#GOOD article

[hellfiredemon]

"Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language.

Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting.

The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate."

Yes this article is paywalled, so I just did the 'ol cmd c + cmd v to read it

[aspd-culture]

Well, WIRED posting one of the only articles on why psychopathy is bs and personality disorders can't predict criminality was not on my 2023 Bingo Card.

But here we are. As someone who doesn't engage in criminal activity, but has ASPD, much appreciation to WIRED and the specific author of this article (I believe that would be Eleanor Cummins). This is a really great article; it doesn't pretend it knows more than it does, but it methodically goes after the term psychopathy and all the issues with the term, the purpose of it's invention, and the researchers who both use it and try to study it.

It's by no means an article just about ASPD, but we do pop up in here and they even make both meaningful mention and a link to source in-sentence about the way ASPD research ignores the history of trauma associated with it.

[ificouldflyhome369]

For the love of God, stop talking about Harry Styles’ sexuality

Is the pop star's private life really any of our business? https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/harry-styles-sexuality

[pandemic-info]

California’s summer COVID wave arrives early. How to stay safe

https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/california-s-summer-covid-wave-arrives-early-19539429.php

[glittergelf]

“Don’t exclude some women from feminism in the interests of inclusiveness. Imagine seeking support from other women, only to find that your husband or father had got there first?

When you allow our ex partners space in your feminism and give them platforms in your organisations and at your meetings, you exclude their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers from accessing these spaces and making use of resources that were set up to support women like them. Prioritise women over your desire to have a “get out of jail free” card to hold up against hostile accusations of bigotry”

[pleasestopthese]

This was before Google, so the only way to find out how carpooling worked was to show up. Here’s what I discovered: you walk to a designated spot – a quiet residential street in North Berkeley – during the regular morning commuting hour. There, you’d find a tidy line of people on the sidewalk, and alongside it a lineup of cars by the curb. There are no signs, no instructions. One by one, a person gets into a car at the front of the line and the car takes off; the line keeps moving as more people and cars replenish it at the back. Everything moves along swiftly. When it’s your turn, you get in the first car in line – no swapping spots, you get what you get – and greet the driver. There are two destination options, both in the heart of San Francisco, and you tell the driver which one you’re headed to.

Then it’s a 20-minute ride across the Bay Bridge, past Treasure Island and into San Francisco, with glimpses of the bay, the sky and the downtown. The genius of this system was that, while the rider got a free ride, the driver got reduced highway tolls and a faster ride into the city for taking in a passenger and using the express carpool lane during rush hour. It enabled a true win-win situation for the two parties, with an extra win for the environment, to the extent that it reduced the number of cars on the road. It worked beautifully.

...

Scott’s anarchism is, rather, a way of seeing the world, a ‘sensibility’ as he calls it, one that can be honed the way a bird watcher can train herself to hear the calls of a particular species, or a cook can learn to detect the early scent of a good char. It is not anti-statist but anti-oppression, pro-human and proactive. It is about noticing taken-for-granted social designs and erecting creative defences against powers and arrangements that chip away at one’s ability to exercise self-ownership. It is Scott following his ‘rational convictions’ and choosing to jaywalk when everyone else waited patiently for the light to turn at an intersection free of vehicle traffic. It is people’s feet forming the most direct and well-trodden path across a park’s lawn – known as ‘desire paths’ – in defiance of urban planners’ aesthetic inclinations. It is the city of Houston, where I live, declaring itself a ‘book sanctuary’ and ensuring its public libraries carried titles banned in schools, thus rendering state-imposed book bans de jure effected but de facto nullified in an unequivocal pushback against censorship.

...

Throughout history, communities have demonstrated a tremendous ability to think for themselves and, more than that, to resist, in an entirely pragmatic fashion, forces of domination and devise alternatives that help restore their agency. Scott’s anarchism is in this sense manifestly anti-authoritarian. There is a clear theme of subversion running through his scholarship. But what he brings to light, in particular in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), is people’s ability to carry out ‘petty acts of insubordination’ and acts of ‘quiet evasion’ against exploitative and repressive powers, the very opposite of violent revolts in the spectrum of resistance. Collective civil disobedience and mass protests are somewhat close cousins, but Scott insists that subtler, everyday forms of nonviolent resistance against domination can be found, and carried out, in many smaller but no less powerful ways. They may not always work, but when they do the result is a restoration of individuals’ sense of dignity.

