So, I’m going to ignore more recent, much smaller instances of surprise to talk about The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer., which ran me the fuck over with surprise in 2022-ish.

This book is marketed as gay YA romance. The cover, the blurb, everything makes it look like a light romance novel set in space, with maybe some space plot to go with the romance.

IT IS NOT THAT.

It’s a mindfucky, philosophical, emotionally wringing rollercoaster of a scifi horror/thriller. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey or Interstellar. It’s got that same sort of “small humans isolated in the sheer, terrifying vastness of space” vibe. But more horror, more tragedy, and sometimes incredibly upsetting.

There is gay romance there too, and it’s an important part of the book (in the way that romance can be important in any literature without that making it romance genre per se), but advertising this book as straightforwardly gay romance is like advertising Interstellar as a family man movie while just ignoring all the epic space shots and the dramatic score and so on. It just boggles the mind that they did this.

Anyway, this book does have some flaws I can nitpick on a technical level in retrospect, but the thing is: I just don’t care about them. This book wrung me out and haunted me for weeks after reading it (like, it kept popping into my head in the middle of doing completely unrelated things), yet it also left me feeling hopeful and more at peace with the inevitability of death.

I thought it was just gonna be a fun romance to escape into for a bit, and instead it’s one of the few novels that has genuinely changed the way I see real life in a noticeable way. I still think about it sometimes, now over a year later. It’s one of the best scifi books I’ve read in recent memory, along with the likes of the Murderbot books by Martha Wells and Exhalation by Ted Chiang (though these three are all very different than one another, and they are among my favorites for different reasons).

Going on like this about a book of course runs the risk that anyone who takes this recommendation and doesn’t like it as much as I did might feel disappointed and over-hyped, but a) I can at least promise I mean all of this earnestly and b) it seems hard to get anyone to read a book advertised as gay YA romance unless they are already people who would be down for reading some gay YA romance.

The thought that this book may eventually end up lost to time because of its marketing pains me. Although I guess I can imagine why they did it, even though it’s inaccurate for the contents; the queer YA romance readership is huge and this book seems to have done well with them, even though the goodreads reviews are as a result amusingly chock full of accounts like mine here.

Anyway, this book was very surprising.

If not “mansplaining”, I don’t think there’s another word that describes that very particular, yet common, experience. It doesn’t read as infantile to me.

Regardless, re. feminism, I wonder if the word’s meaning may be growing more muddled nowadays. The word is used by regressive TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists)/“gender critical feminists”, who these days are very much loud and visible in the media on their trans hate campaign trails, even as the same word is used by 3rd/4th Wave feminists who advocate/fight for intersectionality and gender and sexual inclusivity. Both groups call themselves feminist and often assert that members of the other group are not actually feminist, so if a study asks “is feminism harmful?” without specifying a definition, the answer might depend on what definition the respondent thinks is being used (from the context around the survey, or from whichever contexts the respondent most often hear the word feminism used in).

You do realize that lemmy contains very many users, many of whom disagree on any number of things. You are randomly assigning the opinions of lemmy’s pirate users to a random commenter without evidence that they actually hold those opinions, because it’d be convenient for you if they’re contradicting themself in any way (though the degree to which that would be a contradiction is also arguable). It’s just a way of constructing a strawman instead of engaging with your interlocutor’s actual words.

Also, part of the problem is that these LLMs very often do directly copy and spit out articles and random forum posts and etc word-for-word verbatim, or it’ll do something that’s the equivalent of a plagiarist who swaps a few words around in a sad attempt to not get caught. It becomes especially likely depending on how specific the search is, like if you look for a niche topic hardly anyone has written extensively on or for the solution to an esoteric problem that maybe just one person on a forum somewhere found an answer to. It also typically does not even give credit or link to its sources.

Plus, copyright law, if it exists, must apply to everyone, including major coporations. That’s a separate issue than whether or not copyright law needs reform (it obviously does). If you wanna abolish copyright, fine, ok, get it abolished through the government. But while copyright law is still the law, I’m not ozk with giving magacorps a pass to break it legally, especially when they’re more than happy to sue random, harmless individuals for violating their own copyrights. They want the law not to apply to them because they’re rich.

The argument they’re making is just ridiculous on its face when you compare it to other crimes. If AI should be allowed to violate copyright because otherwise it can’t exist as it is, then anyone should be able to violate copyright because otherwise their cool projects won’t be able to exist. And I should be able to rob a bank because otherwise I won’t have all that money. You should be able to commit murder because otherwise your annoying coworker will keep bugging you. She should be able to walk out of a store with an iPhone without paying for it because otherwise she won’t have an iPhone. Etc. It’s an argument that says the criminal’s motivations are legal justification for the crime. “You should let me legally do the thing because otherwise I can’t do the thing” is just not a convincing argument in my book.

Maybe one day all the human Alexas can have their name back. That would be nice.

