#ai companies and the people who use them will never care about quality

[lostinthe-void-666]

Fic recommendations!

Before we start I would like to say that all the summaries I post here are pulled directly from my own brain, also may contain spoilers (if so I apologize.) Please check the fics themselves for the tags/actual summaries, and just generally more information. Also let me know if any of the fic links are wrong and I’ll replace them! Thank you :)

Also give the authors all the love. They’ve made us all some amazing fanworks <3

Starbound: Scavenge for Survivors - a humans are space orcs fic in the form of Xisuma picks up some aliens and goes running through the cosmos. Also in this series is Starbound: Savage (Forgotten Conquest) although if you plan to read the first, I would recommend not reading it until you get to a certain point in the other fic!

TAXI! [Totally and Xisumally Insane] - college dropout Xisuma runs a taxi service to stay afloat, but some odd people inadvertently become regulars of his.

Well, Well, Look Who’s Inside Again - Ex is unbanned from the Void in a really bad state. Oh and can’t remember anything. A lot of angst ensues :)

Love Me Like I’m Dead - Xisuma whump. There’s more to it and it’s extremely good I love it so much, but that’s the most basic summary.

Skin and Bones - febwhump from the same author as love me like I’m dead! Have to have an acc to view but a lot of the same themes and it’s really good ^^

proverbs uttered by utter fools (i’ll do anything it takes!) - I’m awful at a summary for this one. Ai Xisuma is a mascot for the company that Grian works for. A lot of stuff ensues.

Curiosity and their Consequences. - Cub realizes that the admin has never shared things about his own past. So what happens when he goes digging?

Potion of Forget This - After Tango bans the saturated soups and honey bottles from the lobby of his decked out game, a few of the Hermits start mixing soups and potions! Xisuma mixes a soup for one of his experiments. This time, it wasn’t just some funny effect.

cosmology - a series! Really love their world building and admin headcannons! The first one is post season 8, the second is set in season 10

i of the storm // salvation - Wels puts himself in a dangerous situation, to follow the call of salvation

quality entertainment - The Watchers are the audience, and they have to be satisfied.

Detecting and Other Gerunds - Xisuma finds something in the woods. Little does he know, that sort of creates a person.

The Devil’s Casino (and it’s not-so-devilish people) - Ex runs a casino in the city, Xisuma lives in a town near the city, and they’re forced to move out and go to work at the casino for a little while

get 360ed, bitch (EX + Xisuma) - a lot of really great fics, I can’t list them all out, but the devil’s casino is part of it and it’s so cool :)

Gates of Evolution - Xisuma is transported back in time to Evo. An elaboration on something that happens in another of the authors fics, Hermitcraft Chaotic Group Chat

stumbling in the dark (please come find me) - GIGS and ghostie Mumbo!!

The Orb Factory - Servers are orbs manufactured by the watchers and each admin gets one when they reach 18 yes, new addition, shh. I think it’s a really cool concept ^-^

The Major is walking on general ice - I haven’t personally finished this one yet, unfortunately, but it’s super good. Xisuma angst and the writing is so good

Well I Would Give You My Whole World - 5+ 1, Xisuma keeps getting so absorbed with helping others he keeps forgetting about himself

The art of taking care of others (and the unconventional methods that come with it) - (taken directly from the fic summary) 5 times Xisuma was a hypocrite while also being a worried dad, and one where people finally caught up on what was happening.

The Cloned Series - not much of it is out yet but is seems angsty. Very fun.

Hermitcraft brainrot (mainly Xisuma or EX) - self explanatory

Secret admins are a really bad idea - series! The first is an 8 +1 of the hermits not knowing who their admin is, the second is a pre-fic oneshot explaining something in the other fic

i can be the one you call - THE hurt/comfort Hermitcraft series.

I Can Be the One You Call AU Stories - self-explanatory. A series :)

Ex’s Quest to get a Single Night of Rest - Ex gets brought back onto the Hermitcraft server. The Hermits are annoying.

Iron Bleeds Green - a Hermitcraft/bionicle crossover, no idea what bionicle is but this fic is great, Xisuma and Ex find a demon of their past is following them.

the fracture - …just yeah. Xisuma and ex are pitted against each other, they were never meant to be close. Xisuma tries anyway.

Parasites aren’t the only thing you need to heal from. - (taken from the series summary) This is an Au where E.X was a parasite that practically used Xisuma's body to hurt the hermits then framed him till the point that the hermits did something that they will continue to regret.

Nobody will notice. - the hermits are inadvertently awful to xisuma and he finally ends up breaking down. I need more xisuma whump like this.

Void Medic EX - series, first one is an explanation kinda, the second, ex keeps finding their own sibling in the void..

it gets a little lonely here - series!! About an experiment facility, first one is Xisuma-centric

Void Siblings AU - trans ex, a rocky sibling relationship, and also their awful parents.

From the Archives - MAGNUS ARCHIVES BUT MAKE IT HERMITCRAFT!!! Hard to explain. Spooky and silly :)

your destiny is yours to write (or play) - xisuma-centric band au!!

AniMCYT - I understand that this one is really niche, but if you were ever a fan of animorphs, ever, that’s what this is :)

Oneshots/shorter 2/3 chapter fics:

xisuma and the void - a snapshot of what it’s like to be an admin

A Creaking Heart - Shapeshifter EX and Xisuma!! Creaking!EX!!! Angst!

Xisuma Oneshots - a series of random Xisuma oneshots.

When You’re Down Let Me Run To Your Aid - post season 8, and Xisuma isn’t responding to any of the Hermits. They’re worried.

Dragon’s Whumptober 2024 - a bunch of really fun oneshots, I could never list them all separately

Never Make a Contingency Plan Based on an Assumption - Xisuma gets caught in a death loop :D

Mis-take - (this summary taken directly out of the summary of the fic itself) The Watchers’s declaration of war against mortals, among all the grandstanding, also boasted the capture of Xisumavoid, the Admin Voidwalker.

Shouldn’t you know better? You opened the door for an apex predator - VAMPIRE MUMBO GOING FERAL YES!!!

The Workers Have Left Their Stations - Joe and Xisuma have a chat

Don’t let X and his friends cook - Xisuma and some off-server friends engage in shenanigans

Make a mercy out of me - MORE VAMPIRE MUMBO GOING FERAL!

Not Ready? - Xisuma leans something about EX

Worldeater - an admin headcannon, very cool :)

A knock at the window - Xisuma’s locked outside late at night again.

Rouge’s Gallery - an explanation of the hermits (and why they’re terrifying-)

Flowers. - Xisuma angst

i am a phony - what if xisuma and ex were in third life?

Lean On Me, Let It Out - only Doc knows about Xisuma’s previous server and what horrible things happened there

Honeycomb - Voidwalkers have some weird instincts… love this one :D

Withering Pains - (actual fic summary) Xisuma was just heading out to the nether to fix a glitch. He did not sign up to traumatically die to the almost extinct Wither effect.

Just a Day - Ex doesn’t have a good birthday.

Violet Mistique - Ex’s blindfold gets ripped off…

it’s a hollow play - Inspo of quality entertainment!!! Mumbo breaks something, and Xisuma really doesn’t want to punish him.

