AnarchistArtificer

It's less about the ability to find the clitoris, and more about the will to do so. I think that it is more than a meme, but in the sense of "men seem so oblivious about the clitoris that surely they must not be able to find it". Some women do seem to genuinely believe this to be the case. I guess that, as absurd as it may sound, it may be more palatable to believe than "most of my partners don't give a fuck about my pleasure and I'm functionally little more than a fleshlight to them" There have been a few times where I have been a bi woman's first experience of sapphic sex, where they have told me that the sex was so good that it basically redefined for them what sex could be like. I don't know if it makes it more or less grim that I have slept with plenty of men who were invested in my pleasure enough that they actively enjoyed helping me to have a good time. I guess they have just been fairly unlucky with their partners.

youtu.be/Tgr4q7ci_9g

Oof, yeah, that's gross as hell. I imagine that must make the already pretty demoralising experience of online dating even worse. Guys like this get super defensive if you call them out on this transphobic bullshit too.

I've had a good experience on Feeld, as a bisexual woman. I've found that there are far fewer deceptive unicorn hunters on there (I say this as someone who is open to being someone's unicorn, if they are open and candid about their wishes. I once went on a Hinge date with a woman whose profile said she was a lesbian, but at the date, she ambushed me with her boyfriend. She said she lied because she didn't think I would have showed up to the date if she said she wanted to bring her boyfriend. Gross behaviour)

Vive la France

Man, that highlights how unhinged Zionism is as an ideology

Something that I think is grim is that a Jewish friend with family in Israel told me that they strongly suspect that the percentage of Jewish Israelis okay with ethnic cleansing is a fair chunk lower than 82%, but that because the media landscape in Israel is so homogeneous, and there's a lot of social stigma around being anti-genocide, that there are almost certainly people who don't agree with the ethnic cleansing, but say they do due to the pressure of social shaming. She went on to say that of course, the people who disagree inwardly but loudly agree outwardly are functionally the same as people who wholeheartedly agree with ethnic cleansing. However, this highlights how fucking tragic the state of Israel is even for Jewish Israelis; stuff like this is why she considers Israel to be an insult to Judaism. She has a small amount of sympathy for Zionism in theory, in that she understands why so many people felt like they would only be safe if there was a Jewish state. However, modern Zionism has taken an ideology that she already disagreed with, and turned it malignant — "and now we have a state that is in opposition to Judaism, through its endorsement of disgusting attitudes and actions in its Jewish citizens". I hadn't considered it that way before, and it made me feel sad to reflect on figures like 82%. I don't know what would be more tragic: if only 40% of people were actually pro-genocide, with the other 42% of people not being pro-genocide, but succumbing to social pressure and acting like they are; or if only 10% of people weren't pro-genocide but too scared to speak out. Both of those options are depressing, but in different ways

“About not delegating your brain to machines, that’s a fair point, and I would encourage people to consciously choose where to use machines and where to use their brain” Yeah, big agree on this front. We should be using technology as a tool to aid us to do the stuff we care about, rather than letting ourselves be made subordinate to the tech itself. For some people, that kind of agency means using an open source system like Listenbrainz, and for some, like the person you’re replying to, that means continuing to discover music in their own way. Both of these approaches are fine — indeed, the whole point of building tech that serves as tools is that if our experience tells us that we have a task that wouldn’t benefit from the tool, we can just leave it in the box. Personally, I enjoy going for a combination approach — I sometimes use listenbrainz as a catalyst to help me discover new stuff beyond my experience, but once I have a few new artists I’m interested in, I then go and do some manual digging around them. I don’t need to do this manual work part of it, but it’s a key part of my enjoyment of the music discovery process — so I can somewhat relate to the person you’re replying to’s preference

Yessss! I am so jazzed to see other people in this thread who love Listenbrainz as much as I do. I will always love it because it was my first ever contribution to open source software. It was only documentation, because I’m a mediocre programmer, but documentation is a big deal for projects like these. What I really liked about contributing is that I felt a real sense of contributing to something bigger than myself. I mean, I feel that with the fact that my listening data gets added to the pool itself, but I felt it even more so when helping with the documentation. It was only something small, but I liked the idea that I was helping future tinkerers experience a little less frustration than I felt when I struggled with the outdated documentation. It made me happy to think that I was facilitating more people to tinker. I may only be a mediocre programmer, but that just means I am well placed to help pave the way for people more skilled than I am. This is the kind of project that I want to exist in the world, and so helping to support it genuinely makes me feel a little more hopeful in the face of this increasingly enshittified world

