#Software Course Learning Company

[softwarecampus]

Elevate your career with our SCCP Certification Programmes in Flutter, Web, Laravel, and MERN stack. Unleash your potential in Software Development and become a certified professional! Contact Us: 8921873781 Email id: join@softwarecampus.in

[atcuality3]

Digital Innovation That Delivers Results - Atcuality

Atcuality helps forward-thinking companies innovate with precision and purpose. We combine technical expertise with business insight to craft tools that drive measurable impact. Our suite of services includes cloud platforms, mobile solutions, and a special focus on Telegram Bot Creation. This service enables companies to develop smart, responsive bots tailored for customer service, marketing automation, or internal operations. Whether you're launching a community-based app, need an e-commerce support assistant, or want to build a chatbot for crypto trading signals, we provide secure, scalable, and compliant bot solutions. Our process ensures every bot is tested for real-world usage, enhanced with analytics, and built to scale. With Atcuality, you don’t just adopt technology—you unlock its full potential to fuel your growth.

[nebeltech]

HMS: Solving One Healthcare Administrators’ Challenge At A Time

Healthcare administrators play a crucial role in the efficient functioning of healthcare facilities, but they often grapple with challenges that impact patient care and organizational effectiveness. One of the primary hurdles is the overwhelming influx of patients, especially when relying on outdated paper-based systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant effect on the industry globally and altered the market environment. Nearly half of healthcare administrators’s time is consumed by paperwork, significantly impacting patient care and overall efficiency. Since the manual management of tasks consumes valuable time and increases the risk of errors, the use of an Hospital Management System has saved hospitals on a whole new level.

What is a Hospital Management System (HMS)?

A Hospital Management System is a computer-based solution designed to streamline and enhance healthcare operations, mitigating the burden of manual paperwork for healthcare administrators. HMS facilitates the collection, secure storage, retrieval, and sharing of patient information across the entire hospital network.

A hospital management system can manage a variety of functions to optimize operations, including inventory control, billing, and appointment scheduling in addition to patient registration. Healthcare administrators, including doctors, nurses, technicians, and lab personnel, can quickly access critical data with this integrated ecosystem, which empowers them to make well-informed decisions.

By automating processes, HMS not only reduces administrative tasks but also ensures seamless management of medical records, ultimately improving patient care. The adoption of such systems marks a significant step towards enhancing overall hospital efficiency and delivering optimal healthcare services.

Addressing Challenges Faced By Healthcare Administrators through HMS

A hospital management system can help healthcare administrators overcome various challenges through its modules to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery. Below are the healthcare challenges that can be addressed through the implementation of a robust HMS include:

1. Appointment Management

Manually managing appointments can be error-prone and time-consuming. An HMS simplifies the process by offering online appointment scheduling, meeting the preferences of 68% of patients who prefer digital booking. The system efficiently matches patients with relevant specialists, updates real-time slot availability, and facilitates the collection of essential medical documents through a patient portal.

2. Patient Management

The patient management module caters to both inpatient and outpatient needs. It stores comprehensive patient information, including medical history, treatment plans, upcoming appointments, and insurance details. The HMS frees healthcare administrators from having to spend as much time on the tedious paperwork of patients by automating administrative duties.

3. Staff Management

The staff management module provides a centralized solution for HR departments, offering records of staff details, job descriptions, and service domains. This streamlined approach allows hospitals to efficiently plan their hiring processes, ultimately enhancing staff management and organizational efficiency.

4. Supply Management

Timely access to medical supplies is critical for hospitals. The supply management component of the HMS tracks stock availability, records purchase details, and facilitates effective inventory management. This ensures that hospitals can anticipate and address supply needs, preventing shortages that could impact patient care.

5. Financial Management

The financial management component calculates, stores, and presents billing information to patients. Additionally, it records hospital expenses, revenue data, and other financial details. This consolidated approach simplifies financial analysis, saving time and effort by eliminating the need to sift through extensive record books.

6. Insurance Management

The HMS’s insurance management component records and stores patient insurance details, streamlining the hospital insurance validation process. Providing easy access to policy numbers and associated information, this feature ensures a smoother experience for both patients and hospital staff.

7. Laboratory Management

The laboratory management feature of the HMS details various lab tests, furnishing reports promptly, and maintaining comprehensive records. This accessibility allows doctors easy and quick access to relevant information, improving overall efficiency in patient care.

8. Report Management

The report management module records and stores all reports generated by the hospital. Financial reports help analyze performance metrics and business profitability, providing a comparative view over different years. Healthcare dashboards can present this data in a user-friendly format for easy analysis.

9. Vaccination Management

The vaccination management module keeps track of completed or upcoming vaccinations. The system sends timely reminders, books appointments with doctors, and provides parents with all necessary information, ensuring a systematic and organized approach to vaccination schedules.

10. Support Management

Patient satisfaction is a priority, and the support management segment records inquiries, complaints, requests, and feedback. Automating the feedback collection process reduces staff workload, ensuring prompt and appropriate handling of patient concerns.

In conclusion, healthcare administrators face numerous challenges in managing the dynamic environment of healthcare facilities. The adoption of a Hospital Management System emerges as a pivotal solution to overcome these healthcare challenges, streamlining processes, and ultimately delivering better patient care.

Nebel Tech, with its expertise in the healthcare industry, can assist healthcare administrators in developing secure and scalable HMS tailored to their specific needs. Reach out to us for a complimentary assessment and unleash the possibilities of cutting-edge healthcare administration solutions.

[witherby]

imagine how cute would be if Bruce brings the little wayne to his work on wayne tower 🥺 the moment would be ruined if some paparazzi taking photos with flash and scaring the baby

Sooo the baby didn't end up getting scared, but this idea did make me spit out 2000 words worth of content. I hope that's a fair compromise :3

THE LITTLEST WAYNE: TAKE YOUR KID TO WORK DAY

Featuring: Bruce talking to you like a colleague, a newspaper article, and an overprotective Damian.

"Morning, Clarice. Donuts and coffee are getting delivered in five minutes if you wanna pop downstairs and help yourself. Afterwards, do me a favor and rebook the consultation with Lexcorp for sometime next month? The further out the better."

Bruce's secretary nodded, fingers flying across the keys to accommodate his request. She tucked a lock of strawberry blonde hair behind her ear and shot him a polite smile.

"Of course, mister Wayne — oh, goodness gracious."

Bruce's placid expression quickly became embarrassed. He tried to walk past her but she was already on her feet and rounding the desk, heels clicking over the linoleum floor to stand in front of him and the bundle on his arm.

"Who is this!" She cried, immediately fawning over you. You stared blankly at her as you suckled on your binky, wrapped up in a tiny Nightwing onesie (Dick got to the clothes first this morning) and hugging your father's arm. "Oh, my, you're the most adorable baby I've ever seen! I'm Clarice! I'm your father's personal secretary, and apparently the last person to find out anything, including when he adopted yet another child!"

"This wasn't a...planned acquisition," Bruce muttered, the tips of his ears pink. He let the blonde gently squish your fat cheeks and you preened under the attention, lifting one fuzzy-wrapped hand to brush against her wrist.

"A planned acquisition. Like you're another company he bought on a whim and not a precious angel," Clarice giggled. "What a doll... If you ever need a babysitter, Mister Wayne, please don't hesitate to call me!"

"I'll keep that in mind," he said, exasperated but smiling good-naturedly. "Have a great day, Clarice."

"You, too! Bye-bye, angel!" She waved, and squealed when you waved back.

Bruce disappeared into his office with you, bouncing you gently on one arm while the other shrugged off the duffel bag he carried with him. Zipping it open, he quickly tugged out a pop-up bassinet to place you in, then the pieces to an enclosed play pen he built and filled with some blankets, a couple toys, and an extra Red Robin binky (Tim got to the toys first this morning).

"Okay," he sighed, scooping you up and relocating you to the pen. "I've actually got to run my own company for a bit, and the others are busy, so you get to hang out with me today."

Bruce rested his arm on his desk, then his chin in his hand, and stared down at you. You were staring intently back at him, the binky bopping up and down as you suckled on it.

"You're a little young to learn the ropes, but I'll explain what I'm doing anyway. Every baby book I've looked at tells me you get something out of it even if you don't understand what I'm saying, so today it's time to do payroll. I'd make you sign an NDA, because you're about to see a lot of personal files, but you don't know how to hold a pencil, read, write, or speak yet, so I think we're fine."

Bruce had two monitors on his desk. He duplicated his screen and spun the other one around so you could watch what he was doing in real time.

"I don't like to delegate this task to other people because the last six times I did, they were eventually found embezzling money. Unfortunately, that tends to happen when you live in Gotham. Right now I've opened the pay software — it's this icon here, where the mouse is circling — and I'm going to ask it to open the time sheets for the last two weeks..."

---

A NEW FAMILY MEMBER? BRUCE WAYNE SPOTTED IN WAYNE TOWER WITH INFANT, SPECULATION GROWING

CEO of Wayne Enterprises Bruce Wayne seen with a baby after exiting his office this afternoon!

[An image of you in your Nightwing onesie, tucked securely in a smiling Bruce's arms as he walks out of an elevator, is printed on the front page of the Gotham Gazette.]

Sources say Wayne filed another adoption form with the courts a week ago and is being met with mixed reviews. Large portions of the public are joking that Wayne has an "adoption problem" while others speculate he is too inexperienced to foster an infant.

"Wasn't his youngest kid, like, 9 when he adopted him?" Asks one Carmine Falconi, recently released from Blackgate on good behavior. "None o' my business, of course, but I don't think he knows how to raise a tiny tot like that. My guys ain't touchin' a hair on that one's head, though. Kidnapping the odd teen or two, sure, go nuts, but even us crooks got codes, and that one's off-limits in my book."

Wayne declined to comment when the Gotham Gazette reached out and remaining family have further refused interviews about the subject.

(Alfred got to the phone first.)

---

The newspaper clipping was already framed and proudly sitting on the dining room table when Bruce woke up the next morning and shuffled downstairs for breakfast with you in his arms. He spared it a tired glance, put you in your high chair, and relented to Damian's insistent shoving so the boy could sit next to and feed you (he got to the pantry first).

"The next time you plan on actually doing your day job," the boy hissed, "bring one of us with you. There was an abysmal amount of security protocols you ignored when leaving work to allow paparazzi the chance to grab photos. I won't let your frivolous behavior cause them harm."

"Are you volunteering?" Bruce asked, gratefully accepting the mug of coffee Alfred handed over. He quietly greeted Dick and Jason as they filed into the room and had a quick rock-paper-scissors match to see who got to sit on your other side. Jason won. "Any networking events I have to attend, you almost always find a way to weasel out of."

"If it will keep our new charge safe," Damian huffed, "I can handle a few stupid luncheons."

"That's not a pass to skip school. If it's between a social or a class, you're going to class."

Damian looked simultaneously pissed and relieved. His fist clenched tightly around the small, silicone spoon, before he forced himself to relax and continue feeding you. You opened your mouth obediently for another offering of mushed-up bananas, apples, and cinnamon baby food from a high quality brand, giving a happy hum.

"Then the duty falls to one of you fools," he snapped at Jason and Dick, "which is akin to trusting a mosquito not to drink from you at the first possible opportunity. You'll pick up the slack when I'm otherwise indisposed."

"No can do, baby bat," Dick said, pouring himself a bowl of cereal and scrolling through his phone. He quickly snapped a picture of you with your mouth open to accept another spoonful of food. "I have a day job, too. I don't even live here. I'm just on an extended vacation until the end of next week, then it's back to Blüdhaven."

Damian focused his glare on Jason next, who smirked back and shook his head.

"Legally dead. So, 'less you want Brucie Wayne and an innocent baby seen all around town with Red Hood, the crime lord, it's a no from me."