Or they’re working class or buried in medical bills and can’t afford to be spending money on things like search engines that have a free alternative, even if it is worse.

I’m not actually convinced the alternatives are any better here, anyway.

It bothers me that they all look like they’re in their teens or 20s, when a male wizard would inevitbly be shown as anywhere from middle aged to Gandalf.

I bet it just always makes women young in every context.

Anyway most of them look like they’re from an old 3D Japanese RPG or CG anime. Round face with pointy chin, plastic-y smooth skin.

I’ll note that anime and Asian RPG characters often have a light skin tone (another can of worms there) that can cause foreign viewers to perceive them as white even while Japanese viewers perceive them as asian. Animation and similarly stylized art involves a level of abstraction and cultural interpretation that might not be there (at least not in exactly the same way) if we were talking about race (or gender, or whatever else) with regards to more realistic art.

Edit: this also reminds me of Disney’s notorious “same face, same profile” problem with female characters in their 3D animated films. Male characters can be any of a wild variety of shapes, but a Disney princess essentially round faced with huge eyes and slim. Even just looking at different slim, round-ish faced male characters, I think you’ll find more variety in their portrayals within that group than amongst the Disney princess group.

For those interested in this topic, I recommend PhilosophyTube’s videos, particularly this one: I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis In the British Healthcare System

Also… What the heck is a bioethicist? That sounds like maybe someone involved in advising corporations on ethics, not someone I’d ever expect to see involved in private medical care. Regular doctors and nurses and etc are already required to study and practice ethical medicine.

I’d also like the point out that one can go get their tongue cut in half, or their leg bones lengthened, or get hormone treatment for balding or for menopause, or get a nose job, or surgery to make their boobs bigger or smaller, all without anything like what trans people are forced to go through for the most basic of things.

Even for someone who believes that the gender assigned at birth is the “real” one, or who dislikes or feels weirded out by trans people in general, I don’t see how one could justify imposing so many more restrictions on one group of people who want or need to modify their bodies than are imposed on any other group that seeks similar medical care.

Even if we do just talk about children, the disparity doesn’t make sense. Like, hormone blockers like those prescribed to trans children have been routinely and safely prescribed to cis children, in cases such as to delay early onset puberty (which, iirc but correct me if I’m wrong, is mostly only an issue because of the social consequences surrounding it), for decades. And in many of the new wave of anti-trans bills that ban hormone blockers to delay puberty for trans children, they specifically leave a cut out for cis children to still receive hormone blockers without issue. Because they don’t really believe delaying puberty is unsafe, that’s never been the point.

And that’s not even getting into comparisons with other major medical decisions made by parents and doctors, sometimes even without the consent of the children (let alone the vehemently expressed wish for treatment like trans children), like circumcision, or weight loss treatments or surgeries, or other cosmetic treatments, or even the forced surgeries and hormone treatments that have been routinely done on intersex children (largely the same treatments as a trans person would seek, but forced, to make a person look unambiguously like whichever sex the parents choose for them). If the people pushing these anti-trans bills really cared about children and parents and doctors making medical decisions with big consequences and risking regret, they should be talking about a whole lot of other things - things much less stringently regulated - besides trans healthcare. But nope, crickets.

I think there are ways to impose child safety locks, as it were, on a phone’s access to the internet? Like a curfew or “max hours in a day” limit. I feel like that would make more sense than not giving a kid a phone.

And there are also tricks one can apply to circunvent some of that attention-grabby design, like putting the phone in grayscale mode.

Also, unlike cigarettes, smartphones serve many purposes, and 99.999% of people (in countries where they are ubiquitous) will need to own one at some point. I think it may be better to actively teach a child how to handle the information-overload, attention grabbing tricks, misinformation, and so on of the internet, rather than leaving them to just figure it out for themselves later on.

My concerns with denying children a smartphone altogether include:

• Phones are an essential safety device, and smartphones are better at this than dumb phones because of things like GPS and maps navigation (especially for kids who get lost easily), clear emergency alerts (e.g. “expect a tsubami in 3 minutes”, or “there is an active shooter currently around the grocery store at x and y street”), the ability to store easily accessible information for first responders in the phone (which can sometimes also be auto-shared when you make a 911 call), and the ability to easily and silently text 911 if they find themselves in a situation where calling is dangerous.

• Phones and social media are now an integral part of most kids’ social lives. If a kid doesn’t have a smartphone and can’t join in on real time group chats, with the ability to see the things their peers share in that chat, or if they don’t have video chat access, they’ll be cut off from a lot of other kids and their social life will suffer for it.

And access to social media is especially important for kids who need to find support they can’t find easily irl, like for queer or neurodivergent kids who benefit from talking to others like them on the internet - even if they’re lucky and their parents are supportive, it’s not the same as finding a peer support group. For similar reasons, access to digital library collections can be a big deal. Granted, some of this would be covered if they have access to the internet on a laptop or desktop, but at that point they’d have internet access anyway so they might as well have the phone too.