I felt a bit weird about it at first, but the one thing keeping me tied to Spotify was how useful it was for discovering new music (though even that had been degrading by the time I cancelled it). If you’re someone who either prefers to listen to music that they already know and love, or someone who enjoys discovering new music through manual effort, then Listenbrainz isn’t for you However, if you’re currently relying on the recommendations of a service like Spotify, then it’s at least worth considering. For me, I became a lot more at ease with Listenbrainz when I realised that this kind of music recommendation simply isn’t possible without other people’s data — and that part of the “price” for being able to access recommendations built from that data is that my listening history gets added to the pool of listening data used by the recommendation system. If it’s Spotify’s pool that I’m contributing to, then I feel like I’m getting a pretty bad deal, because they hoard that data like a digital dragon, and then use it to further entrench their monopolistic position in the market. I don’t like that — it makes me feel complicit in the grossness. Whereas with Listenbrainz, I’m contributing to a data commons of sorts. Listenbrainz’s recommendation algorithm has gotten so much better in the couple of years that I’ve been using it, and that wouldn’t be possible without a growing pool of data. Independent researchers and developers are able to benefit from it, and the more people we have making stuff in this space, the more we chip away at Spotify’s power. Like I said, having my data be so public does make me feel a tad uneasy, but with data like this, it tends to only be valuable in bulk (meaning the system doesn’t care about any individual’s sad drinking songs), or hypothetically, to individuals who are excessively concerned with another individual (such as stalkers, I guess). However, that last point doesn’t concern me, because I made my Listenbrainz account under a username that’s unconnected to any of my others, and my profile shows no indication of who I am on Spotify. I’m sure that someone dedicated and skilled enough could retrieve my Spotify account name from the system, because I linked my account way back when I did have Spotify, but I trust Listenbrainz with my data a hell of a lot more than I do Spotify. Spotify definitely have way more money to hire cybersecurity folk to prevent exfiltration of user data, but they’re so opaque that even if there were a breach, I wouldn’t trust them to tell me. I’ve been following Listenbrainz’s development for a while, and they’re pretty cautious and transparent with how they go about things. To be clear, I’m not formally affiliated with Listenbrainz in any way. I have contributed to improving documentation a few times (because that’s usually the best way I can support open source projects, as a mediocre programmer), but that stems from the same thing that made me write this comment: I just really like what they’re trying to do, and I think the world would be a little better if more people joined it. (also, I am just a huge nerd for metadata schema, and the affiliated musicbrainz project has so much cool stuff for me to learn about)

When people are complaining about AI, it’s often the scale of it they have beef with: the fact that it’s being shoved into their face everywhere they look, mandated for use in their job by management, even if it does not make them more productive. A consequence of it being shoved everywhere are the larger problems that make people angry, such as the excessive resource use by AI data centres. I agree that LLMs are here to stay — I understand enough about how the tech works that I know that there is tremendous potential for their use (I originally got into learning about machine learning because I wanted to better understand AlphaFold, a protein structure prediction model made by Google Deepmind (not sure I’d count this as an LLM, but under the hood, it works pretty similarly)). However, the problem of AI is more about how the technology is functioning at a societal level than a purely technological problem. I believe that the current societal impact of the AI boom far exceeds the actual technological impact of LLMs. Whilst I get your point about the dotcom bubble analogy, I think that in that case, the ratio of “harms caused by the dotcom bubble” to “genuine societal impact of the technology once the bubble has popped” is much smaller. I grant that we have the benefit of hindsight with the internet, because the tech has had so much time to mature and become integrated with society, whereas we’re still in the middle of the AI hype bubble, but I don’t believe that LLMs/AI are capable of being anywhere near as transformative to society as the internet. There may be niche fields that are overturned or even functionally destroyed, but there are few genuine use-cases of LLMs. They’ll still exist after the bubble has popped, and they’ll have their uses, but I don’t believe they’ll be anywhere near as ubiquitous as they are now. Regardless of whether you agree with me on this, one thing we are in accord with is that the bubble is bullshit and harmful. Personally, something that frustrates me with it is that I am genuinely curious to see genuine progress in the real use cases for LLMs — I’m open to the possibility that in 10-20 years time, my predictions in my previous paragraph may have been proven to be wrong. However, the bubble is just delaying that kind of meaningful integration into society, as well as hindering areas of research that could improve LLMs (as well as crowding out other areas of AI research that are based on different architectures and methods, which may get us much closer to the sci-fi sense of AI than LLMs ever could. Song-Chun Zhu is an example of a researcher who used to work in this field of AI, but got burnt out by how the economic pressures on research meant that it was hard to do research that wasn’t based on this one dominant method. He’s one of many who is nowadays more interested in researching AI in a “small-data for big tasks” paradigm)