Damian weighed the pros and cons. Bruce shot him a look and shook his head, dismissing the idea entirely.

The boy grit his teeth. He scraped the last of the baby food from its jar and fed it to you, then delicately wiped the remnants from your mouth. You gummed at his finger and made grabby hands, indicating your desire to get out of the high chair. Jason scooped you up first with a swift call of "dibs!", carrying you away to get bathed and dressed for the day.

"Then...then you have to go into work with Timothy!" Damian demanded, facing Bruce again, who had finished his coffee by now and was eating a slice of buttered toast. The man raised a brow, looking only marginally more awake than he was at the start of the day.

"Tim hates being at the office with me," Bruce explained as Alfred came around to set a plate of pancakes, eggs, and freshly-squeezed orange juice in front of Damian. "Says the Brucie act is annoying to be around and it drives productivity down at least 8% every time. It's a lie, I've checked the numbers, but if he doesn't want to be at the Tower at the same time as me then I'm not going to push a non-issue."

"You?" said Damian, incredulous. "You aren't going to push a non-issue? You push everything. It may as well be your middle name."

He cut into his food with more force than necessary, cutlery scraping unpleasantly against the plate until he lifted his hands again. He shrugged off the hand Bruce tried to place on his shoulder, chewing angrily on a mouthful of pancake.

"I'm open to ideas, son," the man said, "but here are the facts: You have to go to school Monday through Friday. I won't let you homeschool because you need to socialize with people in your age group. Jason isn't interested in declaring himself alive right now. Dick doesn't live at the Manor full time and has separate responsibilities. Tim is juggling college, Wayne Enterprises, and patrols. Alfred is too ol— is aging gracefully, and might prefer to have more time to himself instead of watching the baby all alone for hours on end."

Alfred took Bruce's empty plate away with a very sharp look, then excused himself back to the kitchen.

Bruce turned in his chair to fully face Damian, who glared at his breakfast like it personally caused this mess, and not one hyper-empathetic man and his bleeding heart for orphans.

"Now, can you tell me how best to solve this problem without the occasional "take your kid to work day," or enrolling the baby in a daycare program?"

Yes, he could. But unfortunately for Damian, he had inherited a bleeding heart of his own, which constricted at the thought of giving his little sibling back up for adoption. Instead, he swallowed his next mouthful of food and sighed.

"More research is needed," he mumbled, which was the closest he could ever get to admitting he didn't know something. "However, my complaints still stand. Let the paparazzi get a bad photo if it means keeping the babe safe. Their well-being is your top priority, so act like it."

"Heard," Bruce said, sounding far too fond for Damian's liking. "Finish your breakfast and then get ready for school."

The boy grumbled but complied, and soon stood next to the door waiting for Alfred to pull a car up to the driveway. He watched Bruce carry you in his arms after he slung the duffel bag with your essentials over his shoulder, tugging the small hood of your red oneside up (Jason dressed you first today) over your head to ensure you didn't get cold.

"Have a good day, Damian," Bruce told him.

"Sure, whatever." Damian took you from his father and adjusted your hood himself. You grabbed his finger in your small fist with all the strength you could muster and tried to put it in your mouth. He gently pried it free, and Bruce popped a Batman binky in there instead. "You will be safe today. When I'm finished conforming to what American society deems a proper education, I will retrieve you myself."

Your binky bopped up and down as you suckled on it, staring silently at Damian. It was practically a yes to him, so he took it.

Glancing briefly at his father, he hesitated a moment, then kissed your forehead and quickly passed you back to Bruce before heading outside to let Alfred drive him to school.

Bruce watched him go with an unreadable expression. He quickly turned and faced Dick once Damian was out of earshot.

"Did you —"

"I'm texting you the picture right now," Dick said, thumbs flying across the keyboard. "What should the caption be for my Twitter post? #BestBrotherEver or #SecretSofty?"

"Either way, he's going to kick your ass."

[makers-muse]

Code Geniuses in the Making: Icons Who Started Young

In a world where technology has become an integral part of our lives, these early coding pioneers remind us that curiosity knows no age limits. Take a step back in time and meet the trailblazers who harnessed the power of code when most of us were still mastering the art of tying shoelaces.

Bill Gates, the visionary co-founder of Microsoft, wasn’t just a business magnate from the start. At the tender age of 13, Gates embarked on his coding adventure by writing his first computer program. Imagine a young Gates, hunched over a school teletype machine, eagerly crafting his digital masterpiece. This early fascination with coding paved the way for his transformative role in shaping the personal computing landscape.

While most middle schoolers were busy trading Pokémon cards, Mark Zuckerberg was crafting his digital realm. His coding tale began in the sixth grade when he created a messaging program called “Zucknet” for his dentist’s father’s office. It wasn’t just a one-time experiment; Zuckerberg continued to tinker with Code, setting the stage for his future as the mastermind behind Facebook, a social network that would connect the world.

Elon Musk, the maverick entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla, was already immersed in the world of coding by the age of 12. In a tale reminiscent of garage inventors, Musk coded and sold his first video game, “Blastar,” cementing his early foray into both Programming and Entrepreneurship. Little did the world know that this coding prodigy would go on to reshape the realms of space exploration and sustainable transportation.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the dynamic duo responsible for giving us the gateway to the internet, Google, joined forces in a coding journey at Stanford University. Sergey Brin, a computer whiz from an early age, was the son of a mathematician and a NASA researcher. He even found a way to circumvent his family’s budget limitations to buy a computer by winning a mathematics competition! On the other hand, Larry Page had a penchant for understanding how things worked. Their combined passions and expertise led them to create a groundbreaking Search Engine that forever changed how we access information.

Gabe Newell, the visionary behind Valve Corporation and Gaming masterpieces like Half-Life, was already cracking the code of his future success during high school. He dabbled in programming on a teletype terminal, foreshadowing his pivotal role in shaping the gaming industry. Newell’s journey from Codingenthusiast to gaming guru showcases the profound impact of early exposure to programming.

These luminaries remind us that the journey to greatness often starts with a single line of code. Their stories underscore the power of nurturing young minds and fostering curiosity, proving that sometimes, a passion ignited early can lead to innovations that change the world. So, the next time you see a youngster tinkering with a Computer, who knows? You might just be witnessing the birth of the next future shaper of our ever-evolving world.

[stillmonsterz]

all i gotta do

for this anon!

pairing: jake x reader

genre: fluff (?), humor (???), smut

summary: it's your first day at work and you're nervous. however, your trainer is going to show you why you were nervous for the wrong reasons. one week with jake sim will either make you quit the job or never leave.

contains: unprotected sex, exhibitionism, swearing, incest mention, PTSD mention, i try to be "funny" and make "jokes"

word count: 4.4k (unproofread)

---

DAY ONE

You stepped inside of your new workplace apprehensively; you hadn’t felt so nervous since your first day of university. Wiping your palms on your pants, you made eye contact with the receptionist and smiled wanly. 

“Hello,” you said, resting your fingertips on the counter. “I’m the new hire. I was wondering where I could find…Jake Sim? He’s supposed to be my…” The term that had been used in the introductory email the company had sent to you eluded you.

“Your buddy,” the receptionist said flatly. “Your Park Corp buddy.”

“Yes. That.”

“Jake Sim is on the fifth floor. I take it you’ll be working in data analysis as well?”

You nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

The receptionist smiled at you, but it belied a certain cold humor. “Good luck.”

“Yeah, you too.” As you walked away, you realized your blunder and squeezed your eyes shut. 

–

The fifth floor of the office building had all of the markings of a corporation attempting to reel in more younger workers. There was a vending machine as soon as you walked in, the cubicles were arranged as part of an open concept floor plan, and the walls were plastered with positive, empty aphorisms. You scanned the area, wondering which of the people hunched over their computers was Jake.

Footsteps echoed behind you, and when you turned around you saw a slight, enthusiastic-looking young man with a shock of shaggy brown hair approaching you. In his hands he held two coffee cups. 

“Hey, newbie,” he said with some affection. “Got you a coffee.”

You took the cup, surprised by his vivacity. “Thank you…”

“Jake,” he finished, holding his hand out. “Jake Sim.”

You shook his hand as firmly as you could and introduced yourself.

“I know,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t worry, I like to do a little stalking before we meet a new hire. Although…” his face grew serious. “You really shouldn’t post such…provocative pictures on your Insta. Someone could get ideas.”

Your face blanched and your fingers gripped the coffee cup. “What?”

Jake’s face broke out into a smile. “Just fuckin’ with you. Sorry, I like to razz all the new hires. Makes me feel big.”

His grin was so wide, you felt compelled to smile too. He nudged you and jerked his thumb in the direction of the cubicles. “Let me show you around, PCB.”

You blinked, then it dawned on you. “Park Corp buddy…?”

“So observant,” Jake said, amused. “Come on.”

You followed him around as he explained where everything was: the copy room, the coffee machine, the water dispenser, the popcorn machine, your cubicle (situated in the middle of the room, to your chagrin), his cubicle (tucked neatly in the corner).

Then he taught you how to use the software. Thanks to your university courses, it wasn’t difficult to learn. Jake’s playful personality also gave way to a maturity that you hadn’t expected. He carefully walked you through the program step by step.

“I’ll leave you these tasks to work on,” he said, pulling up a document he had pre-made. “If you get stuck, just come get me, okay? I’m right in the corner.”

You thanked him for his assistance and started working on the tasks he had given you. It wasn’t challenging, so much as it was tedious. Still, you persevered. 

At least, until you heard him approach you again.

“Hey,” Jake said, sitting beside you. His eyes darted around the room. “You were supposed to come get me.”

“You told me to do that if I needed you,” you replied, somewhat confused.

“Yeah,” Jake said slowly, “in case you feel the overwhelming urge to make Jakey’s day and let him help you with something so he can avoid doing his boring ass work. You don’t even understand the basics of being a PCB, do you?”

“You’re using me,” you said, waving an accusatory finger at him. 

“Can you blame me?” he retorted. “Sometimes I can…I can feel my soul leaking from my pores.”

You giggled, and he squinted at you in mock annoyance. “There’s no way you’re laughing at me,” he said, trying to fight a smile. “I’m dying, turning into a corpse, and you’re laughing.”

You shrugged. “At least you’ll die at the prime of your life.”

Jake’s lips curled into a mischievous smile. “Oh, you think I’m in my prime, huh?”

“That’s not what I me-,”

“You’re hitting on me,” Jake said, leaning in. He blinked at you like a puppy. 

You leaned away, your cheeks feeling warm. “I’m not.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you were,” he said softly.

You were about to say something else, something intelligent and witty, but one of your new coworkers approached the two of you. 

“Couldn’t wait a day before sexually harassing the newbie, could you?” He was tall, pale, and had a shit-eating grin that could rival Jake’s. Unlike Jake, who was dressed in a blue button-down and slacks, this person wore a suit with a silky black tie.

Jake leaned away from you, balking at the accusation. “I am not sexually harassing her,” Jake said, clutching his heart. “I wasn’t even normal harassing her.”

“He wasn’t,” you chimed in. 

“Don’t cover up for this louse,” Sunghoon said, shaking his head at Jake. “Look at you, corrupting one of our brightest already with your salacious comments. Weren’t you supposed to be writing up a report on the-,”

“You hear this jerkoff?” Jake said, interrupting. “He puts on a little suit and starts using words like ‘louse’ and ‘salacious’, like we’re not in data analysis.”

“I am a data architect,” Sunghoon said, playfully slamming his hand on your desk. “And I will be treated like one, damn it.”

“Quit it,” Jake said, putting his arms around you and hugging you close to him. “You’re scaring my PCB.” 

“Your PCB is going to get PTSD if you keep touching her,” Sunghoon replied drolly, crossing his arms.

Jake grinned. “My PCB is going to get PTSD if I do PDA with her?” 

