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mostlysignssomeportents · 25 days

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Humans are not perfectly vigilant

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

These "hallucinations" are a stubbornly persistent feature of large language models, because these models only give the illusion of understanding; in reality, they are just sophisticated forms of autocomplete, drawing on huge databases to make shrewd (but reliably fallible) guesses about which word comes next:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:

There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation;

There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator;

Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."

These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks – political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs – but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

The proposition that increasing training data will decrease hallucinations is hotly contested among AI practitioners. I confess that I don't know enough about AI to evaluate opposing sides' claims, but even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem. All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably very good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

This means that adding another order of magnitude more training data to AI won't just add massive computational expense – the data will be many orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire, even without factoring in the additional liability arising from new legal theories about scraping:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

That leaves us with "humans in the loop" – the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible – the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.

For example, my car has a system that notices when I activate my blinker while there's another car in my blind-spot. I'm pretty consistent about checking my blind spot, but I'm also a fallible human and there've been a couple times where the alert saved me from making a potentially dangerous maneuver. As disciplined as I am, I'm also sometimes forgetful about turning off lights, or waking up in time for work, or remembering someone's phone number (or birthday). I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.

There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.

That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a nightmare. I'm speaking here of the reverse-centaur: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done. Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying.

But an hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).

This turns AI-"assisted" coders into reverse centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665

There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently – so good that we miss the anomalies. That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773841546753831283

In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers. No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get less done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).

But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to reduce the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to increase their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway – that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world.

An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/nycs-government-chatbot-is-lying-about-city-laws-and-regulations/

The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.

But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.

Reverse centaurism is brutal. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it for and who it does it to. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur – lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

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

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

Jorge Royan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Two_boys_playing_in_a_park_-_7328.jpg

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

Noah Wulf (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #ai #supervised ai #humans in the loop #coding assistance #ai art #fully automated luxury communism #labor

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donald-trump-official · 1 month

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New campaign ad

[Sarah McLachlan’s “Arms of an Angel” starts playing over images of an empty trump tower penthouse suite]

Donald trump Jr. voiceover: hi, I’m Donald trump Jr. Every year, dozens and dozens of billionaires are subjected to unfair and unjust court rulings, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars, and the livelihood they worked so hard to achieve

[landscape view of a desolate, deserted luxurious golf course appears on screen]

Voiceover: in the time it takes you to watch this, billions of dollars will be unjustly stripped away from American patriots and businessmen

[image of a man passed out in a hot tub on a yacht, glass of bourbon and cigar in hand]

Voiceover: we can’t continue to let the deep state do this. We can’t let this continue. We can help these victims, and with your support we can save them from the tragic life of an upper-middle class lifestyle

[cut to a man on the side of the road wearing an Armani suit and a Rolex, cardboard sign in hand]

Voiceover: this isn’t the America I grew up in. This is full blown communism. And with your support, we can stop it. We can put an end to this lawlessness and unjust treatment

[an above view of a Gucci bag falling into a trash can appears on screen, with a superimposed BOOM resonating out after it hits the bottom]

Voiceover: with your monthly $500 donation, we can get these great American businessmen back on their feet. We can truly help these people and make America great again

[in fades the silhouette of a man leaning against his private jet, his back to the camera, clearly sobbing]

Voiceover: please, call now. Don’t wait. We can put an end to this cruelty once and for all. Our wire transfers are always open and staffed by real billionaires affected by this socialist agenda. Now is the time to act

[“Arms of an Angel” fades out to a picture of Donald trump waving to his supporters]

#trump speaks again #satire #donald trump #parody

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tinydeskwriter · 1 month

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LOVE HOLD|⟮little miss maverick⟯

lando norris x wolff reader| wolff reader x f1 grid platonic (mostly)

a/n: there is no face claim, I just can't resist te perfection that is Anya Taylor-Joy(I wanted to save her for a Häkkinen!reader, but couldn't stop myself when I started the dior montage). those are little snippets from her life between the GQ video and Bahrain 23', to give some context. I gave names to y/n mother, sister, stepfather and etc, because I find mad confusing to put a bunch of y/mn, y/s/n, y/bff/n, it gets tiring and confusing especially if it comes one after the other in a social media tag or paragraph, thats the only reason I gave them names. there is a few tennis players in this story, not too crazy, but as it is a character a little bit inspired by break point some of those guys will show up and the netflix show will be mentioned. comment and give it a like if you like, I love to read what you guys have to say and your thoughts. I also gave a name to the series, it is very cliche but I couldn't think of nothing better.

«previous part | next part»

liked by lilymhe, lewishamilton and 865,678 others

(tagged: patrickmouratoglou; matsbahr; susie_wolff; lucy.abrams; british_airways; adidas; redbull; yonex_tennis; hbsc; hiltonhotels; hermes; charles_leclerc; carlossainz55; pierregasly; landonorris; benshelton; mariasherapova; the_kokk1; carlitosalcarazz; lewishamilton; georgerussell63; carmenmmundt)

y/name.wolff it wasn't easy but we did it! today my dream came true, in winning my twelfth title today, the fourth in a row this calendar year, I became the sixth grand slam champion in history, the fourth woman to do so and the very first brit. it takes a village and i would not have managed it without the amazing team i have behind me supporting me at every step. shout out to my coaches, my therapist, my sponsors and my family.🤍🏆🏆

thank u all for the flowers. i will be seeing a few of you in monza.

(i believe I tagged everyone, but my hands are shaking so much and is hard to see through my happy tears, so, if i forgot to tag you, consider yourself thanked)

view all 23,567 comments

pierregasly congratulations little wolff, never doubted you

↳y/n.wolff thank u 🍐

redbull #1!!!

↳y/name.wolff red bull gives you wings 😘

user1 mother is mothering😍😍

georgerussel63 #goat 🐐

landonorris 🔥🔥🔥

↳landonorris congratulations on yet another win, always knew you would🥇

↳ y/n.wolff thank you lan🤍

↳user4 the heart😍

↳user5 'lan' , oml

user2 girly is so delulu she forgot serenawilliams has like 30 grand slams

↳user3 serenawilliams has 23 titles from grand slams events, which eventually was a career grand slam, but she never managed all in a calendar year which is a true grand slam, y/n.wolff is the sixth tennis player to do so, and if she wins the WTA final in november she will have the super slam

benshelton #goat status🐐proud to see one of the greatest of our generation achieving something not even our heros did. keep going sis, next step is to make this a super slam 🥇

↳ y/n.wolff thank you little bro, you and those powerful serves next

mariasherapova little miss maverick. congrats kid, keep going marveling the world with your talent and breaking records along the way 🐐

↳ y/n.wolff🤍🤍🤍

11th Sep 2022

y/n.wolff added to her story:

Nov 9th 2022

liked by landonorris, charles_leclerc & 933,566 others

(tagged: opheliagatz; p.blanchard; cassandra.blanchard; giambattistavalliparis)

y/n.wolff 09·01·2023· the day is here, it only took you guys 20 years of living in sin, 15 years of engagement and raising two beautiful, charming, talented daughters together to finally put a ring on it. i am grateful every single day that in a world with 9 billion people, living in the same city, sharing common friends, you two manage to met outside a little cafe in milano in the summer of 03'(btw, i had the honor of witness this cosmic encounter, though i claim no recollection of the event). père phillippe, thank you for all the years as my bonus father and all the support you always gave me (there is no backing now).

love you two more than words can describe. thank u for trusting me with the role of maid of honour, hope i did a good job.

view all 13,668 comments

landonorris congrats to mamma O and Phil❤️ beautiful cerimony

↳y/n.wolff 🤍

user1 was lando at the wedding???

Jan 10th 2023

y/n.wolff added to her story:

Jan 14th 2023

liked by pierregasly, dior & 933,566 others

(tagged: dior)

y/n.wolff i am happy to be (finally) able to announce that yours truly is now (officially) a dior muse and the new face of diorissimo🤍🤍🤍

view all 33,669 comments

mariagraziachiuri I am so happy to share this journey with someone I have seen grow into the beautiful woman she is today, such an example of timeless beauty and elegance, our true English Rose and the incarnation of the spirit Diorissimo.

↳y/n.wolff grazie mille Maria, thank you so much for the trust

Feb 27th 2023

y/n.wolff after three tournaments back-to-back and a brief pitstop in paris for fashion week, miss éclair wolff and I are heading to bahrain to watch 19 millionaires playboys going vrom vrom in circles for second place😊

view all 23,567 comments

landonorris uncalled for ☹️

↳y/n.wolff as is your tractor 🙂

↳landonorris ☹️

↳y/n.wolff luv u sugarboo🤍

«previous part | next part»

tag list: @myescapefromthislife | @kapsylia | @biitch-with-wifi

#f1 imagine #lando norris imagine #lando norris #lando x reader #lando norris x reader #lando norris x you #charles leclerc x reader #lance stroll x reader #carlos sainz x reader #pierre gasly x reader #f1 grid x reader

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ourdawnishotterthanourday · 10 months

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Welcome to SEVENTEEN World — A SEVENTEEN World Series

💼 CEO Edition

✧ Genre: CEO au; SMUT [18+], fluff, angst (+ more will be added in chapters) ♡ Pairing: female!reader x CEO!SEVENTEEN member ♕ Shout out: special thanks to @fugaciousserendipity for the support! And thank you lovely @outromoni for all the amazing SEVENTEEN World banners 💜 love them so much eeeeeeep!!! ✎ Note: Make sure to enable the MATURE community label if you want to read the individual chapters!!!! The smut, however, is optional!