Marmite is really good for this. Some of the other go-to “umami bomb” condiments aren’t vegetarian, but Marmite works well for vegetarians

Thank you! I appreciate you for ensuring the artist gets credit. Plus I now get to see more of their stuff, so that’s neat too

I’ve never been in that particular pit, as I don’t experience gender dysphoria in my assigned gender, but I recognise the shape of the pit based on other experiences being hopeless. Giving into one’s hopelessness can be an odd comfort sometimes. If you believe that this is it for you and it can’t ever get better, then you’re protected from the pain of hoping for more. Sometimes you hope for more and you work ridiculously hard to make it happen, but it still doesn’t feel enough to make you want to live. The prospect of that is so scary that resigning oneself to misery feels safer. When I was very low, I resented people who were happier than me (which was most people) because they disrupted the worldview I’d built where there was no point in trying. Or alternatively, I resented them because I viewed them as being ontologically different to me — people who were born with the capacity to be happy, whereas people like me had no choice to stew in misery. What sucks is that I did have a choice about a lot of things, but I didn’t have a choice about the systemic oppression that pushed me down that pit in the first place. I’m doing a lot better now, and I don’t feel like I’m in a pit anymore (besides the ultra wide pit of “suffering under late stage capitalism”, but at least I’m in good company). To get to this point, I need to be able to acknowledge that I was both powerless and powerful in my own life. I feel sad whenever I see /tttt/ and other cult-like doomer cultures because I really sympathise.

:3

There’s actually a lot of trans women in the professional modelling world. One friend told me that due to preferences for taller women with particular bone structure, that the field actively selects for trans women. Like, there’s still way more cis women in modelling than trans women, simply because there’s way more cis women in the world, but trans women are disproportionately represented in modelling

It’s because there’s a significant proportion of people whose preferences are something behind “skinny, white, conventionally feminine woman”, and so when people outside of that demographic are featured in media, it freaks them out because their preferences are limited to people who fit within that narrow description, so wider diversity of people depicted in media is, to them, synonymous with a push for unattractive people in media. That in and of itself isn’t a problem — they have every right to their own preferences, and I have no interests in trying to convince them of anything. The problem is because they have attached themselves to the idea that their personal preferences are the objective standard. So when they see more diversity in media, and others thirsting for people they would consider to be objectively unattractive, this destabilises the idea that their preferences are The Truth. This means that, rather than just accepting that people like what they like, they contort themselves into believing that this is all a big conspiracy to try to push objectively unattractive people into media. Framing things like that means they end up seeing this as something that is entirely a political push to erode all foundations of society as part of some Woke ploy. They feel threatened and genuinely scared that there will be a future where there is literally no-one who they find attractive represented in media. Which is to say that someone who is accustomed to being the boot distrusts people who want there to be no boot, because surely they must be lying so that they can seize power and be the boot and crush everyone else. At the heart of this is a zero-sum way of thinking of the world. They have deeply internalised that if one group in society gains rights, or power of any sort, then it must come at the cost of someone else. Some of them occasionally show awareness of the moral awfulness of them using their privilege to oppress others in society, and they briefly have moments where they understand that if the oppressed wished to take our retribution against them, we would be justified. However, they are incapable (or unwilling) to actually reckon with all the cognitive dissonance they’ve built up, and so their fear causes them to become ever more rigid in their worldview. I find it fascinating, really. I am a fat, queer punk, and my existence is viscerally horrifying to them, because I am the epitome of so much of what they hate, and it breaks their brains to imagine that someone could find me attractive (tbh, it still sort of breaks my brain a bit too, but I’m getting there with improving my confidence). They genuinely believe that THE WOKE LEFT want everyone in media to look like me, even though that would be the opposite of the diversity we actually want. They don’t believe us when we say this though. Their zero sum thinking combined with their willful inability to acknowledge that their own preferences are as subjective as anyone’s means they don’t believe us when we say this though, and that this is all part of our dastardly plot to seize absolute power for ourselves and make them be the oppressed ones. It’s quite sad for them in the end. I’ve found that a huge part of what has allowed me to become more confident in myself has been acknowledging and embracing all the non conventional things I find attractive in other people. For instance, I firmly believe that the most beautiful point on basically any human body is the point where the curvature of the calf turns from being convex to concave. And because I don’t feel the need to convince other people of this, I can just let myself like what I like and be free to bite my partners’ calves. Even if their tastes do genuinely align with what is considered to be this narrow notion of “conventionally attractive”, I can’t imagine they feel very free to actually enjoy their own desires and their own bodily potential

That sounds super cool! Do you have any pics?

