Tootfinder

"""
[…] and I opened the case (politely examined by the guards of the Palace at four stages of my approach to the Red Hall) that held my ansible and some pictures. The pictures—films, photos, paintings, actives, and some cubes—were a little gallery of Man: people of Hain, Chiffewar, and the Cetians, of S and Terra and Alterra, of the Utter-mosts, Kapteyn, Ollul, Four-Taurus, Rokanan, Ensbo, Cime, Gde and Sheashel Haven … The king glanced at a couple without interest. “What’s this?”
“A person from Cime, a female.” I had to use the word that Gethenians would apply only to a person in the culminant phase of kemmer [a cyclical period of heightened sexual activity during which secondary gender characteristics emerge], the alternative being their word for a female animal.
“Permanently?”
“Yes.”
He dropped the cube and stood swinging from foot to foot, staring at me or a little past me, the firelight shifting on his face. “They’re all like that—like you?”
This was the hurdle I could not lower for them. They must, in the end, learn to take it in their stride.
“Yes. Gethenian sexual physiology, so far as we yet know, is unique among human beings.”
“So all of them, out on these other planets, are in permanent kemmer? A society of perverts? So Lord Tibe put it; I thought he was joking. Well, it may be the fact, but it’s a disgusting idea, Mr. Ai, and I don’t see why human beings here on earth should want or tolerate any dealings with creatures so monstrously different. […]”
"""
(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness)

RE: https://todon.eu/@faab64/117019836045812390
Now let’s be fair here: Edy Cohen truly believes that “Israel strongly supports human rights and self-determination for all [human beings].”
He just doesn’t see Palestinians as human beings.
And that’s wh…

Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about
astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked.
Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an
effect on our characters, lives, or destinies? What force or influence,
what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human
beings and affect our development or fate? No amount of scientific-sounding
jargon or comp…

The repression of all beings who are not white males is one of the incentives that propel patriarchies. The chain of violence often starts with cruelty to animals, moves on to women, children, people of colour, the neurodiverse and people with non-standard sexuality.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/116893028743364880
Do human beings actually matter at all to the operations of business? We seem to be on the cusp of a “find out” stage for that particular question.

Put in terms that might make sense to people who might disagree, an #LLM is a second order distillation. Reality trains the "models" of cognition via evolution. Those that don't die, evolve emotions to guide them towards or away from things. Humans evolved a complex enough system to construct internal models of reality.
Language jams all this stuff together into a(n extremely lossy) representation for transmitting it to other beings with similar direct access to reality. This becomes the first order distillation of experiential reality. Models trained on that corpus are then second order distillations (they are trained in the artifacts produced by the model trained by reality itself).
A lot of things, like threat modeling, require you to tap into that first order model.

- The only ways through / around all this that I’m aware of involve
(1) making real connections with real human beings whenever possible, not just job listings,
(2) continuing to try and try and try (ugh), and
(3) believing, deeply believing, that the hiring process is 95% not about you — which is a cruel truth, but also a good reminder not to internalize the way businesses treat you.
7/