☀ if you want to be added to the tag list, leave a comment or send me an ask! ☑ — completed ✍ — in progress ✖ — not yet started

ღ Prologue ☑

Where Everything Started. (3.5k+ words)

~ How did a drunken thought turn into a multi-billion dollar business? This is how 13 friends turned their dreams into reality. This is the story of SEVENTEEN World and where it all started.

✧ CEO JEON WONWOO ☑

Don't Tell The Boss. [SMUT] (31k+ words)

Lawyer!reader, Seungcheol’s sister!reader x CEO Jeon Wonwoo ~ You were off limits. Seungcheol had made that absolutely clear from the very start. Wonwoo knew that, the other CEOs did and even you were aware of that fact. But when Wonwoo is tasked to fill in for Seungcheol during his monthly legal consult, he certainly didn’t think that you’d be there, his best friend’s sister, the one person he wasn’t allowed to get close to. Then why did he suddenly find himself asking you out? And why did you say yes?

✧ MANAGING CEO CHOI SEUNGCHEOL ✍

Melon Pang! — PART ONE ☑ (32k+ words)

Barista!reader x CEO Choi Seungcheol ~ The last thing Seungcheol expected was to argue with a random stranger in a bakery after an awfully stressful day. But how could he not when this person was about to take the last melon pan? You were in a similar position. Your boss had been nagging you non-stop at work and all you wanted was your favorite snack, followed by a movie marathon on the couch. Instead, you find yourself having to deal with this stubborn guy who thinks the whole world is his.

✧ CEO XU MINGHAO ✖

IT expert!reader x CEO Xu Minghao ~ As part of his evening routine, Minghao always went on a run to clear his mind and most importantly, escape the two bodyguards that he was stuck with nearly 24/7. That’s when he encounters you, being harassed by a pair of nasty-looking men that seemed to want something from you. And with a reputation like his, he couldn’t just idly stand by. You, on the other hand, were just trying to get home after your late-night shift. But you didn’t anticipate being ambushed by these scary men, and you definitely didn’t anticipate a stranger coming to your rescue.

✧ CEO CHOI HANSOL ✖

Vet!reader x CEO Choi Hansol ~ Vernon and you had been good friends even before SEVENTEEN World was first established. Together, you worked at the animal shelter, with you being the local vet. So, when he became CEO, he asked you to join him at the rescue center, and you saw no reason to refuse such a good offer. As the two of you grow closer due to the nature of your jobs, slowly but surely, Vernon starts to realize that what he feels for you is more than just friendship. However, there is one little thing: you’re engaged. And from what Vernon has seen, the guy is a complete ass. How will he convince you that you’re making a mistake? Or maybe he doesn’t even have to…

✧ CEO KWON SOONYOUNG ✖

Dancer!reader x CEO Kwon Soonyoung ~ There are times when Soonyoung just wants to dance without feeling like he’s constantly being watched. That’s why he has been frequenting a small private dance studio, where he rents a room when he needs to be alone. It just so happens that you also frequent the place for similar reasons. An unfortunate event causes the two of you to meet and from that moment, the both of you start to form a friendship. Well, you’re not sure if you can call it a real friendship when the man who supposedly saved your life doesn’t even dare to show you his face. Who the hell is he and why is he so set on trying to keep his identity a secret from you?

✧ CEO HONG JISOO ✖

Linguist!reader x CEO Hong Jisoo ~ With his busy schedule, it isn’t often that Joshua is able to give seminars. So when a spot opens up in his calendar, he decides to teach a summer course for any students or researchers interested in the history of language. You, a linguist at heart, were planning to travel to South Korea for a few months to explore the culture and the language in particular. Once you hear about Language Lab SEVENTEEN and the summer course given by the CEO himself, you can’t help but sign up for it. There, Joshua encounters you, a woman who is not afraid to tell him when he is wrong, even if it’s in the middle of a packed lecture hall. He knows he’s not supposed to get involved with his students, but you’ve caught his attention and now he can’t stop thinking about you.

✧ CEO LEE CHAN ✖

Photographer!reader x CEO Lee Chan ~ Chan first met you when he was out on a walk and you were wandering through the city, looking for interesting things to photograph. The two of you hit it off almost immediately and it didn’t take long before the two of you started dating. But when a picture of the two of you appears in the media, you suddenly find yourself living your worst nightmare: at the center of attention. Pretty soon, it becomes clear to you that Chan is CEO Lee Chan of SEVENTEEN Productions, which makes you realize that he’s been keeping this big part of his life from you the whole time. But why would he do that to you? And how are you going to get rid of these reporters that just won’t leave you alone?

✧ CEO KIM MINGYU ✖

Food critic!reader x CEO Kim Mingyu ~ Ever since you left a negative review on your blog for the Flavor Factory SEVENTEEN branch in Seoul, Mingyu has been trying to hunt you down. Because who did you think you were to judge his food? And why were you hiding behind your computer? You, however, were just content with your life, with a successful food blog where no one was aware of your identity. So, you certainly didn’t expect the CEO of Flavor Factory SEVENTEEN to come knocking at your door in the middle of a workout session.

✧ CEO YOON JEONGHAN ✖

Junior designer!reader x CEO Yoon Jeonghan ~ From the moment you started working at SEVENTEEN Fashion as a junior designer, your superior seemed to have it out for you. No matter what you did, the woman always critiqued your work or made you work overtime while your colleagues had already left hours ago. Jeonghan has always prided himself in the fact that he treats all employees with respect, regardless of their position. So, when he finds out that it was you, and not your superior, who was responsible for the brilliant idea that got the company’s sales to skyrocket, he decides to get to the bottom of it and ends up taking a special interest in you.

✧ CEO LEE SEOKMIN ✖

Temp!reader x CEO Lee Seokmin ~ Seokmin had always been a little clumsy. And it just so happened that he decided to get a coffee at the same time that you went to get one. What he didn’t expect was to be the cause of you spilling your coffee all over yourself, and the mental breakdown that followed said incident. You were already having a bad morning, so the last thing you needed was a stranger spilling the coffee you’d paid for with your hard-earned money. Or was he perhaps the solution to all your problems?

✧ CEO BOO SEUNGKWAN ✖

Waitress!reader, Childhood friend!reader x CEO Boo Seungkwan ~ It had been years since Seungkwan had taken a proper break from anything work-related. When he is forced to take a break by the other 12 CEOs, he returns to his family in Jeju Island, where he meets you, his childhood friend, working at your family’s restaurant. You? You never thought you’d see Seungkwan again. Not after he became successful and the two of you started drifting apart. So, why did he think he could suddenly step back into your life again?

✧ CEO LEE JIHOON ✖

Office worker!reader x CEO Lee Jihoon ~ Part of being a CEO meant attending social events and unfortunately, that was something Jihoon absolutely hated. After one particular long event, he ends up going to his favorite lookout spot to be alone and clear his thoughts. He didn’t expect anyone to know about that spot. So, he is surprised to find you there, in his spot, and you just won’t stop talking…about your issues, your family, your job and your stupid obsession with HIT SEVENTEEN’s CEO. But then why does he keep coming back, knowing that you’re going to be there too?

✧ CEO WEN JUNHUI ✖

Musician!reader x CEO Wen Junhui ~ It is through Jihoon that Jun meets you. You’d been in contact with Jihoon for a while to collaborate on a music project, and after months of exchanging emails with demos, he finally invited you to Seoul for some in-person sessions. Given your musical talent and the fact that you’ve been living in China for the past 10 years, Jihoon decides that it’s a good idea to introduce you to Jun, who wants nothing more than to find his special someone. When the hotel you’ve booked suddenly cancels on you, you have to decide whether you want to take Jun up on his offer to stay with him for the few days that you’re in Seoul. He was a well-respected man in his field and you trusted Jihoon’s judgment, so what could possibly go wrong?

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batboyblog · 2 months

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Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week. #5

Feb 9-16 2024

The Department of Education released the first draft for a wide ranging student loan forgiveness plan. After Biden's first attempt at student debt forgiveness was struck down at the Supreme Court in 2023, this new plan is an attempt to replace it with something that will hold up in court. The plan hopes to forgive debt for anyone facing "financial hardship" which has been as broadly defined as possible. Another part of the plan hopes to eliminate $10-20,000 in interest from all student loans, as well as a wide ranging public Information push to inform people of other forgiveness programs they qualify for but don't know about.

The House passed 1.2 Billion Dollars to combat human trafficking, including $175 million in housing assistance to human trafficking victims

The Department of Transportation announced $970 Million for improvements at 114 airports across 44 states and 3 territories. They include $40 million to O'Hare International in Chicago to improve passenger experience by reconfiguring TSA and baggage claims, and installing ADA compliant bathrooms(!). The loans will also go to connecting airports to mass transit, boosted sustainability, installing solar and wind power, and expanding service to under served committees around the country.

Medicare & Medicaid released new guidelines to allow people to pay out of pocket prescription drug coats in monthly installments rather than as a lump sum. This together with capping the price of certain drugs and penalties for drug companies that rise prices over inflation is expected to save the public millions on drug coasts and assure people don't pass on a prescription because they can't pay upfront

The EPA announced its adding 150 more communities to its Closing America's Wastewater Access Gap Community Initiative. 2.2 Million Americans do not have basic running water and indoor plumbing. Broken and unreliable wastewater infrastructure exposed many of those to dangerous raw sewage. These Americans live primarily in poor and rural communities, many predominantly Black communities in the south as well as those on tribal lands. The program is aiming to close the wastewater gap and insure all Americans have access to reliable clear water.

