high-frequency trivialities drowned out the important posts from people whose missives were buried ten screens down in the updates since your last login.

For new users who didn't yet follow many people, this presented the opposite problem: an empty feed, and the sense that you were all alone while everyone else was having a rollicking conversation down the hall, in a room you could never find.

The answer was the algorithmic feed: a feed of recommendations drawn from both the accounts you followed and strangers alike. Theoretically, this could solve both problems, by surfacing the most important materials from your friends while keeping you abreast of the most important and interesting activity beyond your filter bubble. For many of us, this promise was realized, and algorithmic feeds became a source of novelty and relevance.

But these feeds are a profoundly tempting enshittification target. The critique of these algorithms has largely focused on "addictiveness" and the idea that platforms would twiddle the knobs to increase the relevance of material in your feed to "hack your engagement":

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction

Less noticed – and more important – was how platforms did the opposite: twiddling the knobs to remove things from your feed that you'd asked to see or that the algorithm predicted you'd enjoy, to make room for "boosted" content and advertisements:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/z9j7uy/what_happened_to_instagram_only_ads_and_accounts/

Users were helpless before this kind of twiddling. On the one hand, they were locked into the platform – not because their dopamine had been hacked by evil tech-bro wizards – but because they loved the friends they had there more than they hated the way the service was run:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

On the other hand, the platforms had such an iron grip on their technology, and had deployed IP so cleverly, that any countertwiddling technology was instantaneously incinerated by legal death-rays:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/10/google-removes-the-og-app-from-the-play-store-as-founders-think-about-next-steps/

Newer social media platforms, notably Tiktok, dispensed entirely with deterministic feeds, defaulting every user into a feed that consisted entirely of algorithmic picks; the people you follow on these platforms are treated as mere suggestions by their algorithms. This is a perfect breeding-ground for enshittification: different parts of the business can twiddle the knobs to override the algorithm for their own parochial purposes, shifting the quality:shit ratio by unnoticeable increments, temporarily toggling the quality knob when your engagement drops off:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

All social platforms want to be Tiktok: nominally, that's because Tiktok's algorithmic feed is so good at hooking new users and keeping established users hooked. But tech bosses also understand that a purely algorithmic feed is the kind of black box that can be plausibly and subtly enshittified without sparking user revolts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Back in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was coming to grips with Facebook's success, he boasted to a friend that he was sitting on a trove of emails, pictures and Social Security numbers for his fellow Harvard students, offering this up for his friend's idle snooping. The friend, surprised, asked "What? How'd you manage that one?"

Infamously, Zuck replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."

https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/

This was a remarkable (and uncharacteristic) self-aware moment from the then-nineteen-year-old Zuck. Of course Zuck couldn't be trusted with that data. Whatever Jiminy Cricket voice told him to safeguard that trust was drowned out by his need to boast to pals, or participate in the creepy nonconsensual rating of the fuckability of their female classmates. Over and over again, Zuckerberg would promise to use his power wisely, then break that promise as soon as he could do so without consequence:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Zuckerberg is a cautionary tale. Aware from the earliest moments that he was amassing power that he couldn't be trusted with, he nevertheless operated with only the weakest of Ulysses pacts, like a nonbinding promise never to spy on his users:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050107221705/http://www.thefacebook.com/policy.php

But the platforms have learned the wrong lesson from Zuckerberg. Rather than treating Facebook's enshittification as a cautionary tale, they've turned it into a roadmap. The Darth Vader MBA rules high-tech boardrooms.

Algorithmic feeds and other forms of "paternalistic" content presentation are necessary and even desirable in an information-rich environment. In many instances, decisions about what you see must be largely controlled by a third party whom you trust. The audience in a comedy club doesn't get to insist on knowing the punchline before the joke is told, just as RPG players don't get to order the Dungeon Master to present their preferred challenges during a campaign.

But this power is balanced against the ease of the players replacing the Dungeon Master or the audience walking out on the comic. When you've got more than a hundred dollars sunk into a video game and an online-only friend-group you raid with, the games company can do a lot of enshittification without losing your business, and they know it:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/10/24153809/ea-in-game-ads-redux

Even if they sometimes overreach and have to retreat:

https://www.eurogamer.net/sony-overturns-helldivers-2-psn-requirement-following-backlash

A tech company that seeks your trust for an algorithmic feed needs Ulysses pacts, or it will inevitably yield to the temptation to enshittify. From strongest to weakest, these are:

Not showing you an algorithmic feed at all;

https://joinmastodon.org/

"Composable moderation" that lets multiple parties provide feeds:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

Offering an algorithmic "For You" feed alongside of a reverse-chrono "Friends" feed, defaulting to friends;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

As above, but defaulting to "For You"

Maturity lies in being strong enough to know your weaknesses. Never trust someone who tells you that they will never yield to temptation! Instead, seek out people – and service providers – with the maturity and honesty to know how tempting temptation is, and who act before temptation strikes to make it easier to resist.

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/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

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

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

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djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en