I’ve Seen Your Face Before - shapeshifting SCP Ex

The Tale of Suma - Xisuma and Ex are kept by the listeners while they’re growing up I can’t do this justice it’s so amazing

Ancient Secrets, Come To Light - …just yeah. Read the summary. Different timeline and watcher Wels

squishy or not, we all still love you - JEVIN FLUFF RAHHHH

Breaking and Entering - Ex tries to escape the void

bee - (actual fic summary) Xisuma gets a little more than he originally wished for with his 'Beesuma' persona.

Soulmarks AU “Hermitcraft” - everyone has a mark representing friendships they form, Xisuma reveals his

naps and high places don’t mix - Xisuma falls asleep in a high place. Instant regret.

Night Night Little God - about the sleeping glitch from the beginning of season 7

Flesh & Diamond - what if Xisuma actually used to be the doomslayer before he came to Hermitcraft?

Doppelgänger - (taken from fic summary) Xisuma confronts his double

when you were flyin’ your white flag, who never gave up on you? - Wels and Xisuma at the end of the world, in the End

You can’t Heal if you Hide - (taken from fic summary) Keralis helps Xisuma after the aftermath of a respawn

Welsknight’s Hoarding Problem - Wels hoards things :)

It’s Inadvisable to Attempt to Fight God as Any Mortal - paladin X!! His god starts to say things, though, and he starts to slip

And the World Stops Turning Just for Me - Xisuma’s tired. So tired, but he can’t give up just yet.

Exhels oneshots!

i love you like the ashes in my cigarette box

If you want a hyphen last name, I guess I don’t mind the cadence

Patterns in Petals

your honor, he’s a cornball

why the fuck are you using tilt controls

[leidensygdom]

Despite how WOTC/Hasbro have sworn off using AI several times (and then got caught using it, like here or here), and then casually firing +1000 employees this year (many of them being artists), their CEO is predictably musing about how to incorporate it, and readily making use of the technology for some other products, and testing how it may be of use for DnD/MtG.

I had mentioned it was just a matter of time, and even when some people were very eager that WOTC would never, well. Who would've thought. It's the same company that showed again and again no respect for its audience, their creators or even the biggest fans. (The OGL mess was about a year ago. They sent the Pinkertons to a fan less than a year ago). Because delivering a quality product isn't really their goal, nor is it to actually compensate artists fairly.

I don't think this is breaking news, but I'm mostly bringing it up in case people wonder where they stand. They also have a poll where you can tell what you think about them (no actual written feedback, only "pick from these 5 options"). And as a final note Margaret Weiss (creator of the Dragonlance, who had some big disputes with them- Including a lawsuit towards WOTC) has come forward to tell how little WOTC has respected her series. Not long ago a book set in the setting (Fizban's Treasury of Dragons) got released, and it cared very little about being respectful towards the world or her work. Which tracks with their usual behaviour, because Eberron was also mangled quite badly.

Just, as a reminder, there's many wonderful TTRPGs that are far more worth to support monetarily, or even available to play for free. (Recently all of the PF2e remaster has been posted on Archives of Nethys- A page that has all the mechanics from all the books for free, which is endorsed by the company itself.)

But yeah. As a small creator and artist, it's surely lovely to see how much the biggest TTRPG company out there respects us.

[deedah]

✨✨!!TADC Oc!!🌙🌙

Finally posting my tadc oc after a whole year of making it! (imma make a separate post (probably tomorrow cause I need to find a very old art piece) about all the variations of my tadc oc lol )

(It’s very long story, read if u dare (or care))

Enjoy!!

[ OCLOAD//: Izarra ]

Izarra is a young 19 year old girl who used to work at C&A as a coder, before being put as a beta tester for the game they were creating. Once she put the headset on, she got sucked into the circus without warning as she met the wacky AI Caine, who took a liking to her, and the other humans who were sadly trapped in this circus game for years without being able to escape. As Izarra tries to find a way out, many dangers come in her way, even leading her to a place she was never meant to see, and news she was never meant to hear..

Word Count - 6904

Check out her old Designs here!

[ STORYLOAD//: Yay!_Idk_What_I’m_Doing ]

[ RESTRICTED ] is a young 19 year old girl who works for C&A as a coder for their game they’ve been working on. When [ RESTRICTED ] was younger, her older brother was killed in a robbery at a store he took her too to get groceries for their family when she was 11. As [ RESTRICTED ] hid from the robbers behind some toilet paper that her brother had built up for her in an aisle, he gave his life to try to distract them until help arrived. [ RESTRICTED ], from then on, made it her mission to finish what her brother had started at C&A as their game coder.

She was an intern for one of the senior employees in her district, and did amazing things like fix bugs for the world and their main AI, and even made the game even better, quality wise. She was happy, even if everyday when she walked up to the company building she was reminded of that day. 

One day when she was working with her mentor, she noticed he seemed sad and agitated, and very, very clingy to her. More than usual at least. When she questioned him, all he said was he was going to miss her. Then an intercom went through her district as it told her to head down to her boss’ office. So she packed her things as she gave her mentor a hug that she didn’t expect to happen and left the room as he waved to her. As she walked up to her boss’ office, she got a strange feeling in her stomach, but pressed on. When she walked in, she greeted herself as she sat down and awaited the information he needed to tell her.

But the information was not what she was expecting. He plainly told her that she was getting a raise, and that from then on she would still be a coder, but also be a game beta tester.

[ RESTRICTED ] was really excited as she smiled as big as she could as her boss took her down some floors where she saw many people working in cubbies with others walking around. Some of them had lab coats on for some reason..

Weird, why would C&A need scientists if we create games..? She thought to herself as she was brought into a room with many wires that connected to one lonely headset in the middle of the room. Her boss instructed her to put on a vr suit that will allow her to actually feel like she is in the game. As she went to a room and put the suit on, they instructed her to put her hair up in a low bun, step inside the room, activate the suit, then finally, put the headset on. Once she was in the room with her suit turned on, she held the headset in her hands as she awaited further instructions. As her boss gave her the go-to, she put the headset on slowly as she saw him smile evilly, before she saw nothing.

Every other sound around her was drowned out slowly as she was held in a black void of nothing. It felt like her body was changing, becoming limp, being caught, then standing back up strong, but at the same time, it felt like she was being transferred into a new body.

After a while of nothingness she was about to take the headset off when she heard voices. A man’s voice telling about an ‘adventure’ then him talking to someone else, but [ RESTRICTED ] couldn’t make it out for all the glitching in between. 

Then a blinding light shone immediately as it made [ RESTRICTED ] close her eyes for a few seconds as her eyes adjusted soon afterwards.

She looked around, she was now in a circus-like tent with many shapes, stairs, and even slides everywhere. Everything was so colorful that it blinded [ RESTRICTED ] for a while as she put her hands on the ground as she sat down. But when she put her hands on the ground, they felt funny. She looked down at her hands to see that they looked non-human, and as she looked at the rest of her body she noticed that she wasn’t human at all, but a digital avatar her boss must have made for her. She even noticed a button on the back of each of her feet, and when she pressed it, roller skate wheels popped out. She did the same on the other foot, and now she had rollerskates on her feet without even changing shoes..

Could she even change shoes..?

She didn’t know..

She pushed the buttons again to make the wheels pop back into her foot as she stepped down and now had normal shoes again. She looked back down at her body as she noticed her hair, or well.. whatever it was.. all she knew was that it was long, a braid to be precise. And it went down to her ankles pretty much. She wasn’t used to this long hair at all. And to make it even worse, she wore a long purple bow that had two pieces that were almost as long as her braid. Yaayyyy….