The White House announced deferred action for Palestinians in the US. This means any Palestinian living in the United States, no mater their legal status, can not be deported for any reason for the next 18 months.

The Department of Energy announced $60 million in investment into clean geothermal energy. The plan will hopefully lead to a 90% decrease in the coasts of geothermal. DOE estimates hold that geothermal might be able to power the hopes of 65 million Americans by 2050 making it a key step in the Biden administration plan for a carbon-free grid by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050.

The EPA launched $83 million to help improve air quality monitoring across America. With updated equipment local agencies will be better able to report on air quality, give more localized reports of bad air quality and the country will be better equipped to start mitigating the problem

The Department of Energy announced $63 million in investments in domestic heat-pump manufacturing. Studies have shown that heat-pumps reduce green house gases by 50% over the most efficient condensing gas boilers, as technology improves this could rise to 75% by 2030. Heat pump water heaters meanwhile are 2 to 3 times as energy efficient as conventional electric water heaters.

HHS awarded $5.1 million to organizations working with LGBTQI+ Youth and their Families. The programs focus on preventing homelessness, fighting depression and suicide, drug use and HIV prevention and treatment, as well as family counseling and support interventions tailored for LGBTQI+ families.

The House passed two bills in support of the oppressed Uyghur minority in China. The "No Dollars To Uyghur Forced Labor" Act would prohibit the US government from spending any money on projects that source materials from Xinjiang. The Uyghur Policy Act would create a permanent post at the State Department to coordinate policy on Uyghur Issues, much like the special ambassador on antisemitism.

#Joe Biden #Thanks Biden #politics #US politics #Democrats #climate change #student loans #student loan forgiveness #green energy #Palestinians #Uyghur

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gh0stsp1d3r · 10 months

Note

Hey there! Is t possible for a Hobie X f!reader who tends to ramble about the most random things?

I find myself blurting the most random shit ever and wonder how it'd be like with Hobie! Ty!

Rambling

I do this all the time tbh..

“Hobieee.” You sung, while you both were in the middle of trying to go to sleep.

"Yeah?” He asked, voice raspy and eyes still closed.

Hobie loved your rambling, he really did. But not while he was trying to sleep, and he was exhausted. But he also just enjoyed hearing your voice so he didn’t say anything about it.

“I love you. You know, something really great happened today. I was walking around and I saw…. People. Yup I saw people. And those people i dunno.. they were just like so… peopley.. you know what I mean?”

“So.. you woke me up to tell me that you saw people?”

“And that I loved you.” You added.

“That’s great, I love you too.” He laughed quietly, and quickly nodded back off to sleep in seconds.

————————————————————————

Hobie webbed the man, and punched him in the face. You looked up at Hobie and waited for him on the sidewalk.

“I’m so glad that my amazing boyfriend is spiderman.” You told him when he walked back up to you.

“Why’s that, love?”

“Because.” You shrugged. “It’s sexy and you can always save me if anything happens.” You shrugged, putting your hands in the jacket that Hobie gave to you.

“And you’ve saved me like a billion times. And it’s hot, did I mention that it’s sexy? And you’re literally the coolest ever.”

He laughed at that, and under the mask smiled.

“Well, I’d love to keep talking but I gotta go to HQ.” He said, making sure no one was around and pulling up his mask. You kissed him and he grabbed your waist and kissed you back.

When you both pulled away you smiled.

“Alright, go do your spiderman stuff.” You kissed his cheek again. He pulled down his mask, and winked at you.

“I’ll see you later, love.” And opened a portal, leaving to HQ.

——————

Tag list: @enviinotes @rayis-psychotic @korizzybee @animechick555 @stupid-ninja @rreasonablydumbb @xxqueen-of-horrorrxx @spidypunkk @criodzasn

@techta @1eonk @chipstermation6 @whosace16 @ @l-pandamatic-l

@spider-phoenix @zebralover @my-melo-gf @wiz-te-ria @tzuyuzzs @luvsaluv @mxkn

@deputy-videogamer @666kpopfan @jared-oranges @likelilac @jjkclub

@kitty-kei @blaxk-widow @hoesindifferentshows @lavsluvsu @lampylamperson @artsykerfuffleplus @notbluees @sp0kyzz @arlipooh @freeingrebels @ken-zah @blustalker @cursedbitchboy @romanoffswoman

@chaoticevilbakugo

#hobie brown #hobie brown x reader #hobie brown x fem!reader #spider punk #across the spiderverse

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reasonsforhope · 10 months

Text

"One of the many benefits of solar power is the speed and scale at which it can be deployed. But, despite this, some states still manage to exceed expectations. Viet Nam is one such place. In 2010, the South East Asian country was ranked 196th in the world according to its solar energy capacity. By 2021, Viet Nam had climbed to ninth in the global rankings, jumping above both Spain and France, an astonishing ascendancy.

In 2018, Vietnamese solar generation was close to zero TWh, but in 2022, solar accounted for 11 percent (14 TWh) of electricity demand from January to June. The rapid growth of solar throughout Viet Nam is estimated to have saved the nation $1.7 billion in potential fossil fuel costs – and this is without factoring in the human, social and environmental harms created through burning fossil fuels.

Viet Nam’s ability to rapidly scale up solar generation over the last decade is down to a combination of factors, including supportive government intervention, a positive policy environment and international collaboration. Targeted investment in key infrastructure was essential, and worked alongside a growing demand for cheap, secure, and clean energy from Vietnamese citizens and businesses. The foundations have been set for Viet Nam to continue its rapid growth in solar, climbing further up the global rankings.

Lessons for rapid transition: How did they do it?

A generous policy mix including tax breaks and a bold feed-in tariff to enable the scaling up of solar generation and bring in new actors.

Investing in transmission and distribution to ensure that the added solar capacity can meet rising energy demand.

Sky-high demand from citizens and businesses driven by concerns over air quality and the availability of affordable household solar systems for clean, reliable and cheap electricity."

-via Rapid Transition Alliance, January 25, 2023

#vietnam #viet nam #fossil fuels #solar power #solar #clean energy #sustainability #air pollution #carbon emissions #infrastructure #asia #southeast asia #good news #hope

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ladykailitha · 7 months

Text

Grief (A Friend Indeed) Part 5

Thank you for all the great responses to this story it really means a lot.

Now they are doing a singing thing in this chapter, it's not that chapter yet. This is a prelude to that. Plus, I wanted to have Steve sing "Somebody' by Depeche Mode off the same album him and Lauren were talking about in the last chapter. Change the pronouns and it's definitely about all things Steve loves about Eddie.

I also added Lauren singing "Here Comes the Rain Again" from the suggestion in the poll because it's such a great song.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

***

Steve questioned the wisdom of going out to a bar their first day in Ashland, tired as both Eddie and he were. But at the same time it was also nice to get out and just have fun.

Apparently Danny’s brother Hal ran the joint so Lauren, Eddie, and he could come in. As long as they didn’t try and get booze they were fine to do anything else. Pool, darts, and even a little stage for people to sing.

Hal told them that he tried to get one of those newfangled karaoke machines but that they were on back order until Christmas. But they were more then welcome to sing their heart out to jukebox in the corner.

Lauren got up there and sang Here Comes the Rain Again by the Eurythmics.

“Falling on my head like a new emotion,” she crooned, just as low and melodic as Annie Lennox. “I wanna walk in the open wind. I wanna talk lovers do. Want dive into you ocean, is it raining with you?”

“Are all you Munsons talented in the music department?” Steve asked Eddie as he watched Lauren continue to belt out the song.

Eddie laughed. “No. I don’t know about my dad, but Wayne can’t carry a tune to save his life.”

“Maybe he’s talented in other ways,” Steve said with a wink. “Who taught you how to play guitar?”

Eddie ran his tongue over the top row of his teeth. “He did.”

“Uh huh,” Steve said with a grin. “And who bought you your first guitar?”

He sighed. “He did.”

“Sounds to me like he’s a good teacher if nothing else,” Steve finished with a grin.

“God you’re so annoying when you’re right,” Eddie huffed.

“That’s because I rarely am and so when that happens, I get to gloat.”

Lauren came bouncing back to the table. “Who’s next?”

“Toss you for it?” Steve said.

“You’re on.”

Eddie pulled out a quarter. “Heads or tails?”

“Heads.”

Steve watched as the coin sailed into the air and Eddie deftly catch it in his large hand. He slapped in on the top of his other hand.

��Tails!’ Eddie crowed. “You’re next, pretty boy!”

Steve leaned over and looked at the coin. He rolled his eyes and marched over to the jukebox, beginning to pour over the choices. He picked one and walked up to the stage.

He grabbed the microphone as the first notes came through the tinny jukebox speakers.

Eddie watched in awe. He had never heard Steve sing. Not really, fooling around in the car and being annoying for the kids wasn’t the same as what he was seeing in front of him.

“Did you know he could sing like that?” Lauren asked, not taking her eyes off the stage. “God, he could make money off that voice.”

Eddie could only agree. “I’ve never heard him like this.”

“She will listen to me when I want to speak about the world we live in and life in general,” Steve sang, his eyes half closed as he leaned into the microphone, one hand raised. “Though my views may be wrong, they may even be perverted she’ll hear me out and won’t easily be converted to my way of thinking. In fact, she’ll often disagree, but at the end of it all she will understand me.”

Lauren looked over at Eddie. “You know this is on that album him and I were talking about earlier. The Depeche Mode one.”