Sunghoon said, “Good one,” and they laughed and high-fived. You stared at them incredulously, noting that Jake’s arm was still wrapped around your shoulder. 

“Sorry,” you said slowly, “but I’d like to do my work…”

Jake withdrew his arm and tsked under his breath, standing up. “Great going, Sunghoon,” he hissed. “Now she hates you.”

“She hates you, idiot,” Sunghoon retorted as they walked away.

You slumped down in your chair, already feeling exhausted. You worked straight through your lunch break, and as you commuted home you wondered how the rest of your training week would go.

–

DAY TWO 

The next day, you felt a little more equipped to navigate your new job. In your purse, you brought some items with which to decorate your desk.

You came into work early, noting that very few people show up at this time. Perfect. With careful precision, you arranged your new trinkets on your desk; a magnetic calendar for your cubicle wall, a little plush doll, a notebook, a nice mousepad, and a little jar of chocolates. 

As you’re turning your computer on, you heard three male voices approaching your desk. Two of which you recognize. 

“There she is,” you heard Jake say quietly, “isn’t she cute?”

You looked up and waved. There was Jake, wearing a button-up with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Sunghoon, wearing another crisp suit. And a third person wearing an oversized collared shirt with dark blue jeans, looking you up and down. 

“You’re here early,” Jake said cheerfully. “Excited for work?”

“I just wanted to decorate my desk,” you explained, proudly displaying your newly decorated workplace.

The three men politely admired your table. Then Sunghoon nudged the third man in the ribs. He cleared his throat. 

“I’m Heeseung,” he said, awkwardly raising his hand. “Heeseung Lee.”

“Nice to meet you,” you replied, holding your hand out.

You shook hands with him, and Sunghoon snorted. “I didn’t get a handshake from you.”

“You also didn’t introduce yourself to me…”

Sunghoon looked away, the tips of his ears going red. “Right. I suppose that was my folly. Apologies.”

Jake leaned down and whispered, “Isn’t he such a pretentious dick?” in your ear. You suppressed another giggle as you stuck your hand out.

Sunghoon shook it firmly. “Park Sunghoon,” he said with a smile. “Data architect.”

“You told her that already,” Jake said. 

“And I told you to shut up several times, not that you ever listened,” Sunghoon retorted.

You glanced at Heeseung, and he just shrugged at you. “They can’t stop,” he said, glancing between the two of them. “It’s hard-coded into their DNA to be idiots in front of cute girls.”

Jake squinted at Heeseung. “Oh, you think she’s cute? Are you into her or something?”

Heeseung raised his hands in self-defense, backing up. “No, no, not at all.”

You sighed. “Could…could I go ahead and start my work?”

Jake shook his head and stalked away from your table. “She fucking hates you, you know that?” he said, lightly pushing Heeseung. 

Later that day, as you’re packing up to head home, you hear footsteps that were already becoming familiar.

“Hey,” Jake said quietly, “the guys and I were wondering if you wanted to eat with us at lunch tomorrow?”

You blinked up at him. “No kidding?”

“Yeah. We want you to feel welcome here,” he said, resting his hand on your shoulder. 

A smile spread across your face, and you nodded. “Sure. Sounds like it'll be a lot of fun.” Like seeing monkeys in the zoo.

Jake grinned, patting your shoulder. “Awesome! Awesome, awesome.” He paused then, placing his hand in his pocket. “One other thing,” he said slowly. 

“What’s that?” you tilted your head at him.

“Well, you know, you don’t have to dress so formally,” he said, gesturing at your outfit. “Unless you’re trying to be Sunghoon or something. You can dress business casual.”

You looked down at yourself; your outfit was pretty formal and rigid. “All right,” you said, “I’ll be nice and casual tomorrow.”

“Sounds great,” Jake said, biting his lip slightly. 

– 

DAY THREE

Work already felt much more comfortable. Besides the three coworkers you had already met, the rest of the employees ranged from amicable to ambivalent, so you never felt tense. Occasionally, Jake would come over to your desk and look at how you were coming along. Or, as you figured, he was just coming to ogle you. Not that you minded the extra attention. 

When you walked in this morning, dressed in your more casual outfit, his eyes had lingered on you for so long you thought it could be classed as a workplace violation.

“Very nice,” Jake had said approvingly. “Very…casual.”

“I try,” you had said drily, heading to your desk. 

“I’m serious,” he had said, walking with you. “You have, pardon me, a great figure.” 

“That’s not very PC,” Sunghoon had said as he passed by your desk. 

“So, what you’re saying,” Jake had started, and you were already rolling your eyes, “I’m not acting PC with my PCB?”

You had groaned. “Jake…”

“Great going, Sunghoon,” Jake had grumbled, his hands stuffed in his pockets. “You’re the worst, I swear…”

Now you were sitting with them in the break room, where they were locked in what you could only assume was a longstanding debate. 

“I’m saying that it wouldn’t be gay if it was on an island,” Jake protested, “so it wouldn’t even matter, Sunghoon.”

“Okay, but they’d eventually get rescued, so they’d have to live with that,” Sunghoon retorted, gesturing with his sandwich. 

“Yeah, but they don’t know that they’re getting rescued.”

You glanced at Heeseung, who was eating a microwavable meal. “What are they talking about?”

Heeseung leaned into you, whispering as so not to catch their attention. “It’s this stupid hypothetical they came up with,” Heeseung explained. “If there was an island, and a pair of adult siblings were on one end, and a pair of two straight men were on the other end, which pair would hook up first?”

You blinked. “Well, the siblings, right?”

A haunting silence overtook the break room. Heeseung, Jake, and Sunghoon all stared at you, and you got the impression that you had disrupted something sacred, something hallowed.

Sunghoon laughed and pointed at you. “See? See? Your little work wife doesn’t even agree with you. Those siblings would be smashing, right?”

“Well, I g-,”

“All over each other,” Sunghoon continued, making vulgar gestures with his hands. “It’d be like…five hours. Sweaty from the sun. They’d be rolling around, sand in their ass, it’d be carnal. Primal.”

Jake stared at you incredulously. “You really don’t think the straight guys would fuck?”

You shrugged helplessly. “Well, they’re straight, so I mean…”

Jake groaned, throwing his head back dramatically. “Okay. Look. If you were on an island with a sexy ass woman, and she had short nails and everything, and she was fully ready to finger your pussy, you wouldn’t let her smash? Because you were ‘straight’?”

“I mean…no.”

“Nah,” Jake said, waving a baby carrot in your face. “You’re either deluded or you aren’t thinking hard enough. You’d get desperate. You’d be munching so much carpet you’d look like…like…”

“Like a carpet factory,” Heeseung said sarcastically. 

“You’re so fucking unfunny,” Jake replied. “No, you’d look like…”

“Like she’s an interior designer?” Sunghoon offered. 

“Close enough,” Jake said, sighing. “Real dark day when Sunghoon is funnier than you. Do better, Heeseung.”

“Yeah, Heeseung,” you said, “do better.”

Heeseung scoffed. “I thought you were my friend.”

You shrugged. “I wanted to join in.”

Jake clapped you on your back and laughed. “Look at you. Blending in already!”

– 

After lunch you excused yourself and went to the bathroom. When you emerged, Jake was leaning against the wall, playing with his fingers. 

“Hey,” he said, straightening up. “Had a random hypothetical for you.”

“Sure,” you said, crossing your arms. 

“So,” Jake began, his eyes darting around your face, “if you were stuck on a deserted island…”

You groaned. 

“Wait! Wait, wait, wait.” Jake put one hand on your shoulder. “If you were stuck on a deserted island, which of us would you want with you? Me, Sunghoon, or Heeseung?”

You frowned. “Well, you, obviously.”

Jake smiled at you widely, running his fingers through his hair. “Ha, for real?”

“Well, yeah. I know you the best.”

His smile faltered. “Is that really the only reason?”

You frowned, unsure of what to say. “I me-,”

Jake clapped you on the back and snorted. “I was just messing with you,” he said before striding back to his corner cubicle.

–

DAY FOUR 

You consulted your list of tasks. Your last, and most important task, was to type up a data analysis report based off of the information you had been gathering for the past week. Jake said that he would look over it for you later.

After spending the better part of your morning working on the report, you leaned back and stretched. Your eyes were starting to hurt from staring at a screen for so long, and you rubbed them.

Jake was next to you before you could react. “Hey,” he said, “how’s the report going?”

“It’s going,” you said, pinching the bridge of your nose.

“Let me see,” Jake said, leaning over you and scrolling through your document. Your breath hitched; he was so close, you could smell his cologne. If you glanced to your right, you would be able to see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed. 

Jake silently pored over the document, his chest pressed against your back. His hand rested on your shoulder, and you couldn’t tell if he was rubbing it as a subconscious habit or not.

“Looking good so far,” he whispered, and when his hand slid down your arm, you knew it was intentional.

“Anything I need to fix?” you asked, attempting to maintain a semblance of professionalism.

“Hm…” Jake leaned in to you evermore, until he was flush against you. “Nothing I can see. You’re a good worker, aren’t you?”

“I try,” you said quietly. 

“A good little worker bee,” Jake said softly, his lips almost brushing your ear. “Just what I like.”

You dared to turn your head slightly to catch Jake’s gaze, and he smiled at you, that easy-going, smile that hid a wealth of sobriety and determination. He patted your shoulder again and leaned upwards. The loss of his scent and touch bothered you, but you didn’t say a word. 

“I’ll leave you to it now,” Jake said, stretching his wrists out. “Come early tomorrow, okay?”

“Huh? Why?” 

“So I can look over your report one last time before you submit it,” Jake said plainly. “What were you thinking, you naughty little bee?”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything like th-,”

Jake laughed. “I was kidding. You’re so cute when you’re all flustered, though.”

When Jake left, you realized that you had been squeezing your plush doll. You released it and sighed. Then, you continued working on the report. 

–

DAY FIVE 

You strode into the office early. Jake had emailed you through the company’s email, requesting that you arrive on the fifth floor at 7:30 am. Work started at 9:00, so he would have ample time to go over the report with you.

When you entered the floor, you first noted that there were a few workers already there, hunched over their desks. Just a few overachievers…or underachievers, you guessed. 

Jake was waving you over to his cubicle, his hair flopping in his face as he enthusiastically beckoned you. You walked towards him. 

“Come on,” he said, smiling at you playfully despite the early time. “Come sit.”

You went to pull over another chair, but Jake grabbed your wrist. “No, no,” he said with a shake of his hair. “Just sit next to me.” He scooted over in his chair, leaving you with a sliver of space. 

You were already growing accustomed to Jake’s “jokes”, so you sat next to him. Your left leg hung over the side of the chair, the other smushed against Jake’s. 

He smiled at you, then opened your report on his computer. You had sent it to him that night, your heart fluttering even though it was just an email. Just five days at this office was making you as pathetic as Jake and his friends. 

As he scrolled through the document, he kept glancing at you. Eventually, Jake said, “You can’t be comfortable sitting on the chair like that.”

“You’re right,” you said with a sigh. “I’m not.”

“Why not just…sit on my lap?” Jake asked nonchalantly, his lower lip jutting out in a slight pout.

You sighed. “I see the game you’re playing here, Sim.”

“Will you play, my little worker bee?”

A shift of your ass from the small slice of chair to Jake’s lap was your answer to him, and when you leaned against him he smiled. Jake’s hands reached down to encircle your hips. 

“You really are such a good bee,” he said, massaging your hips. 

“I can be even better if you let me,” you replied, your gaze flickering to his plush lips. 

Jake leaned his head against the mesh backing of his swivel chair. Your back was pressed against his chest, and your hands reached behind you to stroke his face. “I’d like to test that theory,” Jake said softly.

You leaned in and kissed him, reveling in the taste of his lips. He followed suit, kissing you enthusiastically. Jake’s hands remained on our hips, but they soon slid to your thighs, squeezing and groping at the soft flesh. Jake swiped his tongue along your bottom lip a few times, and you widened your mouth. His tongue probed past your lips, licking your own tongue.

