CHECKPOINT REACHED!
Take care of yourselves! If applicable…
- Save your work;
- Stretch your wrists;
- Remember the 20-20-20 rule to prevent eye strain: Every 20 minutes or so, try to look at something 20 feet (6 m) away for 20 seconds;
- De-pretzel, stretch, or give your back/legs some movement;
- Do you have water or other hydration of choice on hand?
- Double check if you’ve taken your meds today;
- When was the last time you ate?
Be kind! <3
The Discord AI training post is mostly bogus FYI
Well I had a rather thoroughly cited and sourced post about to go up about the “Discord is now recording all of your calls to train AI” post going around, but nobody gets to see it now because Tumblr’s new editor on desktop has some kind of keybinding that deletes entire “blocks” in the editor that cannot be recovered by CTRL-Z or CTRL-Y. I’m too annoyed to rewrite the whole thing. I should not have to write all of my blog posts in an external editor.
ANYWAY.
TL;DR: If you see a post going around about Discord saving and recording all of your calls to train AI, it’s months-old misinformation and the OP pulled 50% of it out of their butt while making assumptions about a change in policy regarding the storage of call data. That specific change was made to allow for the development of the voice message system. Edit: The other change was made to allow for saving clips of your streams.
Legalese is very specific. Can’t just say “Oh, when we said we wouldn’t record your voice that was for privacy reasons. Obviously recording a message for your friends is consensual and A-OK.” They aren’t allowed to do that. They need to change the policy itself to allow it for that purpose.
Sort of like how Tumblr and every social media/gallery website that exists has a clause that allows them to modify or use your uploads: They need that explicit permission to do things like crop, or resize to fit, or display it on the dashboard instead of only your profile. They can’t just assume it’s allowed because it’s something the user wanted to happen.
(And yet, every single time, there is a wave of posts about how “Warning! X new site OWNS YOUR ART!” or whatever.)
/endrant
stairsweek is my annual event that happens sometime in June (going on 6 years now) where instead of posting or reblogging any other content I fill my queue with 672+ posts on tumblr of stairs I've collected over the past couple years + submissions under the special hashtag for the specific year, and set them to post once every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, for an entire week straight
I need to state for the record that every time one of you comments on/sends me an ask about trying or liking my recipes I die a little inside in a very good way. I mean I know this has been public knowledge for like 6 years at this point but still.
Apparently Reddit is not an exception to this because someone on there just tried my cheese muffin recipe and liked it and I cried like a damn baby when I read their comment. :’D
… I should probably post that recipe over here if I haven’t yet. I feel like linking to my Reddit comments on Tumblr is breaching some kind of containment…
The “Stupids”
You know what’s kinda fucked up?
I’ve spent the past (almost) two years mourning the impairment of my higher cognitive functions. I have been getting steadily worse, and worse. My short-term memory is gone. My temper is shot. I can’t do simple math in my head. My WPM has damnear halved at this point because of how hard I have to focus to type even looking directly at the keys.
When the decline started, my doctor ran a couple of tests and an MRI before determining it was nothing since everything looked clean. Completely unrelated to my new medications, she said when I asked.
This whole goddamn time. I have been falling deeper and deeper into this cesspool of toxic thinking and depression behind the scenes because I genuinely thought my brain was just degrading now and there was nothing I could do about it.
So you know what’s kinda really fucked up?
I just found out this past week, after almost two years, that “cognitive impairment” is an unofficial side effect of my medication reported at as little as half my dose; The dose my doctor has refused to touch because she “refuses to dabble in psychiatry” even though I’ve been saying it’s not had any positive effect for almost 2 years. I’ve also been bringing up concerns about negative effects for said almost 2 years.
I’m only finding this out now, because I’m changing meds for other reasons. Nobody magically decided to take me seriously. There was no breakthrough. Just me, being stubborn about getting help for another issue, saying “I need help and I am no longer asking.”
I needed to Google how to safely stop my current meds before starting the new ones (my doctor sure is great at her job), and I’d had the good sense to include the branded name for the drug in my search instead of just the generic. The very first results that came up, searching using the brand name, were asking about how long it takes for your brain to come back after you stop taking it.
People on nearly half my dose, begging their pdocs to come off of it because they’re failing classes and losing jobs.
So yeah anyway my doctor’s basically had me mourning my brain and coming to terms with developing mild pseudo-dementia over the past 2 years because she just assumed since “cognitive impairment” wasn’t listed on the official side effects for my medication that it just wasn’t a thing.
Kinda fucked up.
Edit: I’m adding more information ONLY for the sake of anyone who may search for either term. My experience is mine alone, please do your own thorough research and consult with your doctor (or get the opinion of a second!) before you consider changing your medication.
The drug is called Lamotrigine, branded name Lamictal. It is an anti-epileptic medication, but it can also be prescribed for some mood and eating disorders.
The more people laugh at the way I write my recipes, the more I’m convinced that recipe bloggers are doing it wrong. You can’t legally copyright a recipe, so I get adding the life’s story and stuff to pad it out. I do.
But.
But.
Why not just include the funny-ha-ha content in the recipe itself?
“It’s just a muffin! How do you know they stole your recipe?”
“Because I’m the only baker who still calls for the desegregation of eggs in the year of our lord 2023! Gladys’ brain is as stale as her snickerdoodles, do you think she came up with that herself?!”