[ RESTRICTED ] decided to look around the area as she slowly walked and got the hang of the avatar. 

Wow, it’s just like I’m actually in the game. Just like he said. She thought as she looked around. She was on a stage, alone, in front of.. whatever she should call that area of shapes and colors. She heard faint music, but it had no words, just a soothing melody that sounded like it would be played at a carnival.

When she took a few steps, her head started to throb. She grabbed her head as she gripped it to try and make it feel better.

Then she decided that she would tell the others that her head hurt too bad, and that she would return to the game once it had stopped. So she reached for the headset.. to feel that nothing was there.

She started to panic.

What?! How is it not there?! I literally just put it on a few minutes ago! She screamed in her mind. Her emotions took a turn as she started to freak out as she almost started to cry, but thankfully got them under control as she tried to think logically to her situation.

Well, guess taking the headset off wasn’t an option.

Maybe it was a dream..? Yeah, a dream.. she tried to tell herself as she took in her surroundings.

And with only one option left, she decided to look around, and find the bugs and the main AI like she was told to do.

So, she walked off the stage and into the circus tent. She looked round and round, but found no one.

Soon she walked far away from the stage as she came across what looked to be a mirror. She ran up to it and skirted to a stop as she took a look at herself.

She looked..

Strange..

Her eyes.. her mouth., her hair.. everything was so different..

But this is you.. her mind told her when her reflection was mimicking everything she did.

She would have gotten lost in thought if she didn’t hear a man’s voice talking to a boy with a raspy, annoying, voice.

They were far away, so [ RESTRICTED ] pushed her rollerskate buttons on her shoes to make them pop out as she skated her way over behind a block where she could see the middle of the tent.

She hid half of her body behind the block as she peaked behind it, still weary and not ready to be seen by anyone, or anything.. 

In the middle of the tent was a pair of dentures with eyes in the middle of its mouth, and a full suit with a little top hat, and beside him was a bubble that looked to have eyes and a mouth made of spikey teeth.

The dentures kept talking to the bubble as it just stared at him. Then, suddenly, the dentures stopped and looked at the block where [ RESTRICTED ] was hiding behind.

She quickly spun around and covered her mouth with her hands as she was now completely hidden by the block. It went quiet, until she heard the man’s voice talk again. 

When she thought she was safe, she took a peek back over the block to see the dentures staring right at her with his two colored eyes.

“Well, well, well!! Looks like a new human has entered this realm!!” He said loudly as she backed up from the denture monster.

Good god what is this thing..?! Her mind yelled as she slowly rolled away by pushing herself back.

The dentures noticed her scooting back and grabbed her arm as he got close into her personal space. “Now, now, now, my dear! You must meet the others! They're coming back from their adventure anytime now! Let’s go!!” He yelled as her and him somehow teleported in the middle of the tent, with the bubble thing staring right at [ RESTRICTED ].

They stood there for a while as the dentures kept yapping to her and the bubble. [ RESTRICTED ] was going to try and scoot away, but a green portal opened as six characters walked out, and they too did not look human. A jester, a ragdoll, a bunny, a ribbon with a mask, a chess piece, and some type of geometric thing walked out of the portal as it closed behind them. 

The dentures greeted the others with a strange nickname as he asked them how it was, and most of them said that it was good, but their faces looked like they were worn out. Then, they noticed [ RESTRICTED ] as she held her arm and looked at the others.

“Caine, is this another NPC you’ve made?” The purple bugs bunny said as he turned to the denture man. ‘Caine’ then explained that she was their newest member and would be staying with them. 

The others walked up to her and looked at her as they introduced themselves. Except the purple bunny, who the ragdoll, named Ragatha, told her was Jax. Caine then explained how he and she would be exploring the circus, and would be back in a minute. Caine then grabbed her arm and they teleported outside the tent, as she looked around the area she noticed how far down the ground was, and that she realized she could float somehow. That threw her off and made her freak out as Caine tried to calm her down as she continued to have a little crash out.

“God, Caine, this one’s feisty isn’t she?” A female voice said from behind them. Caine agreed to the voice as [ RESTRICTED ] tried to face them, but she kept spinning in circles. But from what she did see, she could tell it was a moon with eyes and a mouth..

“She looks like me, Caine!” The Moon said as she grabbed and started to hold [ RESTRICTED ] from under her arms like a cat with hands that appeared from thin air. Moon turned her around to face her as she thought of a nickname for her.

“I’ll call you…” she thought out loud, “Starbeam, Star for short.”

Moon asked if she liked it, and [ RESTRICTED ] just starred as she zoned out while the Moon turned her back around and let her go beside Caine so she would start to float again.

“Now, Caine,” the Moon said as the ringmaster and the new member faced the Moon. “You better treat her well, and let her do what she wants. She is now my adopted daughter.” When Caine told Moon she couldn’t do that, she just poked him in the stomach and made him giggle before saying she could do whatever she wanted. 

Caine rolled his eyes and agreed as he told [ RESTRICTED ] about the digital carnival, the digital lake, the tent, and even showed her THE VOID before heading back to the inside of the tent. But before they went into the tent, Caine went to go talk to the moon as [ RESTRICTED ] zoned out. Then she noticed a blue and purple glitch that made some trees go crazy and bug out. When she asked Caine, he said it was DIGITAL HALLUCINATIONS!! as her mind transitioned to the digital plane. Caine bid his farewells to Moon as Moon told [ RESTRICTED ] goodbye as they teleported back to the tent in front of everyone else.

[ RESTRICTED]’s eyes were now spinning as she shook her head and got her composure before Caine asked her about her name. That’s when it dawned on her.

She doesn't remember her name, her brothers, or anyone’s outside the game…

When she started to freak out, Ragatha and Pomni tried to calm her down, but failed when Caine asked her if she wanted to choose her name, or use a machine.

She picked the machine, she couldn’t think right now..

Caine then spawned a slot machine as he pulled the lever.. and it went to..

Hhjsng..

Not a good name..

So he spun it again, and it landed on…

Izarra.

[ RESTRICTED ] decided to go with that name. So Caine despawned the slot machine as he then explained how there would be a simple in-house adventure to warm Izarra up to how things worked in the circus.. but everyone was not happy about that at all.

“We’ve already had an adventure today, Caine!” Zooble said, getting mad, “Let the new kid just be in peace for a night, then do a in-house adventure tomorrow.” 

To which Caine shushed Zooble and started to explain the rules of the adventure.

It was called Catch The Wolf, where Caine would let a werewolf out and the gang had to set up traps to catch it, first one to catch it gets a special prize of their choosing.

Caine then spawned a small hill of supplies and then disappeared with a cloud of smoke.

“What did that mean..?” Izarra asked as Ragatha slowly explained the adventures and how it keeps their minds healthy and stimulated.

Everyone then split into groups of two, but Jax went out alone. Izarra got paired with Pomni, then Kinger and Ragatha, then Gangle and Zooble. Everyone grabbed supplies as they headed out on their own. Izarra and Pomni grabbed a rope, a bear trap, and some steak as they headed to the back of the tent. They set up their trap as they waited behind some block as the two had a chat. They talked about the circus and all the wackiness in it. Pomni then decided to take Izarra to her room. So the two walked carefully towards the living quarters as they entered and walked a little past the middle, Izarra asked Pomni what the X’s on some doors meant. Pomni then explained about abstraction and how she should worry about it. The two walked a little farther to find Izarra’s door to her room. Her room was in front of Ragatha’s and beside Pomni’s. 