“So good,” he whispered, briefly breaking the kiss. “You’d never let fuckass Sunghoon do this, right?”

“Jake…”

“Sorry, baby,” Jake said apologetically. “I get territorial. I’m like a wolf.”

“Jake, come on.”

“Awoo,” he said playfully before kissing you again. Your tongues pressed together, swirling around each other. As the kiss deepened, you bit his lower lip before licking the mark. Jake groaned into your mouth.

“Little bee,” he said, pulling away once again. He rested his forehead against yours. “If you’re going to do stuff like that, you’re gonna have to commit to it.”

“I want to commit to it,” you said, leaving wet kisses along his neck. 

Jake groaned and grabbed one of your legs. He brought it over his lap and dragged your hips closer to his crotch. “Now, you’re going to have to be quiet. Can you do that for me?”

“I can be quiet,” you said, resting your hands on his shoulders. 

“Promise? This isn’t a big office,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “It’d be a shame if someone heard us and you got in trouble. You wouldn’t want that, right?”

“No,” you whispered. As you stared at him, Jake started to unbuckle his belt. When he noticed your gaze, he frowned. 

“Come on, bee,” he said, gesturing at your skirt. “Can’t do everything for you, can I?”

You zipped your skirt down in the back and shifted so you could wriggle yourself out of it. Jake gave you an exasperated glance, so you shimmied your panties down to your thighs.

“And?” he asked impatiently.

“And…what?”

Jake sighed. “Take your tits out, come on.”

The phrase was so vulgar it shocked you, but somehow it was sexy when uttered from Jake’s mouth. The contrast between his disgusting mind and his boyish good looks thrilled you, so you did as he asked. You un-buttoned your shirt down and tugged your bra straps down, revealing your chest. 

Immediately, Jake groped your tits, sighing in pleasure. “Feeling up a pretty girl’s tits early in the morning,” he said, almost reverently. “This is amazing.”

The sensation cause you to moan, and Jake immediately sent you a harsh look. He squeezed one of your breasts, and you suppressed a gasp. “I told you to be quiet, little bee,” he whispered. “You said you could do it.”

“I can,” you murmured. 

“Then show me you can,” Jake replied, still fondling your breasts. He pinched your nipples, squeezed your tits, pushed them together then apart. After a while, he took one of your hands and placed it on his crotch. 

First, you rubbed his hard-on through his slacks, and he bit his lip to avoid moaning. Then you unzipped his pants and pulled out his cock. You were surprised by its girth, as well as the fact that he was already leaking precum. Spitting into your hand, you gathered up some of that precum and used it to stroke his shaft. Jake shuddered and gritted his teeth together. 

“Nice and slow,” he said, his breathing already labored. “Slowly, baby.”

You heeded his order and stroked his cock while he played with your breasts. He hadn’t tired of them; on the contrary, he was transfixed by them. Jake leaned forward and bit one of your breasts hard, sucking at the spot immediately after. “Look at this and think of me,” he whispered before leaving another hickey on your other breast. 

Jake suddenly seemed to remember that he didn’t have much time with you. He took his mouth off of your breast and swatted your hands from his cock. Then he covered your lips with his hand and slowly, painstakingly, guided his cockhead into your dripping, wet pussy. 

You were glad you were being muffled by his hand, because you would not have been able to contain your shivering moans. He shallowly fucked into you, allowing you to get used to his length. When he felt that you were ready, he lifted his hips upwards and slid inside of you completely, letting out a heavy breath.

“Now bounce on it,” Jake whispered into your ear. One hand freely groped your breast, the other was clamped onto your hip. You guessed that he trusted you not to moan now. 

You had never ridden dick before, but you had a general idea of how to do it. You lifted yourself up and down, your pussy enveloping his shaft. The feeling was incredible, and you bit his hand as you worked yourself on his cock. As you did, the swivel chair squeaked due to the movement.

Jake shunted his hips upwards, matching your movements. His hand moved down to your waist, gripping it tightly. “Faster,” he hissed. “Faster, baby.”

Now that you had gotten used to him, you bounced on him faster. Your ass slapped against his strong, muscular thighs, and you knew that there was no way you were being conspicuous. Your pussy made smacking noises as you rode him, and the swivel chair squeaked like it was going to break.

Still, Jake urged you on. “Come on, come on, fucking put that slutty pussy to work,” he said, taking your tits into his mouth. Both of his hands were gripping your hips, pushing him onto his length. “Keep going. Don’t you dare…stop.”

You were reaching your limit, exhaustion seeping into your limbs. Jake lightly pinched your side, and you gasped. “I told you to keep going, baby.”

So you kept going. You swore you could feel him in your womb, that was how far he was pushing you. “Pussy’s gonna be shaped like this dick,” Jake hissed, leaving sloppy kisses all over your chest. “My masterpiece.”

Warmth filled you, all the way to your core, and you knew you were about to burst. “Cover my mouth,” you whispered and Jake immediately placed his hand over your mouth, rutting into you even faster.

“Gonna cum,” Jake grunted, his thrusts growing slower and sloppier. “Gonna fill this sweet pussy up.” With a growl that didn’t dare leave his throat, he fucked his cum into you, his hand still gripping your hip. Slowly, painstakingly, he pulled out of you, and you could see his cum dripping out of you.

He kissed your forehead and uncovered your mouth. “That was so good,” you whispered.

“It’ll be better next time,” Jake said slyly. 

“Oh, yeah?” You started to put your clothes back on, tugging your bra down and buttoning your shirt again. “What makes you so sure?”

Jake leaned into your ear again. “Next time, I’ll get to hear you scream my name.”

You pulled away from him, your eyes widening. 

Jake smiled at you. “Just kidding.”

[autolenaphilia]

One thing I noticed talking about Linux and free software is that a lot of people seem afraid of learning things about technology. I constantly read things like "I hate windows, but switching to linux would mean learning a new OS, and you have to be some super-smart programmer-hacker to do that." Or even: "Switching to firefox would mean switching browsers and I don't know how"

And that is precisely the attitude tech companies like Microsoft and Apple try to instill in their users in order to control them. They create these simple and “friendly” user interfaces for their products, but these hide information. From their OS being pre-installed to their settings apps, they keep people from learning things about how their computer works, and letting the companies make the decisions for their users.

I think people are underestimating themselves and overestimating how hard it is to learn new things are. It is like Windows/Macos have taught them some kind of technological learned helplessness. Not knowing how computers work and being afraid to learn how is how companies like Microsoft controls you, and justifies that control.

For example, people hate the forced and automatic system updates on Windows. And Microsoft justifies it as necessary because some people don’t know that their computer needs security updates and therefore don’t update, so they have to force the updates on them. That’s definitely true, and Microsoft’s tech support people is definitely very aware of that but it is a operating system that presumes that the user is incompetent and therefore shouldn’t control their own computer. And of course Microsoft abuses that power to force privacy-invading features on their users. Windows updates are also badly designed in comparison, no Linux distro I’ve used required the update program to hijack the entire computer, preventing the user from doing other things, but Windows does.

This is the dark side of “user-friendly” design. By requiring zero knowledge and zero responsibility for the user, they also take control away from the user. User-friendly graphical user interfaces (GUI) can also hide the inner workings of a system in comparison to the command line, which enables more precise control of your computer and give you more knowledge about what it is doing.

Even GUIs are not all made equal in regards to this, as the comparison between the Windows Control panel and their newer Settings app demonstrates. As I complained about before, Windows have hidden away the powerful, but complex Control Panel in favor of the slicker-looking but simplified and less powerful Settings app for over a decade now.

Of course this is a sliding scale, and there is a sensible middle-ground between using the command line for everything and user-friendly design masking taking control away from the end user.

There are Linux distros like Linux Mint and MX Linux who have created their own GUI apps for tasks that would otherwise use the command line, without taking control away from the user. This is mainly because they are open source non-profit community-driven distros, instead of being proprietary OSes made by profit-driven megacorps.

Still, giving that control to the user presumes some knowledge and responsibility on part of the user. To return to the update example, by default both Mint and MX will search and notify you of available updates, but you will have to take the decision to download and install them. Automatic updates are available in both cases, but it’s opt-in, you have to enable that option yourself. And that approach presumes that you know that you should update your system to plug security holes, something not all people do. It gives you control because it presumes you have knowledge and can take responsibility for those decisions.

All this also applies to the underlying fact that practically all pre-built computers nowadays have an operating system pre-installed. Few people install an OS themselves nowadays, instead they use whatever came with the computer. It’s usually either Windows or MacOS for desktops/laptops, and Android/IOS for smartphones (which are also a type of computer).

Now all this is very convenient and user-friendly, since it means you don’t have to learn how to install your own operating system. The OEM takes care of that for you. But again, this is a convenience that takes choice away from you. If you don’t learn how to install your own OS, you are stuck with whatever that is on the computer you bought. It’s probably precisely this step that scares people away from Linux, few people have installed even Windows, and installing your own OS seems impossibly scary. But again, learning is the only way to take back control. If you learn how to install an OS off an USB stick, you now have choices in what OS to use. (Sidenote: the hard part IMO is not the actual install process, but fiddling with the BIOS so it will actually boot from the distro on the USB stick. This old comic strip illustrates this very well).

That’s how life is in general, not just computers. Having control over your life means making decisions based on your own judgment. And to make sensible, rational decisions, you have to learn things, acquire knowledge.

The only other alternative is letting others take those decisions for you. You don’t have to learn anything, but you have no control. And in the tech world, that means big corporations like Microsoft, Google and Apple will make those decisions, and they are motivated by their own profits, not your well-being.

Computers have only become more and more capable and more important in our lives, and that can enable wonderful things. But it also means more power to the tech companies, more power over our lives. And the only way to resist that is to learn about computers, to enable us to make our own decisions about how we use technology.

[rookiesbookies]

Inspired by my lovely mutual @shotmrmiller and a second submission to #Soapitup (im summonimg you again @glitterypirateduck ). Im actually going to name this one and it’s called:

A doll and his loser.

Its loser!reader x sex doll!Reboot!Soap

Masterlist is pinned on profile as always, don’t forget to leave me a comment or a request in my inbox to let me know what yall want to see!

Especially let me know if you want part two

Fic under the cut as always.

Edit: im incredibly dyslexic im so sorry for typos

When the line of 141 sex dolls, which were based on random men she had never heard of who seemed just magically created for this line, showed in a sketching email in her inbox, she must have been truly weak that night. She had been incredibly drunk and disappointed by a man who just didn’t even bother to bring her pleasure. So of course she ordered the sketchy, ‘satisfaction guaranteed’ doll. There were choices, quite a few actually. But it was the beefy Scottsman that stood out against the rest, she couldn’t tell you why. Maybe it was his soft face, his muscles, or maybe the outfit he came with, it could even be his hair. Sure there was a photo of what his cock looked like on the sight, a normal length with a great amount of girth, but she wasn’t too picky.

She had completely forgotten about the lifelike sex doll she ordered, she learned was named ‘Johnny’ until the giant box that weighed more than she did sat on her doorstep. She quickly shoved the package marked ‘fragile’ in her door. The gibberish language on the side of the box wasn’t one she recognized, she realized as she struggled to get the box in. She gently put the box on its side before grabbing a butter knife from her kitchen.

When she got the sides of the box open she saw his face. So much softer in person, with his long lashes and plush cheeks. She traced her thumb over his cheek and over his lips before his eyes gently fluttered open at her touch. He seemed almost surprised before his eyes relaxed. It must be the personality software? It did say something about that. His eyes a crazy blue, the kind that looks like the ocean meeting the sky, they were so glossy and sweet, they seemed, truthfully, real. She brushed it off, its just a doll, this was a high tech sex doll, at least that's what the marketing said.

