Scrolling Time

Do the AI people know that the rest of us who never got on the bandwagon are still doing everything the same way we always have

The AI boom has changed literally nothing about my day to day life except I now have to work harder to get access to reliable information, all the important admin work is being done wrong, and I keep getting DMs letting me know the perfectly ordinary and plausible photo I liked was actually a fake image generated by a fascist to generate views and churn out ad money for the purpose of funding their tree-powered puppy-flushing toilet

On this day, 23 August 1924, French resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud was born. On her 20th birthday, 23 August 1944, she engaged in her most successful resistance action. Along with three other fighters and a train driver, Riffaud successfully captured a Nazi supply train complete with 80 soldiers on board. Her unit threw all the grenades and explosives they had at the train, then used fireworks to make the Germans believe they were outnumbered and outgunned. Riffaud recalled to Agence France-Presse in an interview: “We made an incredible amount of noise and it terrified the poor Germans and they pulled back into a tunnel. The locomotive was still sticking out and we managed to persuade a retired train driver who was washing the dishes with his wife to go down with us to detach it. He was a brave man. We warned him that he would be a perfect target, but he told us not to worry, and crawled underneath the engine, unhooked it and drove it away, and then walked home. We didn’t even think to thank him.” The resistance activists were then backed up by some firefighters and the local mayor, until eventually the Germans, stranded in the tunnel, surrendered. At that point Riffaud realised it was her birthday, and they then celebrated with dried sausages, jam and ham seized from the train. Learn more about resistance to Nazism in World War II in episodes 63, 64, 72, and 77-80 of our podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/working-class-history/id1355066333

White Feminism

I wish more white people - and white women especially - would get over their white fragility and truly understand how words and actions like these do more harm than good to women of color. They need to stop making everything about themselves and catering to other whites women like women of color don’t exist.

and to nobody's surprise: white ppl big mad in the notes and comments lmfaoo

"We're gonna achieve immortality by turning ourselves into machines" buddy I want you to find yourself a 15 year old laptop and try to run a 10 year old piece of software on it please. Connect to the internet, if you can, and attempt to log into any of your online accounts

Good luck cyborg buddy, I wish you the best.

Also, previous tag:

This is something I bring up a lot. Digital preservation is not a thing to rely on. Anything digital is inherently ephemeral, fleeting.

All current and former digital storage will eventually fail. Paper tapes and punch cards cards wear and rot. Magnetic tape and disks grow mold and shed their magnetic coating. Hard drives seize and crash, their controllers fail. Optical media scratches, rots, or simply fades. Solid state media loses its charge over time. Cloud services shut down with no warning.

Long-term digital storage is a never-ending process of copying to new media.

And then there's the problem of format.

It took less than 30 years for digital works by Andy Worhol — one of the most popular artists of the 20th century — to be lost to obsolete technology.

We had the disks, we had the computers, we had modern emulators for the computers. But reading the images (PDF Archive) required very specific combinations of operating system and software versions, and in some cases required reverse-engineering image formats for which the correct combination of software could not be found.

This wasn't some obscure machine. Millions of Amiga computers were sold, and Amiga users are among the most dedicated to keeping the platform going long after its discontinuation.

And still the image format had to be reverse-engineered to recover Worhol's images.

How much of our culture from the past 30 years has been entirely digital?

To be fair, this isn't exactly a new problem, or even one unique to the digital era. But I do wonder what will remain for future generations looking back. How much of human history has been pieced together from shards of pottery and clay tablets? With our communications, our documents, our art all moving to digital media, what will be left of us to dig up? What will it tell of our story, of who we are, what we believed, what challenges we overcame?

The depths of depravity we encounter in this world are fucking nauseating. How did we mutilate ourselves and our relationships to the point that this could even be considered, let alone adopted? But I guess if we already tolerate armed police in schools it's really only the new technology that makes this shocking. Forget school to prison pipeline, some US schools are functionally already part-time prisons.

the only thing stronger than the gastric distress i get from eating cherries is my love for eating cherries

what

thank you. im once again reminded why i love tumblr because where else could i get content like this

people who are like "but with universal healthcare you'll have to pay taxes!!! Up to 8%!!!" Are so funny. Like as opposed to the 16% of my gross paycheck that goes to private insurance, that won't cover shit unless i call my insurance company, then my doctor, then my pharmacy, then my doctor again because theyre pretty sure insurance got approved then my insurance company because they didn't get the letter, then my doctor again, then the pharmacy again, and then the copay i still am on the hook for.