My new room..? She thought to herself as she opened the door. Her room was mostly blue streaks to resemble the night sky with pale yellow stars. Her floor was pale yellow and so was her ceiling. She had a dresser, a mirror, a beanbag that was hanging from the ceiling, a blue rug, and even a bed with silk hanging from the ceiling near the front of it. The bed's cover was three colors of blue with a huge pale yellow star on top of it, and had pale yellow and light blue pillows.

She stepped inside as Pomni followed closely beside her. Izarra looked up at her ceiling, and thought it looked pretty bland. She then had an idea she wanted to do for an oil painting to make it pop. She kept walking around the room, and saw herself in the mirror. She stared at herself as her eyes got bigger as she examined her new body. The one she was stuck in for the rest of her life apparently..

Before she could say anything, the two heard a howling from outside the room as Pomni closed the door and the two hid under the bed. They stayed there for a while until they heard the sound of footsteps go away.

Izarra then helped Pomni up out from under the bed as she peaked her head out of the door. She called back to Pomni and said that the cost was clear as she took a step out of her room and…

A rope snagged her as it hoisted her in the air as it pinned her arms down near her elbows. Izarra hung there as she spun around as Pomni ran up and checked on her, then a familiar rabbit jumped out very happily, before realizing he didn’t catch the wolf, but the newbie in the circus.

Izarra yelled at Jax to let her down, but he just laughed it off, grabbed Pomni by the arm, and left Izarra to hang there alone.

That’s when she saw the blue and purple glitch again, now taking some paintings with it. She stared at it as it took two paintings before it became smaller and disappeared.

She would’ve still been zoned out if it wasn’t for the growling of the wolf coming closer. Izarra struggled to try and get out, but it was no use. The wolf walked up closer as Izarra got a good look at it. It was pitch black with green eyes, and looked to have a green outline with some glitches around it. It kinda matched the blue and green glitch that was taking the painting out..

 She tried to baby talk the wolf as it circled her and sniffed the air around her. 

The wolf looked like it was about to at least bite Izarra, but then the rope binding her glitched out as it now fazed halfway through the floor.

Izarra quickly pushed the buttons on her shoes to pop out her roller skates as she quickly skated away from the wolf. The animal caught its attention on her as it saw her skating away from it, and took chase quickly after her. 

It tried to snag her long hair, but missed. Izarra skated quickly around the whole circus as it kept a chase with her. She used sharp turns and faked it out to stay away from it. Thankfully her brother taught her how to roller skate when she was younger.

She then saw Pomni and Jax arguing as she yelled at them to move. Once they saw the wolf, they jumped to the side as Izarra jumped over the rope trap that Pomni and her set up as the wolf jumped right after her.

The wolf got caught in the trap as it flailed around trying to get free.

Pomni got super excited when she realized it was their trap as Izarra sat on the ground after falling down from jumping.

Soon after Izarra got up and Pomni mocking the wolf, Caine appeared to congratulate them then asked them what they wanted as their surprise. Pomni didn’t know what she wanted so she just asked for a jacket she could wear when she got cold. Caine snapped his fingers and made a small jacket appear right in Pomni’s hands. He turned to Izarra as she thought, then it clicked.

She asked Caine for a small cow plush with a blue collar on its neck. Caine looked a bit confused but snapped his fingers and spawned it in. It landed with a squeak into Izarra’s hands as she looked at its face, it looked just like her old one. Her brother gave her an old hospital bracelet with his name on it, and she put it on a stuffed cow when she was younger and told her brother that the cow was for when he wasn’t around, she could still talk to her brother.

She hoped to continue that promise..

She skated slowly to the hallway where her room was as she put a hand on her doorknob to open it. But something caught her eye. At the end of the hall, the last door, it looked to be glitching. She walked into her room and put the cow on the bed as she rolled out and went to the glitching door. She pushed her shoe buttons as her skates folded in. She took a closer look at the door. It was glitching from a mannequin to every other character, abstracted or alive. She touched the door as her hand began to glitch with it, then she quickly pulled it away as she walked back to her room as she closed the door behind her.

She plopped on her bed as she held the cow toy over her head as she looked at it. She began to have a conversation with it, pretending like it was her actual brother. She talked to it every night and every time she was alone in her room. 

After about a month or two, Caine assembled the gang as he explained his adventure. Izarra then spoke up and asked if she could stay in the circus. When questioned, Izarra just said she needed to do something. Caine didn’t question her further until the others went into the portal and left Izarra behind.

Izarra asked Caine if he could spawn in some oil pastels, and three bottles of hairspray if he could. So he did, and he put them in a wagon as Izarra started to walk back to her room as Caine followed her and questioned her every time he got the chance. When they got to her room, Caine turned around to leave as Izarra invited him to join her. Caine got super happy and floated in as he sat on her bed and grabbed her cow plush as he stared at it.

Izarra didn’t think anything of it as she grabbed the ladder she got a while ago and set it up as she started to lay out a bunch of colors in the blue family, plus white. 

Caine asked her what she was doing as she started to make a blob of a lighter blue in the middle of her ceiling. Izarra explained that she thought her ceiling was bland, and that it needed some pop, so she was going to do a night sky with clouds circling around the middle.

Caine’s eyes widened, if that was possible, and he asked if he could help. Izarra then taught him a lot of lessons, what to do and what not to do. Once he got the hang of it, he duplicated whatever blue she was using and helped her create the scene she wanted. Once they got the clouds done, Izarra got some white paint on a paintbrush as she grabbed another and started to flick spots in the ceiling. Caine followed her lead and soon, stars were now on the ceiling. The last thing Izarra did was add a small crescent moon before moving the ladder and laying on the ground to look at it as Caine layed down as well. 

It was pretty, now all that’s left to do was to sign it. Izarra painted her left hand white as she went to a corner and placed her hand firmly on it as she then wrote her name in a beautiful cursive beside it. She asked Caine if she wanted to sign it, and he nodded his head enthusiastically. So Izarra painted his right hand white as he stamped it beside Izarra’s. Then in sloppy handwriting, wrote his name under his handprint.

The two then started to spray the ceiling with hairspray to keep it secure as they left the room coughing. 

Caine then realized the time and teleported Izarra and him to the circus tent as he welcomed the others from their adventure. Soon everyone headed to their rooms as they went inside to head to sleep.

Izarra shut off her lights and started walking to her bed when she saw a green and blue glowing light from behind her dresser. She walked over and slowly moved her dresser as she saw what was glowing. 

It was a glitching portal..

Izarra stared at it as she grabbed a backpack and put her cow plush in it with its hands and head sticking out. She stepped through it as it was still glitching behind her. She looked around taking her area in. She was in a maze-like place with black walls that were lined with blue, the sky was a spinning blue and purple dome with teapots floating in the sky.

Izarra walked around when she came up to a place where she saw models T-Posing as they stood still.

They looked like NPC’s. 