• Phones are more and more often required for basic utilitarian access, too. Sometimes taking the city bus requires a phone because you can’t pay cash anymore. Sometimes the laundry machine doesn’t take coins, only app or internet payment. Sometimes the menu at a restaurant is just a QR code that tells you to look at their website. It sucks but it’s only getting more this way.

I’m not advocating for giving smartphones to literal toddlers, but beyond a certain (fairly low) age I think at this point the risks of giving a kid a smartphone are outweighed by the risks of them not having one.

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Weird. You don’t have any potentially problematic extensions installed?

You could also try Firefox Nightly, though I suspect it may not be better for you if the regular one is broken.

I agree it’s murky. Though I’d like to note that when you shift hateful ideologues to dark corners of the internet, that also means making space in the main forums for people who would otherwise be forced out by the aforementioned ideologues - women, trans folks, BIPOC folks, anyone who would like to discuss xyz topic but not at the cost of the distress that results from sharing a space with hateful actors.

When the worst of the internet is given free reign to run rampant, it has a tendency to take over the space entirely with hate speech because everything and everyone else leaves instead of putting up with abuse, and those who do stay get stuck having the same, rock bottom level conversations (e.g. those in which the targets of the hate are asked to justify their existence or presence or right to have opinions repeatedly) over and over with people who aren’t really interested in intellectual discussions or solving actual problems or making art that isn’t about hatred.

But yeah, as with anything involving large groups of people, these things get complicated and can be unpredictable.

People keep saying it’s dead to them but the company’s own statements seem a lot more optimistic, imo. I think they’re just refocusing, and dumping a lot of the extraneous “let’s be an everything platform” features the userbase didn’t want anyway. Tumblr isn’t a giant cash so far as I know, but its userbase is sizable and stable, and recently grown since reddit and twitter took a tumble.

As a platform, there’s a lot to recommend it, I think. It’s one of those situations where the experience you get out of it depends on how you curate it. So like, you can go down fandom rabbitholes, or webcomic rabbitholes, or you can entirely ignore that and just subscribe to ocean science blogs, or to photography blogs, or so on. There can be drama in some parts, but that can also be entirely avoided in your feed if that’s your preference. I like it a lot better these days than I did like 5-10 years ago.

Hey, I realize this is aaaages after you replied (sorry), but I did eventually dig up that fan-read The Hobbit version and holy crap is it ever something. I’m blown away by it. Thank you!

I’m going to give the Thrawn trilogy a go soon via audiobook, too. :)

This article is about the “AI chips” Nvidia makes that undergird the major cloud services though, not the cloud services themselves. So I think it’s a hardware issue, more akin to a monopoly of GPU or CPU markets? Especially since Nvidia’s competitors in most spaces seem to be limited to AMD and sometimes Intel.

I can certainly imagine Nvidia having anticompetitive practices with their hardware and/or the software for their hardware, as they have done so many times with GPUs, though this particular article really doesn’t go into any detail.

A lot of people in rural areas find themselves in situations like being 10 minutes from a walmart and an hour from any other option. So then anything besides walmart costs gas and time, on top of the product cost difference to begin with.

Nobody wants to drive extra after 8 hours of shitty minimum wage work and/or taking care of children.

Not like other grocery stores are any good for workers, either.

RedReader still works. If you’re gonna look at reddit, I recommend it. You can even turn off all the interaction buttons, so it’s like a “look, don’t touch” museum.

I uninstalled it though. Reddit is in too terrible a state to bother with any longer, except sometimes as a search result, imo.

Edit: I’m speaking of android though. Idk if redreader has an ios version or not.

I also wonder if they controlled for the fact younger people are online more often in the first place.

Yeah. In a world where lawyers cost money, corporations can and will squash small artists without hesitation, with cease and desists, DMCA takedowns via youtube and similar platforms, and by threatening lawsuits they won’t even have to persue because most people can’t afford to fight it.

Even companies often can’t afford to fight bigger companies. Like, the makers of Kimba the White Lion had a very clear case that Disney plagiarized them in making The Lion King (if you go on youtube you can find shot-for-shot scene comparisons, it’s bonkers) but couldn’t afford to fight it at all. And that was a company - individual artists have no chance vs disney & etc.

It’s kinda wild that Paint apparently made it all the way to 2023 without supporting layers.

This feels very similar to me to businesses freaking out and trying to prevent their employees from wearing rainbow flag or pronoun pins. Or rainbow masks, for that matter.

I think employee uniform requirements should be just enough to make employees identifiable so they can do their jobs (e.g. answer customer questions about where the lettuce is or whatever). Just a mandatory hat or shirt is enough to do that. Beyond that, they’re humans. Let them be fucking humans.