[chrisquartet]

“The search in itself is part of the problem. The constant need for an answer and a solution. It’s okay not to know, or just accept the fact that the only certainty is inconsistency and change.”

-Chris Hemsworth, British GQ (6/6/23)

📸 by Georges Antoni

[vague-humanoid]

Hannah doesn’t have to call herself a tradwife because she already is one. As such, Ballerina Farm has become the lodestar for those still aspiring to establish an aesthetically pleasing—and, ideally, monetized—pastoral existence. Most of her acolytes are less subtle about their politics, which they assume Hannah shares. In 2021, Morgan Zegers, the founder of the Turning Point USA-affiliated group Young Americans Against Socialism, said that Ballerina Farm gives her “DAILY inspiration on how to live out my values as a Conservative.” On her podcast, Zegers, who recently got engaged and does not have any children, gives “young unmarried women who dream of becoming a traditional wife and stay-at-home mom one day” advice on how to “become an asset for your future family.”

She is far from the only tradwife-in-training who has been inspired by Ballerina Farm. Take Gwen the Milkmaid, a Canadian “ASMRtist” and wellness-influencer-turned-tradposter. “Pov: you used to be a pro-abortion, anti-marriage, lesbian ‘feminist,’” reads the caption on a TikTok post of her rehydrating sourdough starter, “but now you’re getting married to your fav man on earth, love serving him, and can’t wait to make babies.” Like Hannah, Gwen is blonde, posts videos of herself cooking and frolicking in prairie dresses, and emphasizes the difference between her old life and the new one she has built for herself—or, rather, the life she hopes to have built, someday. In one video, Gwen asks God “why I don’t have a fifty-acre farm, seven children, forty chickens and five jersey cows yet.” Lacking a multimillionaire father-in-law, or a dairy cow of her own, she’s forced to churn store-bought cream into homemade butter. Gwen’s videos turn the subtext of Ballerina Farm’s videos into text, as if to compensate for the ranch she lacks: Gwen is proudly antigovernment, antivaccine, and anti-birth control.

Ballerina Farm has also been frequently boosted by Evie Magazine. Billing itself as the conservative answer to Cosmo, Evie publishes articles on everything from “How to Wear Shorts Like a French Girl” to the supposedly rampant child sex trafficking to which the Biden administration has turned a blind eye. In February, they responded to a minor scandal that broke out when details about the Neelemans’ family wealth began circulating on TikTok. The article ends with a full-throated defense of Ballerina Farm. “Our culture has become far too comfortable with criticizing people for being rich,” it reads. “There’s nothing wrong with having money or coming from money. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with using that money to create a beautiful homesteading life that creates useful food, products, and content for people all across the country.” For Evie, the Neelemans’ secret wealth isn’t proof that living off the land is largely inaccessible to the masses but a symbol of the virtuousness of Ballerina Farm’s mission. They have enough money to live glamorously; instead, they choose to live a simple life. That this simple life might be an expensive illusion is never considered.

A month later, the magazine published a treatise on tradwives by Gina Florio, a personal trainer who moonlights as manager to Candace Owens, a conservative commentator whose BLEXIT foundation urged Black people to abandon the Democratic Party. (Owens has also promoted Ballerina Farm on Instagram. Hannah, for her part, reposted the endorsement and later deleted it.) Like Gwen the Milkmaid, Florio is a reformed liberal who wrote for Teen Vogue and PopSugar before she “left the left.” Tradwives, she argues, are superior to “the shrieking, blue-haired protester who wants on-demand abortion and supports the ‘free the nipple’ movement.” She describes Ballerina Farm as the example on which conservative women should model their lives: “The children are blonde and seemingly well-mannered. The father herds cattle in a cowboy hat. And the mother is impossibly beautiful as she milks cows in her overalls, loose braids, and zero makeup.” This is all in contrast to “the average twenty-five-year-old woman” who “lacks basic domestic skills, serially dates multiple men, and loudly opposes manners and decorum.”

