Tootfinder

Brutal similes
Using #AI is an ethical choice.
I know that there cases when an #LLM could make my job easier. Which doesn't mean I'll use one. Just like I won't be buying cheap junk gadgets that could help me with some random stuff a bunch of times before they'll end up on a trash pile.
Yes, sometimes I am curious what an LLM could come up with. But then, there are people who are curious how many donuts they can eat before throwing up. A waste of good donuts.
What world would you rather live in? One where you put a little more effort in your job? Or one where LLM helps with with your job, but you can't enjoy your free time anymore because the capitalists are using LLMs to turn every single aspect of your life into a nightmare, and eventually your employer just makes you do more and more until you're thrown out? But at least you will get a monthly trial of a statistical "friend" to "talk" about your trouble to.
Yeah, you can claim that training models does the most harm, and that's already happened, so not using them doesn't change much, and all the energy spent on it would be wasted. Or use the traditional "others" fallacy — others will use it anyway, others will fuel the vicious circle, so why renounce convenience. It's like when you learn that your dinner is human meat, and you decide to eat it anyway, because not eating it won't bring that human back to life, and if it's wasted, then their death will be for naught.
#AntiCapitalism

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

This anonymous coward is an example of the worst of humanity.
(There is a reason his account – and yes, I will bet good money it’s a him – is anonymous.)
He is trying to smear our Gaza Verified campaign (https://gaza-verified.org) which is run by @…