Eddie turned to her. “The one with the song he listened to a billion times?”

She nodded. “It’s called Lie to Me. It’s where the album title comes from. That girlfriend, the one with the dead friend, she really fucked him up, didn’t she?”

Eddie sighed. “I wasn’t there for that. We didn’t become friends until way after that. But yeah, I’m beginning to see exactly how much she fucked him up.”

She looked up at Steve crooning the last lines of the song. “Do you think if the world was different he would have changed the pronouns of the song?”

Eddie looked back at Steve as he bowed to thunderous applause. “You know, think he just might have.”

He stood up and greeted Steve with a hug. “Holy shit, man. That was amazing. Where did you learn to sing like that?”

Steve just blushed. “It’s your turn now.”

He went up to Hal and whispered something to him. Hal nodded.

Eddie got on stage and Hal came from behind with a small amp and a black-bodied electric guitar. He handed the guitar to Eddie and then began fiddling with the amp.

“Hey, guys,” Eddie said into the microphone. “Some of you might remember me, I’m Hal’s nephew, Eddie and I play metal.”

He started the opening riff to Run to the Hills and belted out the lyrics. Everyone was on their feet in an instant, Steve and Lauren with them.

Steve was cheering and laughing. It was nice to see Eddie play again after that horrific spring break from literal hell.

As soon as he was done he handed the guitar back to Hal and stepped off the stage.

“You are a beast, Eddie Munson,” Steve said, pounding him on the back when he got back to their table.

Eddie shoved his hair into his mouth to hide his blush. “Thanks.”

Steve ordered another round of sodas for them as they got to talking about their musical influences and who they would love to meet.

It hit ten o’clock and Hal was ushering them out as well as couple other under-aged kids who were there playing darts.

Once they hit the pavement Steve asked about it.

“Anyone under twenty-one always gets kicked out at ten,” Lauren explained. “It’s always been one of Uncle Hal’s rules since he bought this place when I was ten.”

Eddie nodded. “He doesn’t want anyone getting hurt for when the alcohol really starts flowing.”

“Too bad the funeral wasn’t next week,” Lauren said, shoulder checking him. “Then you could’ve stayed later.”

“Your birthday is next week?” Steve asked. “Why didn’t I know that?”

Eddie blushed.

“Because this weirdo doesn’t like to celebrate his birthday,” Lauren teased.

“Look,” Eddie said, “having a summer birthday sucks, okay? Especially if all you have is school friends who don’t give you their phone numbers or their addresses so you can invite them. And by the time you get old enough for that not to be a problem, you just don’t care anymore.”

Steve nodded. “I can understand that. My parents never really celebrated birthdays and by the time I got friends that wanted to celebrate, I learned very fast that it was for my big house and the expectation of an even bigger party.”

“Ouch,” Lauren said with a wince. “Maybe you two should pick a date to be your birthdays and celebrate whenever you want. It doesn’t have to be the actual date you were born. A lot of people that have birthdays on holidays and on leap years do it that way.”

“Oohh,” Steve said to Eddie, “yours should be March 27th.”

Eddie threw his head back and laughed. “Then when would yours be?”

Steve thinks about for a moment. “Either 3rd or 12th of November I guess.”

“Why those dates?” Lauren asked looking between them in curiosity.

“The third is when I chose my found family over a life of peace,” Steve explained.

“And the 12th?” Eddie asked.

Steve scoffed and shook his head. “That was the day I knew I was meant for more in life then dodging bad parents, letting my friends be assholes, and smoking and drinking my life away. I didn’t realize it then, of course. But yeah, that day means a lot.”

Eddie closed his eyes. “Steve...”

He shook his head. “It’s fine. I don’t miss who I was.”

Lauren was even more confused because they seemed to be talking about something deeper than what was actually said.

“This has to do with all the bullshit Hawkins went through, right?” she asked. “The lab, the gas leak, the earthquake. That’s what you’re talking about?”

Eddie and Steve looked at each other and nodded.

“Something like that,” Eddie confirmed.

The next morning while Steve was on the phone with Robin, Lauren dragged Eddie into her room.

“Look, you don’t have to like the music,” she explained handing him a cassette tape.

Eddie looked at the tape. Some Great Reward by Depeche Mode, he sighed.

“But at least listen to it,” she said. “I have it queued to that song he mentioned, Lie to Me. Even if you don’t listen to the rest of it, I think you should hear that one. I think you’ll learn more about your friend.”

“Laurie...” he said with a sigh. “If he wanted me to know, he would have told me, don’t you think?”

“That depends,” she said. “Do you like his ex?”

Eddie reared back is head with a frown. Did he like Nancy? He guessed well enough. He had come to respect her, at the very least. He liked Steve more, sure. But yeah, if she called to go see a movie, he wouldn’t turn her down.

“Yeah, I guess.”

Lauren grabbed him by the arms and maneuvered him to sit on her bed. “I have known Steve for less than twenty four hours and I can already tell he’s the most self-sacrificing idiot since Jesus fucking Christ.”

Eddie opened his mouth to protest, but she raised an eyebrow and he was forced to concede her point, waving his hand at her.

“So believe me,” she continued, “when I say that he hasn’t told you shit about what went down with his ex is because he doesn’t want to ruin things between you and her.”

Eddie nodded. “I know it’s a big fucking ask...” he sighed. “But see if you can find out what happened, maybe he’ll tell you and you can at least give me advice on how to navigate that mine field so I’m accidentally blowing up shit.”

Lauren nodded. “I can’t guarantee shit, but yeah, I’ll try.” She sat down next to him and leaned around to look him in the eyes. “He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”

Eddie clasped his hands together and nodded, pursing his lips.

“Does he know about your…certain proclivities?” She looked up at the door to make sure no one was around.

He did the same and then nodded again, not trusting himself to speak.

“And he’s okay with that?” Lauren pressed.

“His best friend is gay and encouraged me to come out to him, too,” Eddie said. “He’s a really good dude.”

Lauren pressed her lips together and thought for a moment. “Are you in love with him?”

Eddie sighed. “Yeah, yeah I am.”

Then they heard running up the stairs and suddenly Steve was the door.

“Hey guys,” he said. “Penny told me to come get you both, she needs help preparing for the wake tonight.”

Eddie and Lauren shared a glance.

“We’ll be right there, Stevie,” Eddie said with a smile.

Steve nodded and dashed back down the stairs.

“Do you think he heard?” Lauren asked, staring at the place Steve was once standing.

Eddie just shrugged. He couldn’t have, could he? They heard him come up the stairs, after all.

Right?

***

Pt 6|Pt 7|Pt 8|Pt 9|Pt 10|Pt 11|Pt 12

Some people love having a summer birthday. Growing up, I most certainly did NOT. As for the dates Steve brings up Nov. 12 1983 is the day he chose to run back inside the Byers house and battle a demogorgon. Nov 3rd 1984 is when Dustin intercepts Steve's apology to Nancy to help him find Dart. Both are very significant to Steve in his journey to be a better person.

Tag List: @spectrum-spectre @estrellami-1 @zerokrox-blog @artiststarme @swimmingbirdrunningrock @gregre369 @pyrohonk @a-little-unsteddie @chaosgremlinmunson @chaoticlovingdreamer @messrs-weasley @goodolefashionedloverboi @maya-custodios-dionach @val-from-lawrence @i-must-potato @danili666 @carlyv @rozzieroos @emly03 @wonderland-girl143-blog @justforthedead89 @bookworm0690 @itsall-taken @bookbinderbitch @redfreckledwolf @vecnuthy @littlewildflowerkitten @scheodingers-muppet @mira-jadeamethyst @cinnamon-mushroomabomination @gutterflower77 @genderless-spoon @hel-spawn @ellietheasexylibrarian @anne-bennett-cosplayer @mamafaithful @yikes-a-bee

#my writing #stranger things #steddie #ladykailtiha writes #minor character death #dealing with grief

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imaginedanvrs · 5 months

Text

my demon gave me everything

part 1 | masterlist

summary: dark!natasha romanoff x reader. Natasha Romanoff saves the world. Morals, lifestyle and past aside, the fact is that she puts her life on the line for everyone else. And for this, she believes she’s owed something. She saves billions of lives on the regular, so why not take the occasional one for herself?

word count: 3.7k

warnings: kidnapping, drugging, stalking, character death, obsessive behaviour

“Hi, Peggy,” you greeted the veteran warmly, pulling her from the memories playing before her in the photos by the impeccably made bed. Though the quality of the crumpled papers weren’t the finest of that generation's technology, the scenes that the woman could recall just from a glance at the hazy faces were enough to bring their characters and stories to the present. In the months that you had known Ms Carter, you had spent hours listening to her adventures from the war, enthralled by every word. Of course, you weren’t meant to have favourites, but Peggy’s life had been unmatched, so naturally, her presence was too. You missed her greatly in the months that followed.

“Hello, dear,” Peggy replied with an aged smile. “How are you?” She asked, lifting her hand to you. You took it in your own and rubbed your thumb over the back of her hand with a shake of your head.

“You know that’s what I’m meant to ask you,” you tutted, though of course appreciating the care she showed.

“Yes but I’m not the one on my feet for twelve hours a day,” Peggy was swift to respond.

“And I’m not the one that’s fought in a world war,” you countered, earning a soft chuckle from your resident. You placed her hand back down on the soft sheets gently and set about busying around her room. “I heard Steve’s coming in to see you later,” you said as you began watering some of the pots along the window frame.

