#and some of the normies are from other streaming apps | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

missgalaxtea · 2 years ago

Text

Been looking for Twitter alternatives, and other social media sites in general. I'm on the waitlist for Bluesky. No idea when I'll see that, and I haven't heard much about it either. I signed up for CuriousCat for funsies, but I don't think it's what I was looking for. I likely won't use it much. Now on to the juicy stuff.

Last night I signed up for Threads and I already don't like it. Right now, there are zero ways to control your dashboard. Or much of anything, really. Just the basic functions of Instagram, but with words. I'll see one or two posts from people I follow before an endless stream of thoughts from people I don't know or care about. Seeing the 4,508,877th member badge on my Insta page, as it relates to Threads, just hammers home how we're all just pieces of data to get swallowed up by the conglomerate. Not even bothering to hide the fact that it's all a numbers game. The app itself is clunky, lacking soul and personality. It's so boring to look at. A lifeless machine, and all 30+ million users and growing are the franticly spinning cogs.

I've signed up for Pilowfort a little while ago and I like it so far. Its closer to Tumblr. Given that Tumblr is always on the brink of disappearing, it wouldn't hurt to have a back-up. There are posts for everyone to see that live on your blog, but there are also individual communities that act as forums. Posts can have individual comment sections, which I guess helps keep things on-topic. I'm going to slowly transition to cross-posting both old and new posts there. It seems promising, and the interactions I've had with other users thus far have been pleasant. I've already seen a few guides and helpful tips for the internet refugees.

Then there's Spoutible. It was touted as black-owned, having no algorithm, and having mods that handled hate speech and bigots swiftly and appropriately. Those are some green flags. They also have a cute little whale mascot, so all that combined had me. It is the closest to a Twitter clone I've come across so far. The interface is easy to understand and navigate. Posts are limited to 300 characters, and can include pictures, gifs, videos, and polls. There are a lot of safety measures for you to customize your experience to avoid malicious accounts. One being a rating system ranging from Normal to Problematic to help distinguish normies from bots. To post something is to "Spout Off." The trending topics page is titled "Making Waves." I like the vibes, and I believe this app has a lot of promise.

The truth is I've been kind of ambivalent to Twitter, even years before the Elon fiasco. When I first joined, it was for following my middle school and high school friends. After I graduated, those relationships fell off one by one. My dashboard morphed into a cascade of influencer updates and artist promotions. All I could offer was superficial consumption and meaningless life updates. Posting became a competition of who could be the funniest or who had the hottest take, and your whole psyche takes a hit when you just can't hack it. Maybe a restart was inevitable, and necessary for all of our sakes. I'll be taking Twitter off of my Linktree and other socials for the time being, and I don't see the point in linking any of these new socials until I've had enough time to play with them and figure things out.

TLDR: I'm not a tech genius. I simply operate on vibes. Bluesky is mysterious, more data needed. Threads is bloated and leans heavily on the algorithm. Pillowfort is a nice comfy space, just need to get used to it. Spoutible has potential and immaculate vibes.

#social media #pillowfort #threads #bluesky #spoutible #curious cat #hannah speaks

15 notes · View notes

working-on-becoming-a-better-me · 4 years ago

Text

Day 253—Mar. 23, 2021

Okay, so the numbers for my previous consecutive posts were off by a day (like a day ahead) and February 7′s math was way off, but I googled this! so from here on out, we will be accurate! let’s go bois!

BIG UPDATE BOIS! Essentially? I’VE GOTTEN BETTER! Mental health is better, habits are better, outlook on life is better, productivity... isn’t as high as it was when I first started the blog, but it’s doing MUCH better than November and even January.

coping with minecraft:

So, I’m still addicted to the dream smp minecraft fandom. my friend got me a dream hoodie, bucket hat, and a georgenotfound hoodie for my birthday. but! I’m coping better. I’m behind on streams, and am now catching up during Spring Break. For a while, I was pushing back school work to watch and catch up on streams. I promised myself that during free periods I would work since I was catching up on streams at home, and then... yeah. ANYWAY! I’ve gotten a lot better at that recently by noticing that even fanart accounts (accounts dedicated to mcyt-ers) were talking about how they didn’t watch a phasmaphobia stream because they weren’t interested in it, or talking about how they were behind on streams... it really helped me accept the fact that I can be a real fan and not watch every single stream.