Izarra walked up to them, they looked like they were based off of some adventure, maybe the one from today. Izarra kept walking as she noticed five corridors with words in front of them. One saying “World Generation”, another saying “NPC Generation”, then “Room Generation”, one saying “Code”, and finally, one saying “Messages”. Izarra walked down the first hallway named “World Generation” as she took turns until she came across a huge room with lined rows of buttons. At least 20 in each row, and it consisted of 5 rows. All the buttons had different names in front of them that named what world they must lead to. 

Izarra walked past the first row, and recognized some of the names from past adventures. She then realized that the buttons had black lines around them, the black lines made 3 sections and labeled them, “Month 1”, “Month 2”, and “Month 3”. Meaning that the worlds went back 3 months in the past. 

She looked down the rows but left the room shortly after. She checked the other rooms and they didn’t really have much in them. It wasn’t until she got to the “Messages” room where things got a little strange. At first, it was just voice recordings of people saying the updates in the game, and the new people and even when the people got stuck in the game. 

It only got darker the deeper Izarra went in though..

Izarra gave up halfway through and and skated back as she went through her room portal and moved her dresser back as she unpacked her backpack and layed down on her bed holding her cow plush.

She looked at it for a while before almost drifting to sleep, when an idea hit her head.

She immediately got up, freshened up, and sat down at her desk as she started to make cards for each circus member inviting them to a skate party that afternoon. She made custom cards and put them in envelopes as she wrote the circus memeber’s names and quietly walked out of her room. 

She held the cards in her hand as she went to each room and slid the card under the door quietly.

She noticed Jax’s light was on, but didn’t bother him just in case.

Once she passed out all the cards, she walked out of the dorm room hallway and into the main area of the Tent. She then looked around and started moving objects around to create a pretty large track from random objects around the circus tent area.

The track went from pretty close to the stage area to the other side of the tent. It formed an oval shape as well as pillows around the curves on the outside just in case the others fell over the wall, or got pushed by Jax.

 Once she finished the track, it was morning as the light then changed from it being dark to it becoming very bright. So bright it gave Izarra a headache.

She covered her eyes and rubbed them for a bit, but when she opened them, she saw Caine staring right at her.

He asked her what she was doing up so early and why she made a race track around the tent.

Izarra told Caine that she would explain everything, but only if he did her a favor.

When he agreed, she asked him to make custom roller skates for all the cast members.

Caine thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers as a bunch of skates came falling down on top of Izarra as they crushed her.

Caine apologized and made the skates float as he helped Izarra up off the ground as she had swirls in her eyes.

She told Caine that he was fine after he apologized, and followed her to the dorm room hallway as they sat each person's custom skates by their door. Once done, Caine left to go get breakfast ready as Izarra walked out of the tent and into the Grounds.

She called out to the Moon as Moon picked her up with her hands as they started to talk.

It was peaceful,

The most peaceful it had been in a while..

She told Moon stories about her time I’m the circus and told her even more stories from her real life before the circus. Their time was cut short when they both saw Caine waving his hands at Izarra and going back to the Tent.

Izarra told Moon she had to go as Moon set her on the ground and waved her goodbye.

When Izarra walked back in the tent, she saw the others looking at the rink she made as they held their skates in their hands.

Ragatha questioned her as Izarra explained that for their adventure, they would have a fun day and learn how to skate. And thankfully, everyone seemed pretty excited. That’s when Izarra waited for Jax’s comment, but it never came. Izarra looked for him, and asked the other when she didn’t see him.

Zooble explained that he never came out of his room and was probably still in there.

So Izarra made a mental note to go check on him once she started the others off.

Izarra asked if any of them could skate, and only Gangle said she could a little.

Izarra then showed them a small tutorial like how to hold your feet, how to stop, and don’t lean backwards.

Soon the others put their skates on as Cain spawned in some chairs, and they started to slowly skate around the rink.

Once everyone got the hang of it, Izarra slipped out as she asked Caine to watch them, but to not disturb them. 

She then skated towards the rooms as she came across Jax’s and knocked on the door. When no one answered, she knocked again.

A voice from inside asked who she was, and when she said it was Izarra, Jax told her to kindly f[ BEEP! ]k off. 

She asked if he had read the letter that she sent under the door last night, and even told him she had his skates if he wanted to join the others.

He opened the door and looked at her then the skates as he held the note in his hand. The envelope was open, so he did read it.

She held out the skates and asked again if he wanted to join them. He didn't do anything for a while, then he took the skates and looked at them.

He then said he didn’t know how to skate that well, and Izarra told him she could teach him. He said that he didn’t want to be taught something in front of the others, and Izarra told him she could teach him in the hallway right here, then he would know what to do.

He thought, then said “Fine”, as he put the note on his bed, stepped out the door and closed it, and took the skates as he put them on and tied them. He was wobbly at first, but then gained his composure as they went on. Izarra taught him exactly what she taught the others, and when he was ready, the two skated out to the main area and joined the others.

When the others groaned that Jax joined, Izarra reassured them that he would do no trouble, then gave him the death stare. Jax went back to his normal personality and told everyone that he wouldn’t do anything.. Maybe…

Izarra rolled her eyes as her and the others started to skate around the tent area and had a good time. They took a snack break around lunch time, then continued on as they skated some more.

They played games, had races (which Izarra won most and had to step out to make it fair), and more stuff. Caine then said that the adventure for the day was over with and snapped everything back in place as he fixed the main area. Everyone asked Caine if they could keep the skates, to which he said he was fine with. He vanished after they ate their dinner and left the group by themselves. Everyone thanked Izarra for the adventure that day, as they went to their rooms and put their skates up. They all met by a bunch of sofas and a table as they talked. Eventually, they started to talk about Izarra’s quirk. When she asked what that was, they explained that when they held their breath, they got an ability. When pushed to do it, Izarra got in the middle of them and held her breath. Nothing happened for a while, but then, she started to feel lighter. Her braid started to defy gravity as she, slowly but surely, floated off the ground. She let go of her breath as she fell to the ground pretty quickly, as Pomni went to go check on her. She reassured everyone she was ok as they said they had never seen a quirk like that before. As she tried again, she learned that the longer she held her breath, the higher she went up. She quit it pretty soon though from being too scared, but she never forgot it.

Some talked for a while, but then they all went to their rooms, shut their door, and stayed in their rooms since the day was done.

Izarra was left alone in the hallway as the lights turned off overhead to signal it was night time. She made her way to the main area and looked around. There were circles of the night sky as the light from the stars showed through like spotlights. 

She started to skate slowly as she thought of the memories from her childhood. As she got to the back of the Tent. She saw a door glitching out, it wasn’t an exit door, it just looked like a room door. But it had the blue and purple glitches. 

She went in to the door slowly as she found herself in the ‘Messages’ hallway, but deeper in. 

Now she was surrounded by floating audio messages with dates and titles on it, some were just pictures though.

She found one alone close to the very back. It was called ‘Accident (Don’t Read Into This)’. Izarra was curious as she pressed the play button, that’s when a video popped up as a young child stared into the camera of what looked to be a computer camera.

The kid talked, like she was in an interview. Izarra thought the kid looked familiar as she kept watching, then, she then heard a boy's voice as it called out the kid's name..

Izarra recognized that voice all too well…

That voice..

Was her brother…

And if that was her brother, then that kid.. was her…

Her brother popped into his chair as he questioned little Izarra why she was on his computer. Little Izarra told him she was bored and she hugged her stuffed cow toy. Her brother patted her head and told her it was fine as someone called out his name, that person then popped around the corner, and Izarra saw it was her boss. Her boss then called out her brothers name,

Mark..