“That’s the plan,” Peggy agreed. Of course she understood better than anyone that the job of someone like Steve Rogers meant that plans could be cancelled at a moment's notice. Majority of the time though, he made it. Luckily for the super soldier, the home was discreet enough that he didn’t have to worry about any press or genuine threats interrupting his visits with the woman he loved. The home was tucked away just outside the city and only housed a manageable amount of residents for a small team of staff. It was perfect for a retired war hero, even if she did have some complaints about being in a home to begin with.

“I believe he’s bringing Natasha with him as well,” Peggy added.

“Really? Do I need to get the spare red carpet for her too?” You quipped as you smiled at the last flower pot, fully aware of the look Peggy was sending your way.

“Now dear, don’t you start making a fuss too. You’re the only one who doesn’t treat them like a touring rock band.” Peggy sighed. “You’ll give them a complex.” At this, you couldn’t help but laugh.

“Bit dramatic, don’t you think?” You chuckled as you folded and put away the cardigan that wouldn’t be needed for the rest of that day.

“I don’t think so, dear. Things aren’t how they used to be, you know?” You smiled as the familiar rant about the changing world started again. “When me and Steve fought, we fought for freedom and only that. Now you have so many so-called ‘super heroes’ out there showing off their gifts for the crowds instead of using it for good. And that’s not even the worst of it. I’m sure some are all together corrupt,” she said with a disappointed frown. “Steve earned his abilities because he’s a good man but there are some that-” Peggy’s rant was cut off by the chesty coughs that stole her breath. She leaned forward to best support herself as you grabbed her glass of water and knelt besides her, masking my worries as best you could. It was easy for you both to forget the veterans age and limits.

“Take it easy,” you encouraged with a gentle hand on her back. Peggy gratefully took the water and allowed it to ease her irritated throat before leaning back into her bed with a tired sigh. “Okay?”

“Best I’ve ever been,” you hummed and refilled her glass before setting it on the bedside table again.

You took Peggy’s hand in my own once again and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “I should hope so, you have to come with me next time I go back to England,” you said matter of factly. Prompting Peggy to chuckle, more than happy to go along with the fantasy.

“Ah yes, I still haven’t met the queen and she’s been on the throne almost as long as I’ve been alive,” Peggy exclaimed.

“Would be pretty nice if she could pay for our plane tickets,” you added to which the older woman continued to chuckle just as a light knock could be heard from the other side of her door.

“Come in,” she invited, the hope in her voice clear and thankfully rewarded when Steve poked his head around the door with a broad smile to the older woman that he extended to you after a second. You placed Peggy’s hand back to her bed just as a shorter woman crept in behind Steve.

“Oh Steve,” Peggy beamed with a twinkle in her eye she reserved solely for the Captain.

“Hey Peggy, how’s my favourite girl?” He greeted, his eyes just as full of love as Peggy’s as he knelt down where you had been a second before. “Hi, y/n,.” he said, his voice still nurturing.

“Heya Steve,” you smiled back and glanced away from their embrace. Too often did you try to live through them in hopes of experiencing a love nearly as strong as theirs some day.

You glanced towards the silent woman who was already looking at you with interest. “Hi,” you muttered, finding it near impossible to hold such an intense gaze for more than a couple seconds - not that you were the first to find difficulty in making eye contact with the world’s greatest assassin, of course. She was the Black Widow. For a second you had to remind yourself that she was a good guy and that you had nothing to worry about.

“Hi,” she replied, a friendly smile taking over her features so smoothly you wondered if it was sincere.

“I’ll leave you guys to it in a minute but before I go, Peggy, are you comfortable?” You asked. “Not too hot?” You knew the older woman didn’t like to make a fuss and that if you didn’t ask then, she wouldn’t say anything until her visitors left.

“A little,” you were glad to hear her admit, “perhaps there’s no need for the extra blanket.” You nodded in agreement and took the extra blanket off her bed and put it away in her cupboard to grab again before the night. “Thank you, dear,” Peggy said with a grateful nod.

“No problem, just shout if you need anything,” you said as always as you made your way out the room and shut the door behind you, unaware of the eyes that followed you the whole way.

Natasha didn’t believe in any kind of instant connection. She had never looked at someone and felt a desperate need to have them, kiss them, date them, fuck them. It had simply never occurred and she didn’t believe it happened to others. She believed anything remotely close to ‘love at first sight’ was some bullshit horny people told lonely people in order to get in their pants faster. You were no exception.

What Natasha did experience was interest. Interest of woman she would typically define as her ‘type’. It wasn’t that she saw a hot woman and wanted to fuck them, instead, Natasha saw fragile women and wanted to break them. She wanted to surgically remove every part of them that made them the picture of innocence and ruin it. Because no two people are the same. No two people can have that many overlapping traits. Everyone was unique which meant everyone had a unique way to be broken, that was what sparked Natasha’s interest.

In less than a minute in the same room as you, the spy had watched how you interacted with Peggy, a vulnerable lady that you had ensured the comfort of. She had watched how unfazed you were by two superheroes that many had paid thousands just to shake hands with. It had sparked her interest and made her wonder how you would respond to numerous scenarios. She wondered what you would look like when your mind and body had been broken, if it would be any different than the women before.

The one thing Natasha knew for sure was that she was going to find out.

Peggy’s death came two weeks later. Steve couldn’t be there at the end but he thanked you that you were. You held her hand as she passed and told her it was okay, managing to hold back your tears until her final breath. You all knew this meant she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore, but the absence of her presence was felt across the home and would for a while.

The funeral was a blur, a lot of people were invited, unsurprisingly. Peggy had touched many lives that you were beyond grateful to receive an invitation yourself, even if you didn’t know anyone there except for Steve who had enough people to greet. You stuck to the back of the hall and made small talk with a few people and managed to hold back tears until the end of service when you snuck away to the bathroom.

After ten minutes of hardly effective breathing exercises you found on the internet, you made your way back out, hoping to say goodbye to Steve before you left but figured he had to leave early as he was nowhere to be found. You tried to make an unnoticed exit but the small touch to your back told you that you failed in that. You spun around to see Natasha with that same, slightly off, smile you hadn’t forgotten..

“Hey,” she greeted, putting her hands back into the pockets of a coat that probably cost more than a year's worth of your salary. To be fair, she saves the world.

“Hey yourself,” you said with a weary smile, hoping your eyes weren’t too red from crying. She looked perfect.

“Y/n, right?” She tested.

“Yeah and you’re… Natasha was it?” You tested back, making the redhead’s smile become more real.

“That’s me,” she chuckled. You eased up slightly, finding her presence less intimidating than your last meeting. “How are you? I mean, how are you doing?” She continued, her softer gaze becoming more watchful again. You wondered then if that was just her way of showing she was listening and giving her full attention.

“I’m alright,” you lied. Natasha noted it internally. “How are you? How’s Steve?” Another note.

“I didn’t know her all that well but Steve’s not having the easiest time.” You nodded, recalling the affection that never faltered when he looked at Peggy. “He’ll be okay though, he’s a tough guy.”

“Is he here?” You skimmed the faces in the crowd once more but still couldn’t find the blond.

“No, he had to go,” Natasha said.

“He doesn’t need you to help save the world with him?” you teased to try and distract from the resurfacing raw funeral feelings.

“It’s not bad enough to require my skill set,” the spy quipped with some undisguised smugness. You hummed. That was pretty hot. “So seeing as there’s nothing that requires my immediate attention, you need a ride home?” Natasha offered with expecting eyes.

“Thank you, but I can just order an uber I’m not too far-”

“Then you won’t be out of my way then,” Natasha called over her shoulder as she headed for what you could only guess was the flashiest car on the grounds and left no room for arguing. You trailed along behind her as Natasha opened the eagle doors from her keys while you pretended not to be completely awestruck by the vehicle and its driver.

“So was this a gift from Nick Fury or…?” You asked as the spy revved the engine and swiftly made her way out of the parking area and started on the long lane out of the grounds.

“You could say that,” she smirked, making you wonder if there was a story behind the car's ownership. “Do you drive?” The redhead asked instead.

“Um, no. Haven’t really gotten around to it, you know, what with moving here a year ago from England and all.” You admitted in a quick attempt to cover the embarrassment you always felt when people asked.

“That’s fair.” Natasha nodded understandably. “Besides, what are you? Twenty?” She continued with her eyes staying on the road.

“Nineteen,” you corrected. Natasha hummed and you suddenly wondered how old the Avenger was. Definitely not too old for you to see her as attractive but probably too old for her to see you as attractive, as if that were ever a possibility.

Once you reached the main gates to the grounds, Natasha pulled up her screens map and asked you to put your address in then continued on in that direction.

“So how long are you planning on staying in the states?” The spy inquired.

“My visa doesn’t actually last much longer than a year so I’ll have to head back home soon.” You explained, counting down the weeks before your flight.

“Oh? You reckon you’ll come back?” Natasha continued, stopping herself from pushing as much as she wanted to.

“I’m not sure yet. I mean it’s pretty nice here but it’s not home, you know? That’s where I want to be.”

“Yeah, nothing beats that,” the older woman muttered. You were about to ask Natasha about her own home when the car pulled to a stop outside your three story apartment building. “But I suppose this is it for now.”

“Pretty different to yours, I bet,” you mused, only imagining the kind of place she lived.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Natasha chuckled.

“Kinda,” you admitted with a light laugh as you got out of the fancy car. “Well, thanks for the ride, it was fun,” you smiled gratefully towards the redhead.

“Anytime,” she winked and sped away once you were a couple steps back. As you watched her go, you assumed that would be the last time you ever saw Natasha Romanoff.