cultural convention:

My international school does events with other international schools but because of covid, we can’t travel. I act and made varsity drama (we call it a different name, but yeah!) and we had virtual conferences. I was incredibly friendly and loud and there were tons of zoom calls. Our schools kinda known for being... uh, stuck up? and kinda elitist. Not like I was being fake, but I was making an effort to talk during calls and be active on group chats made. I joke-flirt a lot and focused my attention on one person. A whole thing ensued, but some of the other actors in my school (there were only 11 of us) were joking abut sending me to “horny jail” and one girl kept apologizing for me. During “lounge sessions” I would interject with what I thought were funny comments and she’d say “again, I’d like to apologize for her behavior” and... uh... I cried at school. Cuz I’ve heard way too many times from too many different people about how I’m embarrassing... BUT.

What really helped was the fact that there were late night zoom calls and I was one of only three kids from my school the first night on a call with around 25 people. Other people said I helped give them a really good first impression of our school, especially considering all the things they’d heard previously. The guy I joke-flirted with (I previously dmed him asking if he was okay with it and he said he was) said on a call that I was one of the funniest people he’d met in a while. It was a huge confidence booster in knowing that the efforts I was making were paying off :)

confidence:

Since starting this blog, I’ve been trying to be nicer to myself. I’ve been practicing more positive self speak and have recently realized the difference between the way I speak about and to myself and how some other people do. Being nicer to myself out loud has helped a lot in feeling better and more comfortable.

I wanted to try wearing black masks, but my mom bought the wrong kind. They had patterns and I was really nervous because I didn’t really want to stand out. I used to not care, but... I dunno. Teenagehood and whatnot. We wear uniforms too, so the only differences are in accessories, hair, etc. I’m not sure why, but I was really nervous to wear the new mask patterns to school. But I told myself it was an experiment, to force me to be more confident. I actually forgot I was wearing it until I saw myself. And since I’d posted on my private story saying I was doing this to try and be more comfortable, some of my friends came up to me and told me it was actually cute. Shows that I really had nothing to stress for. Not that it was really self-expression, but for me, and anyone else who needs to hear this, no one cares. Maybe they even wish they had the courage to wear different things as well.

mcyt mantra:

I have a mantra now! adapted from something drunk Wilbur Soot said during Quackity’s livestream, I think. I repeat it when I’m happy and when I’m nervous or scared and I guess... I dunno, I’m like classically conditioning myself? Except not really since I’m doing it out of order. But yeah! get yourself a mantra!!!

character day:

more with confidence! spirit week is just an excuse for kids to not wear their uniforms, but I put a lot of effort into an Ace Ventura outfit I put together. I only saw around two or three other people actually dressed up as characters, but I had so much fun and thought I looked amazing. I was proud that I wasn’t a normie ;]

Also... it’s so humid in this country and the rubber bottoms of my boots actually stuck to the pavement and fell off. I spent the day without the bottoms of my shoes and it was so funny. Even my mom laughed after (she laughed for so long, it was adorable) and she said only I could pull it off and that the friend I walk to school with everyday is lucky to have me as a friend. My mom was telling me about how she never had a friend like me growing up, just so weird and goofy. And it made me happy to think that I can bring so much... zaniness to people’s lives

ao3:

been writing a lot more recently! haven’t been posting on my writing blog since it’s all fanfiction, but it’s helping me write! I update one of my stories every two weeks. When I feel like I’m not doing enough, it’s a nice reminder that I actually can be consistent. I may be getting better... who knows :)

nehs:

been editing lots of papers even though I don’t need to anymore since I made vp of my school’s nehs chapter. but it’s helping me learn too! I’m very instinctual when writing, but obviously when I’m editing I can’t just ask them to change something because “it doesn’t sound right”. So I google explanations and then tell the people who’s papers I’m editing. It helps both them and me!

ipad/drawing:

got a new ipad for my birthday. been messing around with procreate. been doodling in class (only dream team characters so far lol). might be getting better... hopefully I am!

also have a sticky notes app on my ipad and been creating to-do lists! yay!