Mark then almost cussed as he shut the video off as little Izarra looked around in confusion.

Izarra just stood there as the video froze when it ended. Izarra’s breath was shaky as she looked at her brother.

She would have kept staring if another audio log started to play behind that one.

Izarra looked behind the picture as she saw one audio log pretty far away, alone too.

She skated up to it as she pressed the video button to restart it as she listened.

It was her boss speaking to someone else who she didn’t know.

Her boss was asking two other men if they could get the job done, to which they asked him to repeat what they needed to do.

He then explained that a boy named Mark Brown would be at a grocery store that day, and needed to be killed for knowing something he shouldn’t have known about the company.

The two other men said that they didn’t really want to kill some dude for learning something, but then her boss offered them 10 grand each. And they said yes. The tape was almost over as the boss said one more thing, to make sure that they get his little sister too, named Evelyn Brown. The tape glitched out for a while as it turned into another tape. Her boss then started to yell at the two men as they told him that they couldn’t find Evelyn. Her boss sighed and just told them to leave. After they did, the boss just told himself that he would get her working here somehow, then put her into their game so she couldn’t be like her brother. Then, the tape ended..

Izarra started at the audio player as she started to have a breakdown. She felt like she was about to abstract..

 She ran away back through that door. She ran and ran back to her room, she glanced over to her side while running through the tent area and saw Caine glance at her, but she just kept running.

She eventually got to her room as she closed the door behind her and started to go ape sh[ Boing!! ]t, throwing things around and bawling her eyes out.

She then grabbed her toy cow and stared at it.

That’s how the cow toy looked exactly like her real one, the image was in the game's code, so all Caine needed to do was just see the picture and make a copy..

Izarra was about to throw it, when she collapsed into the floor as she hugged her toy cow.

Now she knew her real name, and her brothers. 

She heard a knock on her door as she snapped her head up, she tried to get her room looking a bit better in the small time she had.

Soon there was another knock as Caine’s voice was on the other side, asking if she was ok. 

Izarra went to the door as she opened it and Caine saw her and her room.

Sure her avatar didn’t change, but her voice and sniffling gave evidence of her crying. When Caine asked what was wrong, she said that it was nothing. When  he pressed on and told her that her crying wasn’t for nothing, she said it wasn’t his business. 

Caine thought for a second as he flew over Izarra and went into her room.

She called out to him to get out as she closed the door behind her so they weren’t so loud. When he looked around her room and asked about the mess, Izarra said nothing.

Caine snapped his fingers and made her room all tidy up again as he floated to the door.

He floated in front of her and told her that he and Moon were always there if she needed to talk, then he teleported out of her room as she soon collapsed on her bed and hugged her cow as she fell asleep from exhaustion.

She woke up the next day from a knock on her door. As she slid out of bed, she stretched and went to the door as she opened it a bit to see Jax on the other side.

He explained that Caine asked him to check up on Izarra since she fetched him on the roller skate adventure, and to tell her they were doing their intro. Izarra nodded as she put her cow back on her bed and walked to the Tent with Jax.

The gang then did their intro as it went from one person to another.

When it was Izarra's turn though, she did her little move. That’s when a shadow spawned above her, as she looked up, she saw another character spawn above her as they fell on top of her. They made Izarra fall on her back as her eyes turned into swirls.

Caine stopped the intro song as the new person crawled off Izarra and backed up from the others.

Ragatha helped Izarra up as they looked at the new person.

They looked scared and frightened, obviously.. but..

They reminded Izarra of someone..

Her younger self…

Maybe.. sure this wasn’t why she was put into the circus.. but maybe.. she could help this new person, just like Mark had helped her…

[ SONGSLOAD//: Some_Song_That_Match_Her_Lore ]

Rät by Penelope Scott

Over and Over by Rio Romeo

Empty Pages by Halfy and Winks, CG5

4GET by CG5

Why Am I in This Room? by Soupy Garbage Juice

[mostlysignssomeportents]

America's largest hospital chain has an algorithmic death panel

It’s not that conservatives aren’t sometimes right — it’s that even when they’re right, they’re highly selective about it. Take the hoary chestnut that “incentives matter,” trotted out to deny humane benefits to poor people on the grounds that “free money” makes people “workshy.”

There’s a whole body of conservative economic orthodoxy, Public Choice Theory, that concerns itself with the motives of callow, easily corrupted regulators, legislators and civil servants, and how they might be tempted to distort markets.

But the same people who obsess over our fallible public institutions are convinced that private institutions will never yield to temptation, because the fear of competition keeps temptation at bay. It’s this belief that leads the right to embrace monopolies as “efficient”: “A company’s dominance is evidence of its quality. Customers flock to it, and competitors fail to lure them away, therefore monopolies are the public’s best friend.”

But this only makes sense if you don’t understand how monopolies can prevent competitors. Think of Uber, lighting $31b of its investors’ cash on fire, losing 41 cents on every dollar it brought in, in a bid to drive out competitors and make public transit seem like a bad investment.

Or think of Big Tech, locking up whole swathes of your life inside their silos, so that changing mobile OSes means abandoning your iMessage contacts; or changing social media platforms means abandoning your friends, or blocking Google surveillance means losing your email address, or breaking up with Amazon means losing all your ebooks and audiobooks:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Businesspeople understand the risks of competition, which is why they seek to extinguish it. The harder it is for your customers to leave — because of a lack of competitors or because of lock-in — the worse you can treat them without risking their departure. This is the core of enshittification: a company that is neither disciplined by competition nor regulation can abuse its customers and suppliers over long timescales without losing either:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

It’s not that public institutions can’t betray they public interest. It’s just that public institutions can be made democratically accountable, rather than financially accountable. When a company betrays you, you can only punish it by “voting with your wallet.” In that system, the people with the fattest wallets get the most votes.

When public institutions fail you, you can vote with your ballot. Admittedly, that doesn’t always work, but one of the major predictors of whether it will work is how big and concentrated the private sector is. Regulatory capture isn’t automatic: it’s what you get when companies are bigger than governments.

If you want small governments, in other words, you need small companies. Even if you think the only role for the state is in enforcing contracts, the state needs to be more powerful than the companies issuing those contracts. The bigger the companies are, the bigger the government has to be:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

Companies can suborn the government to help them abuse the public, but whether public institutions can resist them is more a matter of how powerful those companies are than how fallible a public servant is. Our plutocratic, monopolized, unequal society is the worst of both worlds. Because companies are so big, they abuse us with impunity — and they are able to suborn the state to help them do it:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

This is the dimension that’s so often missing from the discussion of why Americans pay more for healthcare to get worse outcomes from health-care workers who labor under worse conditions than their cousins abroad. Yes, the government can abet this, as when it lets privatizers into the Medicare system to loot it and maim its patients:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-01-patient-zero-tom-scully/

But the answer to this isn’t more privatization. Remember Sarah Palin’s scare-stories about how government health care would have “death panels” where unaccountable officials decided whether your life was worth saving?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26195604/

The reason “death panels” resounded so thoroughly — and stuck around through the years — is that we all understand, at some deep level, that health care will always be rationed. When you show up at the Emergency Room, they have to triage you. Even if you’re in unbearable agony, you might have to wait, and wait, and wait, because other people (even people who arrive after you do) have it worse.