It’s pretty nice but it’s not home. That’s where I want to be.

Natasha had pondered on that as she pulled into the rusting garage, only being lit by the glow from the inside of her car. She tapped her steering wheel and considered what that meant for her. It meant you were going back to England and you probably weren’t coming back. The redhead hummed as she pulled up your visa on her tablet, seeing the expiration date was only a couple months time and concluded you could be leaving any day between now and then. When she returned home she would find what date you had booked your flight for so she could know for sure.

That was new. The spy had never faced a deadline with any of the past women. It was exciting, adding a new risk she hadn’t encountered before. It made the challenge all the more enticing. With that on her mind, Natasha left the garage through the back door and had to give it several kicks when shutting it back into place.

Shit hole.

The building wasn’t really that bad, more just a little run down because it was in the forgotten part of town, just outside the busy city that had no time to acknowledge it. Natasha, being far more used to her luxury penthouse suite in the heart of New York, thought it was below her and couldn’t wait to show you just how differently she lived.

Once the redhead made her way up to the top floor, and assuring no one was around to see, she slipped inside the empty one bedroom apartment and headed straight for the window at the opposite end of the living space. Sitting in the sturdy foldable chair, Natasha peered through the S.H.I.E.L.D issued camera that was already staring right into your bedroom window down the street.

You were crying again. Natasha tutted. She had liked getting a sneak peak at how you looked when you cried the first time, but had since grown irritated that she wasn’t the one causing those tears to fall. It made her agitated and grew her need to have you.

When you finally took your shirt off, the spy’s interest peaked again and she gave a light groan. It was only the second time seeing you without it and the first time had only been through your webcam. You usually knew to close your curtains when getting changed but the emotions clouded your better judgement.

Such a dumb pup.

You dipped out of view to remove your bra so Natasha switched tabs on her laptop to peer through yours. Turned off. She switched to my phone. In another room.

“Fuck,” Natasha huffed, pulling a cigarette from its packet on the windowsill and grabbing the lighter from her pocket. She held the flame against the end and waited for the orange glow to send off its small grey whisps.

The Avenger had put cameras in some of the other women’s apartments, but given that she was able to see through several of your windows from across the street, she didn’t deem it necessary for you. She preferred it that way. She wasn’t exactly desperate to see you naked. That wasn’t a big part of it. She just wanted to see you. She enjoyed learning your small habits from afar, they would help in a few days. She enjoyed seeing you all on your own and knew it bothered you. You craved companionship and it would make you more open to hers the more desperate you got. It was just a shame she couldn’t drag it out for longer.

When you reappeared, you were in my unicorn pjs. Natasha smiled at the innocence of it all. Nineteen. The redhead didn’t usually go for women that young but you were an adult by law so she deemed it okay. Besides, she knew of your exes. She knew that older women were your type and that thirty definitely wasn’t too old. The spy also knew those exes were inadequate and what Natasha could offer you was something you had yet to experience from anyone, even them. She wondered just how badly you craved it and how soon you would admit it to her.

All that mattered was that you would never experience it from anyone else.

Several days passed since Peggy’s funeral and things were returning to how they were before you met the veteran. Her room at the home was still empty and you hoped it would be until you left. That would always be Peggy’s room. Thankfully, you were able to distract yourself throughout your working days by completing unnecessary tasks to make the day go quicker and stop your mind wandering too much to how lonely you were again. Peggy had been a friend, granted an unlikely one but a friend at that.

You were able to keep yourself preoccupied outside of work too. Whenever the weather permitted, you headed out into the parks in town with your sketchbook and spent hours, sometimes most of the day, doodling pretty much anything you could see. The crowds of flowers around the edges of the park; the moments different wildlife crosses paths; the unique landscapes when the city turned to town; the families and couples enjoying the last of the summer. Everything had a spot in your nearly full sketchbook that you had gotten especially for your trip. You were hoping to recreate them digitally when you got home.

The silver lining in it all was that you slept soundlessly through the nights. From the moment your head hit the pillow you were fast asleep and woke up feeling refreshed until grief gave you a sudden slap. But it wasn’t just you that benefited from my new found deep sleeping habits. In fact, it was what made Natasha able to make her move so fast.

It was 3:36 when the spy stepped foot in your apartment. She crept around without a single breath to be heard and peered around the studio apartment. Due to the layout, Natasha was able to see your sleeping frame as soon as she stepped into your living space. You were of course sound asleep when she saw you, but Natasha still noted where the creaky floorboards were and swiftly manoeuvred around your apartment.

The redhead didn’t make her way immediately to you as she knew you wouldn’t stir. Instead, she took some time to feed her curiosity and opened the cupboards in the kitchen she hadn’t been able to see. You had a lot of snacks, most of which Natasha didn’t approve of, and less ingredients for actual dinners. She knew you weren’t much of a chef and more often than not just put a collection of snacks on your plate for dinner than cook. The older woman would fix that for you soon enough.

She was pleased to see that you kept the studio pretty much spotless. There was no washing up left out, no crumbs on any surfaces, the floor didn’t need to be moped. She wouldn’t mind if you managed to stay in her home a while.

After a few more minutes of assessing the rest of your living space, Natasha continued back to you and hovered over your sleeping body for a while, knowing you wouldn’t have a rest this peaceful for a while. Luckily she had something to make sure you could make the most of it. The syringe in the leather pocket was only a slim one with a needle small enough that you wouldn’t feel it in your sleep. She traced along your neck with the back of her finger before sinking the needle in and flushing the liquid into your system, ensuring you would be no trouble when getting home.

“That’s it, detka,” Natasha cooed when you turned onto your side facing her and nuzzled further into your pillow. She leant down and placed a gentle kiss on your temple and the trace of a smile fluttered across your lips. “Get lots of rest.”

#natasha romanoff #natasha x reader #natasha romanoff x reader #black widow #dark!natasha x reader #dark!fic #dark!marvel

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mizppa · 9 months

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˚✧ -ˋ₊˚.Even if no one else comes. ASL Brothers₊°

🍁˖ ! 𓂃Pairings: ASL Brothers x Big Sister!Reader, Father Figure!Shanks x Daughter of Consideration!Reader, Father Monkey D.Dragon x Daughter!Reader, Grandfather!Garp x Granddaughter!Leiroa ( ALL PLATONIC ) 🥛⬝ .

𓂂𓈒🚏𓈃Summary: What would it be like to be the older sister of the ASL brothers, and Luffy's older sister by blood? it would be many things but if you cared for your brothers with your soul, body and mind along with your heart it made Shanks want to protect you just like his father and grandfather and how would their reaction be when they found out that you are the keeper of eternity with a 50 Billion reward for Belly, who did horrible things but it wasn't you.

RAIDEN SHOGUN!READER

「 Time where everyone is still a child, Luffy 7 years old, Ace and Sabo 10 years old and Reader 13 years old」

⤑ Well, as you grew up caring for and protecting Luffy from everyone your biological father, Garp and Shanks got to know you first than everyone else

⤑ When Luffy wanted to prove his courage to Shanks and sent the knife in his face we say that you were like this: 🤨😐 to Shanks and when Makino took care of Luffy's wound Shanks was distracted and then you... hit him with a big slap doing his head hurt at least all day and he said that if he did shit to his little brother there would only be the straw hat left as the rest of him

⤑ After that day Shanks realized how you were the mother figure to Luffy and how you protected him with body and soul, from that day Shanks started to respect you as a real mother to Luffy and took care of you like a daughter in that moment he saw how you I wanted to have parents to support but I didn't

⤑ Dad Shanks springs into action! Luffy and Uta love you along with the crew since you were the oldest there and with the greatest sense and that was funny all of the redhead's crew besides him were surprised at your maturity compared to your age

⤑ When the redhead teased you, you just looked at him like this: 🤨 ( Side Eye ) and he looked at you like this: 😗 ( Sweet daughter )

⤑ When Luffy was caught you literally shed your blood to save him and even Redhead's crew had to stop you from going after him just so you wouldn't get hurt anymore, in short Shanks gave the straw hat to Luffy and to you the mission of take care of your brother

⤑ ( Shanks sees you as his little eldest daughter and he loves you, plus he cried when you called him dad for the first time, hush friend )

⤑ Well now going to Ace and Sabo, they admire you a lot Sabo maybe admit it but Ace will never admit it

⤑ You are the mother figure of the three and period! being the eldest of the three you help Dadan with these devil miniatures, she thinks you are an angel who helps her every single day

⤑ It doesn't matter to you if Ace was the son of the former king of pirates Gold D. Roger to you he was Monkey D. Ace your other little brother! along with Sabo and Luffy

⤑ Do you still remember when you fought with Ace and he said he hated you and you just replied that you didn't hate him and that you loved him, poor thing he stood still trying to process that you even added that since that day they met he was your brother and you took care of your family

⤑ One of the best times for the three of you was when you made a bonfire and huddled together while you read stories or created to amuse or frighten them, but one thing they loved beyond that was watching the stars and moon with you or your hugs

⤑ When you made a promise to sail you said that you would be the last one to take care of them and not leave Luffy alone

⤑ The three are protective of you no matter what or who this is pure truth!