teaching:

been teaching students in cambodia! last year I had a teaching partner who guided lessons mostly. this year I’m the leading teacher. It’s helping with my fear of leadership and responsibility.

social:

still not the most social, but more active on snapchat now with keeping in contact with some of the cultural convention kids. covids made it harder to keep in contact, and I’ve been trying to reach out more to my closest friend who I’ve not hung out with in a while. not that we don’t see each other at lunch every other day, but I walk to school with, share a class and after school study hall with another friend. so comparably, I’ve spent less time with my closest friend.

recently had a spa day with my small neighborhood gang! my friend painted my other guy friend’s nails! yes! we used face masks as well :)

general update:

- went to the pool the other day and now I’m hecka burnt

- yesterday I wrote letters for honor society points, caught up on math hw, wrote a reflection and plan for a class, reviewed chinese with my mom, met up with my “mentor” for a class

- have been helping a lot of people! am currently a part of two people’s pieces for their theater class and I have a rehearsal later today!

- was doing a lot of work as an officer of thespian honor society—I’m likely going to be on the officer team again next year and, until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t felt like I’d been doing much and was feeling unworthy. but then I was proactive about something and updated our sponser (school’s drama director) on what we as officers decided. felt... prettyyy goooodddd :)

- !!! yesterday I went on a walk and brought money and my student ID, ready to buy bubble tea, but then... I mustered up what little willpower I had and then didn’t buy it. Instead, I bought surprise lilies for my mom (and some groceries she asked me to get) - been trying to cut out unnecessary sugars and foods. if I’m not hungry, I shouldn’t eat, but also... I listen to my body and if I’m feeling really snacky, I’ll indulge - recently been craving ice cream, but not the flavors in my fridge so instead I’m just not eating ice cream at all and ate an apple once as a substitute :D

- not sure if I’ve been sleeping more, but it kinda feels like I have been?

- started taking pictures of the world when I think it’s pretty one sunny afternoon when I was laughing lots with a friend... especially right after cul con, I was taking a lot more pictures...

- just been more active (not physically... though occasionally, when bored, I’ll stretch some... but I should try and get more active (I mean... the walk yesterday?))... creatively speaking (ao3, with art), socially online (cul con kids), in person (making plans over spring break!)...

- I just feel like I’ve been putting more effort into life

of course, there are the down bits, like for one project based class where the end product is due in May-ish and it focuses on the “process”... I’m just... not... process-ing. I chose a writing project (why). I’m focusing a lot on my side projects, but not my class writing one :/ as well as that, when assignments pick up, I do too, but when I get down time I feel like I deserve it (which I do!) but I don’t work ahead. I’ve been really busy though. Teaching got cancelled because the school in Cambodia shut down unfortunately due to covid. But before spring break, I was teaching, editing papers, writing my own for lang, doing cul con and then catching up on work I missed because of cul con, studying for tests, attending rehearsals... there’s a lot going on and I need to recognize that I am doing so well, especially compared with a few months prior when I was in a much darker place.

mostly stress has been my plague, but yeah! also in the span of one week, two classes bumped up a grade (or half a grade... we have letters and + system (no -)) so my previously low gpa became slightly less low! It gave me confidence that I can end the semester strong!

procrastination: another plague. I keep delaying setting up college counseling meetings and have delayed this update for a while now... and the project-class...

also have babysitting jobs again so we gon get some monnaayyyyy! (job is not from people we met at the pool, but we did meet people at the pool and their kids liked me so much they asked me mom to get me to babysit them... another boost to confidence! yay :) I’m a likeable person :] )

thanks for sticking around! I’m glad I’m getting this update in because I’m doing... really well :D hope you guys are also doing well or that it gets better!

0 notes

trendingnewsb · 8 years ago

Text

The coming of a fully automated society has led some Silicon Valley execs to extreme measures

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

Until a couple of years ago, Antonio Garcia Martinez was living the dream life: a tech-start up guy in Silicon Valley, surrounded by hip young millionaires and open plan offices.

He’d sold his online ad company to Twitter for a small fortune, and was working as a senior exec at Facebook (an experience he wrote up in his best-selling book, Chaos Monkeys). But at some point in 2015, he looked into the not-too-distant future and saw a very bleak world, one that was nothing like the polished utopia of connectivity and total information promised by his colleagues.

