fuck "girl lunch" fuck "girl math" a woman is a hairy animal who sweats and grunts and excretes and hungers and gets wrinkly and dies eventually. you have to love that.
The End Is Near: "News" organizations using AI to create content, firing human writers
an example "story" now comes with this warning:
A new byline showed up Wednesday on io9: “Gizmodo Bot.” The site’s editorial staff had no input or advance notice of the new AI-generator, snuck in by parent company G/O Media.
G/O Media’s AI-generated articles are riddled with errors and outdated information, and block reader comments.
“As you may have seen today, an AI-generated article appeared on io9,” James Whitbrook, deputy editor at io9 and Gizmodo, tweeted. “I was informed approximately 10 minutes beforehand, and no one at io9 played a part in its editing or publication.”
Whitbrook sent a statement to G/O Media along with “a lengthy list of corrections.” In part, his statement said, “The article published on io9 today rejects the very standards this team holds itself to on a daily basis as critics and as reporters. It is shoddily written, it is riddled with basic errors; in closing the comments section off, it denies our readers, the lifeblood of this network, the chance to publicly hold us accountable, and to call this work exactly what it is: embarrassing, unpublishable, disrespectful of both the audience and the people who work here, and a blow to our authority and integrity.”
He continued, “It is shameful that this work has been put to our audience and to our peers in the industry as a window to G/O’s future, and it is shameful that we as a team have had to spend an egregious amount of time away from our actual work to make it clear to you the unacceptable errors made in publishing this piece.”
According to the Gizmodo Media Group Union, affiliated with WGA East, the AI effort has “been pushed by” G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller, recently hired editorial director Merrill Brown, and deputy editorial director Lea Goldman.
In 2019, Spanfeller and private-equity firm Great Hill Partners acquired Gizmodo Media Group (previously Gawker Media) and The Onion.
The Writers Guild of America issued a blistering condemnation of G/O Media’s use of artificial intelligence to generate content.
“These AI-generated posts are only the beginning. Such articles represent an existential threat to journalism. Our members are professionally harmed by G/O Media’s supposed ‘test’ of AI-generated articles.”
WGA added, “But this fight is not only about members in online media. This is the same fight happening in broadcast newsrooms throughout our union. This is the same fight our film, television, and streaming colleagues are waging against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) in their strike.”
The union, in its statement, said it “demands an immediate end of AI-generated articles on G/O Media sites,” which include The A.V. Club, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, The Onion, Quartz, The Root, and The Takeout.
but wait, there's more:
Just weeks after news broke that tech site CNET was secretly using artificial intelligence to produce articles, the company is doing extensive layoffs that include several longtime employees, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation. The layoffs total 10 percent of the public masthead.
*
Greedy corporate sleazeballs using artificial intelligence are replacing humans with cost-free machines to barf out garbage content.
This is what end-stage capitalism looks like: An ouroborus of machines feeding machines in a downward spiral, with no room for humans between the teeth of their hungry gears.
Anyone who cares about human life, let alone wants to be a writer, should be getting out the EMP tools and burning down capitalist infrastructure right now before it's too late.
all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.
Isn’t Lady Gaga bisexual?
yes that is indeed why she's on the list of famous women who like women
why have multiple people reblogged this with some horse-assed "um actually most of these people are bi or pan" did I fucking stutter I said they like girls. what is your point. I'm going to kill you.
the icon is because of this post
POV: you make a good post and then encounter tumblr reading comprehension
btw to just clarify for anyone who sees this reblog of this post
op is basically saying something along the lines of "yea ik taylor swift is bi but like. why is she y'all's only lgbtq+ pop icon when there are all these other lgbtq+ people in the pop scene???"
i might have worded this badly but hopefully i got the main point across
hi op here I certainly did not fucking say Taylor Swift is bi
frog k here, trans shitposter & weirdo. i hate to do this again but a bunch of bills came out at once and i'm broke and hungry and my car's brakes are going to shit, please help me if you can
cashapp - $asimplefrog ko-fi (paypal redirect) - frogk
thank you so much!!!