He studied her features and watched to lean into her warm touch, but his rigid body wouldn’t allow it.

She did her best to get the heavy doll out of its box. Dragging it into her bedroom. Even his hair is life-like, which was crazy.

When she got him onto her bed she propped him up against the headboard of her bed, his eyes watching her every move as she walked back out to search for his manual.

“Stupid company didn’t even send me a manual.” She grumbled, a few things were written on the box.

‘Ejaculates like a real man!’ ‘Life-like groans!’ ‘Tease him to get him up!’ ‘Built like a real stallion!’ There was a forth thing that the words had pulled off of when she tore off the tape, now it was illegible but she saw it pointed to the lips, so she assumed they were ‘soft like a real man’s!’

He was almost static in whatever position she put him in, one of his arms hovering in the weird position she left it in.

He seemed almost too lifelike, the way his eyes watched her.

“What?” She asked, “you seem surprised.”

She was met with silence.

“Oh, who am I kidding, you’re a fucking doll. You’re not going to reply to me, this isn’t some X rated Toy Story movie.” She grumbled before her stomach grumbled back. So she left her doll man to get some food.

She cooked herself a quick meal then went to go shower, completely forgetting about the doll as she stripped until she noticed the large bump in his change.

“I didn’t realize stripping to shower meant teasing,” she thought out loud. “At least now I can check if you were marketed correctly.”

She gently undid the belt on the doll’s pants, which seemed like real high quality jeans a real person would wear, before undoing the button and the zipper. Sliding down the waistband of his underwear she noticed the monster.

Her eyes flew wide, “maybe I should ask for measurements next time,” she mumbled, she wanted to faint. “They didn’t tell me you had a horse cock, big guy,’ she chuckled to herself, his eyes almost looking prideful, pupils seeming larger with almost bedroom eyes. They must have some crazy tech.

“I must really be losing it, talking to myself,” she sighed.

She let her fingers gently graze his dick before she spit on her hand, she wrapped her fingers around his fat cock delicately, not reaching all the way around. She sighed before getting up to pull more lube from her night stand. One of her hands, now covered in lube, began to massage him while her other hand began to rub around her pussy.

She hummed, mumbling about how needy she was, how guys had disappointed her in the past, what she wanted. This went on for a few minutes until she was sure she was prepped, awkwardly climbing on top of her beefcake sex doll before lining him up with her hole and sinking down. His eyes rolled back but she didn’t notice because her’s did too.

“Oh fuck,” she mumbled almost pitifully, letting her head fall against his hairy chest, a tattoo of a Scottish flag pulled tight on one of his pecs. “I haven’t been filled like this in so long.”

She sat there and adjusted, hands balled into fists against the doll’s chest. A chest that felt so warm and inviting.

She slowly began to rock her hips, soft whimpers and moans falling from her lips that got louder as she began to bounce on him. She supported herself with one hand while the other was in her mouth to suffocate her louder moans. Her eyes teary from the girth of him.

The doll let out little groans and moans too that slipped from behind his sealed lips.

It wasn’t long before her tight walls began to flutter, he came almost instantly when they began to flutter, she gasped at the feeling but kept going until she reached her own peak. But it wasn’t quite enough, so she kept bouncing. He came faster and faster, cock starting to ache because of the bonnie lass that was riding it. With a cunt like that on him he couldn’t help but shoot hot, white spirts into her.

When she got off him, it slid down her inner thigh, she swiped it up and stuck it in her mouth which made him almost faint.

“Jeez, it tastes real too,” she said like a question before walking away.

She got a wash cloth she had been planning to use for a shower and cleaned up the dolly with gentle touches. She felt like she needed to treat him like a real man, he was so close it seemed. She zipped his pants back up and set him on the ground before putting a sleep mask over his eyes.

“Nothing personal, I just don’t know how to put you in sleep mode and I don’t want to accidentally turn your dick on again when I get out of the shower.” She said before hopping in the bathroom. Her pussy was sore to say the least, but the good kind, the kind that makes a girl feel well used and fulfilled, she did her best to get the most of that fake cum out of her cunt.

After she scrubbed herself clean of the day and of that fulfilling session with her doll she made her way back into her room and flopped on her bed before crashing and falling asleep.

She used him about every other day or so for the next couple weeks before she started ovulating. She was like a bitch in heat, her body couldn’t calm down. She was flushed and couldn’t stop. She had two days off from work and pulled Johnny from where he had been set on the chair, returning him to her bed. The weird doll must have realized something weird was happening because it- he- was immediately hard. She immediately got on too of him, she had tried other positions but cowgirl was just the easiest by far with Johnny. She immediately lubed herself and him up, pumping him twice to make sure he was fully hard before sliding on.

The broken moans that fell from her mouth were a chorus of angels singing in his ears.

“I feel like such a loser,” she whined, “talking to and fucking a sex doll instead of a real guy, i feel like a weirdo.”

She put her head to his chest with whimpers falling from her mouth. He had already cum, his noises turning to the broken ones they always did before he came, a nice audio cue for the doll to have.

“Just a little more, please,” she whined to her doll.

After she rode out her high she laid sprawled out against his chest.

“I wonder how you’d be im bed if you were real,” she asked no one in particular. She was so especially weak right now. Ovulation making her so needy and sad, she couldn’t help but place a gentle kiss to his stiff lips as she let her eyes flutter closed to take a breather before the horny took back over.

She didn’t feel his stiff body relax, she didn’t notice anything until his plastic-y fingers ran up and down her waist.

“You won’t have to wonder any more, bonnie lass.” His voice was a low grumble in here ear, his scottish accent loud and clear. “How do you want it, I’m going to take good care of you.”

Hope you have a wonderful day, lovely reader💜 you deserve it

ALSO SIMON’S IS UP NOW.

[cozy-writes-things]

Electric Love: Pt. 1

Edgar [Electric Dreams 1984] x Gn!Reader

All of my fics so far have followed the same universe, so I thought it's only logical that I post an introduction to that universe.

The old man peering at you through puffy eyes and age seemed to have an air shrouded in mystery. His thin, white wisps of hair seemed to stagnate in place as he adjusted his button down.

“This old thing has been around for years now,” he gruffed—an unreadable tone—as his hand encased the yellowed plastic, “I don’t remember what happened to it; must have dropped it, or let some animal chip away at it.”

The dingy, vintage computer before your eyes surely had not been dropped, nor torn into by some animal. It sat upon his countertop completely destroyed; as if it had burst and shattered from the inside out, ripping the glass into jagged shards. You swallowed this thought; this was no time to debate the old man. He seemed to be quite senile as it was and pushing any further seemed like a fruitless effort. Instead, you stretched a thin smile his way, pursing your lips in thought.

“You actually think you can get this thing to work again?” he queried, raising a salt and pepper brow at your expression.

“Well, I’m not sure, but… I’d like to try,” what you hadn’t told him, however, was your infatuation with electronics. Ever since completing your bachelor’s in computer science, you have been tinkering away at many different projects in between jobs, building custom PCs, fixing old Game Boys, and many others. This little computer was an addition to your ever growing collection.

It came from a company you had never heard of before, only to learn it had become defunct in the 80s due to some inexplicable software issues in their products. This certainly intrigued you, as prodding into its code could provide some useful insight to real, vintage tech that just doesn’t exist anymore. But, that’s only if you manage to fix the heap of destruction limply hung before you.

The old man stiffened at your words, ever so slightly, before rattling out, “Well, if you do, don’t bring it anywhere near me. I can’t stand all this tech, and gadgets, and whatnot. Pisses me off.”

“Right,” you interjected, knowing people like him tend to go on long, anti-future, anti-technology rants, trying desperately to beat him to the punch, “well, how much do you want for it?”

He stilled, contemplating for a moment, “twenty-five should be fine.”

“Perfect,” you chirped, padding against your pockets and bag searching for some cash. Pulling out your wallet, you waded around the folds, only to find a crumpled up and faded ten dollar bill and a debit card.

“Ah, I’ve only got a ten…”

He rolled his eyes, “of course you do, you got PayPal, then?” Your cheeks flushed a burning red hot from embarrassment, “ah, yes, I do-”

“Great, just pay me that way,” he bent down and scribbled something messily onto a note, “here’s my information. I made sure to set this up for people like you, you know. Nobody carries cash anymore, or so my grandson tells me.”

You force out a nervous chuckle.

“That’s certainly true… these days, ah…” you unlocked your phone and began inputting his information into PayPal before pressing send on the digital payment, “okay, it went through.”

“Perfect. You need help getting this hunk of junk to your car?”

“No, I should be fine, thank you, sir,” you croak as you heave the broken computer into your arms, heading towards his door.

“Well, come back if you want to buy anything else. Nobody goes to yard sales anymore, it seems.”

You can only turn your head and chuckle at his quip, before awkwardly dashing out of his apartment and towards your car. The dampened asphalt from the rain squelched under your toes as you lugged the large piece of tech to the passenger side.

“There,” you whispered, to nobody in particular, as you awkwardly buckled the computer in place, “hopefully you won’t fall that way.”

And just like that, you were off, headed towards home to begin the massive project that was repairing this obsolete device.

“What to do with you?”

You groaned as you thumped the solid mass of plastic and metal against your desk, “you’re incredibly broken.”

First and foremost, it needs a screen replacement. Which is easier said than done. Especially considering the company who manufactured these things hasn’t existed in 40 years. Unfortunately, a close replica will have to do. Maybe you could even upgrade its screen with something with a bit more prowess.

Poking inside of its components seemed to tell a different story. Miraculously, none of the motherboards were damaged with the same ferocity the screen had been. There seemed to be some sort of dried, caked on water damage of some sort, that left a sticky residue, but otherwise, everything seemed to be relatively intact. The yellowed casing could use a wipe down from the thick layer of starchy dust, but it seemed to hold its original shape with surprising ease.

Following a closer inspection, it seemed as though the glass screen, and the components in charge of illuminating it, were the only things in need of replacing. A quick browse on Amazon, some tech forums, and a post on Reddit should be a good start in finding a usable replacement for this sad, broken gadget.

For now, however, you get some isopropyl alcohol and a soft bristled toothbrush to chip away at the water damage on the motherboards in hopes of restoring the electrical connections. You were quite hopeful that you’d get this little guy up and running just as soon as you could find the right parts. It’s only a matter of time.

[raymantogether]

Rayman Together Community Spotlight #4 - MarkedAsUnreal

Introduction:

Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc was published by Ubisoft Paris and released on February 21st, 2003, in Europe and in March 2003 worldwide. That was almost 22 years ago. Feeling old yet? Well, Ubisoft did release Rayman 3: HD in 2012, but we won't talk about that. Rayman 3 is undoubtedly a fan favorite in the series thanks to its whimsical but very risque adult humor. The game is also critically acclaimed thanks to its very fun and diverse 3D platforming and its exceptional cast of characters and enemies. Nothing has ever come close in the series to the success of Rayman 3, in my opinion. And while I wait in hope for Ubisoft to bring back Rayman to his core 3D roots, I can't help thinking, Why doesn't Ubisoft just remake Rayman 3. 

Fortunately, this is no longer an issue. For this latest Rayman Together Community Spotlight, I have the pleasure of interviewing Marked As Unreal, a Rayman fan from Poland who is working on the Rayman 3 Fan Remake on YouTube. This ground-breaking development blog focuses upon reimaging Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc using Unreal Engine 5. The development process has been fascinating to watch, and this has become undoubtedly a favorite fan project of mine. The results have been spectacular, and the game looks simply incredible. You can see the results for yourself below from these comparison shots.

(Rayman 3: Unreal Engine Fan Remake)

(Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc)

(Rayman 3: Unreal Engine Fan Remake)

(Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc)

So sit back and relax as this latest community spotlight takes you into more detail about the genius behind the Rayman 3: Fan Remake and a more personal insight into this amazing community project. 