To her credit, Florio acknowledges that it’s functionally impossible for most women—even those who want nothing more than to dedicate their entire lives to caring for a husband and children—to fulfill the tradwife ideal. She points out that real wages have stagnated since the 1970s, making it impossible to raise a family on a single income. “We have to really ask ourselves if we want to truly return to tradition,” Florio writes, “or if we want to just fantasize about the perfect trad wife who is both gorgeous and domestic.”

[salmonandfox]

/pretends to be surprised

[ghelgheli]

Early historians of abolition attributed the gradual emancipation laws primarily to the outcome of the Civil War. They argued that Cuban and Brazilian slave-owners embraced reform in large part because the abolition of slavery in North America discredited the institution on the world stage. But many considered this explanation inadequate. In particular, social historians objected to an account of abolition in which enslaved people played almost no part. These scholars developed an alternative explanation for gradual emancipation that was rooted in subaltern agency. In their telling, slave-owners surrendered freedom of the womb as a political concession to their slaves in order to defuse mounting revolutionary tensions within Cuban and Brazilian society.

(...)

Even thousands of miles away, slaves learned of the ‘general strike’ that had begun in the Confederacy. In Brazil, this news first reached the northern province of Maranhão in the fall of 1861. The Union warship the Powhatan docked in the capital city of San Luıís that September, in pursuit of a wayward Confederate cruiser. Within days, Brazilian officials detected a ‘movement’ among the province’s slaves. In towns stretching along the region’s waterways, enslaved Afro-Brazilians had begun to ‘declare their freedom’. Slaves insisted that they ‘no longer had to obey their masters’ because ‘a [US] warship was there to liberate them’.

(...)

For the first time, a number of slave-owners in Cuba and Brazil began to look for a way out. In Brazil, Francisco Antonio Brandão Jr led the way. Brandão was the son of a Brazilian cotton planter, who grew up in the province of Maranhão. For four years, his family had watched plantations across the province go up in flames as fugitive slaves took up arms against the Brazilian government. By 1865, he was convinced that if Brazil failed to abolish slavery, ‘the slave will sign his freedom papers with the blood of his oppressors’. That year, he published A escravatura no Brasil, one of the first major works by an elite Brazilian to call for the gradual abolition of slavery across the empire. In it, he pointed to the black freedom struggle unfolding across the Atlantic World as the central reason that slaves in Brazil were ‘inspired to fight’. Was it necessary, he wondered, for Brazil to pass through the same ‘bloody scenes’ as the United States, before the state would take action?

‘A General Insurrection in the Countries with Slaves’: The US Civil War and the Origins of an Atlantic Revolution, 1861–1866. Samantha Payne, Past & Present 257.1 (2022): 248-279.

[tomatojello]

What tf did I just read

i think the best pitch for 17776 is “trust me” i think people should go in not knowing what kinds of entities are communicating in the calender portion

[3liza]

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/theyre-not-human-how-19th-century-inuit-coped-with-a-real-life-invasion-of-the-walking-dead

Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.

“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.

And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.

Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.

“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.

Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.

“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”

Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.

By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.

“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.

The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.

“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.

The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.

But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.

The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.

When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.

Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.

Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.

“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.

But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.

The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.

The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.

[sammusbird]

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/6/26/17502346/laura-ingalls-wilder-award-little-house-books-racism

Little House on the Prairie was first published in 1935, but it wasn’t until 1952 that a concerned parent wrote to the publisher to take issue with a line in the book: “There were no people” on the prairie, the line went. “Only Indians lived there.”

[kowai-kabuki-tanuki]

How a TV Hit Sparked Debate About Having Too Many Babies

The Sani family in northern Nigeria has six children, more than the parents can afford but fewer than their own parents had. Birthrates, and the decisions couples make about family size, are changing across Africa.

[cycas]

If anyone would like to try cooking bread in a pan, I like this recipe for English Muffins : https://www.greatbritishchefs.com/recipes/wholemeal-spelt-english-muffins-recipe

Spelt is an old wheat variety that is high in protein and quite flavourful, English Muffins are a kind of slightly heavy unsweetened bread bun (though this recipe uses a little honey to get the yeast started)

I find part of the problem of *writing* people cooking in a pre-modern manner, eg in a stone bread-oven, is that you say 'oven' and people automatically imagine a modern one. Need to do a bit of extra work to overcome the automatic association.

