thedogmanscave

[thedogmanscave]

this is what i was talking about by the way

#deer #cervines #memes #life and society #animals #nature

[thedogmanscave]

#life and society #memes #capitalism #humor #money

[thedogmanscave]

Desert plants

#life and society #nature #scenery #landscapes #plants #desert

[thedogmanscave]

got told at lunch "you feel like Tumblr Incarnate" and i had to tell them i've been here for 13 years and counting. i was here three years before dashcon happened. i saw the mishapocalypse. i survived the gigapause. i've been here longer than the shoelaces post. i've been here since it was hipsters versus fandom and i played both sides extensively by overdoing the sepia filters on everything and making my own flashing galaxy gif edits for my fandom posts. i'm every tumblr. it's all in me

#life and society #memes #humor #tumblr

[thedogmanscave]

some of yall need to understand that "my body, my choice" also applies to:

addicts in active addiction with no intention of quitting

phys disabled people who deny medical treatment

neurodivergent people who deny psychiatric treatment (yes, including schizophrenic people and people with personality disorders)

trans people who want or don't want to medically transition (yes, including trans masc lesbians with top surgery and trans women without bottom surgery, yall are so weird to them wtf)

and if you can't understand that, then you don't get to use the phrase

#life and society #positivity #disability #my body my choice #consent

[thedogmanscave]

steal hellsite genetics gimmick!!

I have no clue how the website they use works lol

#life and society #information #blast #tumblr genetics #how to

[thedogmanscave]

Donation dragon for @wordsnthingsnstuff!

A crystal dragon ~ 💎🔮✨Thank you for donating!

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This strike week, if you donate any amount to one of the organizations/causes below, I will draw you a dragon!

Send screenshots as proof of donation to my asks! Bigger donation = more detailed dragon :3c

Places to Donate:

eSims for Gaza

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

United Nations Relief and Works Agency

Medical Aid for Palestinians

Operation Olive Branch

#life and society #free palestine #dragons #art #artwork

[thedogmanscave]

Friendships as a teenager: we used to talk 5 hours every night now it’s down to 3… are we still friends 🤔? I wonder if they don’t like me anymore

Friendships as an adult: omg I’ve finally cleared up 20 minutes of my schedule to talk to my friend I haven’t spoken to in 4 months #bffs #we will find eachother in every life

#memes #friendship #life and society #humor

[thedogmanscave]

Absolutely evil beyond words. When asked about the murder of Nex Benedict here is how the state's senator responds, calling them filth that needs to be kept out of the state, while audience member's cheer.

These monsters not only don't care that a child was murdered because of their hatred, they outright celebrate it. Christian's are soulless monsters, when are we gonna get the chance to vote to strip their right to exist away from them, like they do to us? Why do we allow these hate filled cultists to have power in the government and spread their murderous hatred.

This is why the school never called an ambulance for Nex instead just suspending them, this is why the coroner and police are currently trying to cover up the murder, because the whole goddamn system is working exactly as they intended, accomplishing their goals of murdering us and getting away with it.

#life and society #transphobia #queerphobia

[thedogmanscave]

when you call your reps to ask them to pretty please stop taking away your rights, remember:

In deep red areas you're a republican who is thinking of voting for someone else if they don't vote what you want on this specific bill because it impacts your republican ideals so very much

In swing states you're an undecided voter who's gonna go blue if they don't vote how you like

remember to call because that way their phone is going off and their peers can hear it because their offices are close together (emails and letters don't work like that), so it can rattle them if they get high volumes. remember that you gotta make them feel like they're losing something.

#life and society #politics #call in!

[thedogmanscave]

I guess I'm really into rotifers now.

#life and society #art #artwork #animals #rotifers

[thedogmanscave]

The best way to wake up

#life and society #humor #memes #animals #dogs #pets #canines

[thedogmanscave]

I don't know if you take questions like this but you have your askbox open so I'll shoot my shot

so since the news about tumblrs new partnership broke out I've looked up just a few things about protection from AI scraping myself

and there are articles online from the summer of last year saying major websites block AI crawlers from scraping their content etc.

why doesn't tumblr also do this? or is it actually ineffective? like is there nothing websites and companies can do to stop AI crawlers?

and I've read people mention the robots.txt file of sites being a sort of "do not track!" message to crawlers so I checked mine but it looks pretty empty. I've checked other users robots.txt files and they have longer lists of disallowed bots (?)

why is mine empty do you think?

Ok, this may be a bit odd to read it you are outside of the web development world, but there is literally no way to block AI crawlers from accessing your site that doesn't also block humans. The site can't tell if whoever is visiting it is a regular browser controlled by a human or a bot.

When we say "block AI crawlers", what we talk about is about consent: what you do to "block" them is to communicate everything trying to read your site "i don't know who you are, but i wish to not be visited by this and this and this bots. If you are one of them, please go away".

Then, the bots may be programmed to comply with these requests or to ignore them completely. It's not even a legal issue to ignore them. So all comes down to how much the parent companies respect your consent or not.

For example, openAi announced their crawler was going to start respecting the site consent to be crawled just a few months ago. Midjourney, for what I know, couldn't care less about this consent and will scrape your site as long as it's public and has access to it no matter what you do.

Robots.txt is just the place where you tell anyone requesting to read your site which kind of visitors you give your consent or not. If it's empty, you are giving consent to everyone.

But again, if a company decides to ignore this consent, there is nothing you, tumblr, or anyone can do to avoid it.

#anti ai #technology #life and society

[thedogmanscave]

Teenie tiny metal pocket watch dice!

#life and society #art #pocket watch #dice

[thedogmanscave]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

#anti ai #life and society

[thedogmanscave]

LMFOA ITS ACRHAKLT RHE MOVIE IF YOU click the link and go to Spotify directly

#life and society #fnaf #memes #movies

[thedogmanscave]

#yeah #life and society #memes #babies