In America, health care is mostly rationed based on your ability to pay. Emergency room triage is one of the only truly meritocratic institutions in the American health system, where your treatment is based on urgency, not cash. Of course, you can buy your way out of that too, with concierge doctors. And the ER system itself has been infested with Private Equity parasites:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

Wealth-based health-care rationing is bad enough, but when it’s combined with the public purse, a bad system becomes a nightmare. Take hospice care: private equity funds have rolled up huge numbers of hospices across the USA and turned them into rigged — and lethal — games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Medicare will pay a hospice $203-$1,462 to care for a dying person, amounting to $22.4b/year in public funds transfered to the private sector. Incentives matter: the less a hospice does for their patients, the more profits they reap. And the private hospice system is administered with the lightest of touches: at the $203/day level, a private hospice has no mandatory duties to their patients.

You can set up a California hospice for the price of a $3,000 filing fee (which is mostly optional, since it’s never checked). You will have a facility inspection, but don’t worry, there’s no followup to make sure you remediate any failing elements. And no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks complaints.

So PE-owned hospices pressure largely healthy people to go into “hospice care” — from home. Then they do nothing for them, including continuing whatever medical care they were depending on. After the patient generates $32,000 in billings for the PE company, they hit the cap and are “live discharged” and must go through a bureaucratic nightmare to re-establish their Medicare eligibility, because once you go into hospice, Medicare assumes you are dying and halts your care.

PE-owned hospices bribe doctors to refer patients to them. Sometimes, these sham hospices deliberately induce overdoses in their patients in a bid to make it look like they’re actually in the business of caring for the dying. Incentives matter:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

Now, hospice care — and its relative, palliative care — is a crucial part of any humane medical system. In his essential book, Being Mortal, Atul Gawande describes how end-of-life care that centers a dying person’s priorities can make death a dignified and even satisfying process for the patient and their loved ones:

https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/

But that dignity comes from a patient-centered approach, not a profit-centered one. Doctors are required to put their patients’ interests first, and while they sometimes fail at this (everyone is fallible), the professionalization of medicine, through which doctors were held to ethical standards ahead of monetary considerations, proved remarkable durable.

Partly that was because doctors generally worked for themselves — or for other doctors. In most states, it is illegal for medical practices to be owned by non-MDs, and historically, only a small fraction of doctors worked for hospitals, subject to administration by businesspeople rather than medical professionals.

But that was radically altered by the entry of private equity into the medical system, with the attending waves of consolidation that saw local hospitals merged into massive national chains, and private practices scooped up and turned into profit-maximizers, not health-maximizers:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-02-qa-corporate-medicine-destroys-doctors/

Today, doctors are being proletarianized, joining the ranks of nurses, physicians’ assistants and other health workers. In 2012, 60% of practices were doctor-owned and only 5.6% of docs worked for hospitals. Today, that’s up by 1,000%, with 52.1% of docs working for hospitals, mostly giant corporate chains:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-04-when-mds-go-union/

The paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring transhuman colony organism that calls itself a Private Equity fund is endlessly inventive in finding ways to increase its profits by harming the rest of us. It’s not just hospices — it’s also palliative care.

Writing for NBC News, Gretchen Morgenson describes how HCA Healthcare — the nation’s largest hospital chain — outsourced its death panels to IBM Watson, whose algorithmic determinations override MDs’ judgment to send patients to palliative care, withdrawing their care and leaving them to die:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-say-hca-hospitals-push-patients-hospice-care-rcna81599

Incentives matter. When HCA hospitals send patients to die somewhere else to die, it jukes their stats, reducing the average length of stay for patients, a key metric used by HCA that has the twin benefits of making the hospital seem like a place where people get well quickly, while freeing up beds for more profitable patients.

Goodhart’s Law holds that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Give an MBA within HCA a metric (“get patients out of bed quicker”) and they will find a way to hit that metric (“send patients off to die somewhere else, even if their doctors think they could recover”):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Incentives matter! Any corporate measure immediately becomes a target. Tell Warners to decrease costs, and they will turn around and declare the writers’ strike to be a $100m “cost savings,” despite the fact that this “savings” comes from ceasing production on the shows that will bring in all of next year’s revenue:

https://deadline.com/2023/08/warner-bros-discovery-david-zaslav-gunnar-wiedenfels-strikes-1235453950/

Incentivize a company to eat its seed-corn and it will chow down.

Only one of HCA’s doctors was willing to go on record about its death panels: Ghasan Tabel of Riverside Community Hospital (motto: “Above all else, we are committed to the care and improvement of human life”). Tabel sued Riverside after the hospital retaliated against him when he refused to follow the algorithm’s orders to send his patients for palliative care.

Tabel is the only doc on record willing to discuss this, but 26 other doctors talked to Morgenson on background about the practice, asking for anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the nation’s largest hospital chain, a “Wall Street darling” with $5.6b in earnings in 2022.

HCA already has a reputation as a slaughterhouse that puts profits before patients, with “severe understaffing”:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/workers-us-hospital-giant-hca-say-puts-profits-patient-care-rcna64122

and rotting, undermaintained facililties:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/roaches-operating-room-hca-hospital-florida-rcna69563

But while cutting staff and leaving hospitals to crumble are inarguable malpractice, the palliative care scam is harder to pin down. By using “AI” to decide when patients are beyond help, HCA can employ empiricism-washing, declaring the matter to be the factual — and unquestionable — conclusion of a mathematical process, not mere profit-seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/ggarbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

But this empirical facewash evaporates when confronted with whistleblower accounts of hospital administrators who have no medical credentials berating doctors for a “missed hospice opportunity” when a physician opts to keep a patient under their care despite the algorithm’s determination.

This is the true “AI Safety” risk. It’s not that a chatbot will become sentient and take over the world — it’s that the original artificial lifeform, the limited liability company, will use “AI” to accelerate its murderous shell-game until we can’t spot the trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/10/in-the-dumps-2/

The risk is real. A 2020 study in the Journal of Healthcare Management concluded that the cash incentives for shipping patients to palliatve care “may induce deceiving changes in mortality reporting in several high-volume hospital diagnoses”:

https://journals.lww.com/jhmonline/Fulltext/2020/04000/The_Association_of_Increasing_Hospice_Use_With.7.aspx

Incentives matter. In a private market, it’s always more profitable to deny care than to provide it, and any metric we bolt onto that system to prevent cheating will immediately become a target. For-profit healthcare is an oxymoron, a prelude to death panels that will kill you for a nickel.

Morgenson is an incisive commentator on for-profit looting. Her recent book These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America (co-written with Joshua Rosner) is a must-read:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

[Image ID: An industrial meat-grinder. A sick man, propped up with pillows, is being carried up its conveyor towards its hopper. Ground meat comes out of the other end. It bears the logo of HCA healthcare. A pool of blood spreads out below it.]

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[townofcrosshollow]

Y'know I'm really hoping that someday we'll get a version of generative AI that's actually, like, useful and ethical. Imagine a future where you could do a lineart pass in your favourite pen, then waffle about in an lineart editor that uses a model trained on different styles of lineart to let you modify it in post to say, a scratchy pencil or charcoal or adjust the thickness or whatever. That would be pretty cool. Or imagine an addon for Blender that could analyze a photo and recreate the lighting setup. Sick.