How to cook in a medieval setting

Alright. As some of the people, who follow me for a longer while know... I do have opinions about cooking in historical settings. For everyone else a bit of backstory: When I was still LARPing, I would usually come to LARP as a camp cook, making somewhat historically accurate food and selling it for ingame coin. As such I know a bit about how to cook with a historical set up. And given I am getting so much into DnD and DnD stories right now, let me share a bit for those who might be interested (for example for stories and such).

🍲Cooking at Home

First things first: For the longest time in history most people did not have actual kitchens. Because actual kitchens were rather rare. Most people cooked their food over their one fireplace at home, which looked something like what you see above. There was something made of metal hanging over the fireplace. At times this was on hinges and movable, at times it was set in place. You could hang pots and kettles over it. When it came to pans, people either had a mount they would put over the fire or some kind of grid they could easily put into place there with some sourts of mounts (like the two metal thingies you can see above).

If you have a modern kitchen, you are obviously used to cook on several cooktops (for most people it is probably four of them), while in this historical you obviously only had one fire. Of course, as you can also see in the picture above, you could often put two smaller pots over the flames or put in a pan onto the fire additionally. But yes, the way we cook in modern times is very different.

Because of this a lot of people often ate stews and soups of sort. You could make those in just one pot - and often could eat from the same stew for days. In a lot of taverns the people had an "everything stew" going, which worked on the idea that everyone just brought their food leftovers, which were all put into one pot everyone would eat from.

Now, some alert readers might have also noticed something: What about bread and pastries? If you only have one fireplace and no oven, how did people make bread?

Well, there were usually three different methods for this. The most common one was communal ovens. Often people had one communal oven in a neighborhood. Especially in a village there might just be a communal oven everyone would just put their bread in to bake. (Though often this oven would only be fired up once or twice a week.)

The second version to deal with this some people used was a sort of what we today call a dutch oven. A pot made either of metal or clay with a lit you would put into the hot coals and then put bread or pastries into that, baking it like that.

There was also a version where people just baked bread in pans on the fire, rotating the bread during the baking process. At least some written accounts we have seem to imply. (Never tried this method, though. I have no idea how this might work. My camp bread was mostly done in dutch ovens or as stickbread.)

Keep in mind that the fireplace at home was very important for the people in historical times. Because it was their one source of warmth in the house.

🏕️ Cooking at Camp

Technically speaking cooking at camp is not that different - with the exception of course that you have to drag all your supplies along. And while in Baldur's Gate 3 and most other videogames you can carry around several sets of full-plate armor and several pounds of ingredients so that dear Gale can whip something up... In real life as an adventurer running around you need to make decisions on what to take along.

If you have read Lord of the Rings, you might remember how many people have criticized Sam for actually dragging all his cooking supplies along and how sad he was for not being able to cook for most of the time, because they were very limited in taking ingredients along.

So, yes, if you are an adventurer who is camping out in the open, you will probably need to do a lot of hunting and gathering to eat during your travels. You can take food for a couple of days along, but not for a lot.

A special challenge is of course, that while you can cook food for several days when you are at homes, you do not want to drag along a prepared stew for several days. So usually you will cook in smaller batches.

A lot of people who were journeying would often just take along one or two pots along.

So, what would you eat as an adventurer travelling around while trying to save the world from some evil forces? Well, it would depend on the time of the year of course. You would probably hunt yourself some food. For example hares, birds or squirrels. Mostly small things you can eat within one or two days. You do not want to drag along half a dead deer. In the warm months you might also forrage for all sorts of greens. You also can cook with many sorts of roots. Of course you can also always look into berries and other fruits you might find.

Things you might bring with you might be salt and some spices. A good thing to bring along would be herbs for tea, too, because I can tell you from experience that water you might have gotten from a river does not always taste very well - and springs with fresh water are often not accessible.

Now, other than what you can access the basic ideas of camping fires and cooking with them has not changed in the last few thousand years. While modern people camping usually have a car nearby and hence will have access to a lot of ingredients. But the general ideas of how to build a fire and put a pot over it... has not really changed.

So, yeah.

Just keep in mind that for the most part in historical settings until fairly recently, there was not much terms of proper kitchens. People cooked over an open fire and hence had to get at times ingenius about it.