Tbh I'm old. The first computer I ever used didn't even have a GUI. That a machine can take my specs and spit out a spreadsheet is fucking unbelievable to me, and I refuse to become so jaded that I can't be impressed with the leaps forward that stuff makes.

I'm 40. I can waste 40 minutes making this spreadsheet myself, or have an AI do it in like, 2 minutes. It's not about not knowing how, it's about not having to do the thing I know how to do anymore.

I'm in college and for one of my classes we actually have a prompt we feed to ChatGPT so that ChatGPT creates an excel spreadsheet for us as a step in an assignment process. The whole spreadsheet.

The class is for healthcare and I won't get more specific, but yes, you can use AI today to make whole ass Excel spreadsheets.

(One of the steps in that particular assignment involves fact-checking the spreadsheet, btw, but about 95% of the time all the answers are word-for-word in the book, 4% they're taken from the web and have more up-to-date info than the book has, and 1% is blatant lies.)

Like back when we had to teach people how to google shit. Tedious.

It's fair to be oblivious to sexual and romantic subtext. At least you're aware that you have that issue.

"What I added to that in that first episode was a sexual ambiguity about Garak. In that very first scene when he meets Dr. Bashir it’s clear as a bell— and this was my choice—that he was sexually attracted to this good-looking young Starfleet doctor. And although they didn’t follow that up with an explicitly gay character, that ambiguity about Garak remained."

Andrew Robinson, that actor who played Garak, intentionally added that subtext.

Some things are symptoms of both autism and ADHD.

They are not only restricted to autism.

These comments bother me as much as the ones that say "everyone has that problem" because it is very difficult to carve out a single place for ADHD.

I was absolutely gonna say "wrap money around a brick and throw it through a window."

Of course I'm from the anarchist instance so brick hurling is my love language.

(Pro tip. Make sure there's also enough to replace the window.)

Oh but on a more friendly note, please feel free to look up tips for writing for ADHD readability. Many of us see big blocks of text like that and our eyes straight up skip it.

Our instance is known for having a higher than average number of autistic and ADHD members. Telling us to go read a word wall when a tantalizing pedantic linguistic argument is waiting to be had is just not gonna fly.

pay the dues

I find this viewpoint absolutely baffling. No one owes you for your data when you give it away.

Every single thing we post is graffiti on the sides of a public view board. There are no magic words you say that protect you from other people, or in this case, anyone on the internet from taking what you post.

The type of thing you submit doesn't change that. And one of the reasons this baffles me is... Any idiot knows you don't post your password online. You don't post your credit card information online. You don't post your social security number online.

Why?

Because it will be stolen.

Why people pretend that scraped comments or someone's art should be immune to this just... baffles me.

If you want it to be different, you have to actually do something about it.

It's the problem with liberals today. People will spend five billion hours online whingeing that LLMs shouldn't steal art, and not a single minute actually organizing protests or lobbying their government representatives or building a site or setting up a server. Literally complaining nonstop without lifting a finger to make change.

Also I am so fucking over how people call every group they don't agree with blank-bros. This is another kind of female erasure and it pisses me off.

Okay but Armpits Esquire has the kind of whimsy I love best.