「 The day you became Raiden Shogun or known as Raiden [name]」

⤑ Everything happened so fast for you, seeing that woman with purple hair staring at you as she said: I found you

⤑ She wanted a host and you wanted to protect her brothers and sisters, it was an unfair exchange, she didn't keep the deal and that resulted in it and all that

⤑ Trapped in that empty time with no one just meditating as she took your body to Inazuma and pretended it was you

⤑ No matter how many times you wanted to fight there was no escape

⤑ One of the only times you broke her conscience was to save Ace and kill that damn man who wanted to hurt her brothers

⤑ Boy, you destroyed almost everything making everyone impressed but soon Raiden came back to consciousness and took you back to Inazuma and you couldn't even talk to anyone

⤑ In the end, for this to never happen again, she tied you with the strings of memories and imprisoned you again, leaving you alone

⤑ In the end, for this to never happen again, she tied you with the strings of memories and imprisoned you again, leaving you alone 「Current time, everyone is alive」

⤑ Congratulations my little grasshopper you have the highest bounty ever with 50 Billion Belly making everyone amazed

⤑ Shanks wanted to congratulate you your granddaughter reached that level but realized it wasn't you, there was no way you could be as cruel as that woman everyone called Raiden [name]

⤑ All of these ( Luffy, Sabo, Ace, Garp ) had the same impression of Shanks, Ace almost jumped off Whitebeard's crew ship just to go to Inazuma to confirm that, poor Whitebeard had to hold Ace for him not to go, O Ace's captain was also shocked by this because the stories Ace told about you to him, you seemed like a kind and innocent girl who didn't kill anyone who went against you

⤑ Little Luffy couldn't believe those lies dirty from you! The whole crew had to hold him back so he wouldn't go looking for you, they tried to convince Luffy that you changed but he didn't believe he would never believe!

⤑ Now when Sabo saw this he was in disbelief! how could a sister who took care of him like a mother do that!? He then showed it to his father and even Monkey D. Dragon was amazed that his beloved daughter had turned into a monster

.⤑ Everyone went to Inazuma to see if this was true until Luffy found Shanks but he wouldn't return the hat the reason they went there was to save his sister! (ASL brothers and their daughter for Shanks and Dragon)

⤑ After a lot of fighting I mean a lot of fighting!, you managed to get out of that damn control of Raiden and realized what you did, you thought everyone would leave you for doing that they did instead Shanks put you lying on his lap like he used to do when you you were a child, Luffy, Ace de Sabo ran to hug you saying they loved you

⤑ At the end of it all you became an honest and kind person unlike Raiden but you were very strong and ended up becoming a Yonko ( papa Shanks and pirate brothers are proud! ) and they made a feast but each on their ship

⤑ You became known as various titles but it didn't bother your father (Shanks and Dragon) or your brothers or grandpa Garp they were proud of how you cared and how you were Raiden [name]

#one piece x reader #raiden shougun #asl x reader #shanks x reader platonic

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

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/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

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

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

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

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

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

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arealphrooblem · 1 year

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Mutually Assured Destruction Part 11 -- The End!

This is the last part everyone! I may right little snippets after this one if the inspiration strikes, but this is the definitive end to the series.

Synopsis: Villain x Civilian. Civilian can sense other people's powers through auras but hides this ability. They are terrified of the most boring person at their office job, who hides the most powerful aura Civilian has ever felt.

CW: Mentions of death, low self-esteem thoughts, brief vague mention of sex at the end, two kisses

Part One Here

Part Ten Here

At first, they thought he was sick. Jonathan didn’t ever give them a cell phone number, so they couldn’t call and check on him. By Wednesday they drove round for three hours after work, trying to find the neighborhood that housed his apartment, with no luck. By Friday, worry stayed a constant pit in their stomach.

Monday morning brought the news that Jonathan had “transferred” to another in another part of the country. Civilian had to suffer all day through the cloying sympathy of their coworkers. Gloria had even hugged them. Everyone assumed a breakup occurred so horribly awkward that it drove Jonathan to move several hundred miles away a week before the holidays.

For the rest of December, Civilian kept up religiously with the news, looking for something big enough to fit the plans Jonathan had hinted at — massive art theft, large scale arson, hell even a government coup.

There was nothing save for constant Christmas ads that Civilian tuned out.

Eventually they had to accept the truth that Jonathan had just got the fuck out of dodge and didn’t look back. Fine. Civilian knew their ‘relationship’ had an expiration date, that it had never existed in the first place. But they had expected some kind of goodbye, even if it had been a threat to stay quiet — not this slipping away in the dead of night like a ghost.

Maybe his plans fell through and he had to leave before someone else discovered him. Maybe the Agency had found him despite his best efforts and he had to abandon everything. Both scenarios were more likely than the one echoing cruelly in Civilian’s head at night:

That they had driven him away; that he couldn’t take their needy loneliness anymore and bounced.

It’s a thought that hounded them for the next six months, followed them as closely and loyally as their own shadow. As the weeks drifted by, Civilian burrowed further and further inside themselves, rejecting offers from Gloria to eat lunch, rejecting their mother’s requests to call or visit, rejecting drinks after work with the other members of their department.

It wasn’t that Jonathan broke their ability to trust anyone — it was the stubborn, naive belief that if Civilian chose to be alone then they weren’t lonely, that it didn’t count because it was self-imposed, a choice, a preference. And being around other people reminded them so sharply of feeling not alone that they couldn’t handle its absence once the night was over.

The whole thing was ridiculous, and Civilian berated themselves at each night for it. They were acting childish and silly. Jonathan was right: the only thing stopping them from having friends was their own fear. They could find a new job, move to a new city, find a place where Jonathan had never set foot in and build anew.

But they didn’t.

And six months later, the bank went under.

Ironically, the one thing Civilian needed to watch the news for, they had ignored in favor of a Buzzfeed shopping list. Their mom had sent a text with a link to a video and a series of question marks.

Isn’t this your bank????

The video explained how the entire board of directors had been arrested for fraud and embezzlement to the tune of billions.

Billions with a B.

After that number, Civilian’s attention went a little fuzzy. The explanation of the complex series of fund transfers and shell corporations and blah blah blah faded to the background as Civilian tried desperate to work out just how the hell Jonathan made it happen.

Over the weeks, each man screamed his innocence of course, but camera footage and witness testimonies — even ones from the other board directors, all eager to stab each other in the back — denied those claims. Each director passed a psych test with flying colors, despite their protests of their body moving with out their consent. It all looked very much like a bunch of disgustingly wealthy men got caught trying to illegally make themselves even more disgustingly richer.

After a certain point, Civilian could have spoken up about Jonathan, and no one would have believed them anyway.

It was the perfect crime and now Jonathan was walking out there will several billion dollars in his pocket and Civilian . . .

Well Civilian was now out of a job, living off a pathetic severance package, and trying to find a solution to their problem that did not involve moving back in with their mother.

It happened in the middle of the night. The ear-popping pressure of a powerful aura dragged them from sleep. In the soft darkness of their bedroom, they could just make out a shadowy figure looming over them.

In seconds confusion crystalized sharply into fear. Civilian’s hands dove under the pillow for the knife they kept there and yanked it out. Their hand froze in the air, gripped by invisible fingers Civilian knew all too well.

“Did you just pull a fucking knife on me?” The figure asked incredulously.

The familiarity of his voice hit them like a physical ache, like a thumb on a bruise.

“Jonathan?”

The lamp switched on, bathing the room in a dim glow. Civilian squinted and blinked against the sudden light. Standing there, eyebrows raised and dressed in all black, was Jonathan Anderson.

The knife gleamed between them. He glanced between it and Civilian and shook his head.

“You should give me that before you hurt yourself.”

He took the knife gently out of their forcibly relaxed fingers and set it on the nightstand, far out of their reach.

Their chest was a swirling maelstrom of too many emotions to count — joy and fear and anxiety and relief.

But most of all anger.

How dare he just show up after ten months of nothing.

“You should go fuck yourself,” they retorted, sitting up and swinging their legs over the side.

“Awww, Civilian, did I upset you by leaving?” He gave them a mocking frown. “Did you miss me?”

The truth of his words pierced them, sending a hot flush of humiliation up their neck.

“No, I did not miss you, you sick on of a bitch — ”

Jonathan bent down, cupping their face in his hands and cutting them off with a fierce, almost desperate kiss.

“I missed you,” he breathed. “So fucking much.”

Civilian’s heart pounded like thunder in their ears. How often did they daydream this kind of moment happening, and yet now that it was here, they couldn’t help but doubt it. It felt dangerous to believe it.

“How am I supposed to believe that?” they demanded. “For all I know, you could be here to kill me and — and tie up loose ends.”

Jonathan had the gall to laugh. “Where do you think we are — a mobster movie? Do you think I’m going to tie cinder blocks to your legs and throw you off the pier?”

“You wouldn’t need the cinder blocks to make sure I drowned,” they said mulishly. “You wouldn’t even need a pier. You could make me smother myself right now with my own pillow.”

Why they were arguing this, they had no idea. Perhaps stubbornly clinging to the belief that he didn’t care about them protected them from hope. Jonathan’s grin faded into something more somber as he studied them. Then he slowly sank down on one knee before them, putting him at just under eye level.

“Why would I come here to kill you after everything I’ve done to protect you?”

“Protect me? Is that what you calling taking off with no goodbye like I didn’t mean anything?”

“Tell me, Civilian, how suspicious it would have looked if I had stolen all that money and then skipped town? How many people would be scrutinizing the newest hire that suddenly disappeared and anyone who associated with him? How long before the Agency would come sniffing around, looking for someone with my skill-set, and find you and your glorious little secret? Hmm? Tell me.”

Civilian glared at him and his tight, unbeatable logic. How dare he make sense.