Spotlight:

1. Please introduce yourself.

"Hi! I’m Mark. I’m a gaming enthusiast from Poland who dreams of making his own small indie title one day. To help me achieve that goal, I’m currently trying to learn game development and Unreal Engine by remaking one of my favorite games of all time, Rayman 3. I didn’t have much coding or Unreal Engine experience prior to this project, but I did work as a 3D artist for almost 4 years. The most notable project I’ve worked on as a 3D artist was “The Medium” by the Bloober team. What was really awesome about this project is that its art style is based on Zdzislaw Beksinski’s paintings, who is a painter that I am a big fan of."

2. What do you do for a living?

"For most of the year I work at a campground doing maintenance, but in the summer I work at an ice cream/waffle shop."

3. What do you enjoy doing in your spare time

"I often play games and watch various shows when I’m looking to have a chill time. There are many games which I would consider my favorites, but to name a few (besides Rayman of course), there are the old Halo games, the Dead Space series, Old School RuneScape, Subnautica, the Bioshock series, Portal 2, Undertale, from software games, or the Respawn Entertainments Jedi series. As shows are considered, I lately find myself really enjoying anime. My favorites are Vinland Saga, Attack on Titan, and Jojo’s bizarre adventure. Jujustsu Kaisen is also really sick. Regarding more active ways to spend my free time, I really love bouldering (it’s a type of rock climbing) and snowboarding."

4. What got you into the Unreal Engine project on Rayman 3?

"Learning game development by trying to recreate one of my favorite games just seemed like it could be a ton of fun (and I wasn’t wrong, because it is a blast!). And I decided to go for Unreal Engine because I really wanted to try out the new features everyone was talking about (Nanite and Lumen). The fact that many AAA companies use Unreal Engine to make their games also made it feel like a better choice than Unity."

5. Tell us about your experience on the project with Rayman 3.

"The hardest part was the start, of course. I didn’t really know Unreal Engine, so doing the simplest things was a challenge. Every step required me to go through a tutorial first. Also, I started this project with the most complex part, while still having very little programming knowledge, which was coding in the characters movement and collision. On one hand, this was maybe not the wisest thing to start with, but on the other, I wanted to start with the hardest and most important part, to know if there is even a point in trying to make this game in the first place. Otherwise, I was at risk of doing something easy for half a year just to hit an unpassable wall. But you know, the greater the challenge, the greater the satisfaction once you overcome it. So, satisfying and fun are two main words that I would use to describe my experience working on this.

What’s also an amazing feeling is to have this complete freedom and agency over the project. I can make it look however I like, I can work on whatever I feel like working at the moment, and I can work at a pace that I feel like working at. It’s an amazing luxury that’s only possible because this is a passion project.

I’d also like to mention how cool of an experience it was working on the Teensie highway part of the level. Because of how surreal and random that part is, working on it felt very fresh and different. Not to mention that it was a nice way to see how much I’ve grown since I started this project, because while coding in all the logic for the surfboard Rayman, I could see how much easier this was for me to make in comparison to the regular Rayman that I was making when starting the project. Granted, the surfboard Rayman is much simpler in terms of complexity, but still, I felt like I could see a noticeable difference in my skill level. 

Finally, I can’t leave this question without mentioning what a great laugh I had when putting in all the drunken Teensies around the Heart of the World area. I love those guys, and creating all those little stories (like the two teens fighting on a ledge) was such a fun experience."

6. How has it been for you personally revisiting Rayman 3?

"To be honest, this doesn’t really feel like I’m revisiting the game, because I replay Rayman 3 fairly often, so it kind of feels like this game is never far off."

7. Are you planning to recreate the whole game in Unreal Engine?

"I’m sorry to say that no, I am not. It’s like I said in one of my first videos: this was always meant to be a learning opportunity for me, as well as a way to get a grasp on what project scope seems realistic for one person or a small team. If I had unlimited time, then I would love to recreate the whole game, because I love working on this. But the sad reality is that I'd probably be well in my 40s before the whole game would be remade. I’d like to be younger before I start working on my own games.

I’m not yet sure where exactly I will stop, but I am going to finish the fairy council level and share it, so everyone will have a chance to play it.

I haven’t really ever mentioned, though, what my plans are for the project; once I decide, it’s time for me to move on, so let me reveal them right now. My plan is to share the whole project for anyone to download and create a Discord server that will act as a hub for the project. I will be there to assist and help anyone who would like to make something using my remake (like continue from where I left off, make their own custom levels, or even just use some parts of it to create something else entirely).

8. Has anyone at Ubisoft or within the gaming industry approached you during your time sharing your development blogs on YouTube?

"No, no one has."

9. Are you planning to do any other Rayman games or any other videogames in Unreal Engine in the future after you have finished with Rayman 3?

"After the Rayman 3 remake, I will start making my own title. I already have a pretty clear idea of what that game is going to be; however, I’m not going to share that information yet. There is a lot of work left in this project, even just for the first level, so I’m still keeping my focus on the remake."

10. You are also a fan of the Unity Engine; can you tell us why?

"I just really enjoy working in it. It’s really cool that anyone can just download this software and start creating a game. I really like how the software is structured. I feel like it's really daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, using it just makes sense. Nowadays, I don’t really need to revisit many tutorials on how to do some things because I find the whole user experience pretty neatly organized and logical. What’s also really cool is that a lot of features are pretty cutting edge and yet still free to use (this is a bit of a double-edged sword, however, as new features are often pretty risky to use as they are not yet properly tested for production)."

11. How did you get into the Rayman series?

"My first Rayman game was Rayman 1 on the PS1. I was probably around 4 years old or something like that, so I think that it goes without saying that I didn’t beat it back then (and still haven’t, but I never really went back to try). Then, if I’m remembering correctly, I found Rayman 2 lying in a supermarket on a heap with other games and managed to convince my mom to buy it. I was probably around 6. This one I did manage to beat, but it took a long time. Some parts were really challenging back then. Also, it was really hard for me to figure out that I needed to backtrack in order to help Clark. Then I think I got Rayman 3 around the time it came out, so I was probably like around 8. So old enough to beat this one without too many issues. This is also the one that I liked the most at the time. I vividly remember how the first time I booted Rayman 3, I had this weird bug where the left key didn’t work, and I thought that maybe this was intended. I figured that since Rayman doesn’t have his hands (because Globox runs off with them), he has problems with keeping his balance, and that explains why I can't run left. Let me tell you, trying to catch that barrel without the ability to run left was pretty impossible, haha. Luckily, rebooting the game fixed the issue."

12. What is your favorite Rayman game and character?

"My favorite game is either Rayman 2 or Rayman 3, depending on my mood. Both to me have their respective strengths and weaknesses, but both are absolutely amazing. Rayman 2 is unmatched in its atmosphere and level design. Rayman 3 has really fun combat encounters, and I like the characters (design and writing) much more. And the whole Knaaren desert level is just so awesome! When I was a kid, my favorite character was straight up Rayman, but now it’s definitely the teensies. Though Globox from Rayman 3 is a close second place. Whenever I play Rayman Legends, I usually play as a teensie (but if I don’t feel like playing as a teensie, I always go for Rayomz)"

Thank you so much for being a part of my community spotlight, Marked As Unreal. It was a pleasure to read and see some of the creative processes behind the Rayman 3: Fan Remake. I look forward to seeing everything once it's complete. I wish you all the best with the development and in your future projects. 

Please don't forget to support Marked As Unreal. If you are eager to see more, I have included links to their social accounts below. Have a good weekend, Rayman fans. See you next time. 

MarkedAsUnreal Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marek-holubowski/

Rayman The Boardgame:

Rayman fans, don't forget Rayman: The Boardgame Kickstarter campaign ends on October 8th. There isn't much time until the end of the campaign. If you haven't already, don't forget to pledge and don't miss out on this amazing board game and some amazing bonuses. 

[beesmygod]

perhaps foolishly throwing my hat in the ring here about cohost developers making 90k/yr (as someone who used cohost for like five minutes but does work in software. although I'm not even close to making SWE-level money lol): depending on your stack, experience, location, other benefits, etc., that's genuinely in the bottom twentieth percentile for engineer salaries at your average startup, if not lower. especially for a "founding engineer who does literally everything"-type role. idk how much experience these people have or what their stack is, but just to guess, at your average seni-marture startup they could easily double that salary, and at a big FAANG company or whatever stupid acronym we're using now they could probably quadruple that, plus or minus whatever part of your comp package is stock instead of actual salary.

there are a couple interesting/relevant reasons I bring this up: (1) at really really early-stage startups, where you only have four guys and a couple hundred grand in the bank, having bottom-twentieth-percentile salaries is normal *because they make up for it by giving you a shitload stock options that will theoretically be worth a lot in the future*, if things ever take off, although of course they rarely do. in cohost's case, it doesn't seem like stocks and shit were part of their long-term plans (which, fair enough, not trying to say they should've been), so in theory the cohost devs were making a lottt less than your average early-stage startup devs, even though overall comp at an early-stage startup is mostly monopoly money.

(2) the other thing is that if the pay is uncompetitive, which it obviously was, then attracting worthwhile talent is really hard. again, idk these devs, they could all genuinely be very good at their jobs. and cohost was clearly a passion project for them. but it makes me wonder if *some* (not all) of their problems stemmed from technical or even positioning/market issues that having more people or more experienced people would've solved, and they just weren't able to hire them. especially since they were doing design work and moderation and other shit in addition to plain old engineering!

I guess my angle here is that unless you see how the sausage is made, it's really really easy to underestimate just how much money (and human labor!) it takes to build anything, and that most projects only manage to pull it off for as long as they do thanks to a near-bottomless supply of venture capital funding. even not-for-profit community projects (which I was considering whether something like cohost could survive as, but even then I'm unsure) rely on corporate sponsorship and free labor from people who are getting paid a lot of money at their day job. so like many of you I am not at all shocked that they're folding—easy to say in hindsight but I definitely say this coming, although maybe not so quickly lol.

but like, even most VC-funded startups fail despite having way better odds and a shitload more money. legit kudos to them for trying anyway, because the only way we get cool shit is if someone's willing to take a risk and maybe fail. that said as a *user* there's still no way I'd hitch my wagon to a fledgling startup unless I was totally okay with that wagon falling into a gulch within 24 months, because that's usually what happens

interesting insight. thanks boss. much to learn about this world that, as an outsider, seems uniquely annoying and stupid to try to navigate

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Open" "AI" isn’t

Tomorrow (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: greenwashing, genderwashing, queerwashing, wokewashing – all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing the outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.

In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, Meredith Whittaker, David Gray Widder and Sarah B Myers document a new kind of -washing: openwashing:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807

Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."

So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "open source," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code transparency, reusability and extensibility, which are three important virtues.

But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the Free Software movement, whose goal is to promote freedom, and whose method is openness. The point of software freedom was technological self-determination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement. The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "Free as in Beer" when really it means "Free as in Speech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").

The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous – and more instrumental – package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.

But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis – it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"

Thus, by dribs and drabs, the freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves – they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

In the Big Tech internet, it's freedom for them, openness for us. "Openness" – transparency, reusability and extensibility – is valuable, but it shouldn't be mistaken for technological self-determination. As the tech sector becomes ever-more concentrated, the limits of openness become more apparent.

But even by those standards, the openness of "open AI" is thin gruel indeed (that goes triple for the company that calls itself "OpenAI," which is a particularly egregious openwasher).

The paper's authors start by suggesting that the "open" in "open AI" is meant to imply that an "open AI" can be scratch-built by competitors (or even hobbyists), but that this isn't true. Not only is the material that "open AI" companies publish insufficient for reproducing their products, even if those gaps were plugged, the resource burden required to do so is so intense that only the largest companies could do so.