SEE ALSO: This is for you, Elon Musk: 5 threats to humanity greater than artificial intelligence

“Ive seen whats coming,” he told me when I visited him recently for BBC Twos Secrets of Silicon Valley. “And its a big self-driving truck thats about to run over this economy.”

Antonio is worried about where modern technology especially the twin forces of automation and artificial intelligence is taking us. He thinks its developing much faster than people outside Silicon Valley realize, and were on the cusp of another industrial revolution that will rip through the economy and destroy millions of jobs.

“Every time I meet someone from outside Silicon Valley a normy I can think of 10 companies that are working madly to put that person out of a job.”

Antonio estimates that within 30 years, half of us will be jobless. “Things could get ugly,” he told me. Its very scary, I think we could have some very dark days ahead of us.”

Think of the miners strike, but in every industry. People could be be driven to the streets, he fears, and in America at least, those people have guns. Law and order could break down, he says, maybe there will be some kind of violent revolution.

So, just passing 40, Antonio decided he needed some form of getaway, a place to escape if things turn sour. He now lives most of his life on a small Island called Orcas off the coast of Washington State, on five Walt Whitman acres that are only accessible by 4×4 via a bumpy dirt path that just about cuts through densely packed trees.

Instead of gleaming glass buildings and tastefully exposed brick, his new arrangements include: a tepee, a building plot, some guns, 5.56mm rounds, a compost toilet, a generator, wires, and soon-to-be-installed solar panels. It feels a million miles from his old stomping ground.

Former Facebook executive Antonio Garcia Martinez at his remote island hideout, ready in case automation causes social breakdown

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

Antonio isnt the only tech entrepreneur wondering if were clicking and swiping our way to dystopia. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and influential investor, told The New Yorker earlier this year that around half of all Silicon Valley billionaires have some degree of apocalypse insurance. Pay-Pal co-founder and influential venture capitalist Peter Thiel recently bought a 477-acre bolthole in New Zealand, and became a kiwi national to boot.

Others are getting together in secret Facebook groups to discuss survivalism tactics: helicopters, bomb-proofing, gold. Its not all driven by fears about technology terrorism, natural disasters, and pandemics also feature but much is.

According to Antonio, many tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are just as pessimistic as he is about the future theyre building. They dont say it in public of course, because whats the point. Its inevitable, they say; technology cant be stopped. Its a force of nature.

Even just a couple of years ago, this would have sounded like just another exhibit in the long-tradition of American dystopian paranoia. But the robot jobs apocalypse argument is starting to sound more reasonable by the day.

“Ive seen whats coming, and its a big self-driving truck thats about to run over this economy.”

The Economist, MIT Review, and Harvard Business Review have all recently published articles about how the economy is on the brink of transformation. President Obamas team suggested driverless cars would dispense with 3 million jobs pretty soon. According to the Bank of England, as many as 15 million British jobs might disappear within a generation.

I blame Hollywood for our lack of preparedness. Thanks to Blade Runner, Terminator, Ex Machina and the rest, artificial intelligence is now synonymous with sentient robots taking our jobs, our women, or our lives. Forget all that.

The A.I. revolution comes in the less sexy form of machine learning algorithms, which essentially means giving a machine lots of examples from which it can learn how to mimic human behaviour. It relies on data to improve, which creates a powerful feedback loop: more data fed in makes it smarter, which allows it to make more sense of any new data, which makes it smarter, and on and on and on.

Antonio thinks were entering into this sort of feedback loop. Over the last year or so, various forms of machine learning technology, teamed up with robotics, are making inroads into brick-laying, fruit-picking, burger-flipping, banking, trading, and driving. Even, heaven forbid, journalism and photography. Every year will bring more depressing news of things machines are better than us at.

New technology in the past has tended to increase markets and jobs. In the last industrial revolution, machinery freed up humans from physical tasks, allowing us to focus on mental ones. But this time, A.I. might have both covered.

Machine learning can, for example, already outperform the best doctors at diagnosing illness from CT scans, by running through millions of correct and thousands of incorrect examples real life doctors have produced over the years. Potentially no industry will be untouched.

Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, 27 year old founder of Starsky Robotics who are using $5 million of investment to develop self driving trucks.