“Some warning would have been nice,” they said instead, crossing their arms. “I thought I had — that you ran because — ”

They couldn’t finish the thought, it was too embarrassing. How stupid they had been, obsessing over a silly kiss, when Jonathan was executing such grand larceny on an unheard of scale. Like he had even spared it a second thought.

He gave them a knowing, crooked smile. “You thought I took off because you kissed me and I flipped out.”

“No,” they lied. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous,” he agreed. “It’s the one thing that made it hard to leave in the first place. And I couldn’t let you know, in case someone did question you. You were my insurance, not my accomplice.”

The one thing that made it hard to leave. Staying angry at Jonathan was getting more and more difficult. Civilian tried to hold onto it, but it slipped through their fingers like an eel.

“So the bank . . .that really was you?” they asked.

This time his smile widened into a full smirk. “Beautiful, wasn’t it?”

“Beautiful? It fucked over a lot of people — including me! I’m out of a job now, you prick.”

He shrugged. “People will move on just like they always have. As for you . . .that’s why I’m here.” He reached out and traced the pad of his thumb down their jawline. “To spirit you away.”

Civilian fought and failed to hold back a shiver at the light touch. “You mean kidnap me.”

“It’s only kidnapping if you don’t volunteer for it,” he said. “You’re being very stubbornly angry with me. You must have missed me quite a bit.”

They swallowed thickly. “I hate you,” they lied.

He smile, soft and gentle, his thumb swiping over their bottom lip. “You wish you did.”

Civilian’s pulse fluttered. They wanted very badly to kiss his thumb, his hand, anywhere they could reach. “And where would you take me?” they whispered instead.

Jonathan turned his hand so the back of his knuckles brushed over their cheekbone. “Where do you want to go? I have more money than God, Civilian. We can go anywhere in the world and disappear and never have to look over our shoulders again. What say you to that?”

“What happens if I say no?”

As tempting as his offer was, they had to ask the question, regardless. His answer determined everything.

“You will never have to see me again,” he said, taking his hand away. “And I will find a way to anonymously give you enough money to do whatever you wish in a way that can’t be traced. With me or without me, you will have the same freedom from the Agency that I do. I had planned for that for a long time.”

Whatever resentment for their months alone evaporated in an instant. This time Civilian took his face in their hands and kissed him, long and fierce.

“Take me to Greece first,” they said. “I want to see the ruins.”

Taglist: @those-damn-snippets@heroes-villains-side-blog@anonymousewrites@follow-me-into-the-fog@sunnyside-world, @rivalriotrenegade@trappedgoose-in-a-writblr-room@midnightsillusions@villain-obsessed-word-nerd@deflated-bouncingball @pickleking8 @cesspitoflove@to-sneak-away-and-hide@im-a-wonderling@hasel-anne@ghostly-writer@moonknight-s-cumdump@valiantlytransparentwhispers@galactic-squiddo@boomimhere@organizedchaos03@dungeon-roomba@vidiaka@powerflower119 @cbiom @meltedgallium@skevethefool@sarcasticlittlebook@lisapicklemagick@dragonfirephoenixflame, @royalmuffinsworld@sillypeachduck

#my writing #hero x villain #villain x civilian #enemies to lovers #writeblr #mutually assured destruction

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squoxle · 4 months

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🎄Christmas Fun w/ Enhypen

☃︎ pairing: Enhypen!bf x Reader!gf | ☃︎ wc: 930 ~ 100+ wc per member | ☃︎ summary: Christmas/Winter themed activities each member would do with you (in my opinion) | ☃︎ cw: it’s pure fluff so have fun 🎁😘🎄

🎄희승~Heeseung wc: 132

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Heeseung is such a loser boyfriend--but in a cute way like he just wants to chill with you yk

Anyways, I could definitely see him wanting to watch a billion Christmas movies with you while you snuggled up together.

"Hey, babe. Do you want any snacks?" he asked as you layed on his chest. "No, I'm alright," you said looking up at him. "You sure?" he asked again...you could tell he wanted something, but didn't want to get up only for himself. "You know what? I'd like some cookies...or maybe some ice cream," you suggested. "How about both," he smiled before running off to create your tasty toothache.

Being that this is Heeseung...it could get freaky, but I think cuddling would be great for now.

🎄제이~Jay wc: 132

We all know how much of a husband Jay is. So we shouldn't be surprised when he calls you in the kitchen to bake cookies with him.

I could see him coming over to wrap an apron around your waist before you go over to look at the recipe he printed out.

"Soooo, what do we do first?" you ask. "Hmm, let's get out the ingredients and then we can start," he said as you scanned the list with your eyes. After gathering the ingredients and mixing the dough Jay grabs a spoon for you to scoop the cookies onto the tray.

Ok...I can see things getting really cute after this, like maybe one of you mention something about baking cookies with your future kids and the other one blushes. EEK!

🎄제이크~Jake wc: 149

As our cute little Aussie boy, I feel like Jake would have fun making a gingerbread house with you.

I can see him getting frustrated as he struggles to keep the walls together.

“Ahh,” Jake sighed as the walls fell down. “Jake…you can’t do them all at once,” you said picking up the frosting covered gingerbread pieces. “Ugh, and you used too much icing,” you giggled. “They’ll never stay together with all this stuff,” you added as you watched Jake hopelessly scrape the frosting off. “Argh! This is impossible!” Jake laughed as he tried again. “Here, let me do it,” you smiled as you held the pieces in place. *Crunch* you looked over to see Jake eating the little candy decorations. “Save some for the house,” you giggled as he licked the icing from his fingers.

Who wouldn’t have fun making a gingerbread house with this cutie patootie~

🎄성훈~Sunghoon wc: 111

You should immediately expect the Ice Prince to take you out on an ice skating date...duhhhh

I can literally see him laughing with you and holding your hands while you struggled to stop yourself from falling flat on your ass.

"Relax, princess. Just keep your eyes on me," he'd smile as you trembled. "I'm scared," you whined. "What if I fall?" "If you fall I'll catch you," he reassured you as the two of you continued inching around the rink. Eventually, you'd do well enough to skate slowly, but you enjoyed watching your boyfriend dance on the ice.

Afterwards he'd probably take you out for coffee...because...why not? Sunghoon LOVES coffee.

🎄선우~Sunoo wc: 160

I feel like Sunoo is the type of guy to love doing arts and crafts. So making cute Christmas cards for everyone is right up his alley.

I could see you two playing around with stickers and glitter as you created you holiday masterpieces.

“What do you think?” You said lifting up your googly eyed reindeer card. “It’s for Heeseung,” you continued. “Awww. Cute,” he smiled. “I know our Bambi boy will love it. Wanna see mine?” He asked. “Yesss!” You smiled. Sunoo lifted up a card covered with glitter and heart stickers. “Who’s that for?” You asked with a puzzled look on your face. “Do you like it?” He asked immediately. “Yeah, but who’s it for?” You asked again. “It’s for you. I just wanted to make sure you liked it first,” he giggled before placing it down to scribble some designs on it.

OMGGGGG!!! The more I think about it the more I can see this happening!

🎄정원~Jungwon wc: 134

Maybe it's because he's the leader, but I could see Jungwon and you decorating the Christmas tree together. It would be sooooo cute omg.

You'd be helping him hang ornaments and string garland all around the tree. He'd most likely even let you put the angel on top (or the star...whatever you prefer)

"Wow, we did a really good job," he said stretching as he scanned the tree from top to bottom. "Yeah, we did," you smiled. "Ah, wait...we almost forgot the angel," Jungwon said handing you the cute tree topper. He supported you from behind as you reached up to carefully put the angel on top. "Phew, now it's perfect," you sighed. "Just like you," Jungwon said before hugging you from behind.

Is this cute or what??!!! Help this just radiates Wonergy.

🎄니키~Niki wc: 115

Being the fun, lovable maknae that he is, I could so totally see Niki wanting to build a snowman with you.

Just don't say anything cringey because he WILL call you out for it.

"Aww he's so cute," you said looking at the snowman you and Niki built together. "Oh yeah, well how about you date him instead," he teased to which you just rolled your eyes. "Well hopefully he takes me out on better dates," you teased back. "Hmm looks like he already bought you dinner," Niki smiled mischievously. "Wh--" you were cut off by a snowball launched right at your face.

Yeah...I can definitely see you two getting into a snowball fight.

❀ Thank you all so much for reading! Make sure to check out other works on my masterlist!

❀ 𝚃𝚊𝚐𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚝: @chlorinecake @hoyeonheeseung @nikisdubblchococake @sussyjake @furious-eagle @cherrriesss @abbyizzy @weyukinluv @addictedtohobi @thatonenoona @wavykook @givemeyourtmihyun @jaeljn @hoonmywk @valennshit @19-yunalyn @hoonbby @frostedblankets @hoonsyo @no-mannerism @perfectxserendipity @chubbibish @ihrtlix @bunniesforsoobin @thereadersparadise @thatbooknerdfr @aiden2001 @belongstoheeseung @jakeybabe @donut-crazs @rizzhee @nikimeows @woonieees @uarmyxtae @rebecca-johnson-28 @they2luv1naia @isa-2007 @silcry @riverscafe @pearlwhitesoul @nikohiroshi @thatbooknerdfr @wonniewonwon @sughoonieeee @babyy-bambii @adrika04 @sehunsharpasseyebrows @nikisblkgf @wtfyangjungwon @fr-3-akn-4-stymf @rikiloversworld @shawyle @sunoosrightbuttcheek @uarmyxtae @lovesickxmina @urfavberry @urauntiefaye @breadlover01 @taehyunsfavmoa

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