I’m just saying.
Still not over the fact that young American schoolchildren are expected to stand up every morning in school and recite some cultish promise that they’ll love their country no matter what. Bonus points for mentioning one specific religion’s God in the process.
Like, do they realize the rest of the civilized world looks at that and kinda goes “Ummmmmmmmm????”
Do they know that other countries don’t do that?
Do they know the rest of the world thinks it’s some totalitarian state shit? Nazi Germany and North Korea shit?
TFW a family member buys a literal weapon for your 10-year-old immediately after you politely asked them not to.
I’m sure she’ll be thrilled, what kid wouldn’t be? Bows are fucking cool.
But that’s not the poiiiint
So, I spent a chunk of my day today without power.
Turns out someone broke into the building and stole the copper wiring grounding the entire apartment block over the weekend.
We only found it today, meaning the whole building’s been without grounding for a couple days. I cannot stress enough how dangerous that is. The only reason we found out today is our darling of a maintenance man noticed a broken lock.
Hooooo.
"kids can't read about [insert mature topic here] itll traumatize them" i went through something as a child that would make the brain of a grown ass adult shatter into a million pieces. I would never see this aspect of my life represented in a book until. 2022. When I was 26 years old. Kids are already seeing and experiencing the things you are afraid of exposing them to. What you want to take from them is to learn about it, or to learn that others are going through the same things as them, at their own pace through the safety of fiction
And you can put down a book and walk away if it's too much!
I've done that with books that squicked me before. It's a safe way to address these concepts.
I’d respectfully argue this one as being finicky and highly situational depending on the context, especially with fiction. I’m not for “you can’t read about x mature thing”, but this is one of those areas where source and context matters WAY more than subject matter and I wish more parents (and teenagers, kids are gonna think it sucks regardless) would think that way. One of the few areas I’ll helicopter to some degree because I’m young enough to remember being that kid.
If they’re learning from and exploring the wrong sources with no outside input it’s going to do damage. Not necessarily trauma, but it can push their views on those topics in uncomfortable directions if left unchecked. (Note: I say can. Not does.) It’s a “taking the teacher at their word” moment, only the teacher is a young 20-something writing fanfiction on the internet and not properly tagging their shit.
(Pre-submit warning: Anecdote/tangent follows.)
Coming at this from the parent direction: I just screened a YA novel for Cat that, 300 pages in, veered suddenly into a 2-page almost-but-not-quite-went-all-the-way-because-it-was-interrupted SA between the protagonist and her father. (Admittedly I would have known about that scene had I read actual reviews rather than official blurbs, which omitted that particular warning for some reason.)
I finished reading it quite literally yesterday. It’s not a loan; She bought this book. She’d started it before me. We are/were a “you will never be grounded from reading or have your books taken away for any reason” household. Making this decision to not give it back to her (yet) is weirdly one of the most conflicted parenting decisions I’ve made in her life so far, especially since the scene doesn’t get explicit.
But.
I know at my kid’s age, I would have read those pages out of curiosity even if they did “go there”. They wouldn’t have been upsetting, I was a tough-ass kid when it came to darker topics and reading. But I also know that at her age, I would not (and could not!) have had the experience I do now to see just how disrespectful and downright BAD the portrayal was in that YA novel. The kind of scene that is tossed in to spur emotional outrage or fear in the reader rather than contribute to the book in any meaningful way. Used as a tool for rage-bait.
I love her, and she is incredibly intelligent for her age, but she is also an information sponge. Many youth are, even if some adults want to pretend they’re not paying attention. Being an information sponge with inexperienced exposure to not-so-great source material is… Not good. (Hell, look at how easily grown adults fall into that trap.)
That, as a parent trying to raise a good human, fucking terrifies me.
Adult me reads that scene, and admittedly? I feel like I’m Karen-ing on this. I’m angry about it. Offended, even. Again, not about the subject matter, but that my kid might have been exposed to it so casually, as nothing more than rage-bait that gets brushed aside the second it’s not directly convenient to the plot. If I hadn’t screened it, I worry that she might have assumed/taken some things in that book to heart that really should not be normalized.
Do I think kids need to be sheltered from concepts as a whole? Oh holy mother of fuck no, because that’s how you get kids who feel lost in their own home, or don’t speak up about abuse. But I do know that if (and when) my kid is exposed to this kind of thing in literature, fiction or no, that it should be from a source that handles the subject matter with at least some illusion of tact. That, I can help her with. I can at least try.
So I’m more saying “please don’t read about that topic until I can look it over first or we can talk together” rather than banning it entirely.
Shit… Never ban information; Educate on where and how to use it properly.
Bleh. Tangent. Veering way off topic.
I swear I’m not arguing against the post. I think I was going somewhere with this, more as a defense of parents who *do* take issue with/take away stuff like that for the right reasons.
“Defense of a middleground,” if that makes sense.
/endrant
I missed Tumblr but oh boy did I forget about the whole block a handful of thotbots every morning thing.
OK, but I’m genuinely surprised the bots here still behave the same!
Over on Reddit right now the bots are scraping legitimate posts to generate realistic-seeming profiles, comments, and messages rather than following static scripts. They get reported slower as a result, and it builds engagement with legitimate users which lowers the chance of it getting dinged as a bot.
Even the bots on this hellsite are out of date lmfao I missed it here