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captain-acab · 3 minutes
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captain-acab · 2 hours
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hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
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captain-acab · 3 hours
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captain-acab · 4 hours
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Some things I think people are overlooking in the tiktok ban bill, because it's not just a tiktok ban:
It gives the US government to ban *any* app, website, or company they believe to be "controlled" by an "adversarial power" which can change whenever they want
It allows the President and the Administrative branch almost unilateral power to designate *any* app, website, or company to be under the control of an "adversarial power" (and just think about how thelat can be used un the hands of, say, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis)
They have to offer little to no evidence for this. For example, tiktok - a Singaporean-headquartered and ran company, partially owned by US interests, incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and whose userdata is stored Austin, TX - is apparently controlled by the Chinese government
It also gives the Federal Government the ability to investigate and shut down any provider who gives access to these banned websites or services, including VPN. They will have unilateral power to dismantle VPNs through outrageous fines what will essentially force them to not operate in the US
A lot of the Congressional Representatives who supported this bill have large donors and/or stock in US Tech companies like Meta, Google, or Palantier who would benefit from the downfall of tiktok or the ability to purchase it and monopolize the market
Those same tech companies which sell our data constantly anyway, including to "adversarial powers"
This is so much more than just a tiktok ban.
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captain-acab · 5 hours
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When someone reads one of my posts where I lay out evidence and then decides that their vague intuition about how the world SHOULD work is more important than actual science, I have two options: explain why they’re wrong, AGAIN, or block them.
Anyway, listen, if “more cells=more cancer” is true, why don’t elephants have a CRAZY rate of cancer? They’re huge! Blue whales ought to be out there dropping like flies. But maybe, just maybe, it is MORE COMPLICATED than that.
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captain-acab · 7 hours
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I think it was about a month into dating my betrothed that I first turned to them and said, “You smell hungry, want to get some lunch?”
“I what? I smell hungry?”
“Yeah, like, the empty smell. Aren’t you hungry?”
They were, but it was hard for them to accept smelling a state of being. After a few weeks of me pointing it out right before they realized it themself though they asked, “What does hunger smell like?”
“Bad.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“It’s like… an emptiness that goes past the mouth? Bad breath is more upfront but hunger is like you’re smelling stomach acid, it’s all the way from an empty belly.”
They started smelling my mouth in exaggerated silly fashion but eventually they did start to recognize it.
They’re now very smug when they get to use the skill back at me and inform me that I’m hungry.
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captain-acab · 8 hours
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As I have mentioned before, its very hard to track any economic impact of new LLM models because a lot of systems are built with the "quality check" of "human effort as demonstrated by text responses" in mind, and in particular those have been the targets of application. Peer review, letters of recommendation, analytical reports (no one reads those!), certain legal briefs, etc. Now some systems are agnostic on the quality of those, its pure bureaucracy, so automating it is still a gain. But in the case of peer review, this is essentially an active loss, its shredding value, since current LLMs have dismal accuracy rates, coming to whatever conclusion their prompt implies (or just dice rolls), and that accuracy is why we care about peer review.
So whenever you see claims of "academics have reported 50% decreases in time spent on task X", it needs to be asked if that reduction is freeriding on systems slow to adapt to new ways of cheating.
Though to balance this, peer review is already a pretty broken system; if mass-scale delegitimization is the kick in the pants to make academia actually reform its practices, then that is a huge win. That second-order effect just has to happen first!
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captain-acab · 10 hours
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It has been brought to my attention that a large number of people probably don't know why Campbell's "monomyth" is bunk when discussing anything other than a piece of modern literature written under the direct influence of Campbell, in much the same way that a Freudian analysis of any story that was not written a) after Freud and b) based on acceptance of Freudian theory is bunk.
If you've studied English Lit and haven't done genuine rigorous dives into the serious studies of folklore, mythology, religion, anthropology and a number of other things, then you may have unfortunately been told by your literature professors that Campbell is not bunk. This is, indeed, unfortunate.
This is a solid takedown of why, both in terms of the fact that even Campbell's theory in and of itself is honestly so vague that it's much like a newspaper horoscope (you could shove anything in there and make it match if you tried hard enough), and then also in terms of engaging with the ethnocentric and also intellectually lazy nonsense it is.