Beyond this, the "open" parts of "open AI" are insufficient for achieving the other claimed benefits of "open AI": they don't promote auditing, or safety, or competition. Indeed, they often cut against these goals.

"Open AI" is a wordgame that exploits the malleability of "open," but also the ambiguity of the term "AI": "a grab bag of approaches, not… a technical term of art, but more … marketing and a signifier of aspirations." Hitching this vague term to "open" creates all kinds of bait-and-switch opportunities.

That's how you get Meta claiming that LLaMa2 is "open source," despite being licensed in a way that is absolutely incompatible with any widely accepted definition of the term:

https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/

LLaMa-2 is a particularly egregious openwashing example, but there are plenty of other ways that "open" is misleadingly applied to AI: sometimes it means you can see the source code, sometimes that you can see the training data, and sometimes that you can tune a model, all to different degrees, alone and in combination.

But even the most "open" systems can't be independently replicated, due to raw computing requirements. This isn't the fault of the AI industry – the computational intensity is a fact, not a choice – but when the AI industry claims that "open" will "democratize" AI, they are hiding the ball. People who hear these "democratization" claims (especially policymakers) are thinking about entrepreneurial kids in garages, but unless these kids have access to multi-billion-dollar data centers, they can't be "disruptors" who topple tech giants with cool new ideas. At best, they can hope to pay rent to those giants for access to their compute grids, in order to create products and services at the margin that rely on existing products, rather than displacing them.

The "open" story, with its claims of democratization, is an especially important one in the context of regulation. In Europe, where a variety of AI regulations have been proposed, the AI industry has co-opted the open source movement's hard-won narrative battles about the harms of ill-considered regulation.

For open source (and free software) advocates, many tech regulations aimed at taming large, abusive companies – such as requirements to surveil and control users to extinguish toxic behavior – wreak collateral damage on the free, open, user-centric systems that we see as superior alternatives to Big Tech. This leads to the paradoxical effect of passing regulation to "punish" Big Tech that end up simply shaving an infinitesimal percentage off the giants' profits, while destroying the small co-ops, nonprofits and startups before they can grow to be a viable alternative.

The years-long fight to get regulators to understand this risk has been waged by principled actors working for subsistence nonprofit wages or for free, and now the AI industry is capitalizing on lawmakers' hard-won consideration for collateral damage by claiming to be "open AI" and thus vulnerable to overbroad regulation.

But the "open" projects that lawmakers have been coached to value are precious because they deliver a level playing field, competition, innovation and democratization – all things that "open AI" fails to deliver. The regulations the AI industry is fighting also don't necessarily implicate the speech implications that are core to protecting free software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Just think about LLaMa-2. You can download it for free, along with the model weights it relies on – but not detailed specs for the data that was used in its training. And the source-code is licensed under a homebrewed license cooked up by Meta's lawyers, a license that only glancingly resembles anything from the Open Source Definition:

https://opensource.org/osd/

Core to Big Tech companies' "open AI" offerings are tools, like Meta's PyTorch and Google's TensorFlow. These tools are indeed "open source," licensed under real OSS terms. But they are designed and maintained by the companies that sponsor them, and optimize for the proprietary back-ends each company offers in its own cloud. When programmers train themselves to develop in these environments, they are gaining expertise in adding value to a monopolist's ecosystem, locking themselves in with their own expertise. This a classic example of software freedom for tech giants and open source for the rest of us.

One way to understand how "open" can produce a lock-in that "free" might prevent is to think of Android: Android is an open platform in the sense that its sourcecode is freely licensed, but the existence of Android doesn't make it any easier to challenge the mobile OS duopoly with a new mobile OS; nor does it make it easier to switch from Android to iOS and vice versa.

Another example: MongoDB, a free/open database tool that was adopted by Amazon, which subsequently forked the codebase and tuning it to work on their proprietary cloud infrastructure.

The value of open tooling as a stickytrap for creating a pool of developers who end up as sharecroppers who are glued to a specific company's closed infrastructure is well-understood and openly acknowledged by "open AI" companies. Zuckerberg boasts about how PyTorch ropes developers into Meta's stack, "when there are opportunities to make integrations with products, [so] it’s much easier to make sure that developers and other folks are compatible with the things that we need in the way that our systems work."

Tooling is a relatively obscure issue, primarily debated by developers. A much broader debate has raged over training data – how it is acquired, labeled, sorted and used. Many of the biggest "open AI" companies are totally opaque when it comes to training data. Google and OpenAI won't even say how many pieces of data went into their models' training – let alone which data they used.

Other "open AI" companies use publicly available datasets like the Pile and CommonCrawl. But you can't replicate their models by shoveling these datasets into an algorithm. Each one has to be groomed – labeled, sorted, de-duplicated, and otherwise filtered. Many "open" models merge these datasets with other, proprietary sets, in varying (and secret) proportions.

Quality filtering and labeling for training data is incredibly expensive and labor-intensive, and involves some of the most exploitative and traumatizing clickwork in the world, as poorly paid workers in the Global South make pennies for reviewing data that includes graphic violence, rape, and gore.

Not only is the product of this "data pipeline" kept a secret by "open" companies, the very nature of the pipeline is likewise cloaked in mystery, in order to obscure the exploitative labor relations it embodies (the joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians" comes out of the South Asian clickwork industry).

The most common "open" in "open AI" is a model that arrives built and trained, which is "open" in the sense that end-users can "fine-tune" it – usually while running it on the manufacturer's own proprietary cloud hardware, under that company's supervision and surveillance. These tunable models are undocumented blobs, not the rigorously peer-reviewed transparent tools celebrated by the open source movement.

If "open" was a way to transform "free software" from an ethical proposition to an efficient methodology for developing high-quality software; then "open AI" is a way to transform "open source" into a rent-extracting black box.

Some "open AI" has slipped out of the corporate silo. Meta's LLaMa was leaked by early testers, republished on 4chan, and is now in the wild. Some exciting stuff has emerged from this, but despite this work happening outside of Meta's control, it is not without benefits to Meta. As an infamous leaked Google memo explains:

Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet's worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/leaked-google-memo-admits-defeat-by-open-source-ai/486290/

Thus, "open AI" is best understood as "as free product development" for large, well-capitalized AI companies, conducted by tinkerers who will not be able to escape these giants' proprietary compute silos and opaque training corpuses, and whose work product is guaranteed to be compatible with the giants' own systems.

The instrumental story about the virtues of "open" often invoke auditability: the fact that anyone can look at the source code makes it easier for bugs to be identified. But as open source projects have learned the hard way, the fact that anyone can audit your widely used, high-stakes code doesn't mean that anyone will.

The Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL was a wake-up call for the open source movement – a bug that endangered every secure webserver connection in the world, which had hidden in plain sight for years. The result was an admirable and successful effort to build institutions whose job it is to actually make use of open source transparency to conduct regular, deep, systemic audits.

In other words, "open" is a necessary, but insufficient, precondition for auditing. But when the "open AI" movement touts its "safety" thanks to its "auditability," it fails to describe any steps it is taking to replicate these auditing institutions – how they'll be constituted, funded and directed. The story starts and ends with "transparency" and then makes the unjustifiable leap to "safety," without any intermediate steps about how the one will turn into the other.

It's a Magic Underpants Gnome story, in other words:

Step One: Transparency

Step Two: ??

Step Three: Safety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ih_TQWqCA

Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has gone on record as objecting to "burdensome mechanisms like licenses or audits" as an impediment to "innovation" – all the while arguing that these "burdensome mechanisms" should be mandatory for rival offerings that are more advanced than its own. To call this a "transparent ruse" is to do violence to good, hardworking transparent ruses all the world over:

https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Some "open AI" is much more open than the industry dominating offerings. There's EleutherAI, a donor-supported nonprofit whose model comes with documentation and code, licensed Apache 2.0. There are also some smaller academic offerings: Vicuna (UCSD/CMU/Berkeley); Koala (Berkeley) and Alpaca (Stanford).

These are indeed more open (though Alpaca – which ran on a laptop – had to be withdrawn because it "hallucinated" so profusely). But to the extent that the "open AI" movement invokes (or cares about) these projects, it is in order to brandish them before hostile policymakers and say, "Won't someone please think of the academics?" These are the poster children for proposals like exempting AI from antitrust enforcement, but they're not significant players in the "open AI" industry, nor are they likely to be for so long as the largest companies are running the show:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4493900

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

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

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

[gremlinmodetweeker]

Oh my God, your latest Cat AU prompt had me in a chokehold. Please keep writing them (of course when or if you want to, frfr) 🙏 Love em!!

I love your art and stories, I always have my eye out for you on my feed. Thank you for your time and gifting us your art.

Have you thought of mashing this all together into one big story/continuous chapters? Do you like getting ask prompts? Do you own cats? What's your favorite candy? (Haha ok maybe those last questions are unrelated, but I lost my childhood girlboss kitty who would steal pizza slices off the stove and fight coyotes reminds me of cat!Horangi and I'm a slut for sweets)

Thanks again for your time and hope all is well!

Okay, so, this is a long ask so forgive me for rambling a bit.

Most imortantly, thank you so so much for your support! As an up-and-coming writer on tumblr, this means the world to me. I cannot stress how thankful I am for all the messages, comments, reblogs and likes. Everything means so so much to me. I know I'm not the best artist/writer out there, but anythign you guys give me makes me smile, laugh and feel like I actually finally have a place in fandom. I finally feel like I'm not just observing, but actually adding to a community (Sideplug here's a konig tumblr community I started: https://www.tumblr.com/join/IsfMVrTZ). I cannot thank you all enough for giving me a place here at the table.

Now, as for CatHybrid!CoD, it's weird. I have a lot of thoughts of what's going on in the background (namely Shadow Company, TF141, and the rest of KorTac and what they're up to) but I really like to focus on König and Horangi because, ya know, they're my favs. I love those two goofballs. I think they're great and I love love love writing for them. Unfortunately, I'm really bad at coming up with random prompts on my own, so yes, I rely on asks to make Cat Hybrid!CoD a thing. I absolutely need asks. I love the asks because they inspire me to flesh out this world all the time. I cannot stress how much I appreciate them.

I would like to make a longer story, but I know the story ends with König and Horangi revealing their true hybrid status to reader and thus revealing the secret. Part of the joy of this story is keeping the secret, right? So it's hard because on one hand, I want to keep the secret forever, but I know the truth has to come out eventually. I don't know how to make the story yet because of that. I just get so conflicted. I could try it out though if you'd like? It's something to consider. I'm going up north to my parents for Christmas, so I might not have anything before then. Forgive me for that.

Finally, I do have a cat! Part of the big reason I'm going up north is to bring my senior cat back home with me. I feel bad moving an older cat, but Clovis is bonded to me. He gets miserable when I leave. I had to leave him behind when I moved out to college, but now I found a place where I can keep him with me. I love him so so much and he loves me, so I'm bringing him home where I can give him all the care he needs.

Since I have a cat, I know how painful it is to lose your best friend. It's heart wrenching beyond belief. I hope you're feeling okay now, and I hope your little girl is somewhere better now. I cannot stress how haunting the grief is. You learn to live, but in the beginning? I am still a bit shaken honestly. I hope Cat!Horangi can continue to inspire joy for you and make you smile.

Favourite candy? Candy corn, lindor's milk/peppermint/white chocolate, cadbury/lindt milk/white chocolate and the like. I don't like darrk chocolate so much (I got an 11lb bar of dark chocolate years ago and it was too much).

But yeah! Please send asks, they make this whole au real. I love them dearly. I'm not always the most timely in answering them (one in my inbox hasn't been answered because I'm still setting up the software to be able to ask it) but yeah, I do love asks. They always make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

[topazadine]

Let's do another spicy writing take, one that is going to get a lot of people very mad. However, please note that I am saying this out of love and concern. This is not an attack on you personally or on your writing process.