ok NOW we can all freak out marvel vfx workers voted to unionize
california dmv plate: "POTENT CUM" Customer: CHECK OUT THESE ROPES DMV: HE'S NOT LYING. PRETTY THICK Verdict: APPROVED
It is exhausting how many people seem to refuse to give unaligned non-binary people the same level of compassion as they do masc or fem aligned trans people. So many people seem to completely understand how much constant misgendering can affect a person, that many trans people are forced to stay closeted and that being closeted is not a privilege even if it reduces the risk of being targeted by bigots, that many trans people can't transition due to lack of access/support/health issues... But the same people that understand that for trans men and women will forget all of that when it comes to non-binary people, especially those of us unaligned with concepts of feminity or masculinity. Suddenly people will act like every non-binary person who "looks cis" is making a conscious choice to do so, and that they are fully comfortable and happy with that choice. People will go from treating misgendering as a serious issue to acting like nb people should just brush it off. People who understand that infighting and comparing who has it worse within the queer community distracts from real progress will start talking about nb people as if we have no real problems and just want to feel oppressed. Leftists will start to sound like alt-right incels complaining about "special snowflakes" and "safe spaces" when they talk about non-binary people.
It's utterly exhausting and it's infuriating how many people seem to not even notice this.
Non-binary people face a huge amount of invisibility and infantilisation. Non-binary people spending their lives being misgendered and hiding away in the closet are not privileged for that. Non-binary people face the same obstacles in medical transition as any other trans person. Non-binary people discussing our own struggles on our own posts or in our own spaces doesn't take away from other trans people. Non-binary people have a right to take up space and participate in the wider queer community without be treated like we're intruders.
Stop treating non-binary people like we're "basically cis" or "trans-lite," stop acting like trans issues don't affect non-binary people. Treat non-binary people with some compassion or just leave us alone.
Had to include this tags cause i also catched people not getting the issues and this person explained it best
Spring comic. Spring is when I miss living in the woods in Wisconsin the most, cool plants, morel mushrooms, my mom pulling wood ticks off my head… just wonderful.
If you like my comic and want to toss some money in my hat here’s a link.
I love this comic so much!!
I’ve had the graphic novel pre-ordered since it was announced, and I just got and read in one shot! The Accursed Vampire is so so lovely 💕
madelinehmcgrane
reblogging good things said about The Accursed Vampire.
the fact that pro-monarchy arguments have degenerated, over the past few centuries, from “the king rules by divine right and is accountable to nobody but god”, to “uhm the royals generate a lot of income from tourism” will never stop being extremely funny to me
the monarchs… bad. but the castles? oh, the castles are positively lush with rats… 👅
Delete this account immediately.
Oh Jeffrey? Jeff the killer? Oh yeah he's not a teenager anymore. He's 28. Yeah he's still into the killing part just not as much. He says it lost its spark. Yeah he still says go to sleep but he'd honestly rather go sleep himself. He's pretty chill. Past the killings. He's a beloved member of the community. Yeah he's on estrogen
I lent my mom a book before I read it and apparently right at the beginning they tell a true story about all our chestnut trees dying and it made my mother SO DEPRESSED that she couldn't sleep and now she's been researching chestnut trees for the past half hour looking sick
She's right!!
Chestnut trees used to define forests in the South -- some estimates say about 1/4 trees was a chestnut tree. And they were huge! Growing more than 100 feet tall (with trunks more than 10 feet in diameter), they were called the "redwoods of the East." They were a characteristic food source of the South, too. A mature chestnut tree can produce upwards of 50 lbs of nuts a year -- many of these were gathered and eaten by poor families, or turned into chestnut flour and used to make "poor man's bread."
But, at the beginning of the 20th century, a fungus called the blight was brought over from Asia. Over the next 50 years, every single American Chestnut was infected and died. While some root systems are still alive, they're considered functionally extinct.
People cut down huge areas of forest trying to prevent the spread of the blight and save the trees -- but they failed. And now several generations have never even known the chestnut tree. We don't even know enough to miss them.
But now, with advances in genetic technology, the chestnut trees may be coming back! Through a group scientific effort led by the American Chestnut Foundation, researchers have created a "transgenic American chestnut tree with enhanced blight tolerance" called Darling 58. Darling 58 is genetically modified to be able to coexist with the blight.