The amount of slavery in Ancient Rome was legitimately terrifying tbh

Y’all know that I’m into ancient Roman history and I do a lot of research on it but even though I should be used to it by now sometimes I read an anecdote about how an individual slave was treated and I’m hit with the realization that like a third of the population was living like that and I just need to put my head in my hands for a second

Emperor Hadrian randomly stabbed a slave in the eye in a fit of rage and he was supposedly unusually sympathetic to slaves.

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

Like how many people throughout history were beaten to death because some rich asshole was angry and there was no legal or social consequences for doing so? We don’t know.

When you study ancient history you’re reminded that slavery has never once been kind or justified. It just takes on different forms of evil in every time and place that it infects.

x

This NPR Article!!

Also, in the Mexican constitution, the first article mentions how slavery is prohibited in México and every enslaved person arriving here would be freed by virtue of being on Mexican soil, and protected by our laws

I had no idea!!

no but the “”ai”” boom is crazy bc they made the entire internet so shitty that the only reason to use it is because it’s where all the people are and now they’re getting rid of the people. like i’m straight up logging off and going to the library there’s nothing on here anymore

‘here’s how to tell if an image is ai’ ‘signs the person you’re talking to is a bot’ ‘how to tell if a song is ai generated’ ah but consider this: i am shutting my laptop and walking outside

I saw a bsky post last year where someone said their grandma couldn't tell what was real on the internet anymore so she stopped using it and I really, genuinely think the techbros currently ruining everything have never even considered that possibility. their projections and pie charts and market share research and whatever simply do not take into account a scenario where people lose interest in being online. like yeah we're pretty much all gonna keep using the internet to book travel and look up words and order pizza, but in terms of how we spend our leisure time? I'm still extremely online, but in the last few years I've been learning candlemaking and carpentry and sewing, and I was already spending a lot of time cooking and reading books and skating at the rink and hiking, and an afternoon spent on any of those things always leaves me feeling better about myself than an afternoon spent doomscrolling. I think my daily life is going to keep reflecting that more and more as the slop encroaches, and it sounds like I'm far from the only one feeling that way. silver lining to everything, I suppose.

late night reminder to self: your depressive episode will not last forever. it will have an end. tonight will not be the end of you.

Hey guess what i saw this a few days ago when i was in an absolutely scary slump and then i spoke to my counsellors and did what they told me to do and now i feel so much better. So this is true. Reblogging for more good luck

why is this so beautiful in like a space way

Because the essence of humanity and life as a whole is a constellation of connections with one another. We are all here in this cosmos together, from the tiniest creatures to the distant stars.

You're not alone.

you got lots of company, and you're gonna be okay 🫂

i am so serious when i say dark and quiet are both human rights.

i don't mean like absolute silence. obviously in an ideal community, there would still be sound and noise from people and music and work etc. but it haunts me that when i camp in the forest i can hear the howl of semi trucks on the interstate miles away. and the people who live beside it never know quiet. it haunts me that many people will live their whole lives never seeing the stars in the sky that were fully visible with NO electric light pollution as recently as my great-grandparents' childhoods.

so much of our lives is bright bright unnecessary noise. neon mcdonalds signs 200 feet in the air so we can see it from the road. led lights over billboards. parking lots lit up like sports stadiums at closed office buildings. advertisements playing at gasoline pumps. streets lined with led porch lights and decorative garden lights that genuinely threaten entire species of wildlife. music blaring outside pharmacies to deter homeless people. everything always shining and wailing for no purpose but profit and cruelty.

obviously not everything can be turned off or made quiet and i wouldn't want it to be anyway and there is a lot of nuance and room for "but what about" here, but MANY things HAVE to change because none of us are supposed to live like this and we shouldn't have to!!!

Recently learned about green dragon tail butterflys, absolutely beautiful buggos that deserve to be known.

it's truly insane how much more functional society would be and how much happier everyone would be if every job was perpetually 10% overstaffed (and people who weren't needed could chill and rotate in when needed while still getting paid) instead of 10-50% understaffed but that wouldn't be 'efficient' (in the short term, for shareholders) so fuck everyone I guess