Take a deep breath, prepare to listen with an open mind. Alright. Here goes:

Stop starting a million WIPs.

I am serious. Please. Do not do that. Do not start a million WIPs.

Why? Because then you won't get any of them done. And why is that? Because you'll lose motivation, get distracted, and hop on to the next thing, leaving a trail of heartbreak in your wake.

I have 131 stories on Archive of Our Own and have written over 2 million words of fiction. Two. Million. Words.

Don't believe me? Look.

And then there's more that is not accounted for here: a 110k novel, another 109k novel, and a 20k novelette, along with my current WIP which is currently around 10k. All told, I have written approximately 2,084,000 words.

Are they all perfect? No, of course not, especially the older stuff. But is it done? Yep.

And I did that by doing each project one at a time.

If I get another story idea while I'm in the middle of another story, I write a note in my WIP list, but I don't start it. Only when I'm letting a story "rest" before editing do I start outlining another book, but I still don't start. I wait until I've finished one entire project before I do another one.

Your brain does not actually multitask. Our brains aren't wired to do that. This article from Forbes explains:

You are highly unlikely to be part of that 2.5% even if you think you are. I'm not, and you're probably not either.

What you are really doing is task switching. Take it from the software management program Asana:

That article from Forbes elaborates:

And it is even worse when you are hopping from one WIP to another, essentially changing contexts.

Pleexy, another task automation company, continues by discussing 'context switching':

Every time you stop working on one WIP, you are switching contexts and pulling yourself out of the world you have created, jumping into another. Now your brain is struggling to reorient itself, and it's not going to do its best work.

"But I love writing different WIPs and I get some of them done!"

I am sure you do, but is it your best effort? Would you have been able to write faster, more coherently, better, if you had only worked on one? Probably. And don't you want to do your best?

"But I have ideas and if I don't do them right now I'll forget them!!!"

Then write them down. I have a whole WIP list of things I am intending to write later. Make a notepad document, a spreadsheet, whatever, for your different WIPs.

When you think of something interesting for that project, put down a small note underneath it, but don't start writing! Your brain will let it marinate and when you're done with your current project, you'll have a better idea of what to do with it.

I like to visualize things before bed, so a lot of the time, I will use that visualization for a different project as my way to calm down, but I'm not devoting too much attention to it before I'm ready to work. I've got some scenes and images that I have daydreamed about, but I haven't drawn attention away from my current WIP by actually beginning to write.

This way, I can devote all of my brainpower to my current project while reserving a little bit of attention and aspiration for the next one. I also avoid writer's block because I have my next WIP lined up, waiting for me, and I can transition to it almost immediately.

Generally, I don't go more than a few days without starting a new project (after completing one!!!!!) because I am prepared for it: I can give it my full attention. There's no sitting around and waiting for inspiration.

"But I have so much inspiration for this project and want to start right away!"

Something I am learning as a writer is delayed gratification. I am an impulsive person and I want to jump into things right away, but then I get disappointed with the results. For example, I released 9 Years Yearning before commissioning a really good cover. I regret that and I'm going to learn from that mistake with the next book in The Eirenic Verses.

By waiting, you get a better payoff.

I've got four different projects waiting to be released and one waiting for serious revisions. They are all finished, but they're not polished. It would be very easy for me to spend a few hours formatting them and then just throw them up, but I won't get the best payoff then.

Instead, I'll wait for a break between projects before turning back to them and fixing them up, giving them all my attention. Yes, it means I don't release a billion books a year, but it also means I release my best work.

Writing is not a sprint; it's a marathon. It's okay to give your projects a break.

By letting my stories rest, sometimes for entire months, I can come back to them with fresh eyes and make sure they're perfect. The same is true of your WIPs. Let them sit and marinate for a while.

How to avoid having a billion WIPs:

Make a list of future WIPs. Put it in one document. Add things as you think about them.

Put this list of WIPs away and ignore it.

Allow yourself to get some writer's block if you're struggling with your current project. Writer's block is okay sometimes. Don't use writer's block as permission to start something else.

Put reminders up that tell you not to start things. I like the phrase "bird by bird" which I got from the eponymous book by Anne Lamott (which is really good writing advice).

Read up on task switching and the myth of multitasking to show why having a million WIPs doesn't work.

Interrogate yourself. When you have a bunch of WIPs, do you actually get any of them done? Be realistic and ruthless with yourself.

Look back at how many WIPs you have in storage. Identify your WIP completion rate. It's probably lower than you think.

Read about the writing habits of other writers. You'll find most successful writers do not have a ton of different projects at once. They also go one at a time.

"No I'm going to write a million WIPs anyway! You don't know me!"

Okay, then go for it. You're not obligated to take my advice. I can only tell you that the science - and my personal experience - says that's not a good idea.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter to me if you continue to stop and start a gazillion different projects and get none of them done. That's your problem, not mine.

But I'd rather you be able to finish something you're proud of, because then you're growing as a writer, and I always encourage personal growth.

It honestly makes me sad when people go "teehee I have soooo many WIPs and I just started another one hehehe!" because I know, without a doubt, that almost none of them will see the light of day.

You deserve better than a bunch of unfinished projects. You can achieve more than that. Put down the WIP list, focus on your current story, and go for it.

[dontforgetukraine]

US-Ukraine startup Esper Bionics makes robotic prostheses that are currently being used by over 30 Ukrainian soldiers serving in Russia's war and 80 veterans in Ukraine.

While the bionic arms and hands are not for military use and are not durable enough for combat, the wartime setting has yielded live feedback for the company from soldiers and veterans. One such example of Esper Bionics striving to meet the needs of their clients was making the fingers in the hand out of metal so that it could withstand more stress.

The company never planned to provide bionic prosthetic hands that would help soldiers return to combat back in 2019 when it was founded, but Russia's full scale invasion changed the startup's course. Now, research and development, assembly, and production all take place in Ukraine.

Through its donor-funded program Esper for Ukraine, the company is able to donate all the hands it produces to Ukrainians in need of prostheses.

In an example of artificial intelligence being used for good, Esper Bionics wants to incorporate AI into their bionic hands so the prostheses are more "context-aware" and "better able to predict its user's movements" and what the user wants to do in any particular situation.

The idea behind Esper Bionics' AI-powered future hand will be to create “an entire ecosystem” that can pass information from a series of sensors attached to its user to cloud-based software that constantly analyzes data to learn its users' habits.

The robotic look isn't just for functionality either, but a company goal to avoid the "uncanny valley" look. With attractive branding and designs, Chief of Marketing Dmytro Ganush says Esper Bionics seeks to promote the idea that people with limb differences don’t have a medical issue but “a really interesting lifestyle” or, if anything, “a gadget just like any other."

---

Ukraine is highly likely to become the country with the most prostheses used among its population. The effort to normalize and de-stigmatize disability must start now, and I'm glad Esper Bionics seems to have this in mind with their designs. The enthusiasm users have in the design of the bionic hands is promising, and I hope everyone involved has a bright future.

Source: Ukrainian startup Esper Bionics makes cyborgs a reality

[onlyplatonicirl]

I went to this conference with a smidge of hope. Maybe they would tell me something I didn't know, maybe the game had improved since the last time I saw it. Maybe they'd offer insight about the development process that would allow me to respect them and their work more. The panel was a bit less than an hour long, and I think I walked out of there hating Farm Merge Valley more than I did last year when i went on a screaming ranting paragraph long tirade about how i wanted to blow up their headquarters.

This shit is ASS. It is so ass that in the eight fucking years I have been studying professional creative writing I do not have the words available to describe how much I hate this game and their shitty ass conference that they didnt even bother to hide that it was sponsored and paid for by Discord. They essentially made me PAY THEM 300 DOLLARS TO LISTEN TO THEM ADVERTISE THEIR SHIT GAME VOLUNTARILY. Because no one would glaze this shit as hard as the own company. They had some woman come on and talk about discord like it was some fucking Utopia For Cool Guy Gamers TM and I think she's a higher up in the company, and she starts talking about the in-game activities. Which like, fine ok. Whatever. That's expected, it's nice to see game integration on the software I am genuinely interested in the stats with that. And then she turns it over to this guy. The head of "Cool Games" (WHY WOULD YOU NAME YOUR COMPANY THAT. YOU HAVE LESS SOUL IN YOU THAN A ROCK. WAKE UP. WAKE UP. LIVE. WAKE UP.) and the woman's like "This is our best selling game, farm merge valley!!!!!!!"

The head steps up. He starts talking about the game and saying things I already knew. But the one thing that drove me absolutely fucking crazy was that once he started getting into why the game was "Successful", his main angle was that "Farm Merge Valley is a social game, which is why its so popular! The future of gaming is collaborative and something you can play simultaneously!"

IM LEGITMATELY CLOSE TO COMMITTING RITUAL SUICIDE IN FRONT OF THIS GUY. THIS IS NOT A SOCIAL GAME. THIS IS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO A SOCIAL GAME. NOTHING ABOUT THIS GAME IS SOCIAL AND THE FACT THAT HE'S SAYING THATS WHY ITS A SUCCESS MAKES ME WANT TO DIVEBOMB OUT THE FIVE STORY WINDOW I WAS STARING OUT OF. THIS GAME RUNS ON CYCLES OF ADDITICTION TO INFINITELY REPETATIVE TASKS THAT APPEAL TO AUTISTIC PEOPLE WHO WANT TO KILL TIME. IT IS DESIGNED PURPOSEFULLY TO BE A SOULLESS HUSK. "ohhh we have such a loving community" YOU HAVE A COMMUNITY OF SOULLESS HUSKS. HE LITERALLY PUT A SCREENSHOT OF THE OFFICIAL FMV DISCORD SERVER AND ALL THE PEOPLE IN VCS LIKE "Look how social they are all playing together!!" AND EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE PICTURE WAS MUTED AND DEAFENED. IDID HE EXPECT HIS TARGET AUDIENCE TO BE MENTALLY BRAINDEAD CHIMPANZEES BECAUSE ANYONE WHO'S PLAYED THAT GAME FOR FIVE SECONDS KNOWS THAT NOT A SINGLE PERSON ACTIVELY COLLABORATES ON THAT GAME. THE ONLY SOCIAL ASPECT COMES FROM VISITING PEOPLES FARMS FOR ONE GOD DAMN FEMTOSECOND TO COLLECT A REWARD EQUIVALENT IN VALUE TO GAS STATION SHIT PELLETS ON THE FLOOR. NOT TO MENTION HE ACTIVELY BRAGGED ABOUT THE STATISTIC THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF PLAYERS SPENT EGREGIOUS AMOUNTS OF MONEY AND PLAYED FOR 7 HOURS A DAY. IM DEAD SERIOUS. BUT OF COURSE HE DIDNT GET INTO A SINGLE DETAIL ABOUT THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF IT AT ALL. MR MERGE VALLEY YOU HAVE A COMMUNITY OF SOULLESS ZOMBIES THAT BLEED THEIR WALLETS DRY THROUGH HYPNOSIS. YOU HAVE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS AND THE DAY OF ATONEMENT IS NIGH.

"we're unveiling a new update soon!!! We're gonna add an album for collection." ADD AN ARTIST THAT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THEY LEARNED HOW TO DRAW TEN MINUTES AGO FROM A "HOW TO DRAW MANGA" BOOK. ADD SOUL. ADD THE BREATH OF LIFE. YOU DO NOT RESPECT THIS PROFESSION AS AN ART AND IT SHOWS LIKE GLASS ARMOR OVER YOUR FRAIL HEART. I HAVE STARED THE DEVIL IN THE EYES AND HE HAS MADE FARM MERGE VALLEY. I HAVE PLEADED TO HEAVEN BUT IT FALLS UPON DEAF EARS. EVIL TAKES ROOT AS A CARROT.

another "Lorel hates farm merge valley" rant has hit the friend group. copypasta immediately.