Darling 58 American chestnuts are currently being reviewed by the USDA-APHIS, EPA, and FDA. But researchers hope to be able to reintroduce them soon -- one huge step towards restoring our forests.
You can follow the chestnut trees' progress (and request a Darling 58 tree when they're available) at https://acf.org/ .
Thank you I'm gonna share this chestnut revitalization news with her!
There are many American chestnut trees still living outside their original natural range. Michigan, for example, has a large number of chestnut farms and is the biggest grower of chestnuts in the US. The species is listed as endangered but is not extinct.
Where I grew up is considered oak/hickory forest now but was once oak/chestnut. Even the corpses of the chestnuts are gone now. It's a wood that takes a long time to decay and there was at least one fallen trunk still somewhat recognizable when I was a kid, but it too is just a mossy spot now. We're still seeing the impact of the loss on local wildlife.
If Darling 58 gets approved I'm going to have to see how many we can plant on the property.
*waves* I work at the university where Darling 58 was developed, and we're all really excited about it!
The devastation of losing the American chestnut can't be overstated. It was a keystone part of eastern North American forests, providing nuts for wildlife, leaves and wood for many specialized herbivorous insects, and was a vital source of pollen for bees, beetles, butterflies, and other pollinators during mid-summer - a time when there are few other flowering plants in forests. Not to mention many other aspects I myself don't know much about, such as their mycorrhizal networks, which I'm sure were quite important.
I mention that last bit specifically because I study pollinators, and my latest research is surveying pollinators in American chestnut orchards to better understand the importance of this tree for insects. Because the loss of the tree happened so long ago (not in ecological terms but for peer-reviewed science) we don't really have the ability to do before-after comparisons, just after. Chestnut orchards are really all we have to get a tiny glimpse into how these trees interacted with other species. There's even a specialized chestnut bee, Andrena rehni, that only collects pollen from chestnuts and chinkapins, which was thought to have gone extinct for decades after the loss of chestnut. It was rediscovered only around a decade ago, and has since been found in a few chestnut orchards.
Oaks, which are also keystone species, have largely replaced chestnuts in eastern forests, filling their empty niche, but they're not the same. Undoubtedly the dynamics of forest ecosystems have been greatly impacted in ways that are hard to quantify. Yes, you can still find American chestnuts growing in the wild - the vast majority are not at mature age, as the blight kills them back, and they will continue to stump sprout over and over. I am from New Hampshire and our woods are full of little chestnuts that are maybe up to 3cm DBH and won't ever produce nuts. Naturally blight resistant mature chestnuts are exceedingly rare and their locations are often hidden to protect them. The ones you see in orchards are usually Chinese chestnuts, or American x Chinese backcrossed hybrids, which was the previous method of breeding blight resistance.
We have a growing number of invasive pathogens threatening our native trees - hemlock woolly adelgid, emerald ash borer, Dutch elm disease, oak wilt, and more it seems every year. The entire dynamics of our eastern forests are at risk of fundamental change, as the composition and diversity of woodlands are impacted by these exotic diseases. There are countless researchers studying and trying to develop ways to fight them, but it's happening far too fast to prevent some significant losses. Ecosystems that have been evolving together since the last Ice Age are unraveling in our lifetimes, and I can't stress how important it is for you to remember.
Remember chestnuts. Remember ash forests. While we're at it, remember wolves and mountain lions, remember ivory-billed woodpeckers and passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets and Atlantic cod. So many species that were fundamental parts of North America but have either gone extinct or become just about functionally extinct across most of their range.
Do not let shifting baselines make you think what you see now is normal.
We have to remember that things are deeply wrong. Most of the green you see on roadside and forest edges are invasive vines and shrubs. There aren't supposed to be this many deer and deer ticks. Cowbirds once lived on the Great Plains, now they're parasitizing birds across the US to the level of being a true threat to the survival of some endangered species. Atlantic cod was once so abundant they jumped into fishermen's boats. And don't even get me started on the decline in so many insect groups - the abundance of all kinds of insects used to be exponentially greater. We used to be surrounded by a wealth of biodiversity and life. Despair and grieve momentarily at how mutilated this land is, but then get your hands in the dirt and do something about it.