Campbell was a literature prof who fully and completely believed in the Jungian (or at least branch of Jungian) premise that humanity has a collective psychic unconscious that is shared across the globe. He took single versions of stories, many of them in translation, massive numbers of them from cultures he did not know and did not understand, and hacked them up and reinterpreted them, out of context and based on Freudian and Jungian principles, to make a claim about a Universal Human Understanding.
This, of course, is ethnocentric bullshit.†
Now much like Freud was incredibly influential on the European literature of the early and mid 20th century and as such you absolutely should keep Freud in mind when reading, say, Sons and Lovers, Campbell was influential (and sadly continues to be influential) among lit and other creative spaces and is certainly applicable to, for instance, Star Wars and Labyrinth.
But much like Freud, you should not actually apply him to anything that wasn't written under his influence, because in terms of application to anything else, his theory is bunk.
It's also not taken seriously in literally. any. field. outside European lit circles and the visual media/etc that are their heirs. In fact the renowned folklorist Alan Dundes* said at one point, "there is no single idea promulgated by amateurs that has done more harm to serious folklore study than the notion of archetype".
tl;dr: fuck Joseph Campbell, stop letting him collapse the gorgeous array of human storytelling, mythmaking, meaning-making and metaphor into a boring tawdry (heterosexist and hetero-sex-obsessed) pastel, he is bunk.
But he's relevant to Labyrinth bc Lucas was a fanboy and also a producer, and the guy managed to convince a lot of people that he was legit.
†for instance just to start with the idea that there is only one version of literally any major cultural/folklore story is itself deeply silly; this is basically never the case. Even stories we here and now are used to thinking of as having one authoritative version - like the story of Achilles being only the Iliad - does not reflect the actual reality of the people of the time. Or us, for that matter: the cultures between the first written form of that epic and now have all of us reinvented, retold, reinterpreted and repurposed the story of Achilles to suit ourselves a million fucking times. There are a billion Achilles.
Fuck, man, you can't even claim there's only one version or one myth-set for fucking Batman, and he really was made up by one dude less than a century ago.
*who is himself not at all perfect, but who was at least an incredibly serious, dedicated scholar of folklore in its inception as an academic field
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captain-acab · 12 hours
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captain-acab · 13 hours
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Remember, on the first question asking how you would describe your political views, you are Moderate/middle of the road or Mostly conservative. You are not a raging leftist who holds these opinions, you are a potential undecided voter.
Hello everyone, the US Senate is conducting a survey to get the opinions of people on issues such as a ceasefire in Palestine, America funding Israel’s weapons, and the TikTok ban. Please share and take the survey, let your voices be heard. (Non Americans can participate )
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captain-acab · 13 hours
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New reaction pic for y'all to be used when you get into an argument about trans healthcare and your opponent starts talking about the 0.8% or whatever or trans people who regret transitioning
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captain-acab · 21 hours
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ARCANE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS: SEASON 1 ↳ Amanda Overton (Arcane Series Writer) x Tweets on Caitlyn and Vi
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captain-acab · 22 hours
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Hello! I come with some good news! In the EU, a law has been passed restricting generative AIs (particularly ones that pose a high risk). I hope other areas in the world follow suit, but this is huge! It'll take a while to be applied as well, though this is still a major win for everyone.
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captain-acab · 1 day
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captain-acab · 1 day
Video
LOL
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captain-acab · 1 day
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captain-acab · 1 day
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"taken" style action movie where a man searches for his wife. as he fights baddies in gunfights and hand-to-hand combat, it's slowly revealed that:
his wife hasn't been kidnapped
their marriage is not healthy or functional
this guy isn't rescuing his wife, he's hunting her down
his wife is a crime boss, those are her henchpeople he's fighting in a john-wick bloodbath
the tension builds until, drenched in blood, our protagonist steps forward for the final showdown. he pulls a manila envelope from his bullet-torn jacket and throws it at his wife's feet. he's just spent an entire trilogy biting & killing & maiming....all so he can deliver his shit wife her divorce papers
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