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

The latest wave of machine learning is even smarter. It involves teaching machines to solve problems for themselves rather than just feeding them examples, by setting out rules and letting them get on with it. This has had particularly promising results when training neural networks (networks of artificial neurons that behave a little like real ones), using an approach called deep learning.

Recently, some neural network chatbots from Facebook were revealed to have gone rogue and invented their own language, before researchers shut them off. These simple chatbots were given a load of examples to spot basic patterns in human communication, and then conversed with themselves millions of times in order to figure out how negotiate with humans. What followed appeared as a stream of nonsense:

Bob: i can i i everything else.

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

No human, with the possible exception of one Chuckle Brother, talks like this. But the failed experiment proved an important point. It seems these chatbots had calculated, within the parameters of their task, and without human intervention, a more efficient way of negotiating. This is the essence of deep learning: coming up with new ways to tackle problems that are beyond us.

In the same week, Elon Musk (who believes A.I. is a great threat to humanity) and Mark Zuckerberg (who does not) got into a public row about the risks of letting A.I. like this loose. Zuck said Musk was irresponsible. Musk said Zuck’s understanding of the subject was ‘limited.’ But this misses the point.

A.I. is not about to go Skynet on us. These chatbots hadnt developed some sinister secret language. But mega-efficiency or neural network problem solving might be just as disruptive. True, some of the recent fear about the coming age of the robots is probably overdone. Were not all about to be turfed out by bots. And weve always had disruption: people were warning about a jobless economy 50 years ago too. Weve always found new jobs, and new ways to entertain ourselves.

Around half of all Silicon Valley billionaires have some degree of apocalypse insurance.

Let’s not forget the wonders of A.I., such as dramatically improving how doctors diagnose, which will certainly save lives. It will stimulate all sorts of exciting new research areas. Replacing people with machines will have other benefits, too: driverless lorries would almost certainly be safer than exhausted driver-full ones.

The most likely scenario, reckons Antonio, is a gradual dislocation of the economy and an accompanying escalation of unrest. David Autor, an MIT economist, reckons we could be heading toward a bar-belled shaped economy.

There will be a few lucrative tech jobs at the top of the market, but many of the middling jobs trucking, manufacturing will wither away. They will be replaced by jobs that cant be automated, in the low paid service sector. Maybe there will be new jobs who imagined app developer would be a profession but will they be the same sort of jobs? Will they be in the same places, or clustered together in already well-off cities?

Drivers alone taxi or truckers make up around 17 percent of the U.S. adult work force. Taxis are often the first jobs for newly arrived, low-skilled migrants; trucking is one of the reasonably well-paid jobs for Americans that are not highly educated. What are they going to do instead? Are the cashier operators, and burger flippers going to retrain overnight, and become software developers and poets?

At the very least it seems economic and social disruption and turbulence as we muddle through are likely. The whole shape of the economy could change too. Some worry about the possibility of growing inequality between the tech-innovators who own all the tech assets and the rest of us. A world where you either work for the machines or the machines work for you.

What does that mean for peoples sense of fairness or agency or well-being? Or the ability of governments to raise taxes? The Silicon Valley survivalists fear that, if this happens, people will look for scapegoats. And they might decide that techies are it.

Jamie Bartlett outside Apples new $5 billion HQ

Image: Tristan quinn / bbc

One of the questions I asked as part of this programme is whether we are prepared. We dont even know how little we know; and our politicians seem to know even less. I found one mention of artificial intelligence in the 2017 party manifestos.

When asked recently about the future of artificial intelligence and automation, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin replied that its not even on our radar screen and that hes not worried at all. A couple of months back his boss climbed into a huge rig wearing an I love trucks badge, just as nearly everyone in Silicon Valley agreed that the industry was about to be decimated.

Antonio told me in the race between technology and politics the technologists are winning. They will destroy jobs and economies before we even react to them.

Still, guns and solar panels? Survivalism seems like overkill to me. “What do you have?” Antonio asks, fiddling around with a tape measure outside his giant tepee. “Youre just betting that it doesnt happen.”

Before I can answer, he tells precisely me what I have: “You have hope, thats what you have. Hope. And hope is a shitty hedge.”

WATCH: This beautiful 32,000-square-foot mural was just unveiled in Rio