When Darling 58s become available for the public, plant one. In the meantime, plant other native trees, and native wildflowers, native shrubs, native ferns. Read some books on our native ecosystems - there's thousands of them out there, whether you are interested in pollinators, raptors, salmon, squirrels, saltmarshes, you name it, ecologists have written books about them, or field guides, to try and get the public motivated to care and help restore them. Start noticing as many species as you can on your next walk, including the invasive ones. Learn to read the landscape, so instead of one big wall of green you see individual species, instead of a white noise of birdsong you pick out the conversations of orioles, vireos, sparrows, and warblers.
The most that ecologists can ask you to do is to care. If most people just cared, let alone took action or better yet became a conservation biologist, we'd be in a much different scenario. But the majority of people are indifferent, ignorant, or are in the case of corporations actively working to destroy. Anyone can restore habitat, if done thoughtfully and with the right native species. You can transform your backyard, or help redesign a town park, or work with your local garden club or conservation commission to get native plants installed in front of buildings instead of more hostas and daylilies. It's not happening because no one's demanding it, and few know enough to demand it. Destruction will keep happening until there's pushback against it, ignorance will remain until eyes are opened to other ways of being.
We can bring chestnuts back. We can bring many things back from the brink, so in a few hundred years they will perform the ecological roles they once did. Nature is resilient. Your actions today determine the ecosystems of tomorrow, and all the things that ecosystems do for us, from mitigating hurricane damage to clean drinking water to carbon storage to food production.
Want some books to get started?
Read 'Bringing Nature Home' by Doug Tallamy, or his latest book, 'Nature's Best Hope.' Or, if you want to revel in the awesomeness of oak trees, his book 'The Nature of Oaks.'
Read anything by Bernd Heinrich or Thor Hansson, who will make you feel connected to this land like you never have before.
You can find books about the biggest trees in New England, birding guides for each state that tell you where the best places are and what to find there. You can find natural history encyclopedias for most states too - for example, 'The Nature of New Hampshire,' 'Natural Landscapes of Maine', 'Wetland, Woodland, Wildland' (for VT), and I'm sure many others, all of which are detailed accounts of every type of natural community that occurs in each state.
Want to learn how to 'read the landscape' like I mentioned? For the northeast, get 'Reading the Forested Landscape' by Tom Wessels. It's so good it was assigned as a textbook in my undergrad at UNH. I'm sure there are many similar books for the mid-Atlantic or southeast.
Seriously, just, go to the natural history section of your local bookstore or library. I could list a bajillion websites here with resources that are fantastic, but I argue it's far more valuable to sit down with a book and get immersed in a narrative that will move you spiritually. There's still so much information that's only found in books, or is collected there in ways that you'd have to go searching all over the internet for, without the assurance it's even accurate.
Change the way you see this land; notice the absences, the new arrivals, the things that are slowly blinking out and becoming a ghost of eons past, the things that are changing before our very eyes. Connect the dots through time, and see your place in it too.
The best time to plant a tree was yesterday; the next best time is when you can get your hands on a Darling 58.
Also, I want to add, if you’re interested in these sorts of projects, check with your state Department of Natural Resources (or Department of Conservation, even Game Commisions can have resources) - they may have all sorts of guides to native plants, or even programs to assist (and Certification programs if you want a cute sign).
I know specifically Maryland DNR has the Wild Acres program, but other states have their own programs as well.
1bedroom/1bath’s being $1800+…… we have to start lighting landlords on fire. i’m so serious
When I found out Paramount+ was removing Star Trek: Prodigy I bought all 20 episodes of S1 from Amazon Video since that was the only way for me to watch all 20 at the time. On 6/27, I lost access to episodes 10-20. Amazon has done what they can, which isn't much.
All 20 were accessible when I paid for all 20. The full season is what I was buying. Now, I only have access to 9 of the episodes.
What is the point of buying digital content if they're just going to steal it back from you afterwards?! Is this not false advertisement?
Seems appropriate
People don’t seem to realize this. Digital purchases are great until the seller no longer has the rights to the media and suddenly its not yours anymore
every time a fat girl wears a shirt that shows her belly an angel gets their wings reblog if you agree