What it’s meant to mean is “yay us! We’re doing inclusivity!” What it actually means, to me, is “we will make a show of valuing disabled people, but we won’t go so far as to actually include them in the design process, thereby making this bench an artifact to our own self congratulation, as well as making wheelchair users feel excluded in a far more insidious way than they already did”. And I feel like an asshole to say it like that, but it’s so annoying to see well intentioned people fall at literally the first hurdle. Like, if they truly do see us as people who have intrinsic value that means we are worth including, then they also need to see us in our full personhood and include us in the process. The alternative is that their enthusiasm will just cause more money to be pissed down the drain on symbolic gestures that don’t fulfill their intended purpose

I can appreciate the thought, because as a part time wheelchair user, it does often wear me down when I feel like I’m perpetually perched on the periphery of any conversation. However, like you say, this is just far too impractical for most people. I have a small, active wheelchair, and even that would probably put me in front of friends sitting on the bench beside me. However, I can totally believe that this was made in earnest. I’ve seen some ridiculous “accommodations” that are ostensibly for disabled people that just show that the able bodied designer just didn’t involve any disabled people in the design process at all. And that’s why “nothing about us, without us” is a long used slogan used by disability rights campaigners. If anyone wants to see an example of good accessibility design, I love how they designed the packaging for the Xbox Accessible Controller. They included lots of people with varied needs across multiple stages of the design process, and it really shows. And the end product is so elegantly functional. I like this quote from Solomon Romney, a “Microsoft Retail Stores retail learning specialist": “The whole thing sort of blossoms open in this really beautiful, fluid way. The package just sort of opens and hands you the controller. What’s wonderful about it is the effortlessness.”

I would probably step out of the way of the trolley, but I admit that I would hesitate. If you saw my hesitation and if I was doing okay, I would say that I'm doing as well as I can be, under the circumstances. I am fortunate to have good people in my life. When things get to be a lot, connections with people I care about helps keep me grounded. The world often feels so awful that I feel hopeless. I also often feel awful, sometimes due to the world, sometimes due to brain weasels scurrying around in my head. But in the end, I figure that if I am someone who is able to see all the bad stuff that's happening as bad, then that suggests that I am probably a force for good, however small that may be. At least I can see the problem. If I died, there would be one less person who understands that things need to change. My resolve is weak and weary, but it endures. As long as it does, I would step off the tracks and give the gun to someone responsible asap. Edit: I know that the meme is a commentary on the recent murder of Renee Nicole Good. I was just waxing poetic on my own mostly-managed despair, which certainly is relevant to the topic of ICE's crimes. It's an interesting contrast: ICE would shoot the driver, whilst the rest of us are left to battle the dread that causes some of us to contemplate willingly falling to the trolley. *That's* why I'm trying to stick around — because if I let myself die, then that's just another injustice in the world.

This extension is Art

“Content not available in your region” because Imgur has blocked the UK due to the Online Safety Act. Lmao, this is hilarious in a grim way.

What makes it worse is that the legislators are technologically illiterate. I don’t expect politicians to be experts in everything, but I do expect them to listen to experts. Take chat control, for instance. Experts said that it would end up being harmful because the more legit sites would implement age controls, and that this would drive traffic to the less legit sites that aren’t implementing such controls — sites where there’s a much higher likelihood of harmful content like revenge porn, non-consensual porn, etc… And then when the completely predictable consequences of chat control arise, then the legislators have the audacity to be like shocked-pikachu.jpeg. And then they continue to ignore the experts and ask stupid questions like “how do we ban VPNs?”

That’s fine, it just becomes a balancing task.

Seconding the recommendation for Bitwarden. Starting using a password manager is one of the single most powerful improvements to my life in a long time. You know the phenomenon where you try to log into a website you rarely use, but your regular password doesn’t work, meaning you have to reset it — only to discover that your regular password didn’t work because the website has weirdly specific and persnickety password requirements (bonus points if you modify your usual password to fit their requirements and then the system says you can’t reuse an older password)? Well I haven’t had to deal with that problem in years. Being able to avoid that kind of thing saves a surprising amount of executive function energy in the long term. If I stongly encourage you try one out

I replayed Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines (2004) recently

This reminds me of the surprisingly effective inflatable frog costume that was in the news recently during protests against ICE