Untitled.

Dragon like cloud over Mount Fuji at sunrise. By touyoui, Nov 2024.

From The NY Times:

nytimes.com

Trump Intensifies Statehood Threats in Attack on Canada

The U.S. president on Tuesday reiterated his claims on Canada’s territory as he increased tariffs, threatening to bring the country’s econom

And from Facebook:

(X)

(Edited to make the first link a mainstream source rather than Substack)

Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

really hate to do it but i'm locking all my works for the foreseeable future. the capitalistic, callous scraping of free, lovingly human-made art for the purpose of training generative ai is indescribably immoral, and goes against all i stand for as a writer who writes for the sake of it.

what i make is mine. i did that. and no cheap, synthesized, blended-up and watered-down pathetic pale mimicry can ever come close to what i can and have achieved.

i really, really hate to do this. a reader once commented and told me that my work was the reason they went and applied for an ao3 account. that exchange of respect and appreciation could not have happened if my works were locked from the start. i am fortunate to have felt this love for my work, and am sorry that i now have to sequester it.

what generative ai spits out is not art. there is no passion in the slop it regurgitates, no intentionality behind word choice or frustration with tense. no love imbued from hours spent hunched over a desk editing, no joy derived from having driven your friends crazy with the snippets you strategically dropped to deal the most emotional damage.

fuck generative ai and its profit-driven, uncaring, fuck-you practices. every new post about the violation of artists purely for their efforts to make art accessible sickens me. the industry needs to be better, and the individuals behind each model need to be better; every non-consensually scraped training set you weigh is worth a million artists' souls.

also, fuck anyone who says to stop writing a certain way because the llm "style" of writing is to use em-dashes and other such "tells" – the models do that because REAL LIFE HUMAN WRITERS do that. i will continue to use the goddamn punctuation. it was created to be used. don't be afraid to use it.

They say that the way you should view disagreements in relationships is “us vs the problem” and not “me vs them” and I think that to a certain extent that mindset can also be helpful when engaging in political or ideological movements

been experimenting

Insider

OceanGate tried to scrub the internet clean of traces that it ever existed, taking down its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages

OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration company that created the Titan submersible, has removed its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn a

poor things, well we should definitely make this easier on them by never repeatedly mentioning their name and deeds on the "reblog things forever" website

I also walked myself into a corner r.e. leaving out the context for Nerdi's big blowout scene because it's critical for everything else in the story 😭 dancing around the full scene is really kneecapping what I think I should and shouldn't include

I will say that Grave Digging's second chapter has a document 7 pages long that's mostly scraps of scenes

Un cuervo con tenis 🐦‍⬛👟