The problem is that in this capitalistic hellscape we've sort of lost the ability to use new technology to better humanity. A lot of people compare it to traditional art and photographs, but like... photography added new ways for traditional artists to work. We developed new methods to increase the ease of certain tasks, like rotoscoping animation or tracing photos. Somebody looked at a part of the artists' workflow, said "that could be made more efficient," and then built it.

And we're not really getting that with this wave of generative AI. We were getting it before the tech bro invasion- like for example I remember AI powered vocal synths way before the explosion of generative AI and they were awesome, using machine learning to improve the output of programs like Vocaloid and SynthV and make them sound more realistically human. Where is that for art? Hell, who is making that for music or anything now?

It's like in the past the typical flow was design new technology -> research the market -> come up with ways to implement the tech in the market -> perfect the implementations -> profit, but now it's design new technology -> put the unfinished technology into everything -> profit (?) At no point in the process is anybody actually stopping to think of interesting ways to implement machine learning into the real workflows of professional artists because they're all skipping like 15 steps in the product development pipeline to make max amounts of money.

If these companies were doing things the normal, traditional, useful way and trying to actually develop high quality products, all of the backlash and hostility would never have developed. If you got a focus group full of senior artist directors into a room and asked them about ways to implement AI into their workflows you would immediately come up with a better product.

Just off the top of my head...

Program that can take a 3D scene and convert it into a sketch. Immediately cuts down on workload for comic layout artists and storyboard artists

Tool that analyzes your lineart and generates basic cell shading. Pretty sure the new version of CSP has this but idk if it uses machine learning or if it's good. Makes shading way more efficient

Tool that can take basic airbrush blending and change it to different blending presets. Imagine being able to just hit a button and switch your blending to use different brushes.

Post-proces colour jitter, higher quality colour blending, easier posing for 3D rigs, all sorts of small shit

But we aren't getting any of those things because the people designing these programs fundamentally don't care about making a good or useful product

[melokuu]

The world became so fucking dystopian it's crazy. It happened so fast that now it would take years, maybe even decades to undo all this... Like if you're my age or if you're from like a small town and your family is normal you certainly don't even see it in your daily life, but between having no more space to be at outside of home and school/work, relaying more and more on technology that not only breaks after a year or two because of programmed obsolescence or bad quality, but everything rely on a subscription and any day you can lose everything you payed for, sometimes for years. Then you also have the kids raised on screens and who have no interest in real life because they got everything they desired on that screen since they were born and so, can't focus on anything, whatever it's to learn any skill or even just to have hobbies. And adults too, I know I spend an insane amount of time on the internet each day, people are so tired because everything feels so hard and boring compared to just scrolling on social media, and it feels like nobody do anything anymore if it's not to make a picture of it for the internet. I mean, at least I have so many memories of stuff I did in my youth; places I went to, shenanigans I would plot with my classmates, the classes I would go to after school to learn an instrument or dance, doing some lame craft just to see what it would do... What will the kids remember in a decade from their lives ? Beside random drama, influencers and cool videos of people doing things they will never do themselves. It's so sad, it's horrible and obviously the kids don't mind because they are kids, if the old gens are regretting to not have asked their school crush out or something. The kids today will grow up to regret not having the same childhood as in movies or books, or not having a childhood at all. They will be so sour, so jealous and vindicatif because they will have nothing, not even dreams and hopes and connections. And they will know nothing about reality. With all the censorship, some people might grow into adulthood without ever hearing words like death, kill, murder, every big sites now force people to censor so many words that any kid from my generation would commonly use in their daily lives. Then with all that, everything that big companies and elites are putting us through; the work condition, the poor salaries, laughing at your face when you can't afford health care or because they spend all the tax money on bullshit you will never see instead of building libraries, shelters, good schools, places where people can hang out at, practical infrastructures... Instead all of our surrounding is literal trash. Concrete blocky buildings, ugly and dirty parkings, everything is polluted, everything is "minimalist" and our food is more and more turned into industrial paste made of ingredients like EF145 and TG45H and whatever else. Nothing is natural anymore. Nothing is worth anything anymore. People live just to work, buy stuff and scroll on social medias. As if there is nothing left of humanity. And instead of doing something people just get angry at what their political parti is angry at even if deep down they disagree like if each of them are not all billionaires who don't give a fuck about you and will never do what they promise to get elected for and live of your money, hang out all together on their cruises and jets eating number one fresh best produces, surrounded by luxe and everything you will never afford, just for saying things and pretend to care. Now even art is getting slowly erased. Ai art turns everyone against each other at an even greater pace, even artist against artist. Big gaming, movies and other artistic companies now don't even need to care about quality, they have the monopoly and can afford to publish crap because they know people will pay for even if they complain. Like, it's all at once. Your whole life. I hope people will start rejecting all that before a new generation is born into a world where it will be all they will ever know.

[chipped-chimera]

I keep seeing people panicking about the AI thing and I want to help, but after being shutdown for trying to do so I guess I'll just let people deal with it themselves. But for those who care I'll say this:

The facts are this current state of affairs is going to be temporary, and due to the internet predicted to be 90% AI generated content by 2026 and since AI cannot train on itself without degrading, AI companies are going to run out of scrape-able good quality material for datasets very quickly - at least in terms of images (language scraping will be harder to fight). They'll likely be designing their web-trawling bots around this fact, which means they'll be seeking out any kind of image that is not AI generated or has been Glazed/Nightshaded. If we want to put pressure on these companies to respect our content and that they want to use as good training data - don't let them set the terms and conditions. Your data is yours - protect it. The noose is closing for these huge tech companies, so don't let them fool you into believing there is no hope, no control, and you should give up. It is a lie to keep you complacent and if you're Adobe - maybe lets them get away with paying you a pittance for your data being trained on.

You'll soon be the one with the leverage here. You set the terms. Not them. Never give them anything for free, or less than you feel it is worth.

Fuck corpos. Poison the machine.

[lemonmoxy]

Ok just to preface this. I am not a fan of AI. For labor reasons, for quality reasons, for the selfish reason of when I’m looking for art I don’t want it clogged down with just objectively bad art (like the hands are fucked up and extra feet).

I do think the primary problem isn’t AI itself but unregulated capitalism that doesn’t care about quality, only lowering costs and the lack of safety nets for people who are ejected to cut costs. It’s bad that the companies do that. It’s bad that there are no safety nets. The problem isn’t really AI BUT until we fix those problems we should regulate the thing directly causing harm.

But some of you anti-AI people have lost your fucking minds.

So. A lot of you are crying about stolen commissions. I promise you, most of the people using AI to generate pictures of their OCs were never going to pay you. They cannot afford to pay you. Or that’s a luxury expense that just isn’t going to happen. I am paycheck to paycheck and I’m never going to spend a whole video game’s worth of money on a picture of my little goblin. Your art IS worth that much, I promise you, I’m not telling you to lower your rates. But I do not have that kind of money for that sort of indulgence. I’m sorry but you peddle luxury, there’s a reason why we had art patrons back in the day.

Some of my friends use AI for their OCs for table top games. I don’t. Because honestly sitting there fucking with it sounds tedious and frustrating to me and the results are always mid at best. But y’all also get mad about people “taking” your art to use for their OCs and maybe editing it to fit the character they have in mind. Which is WILD. I’ll agree, people who do that shouldn’t post it, but if you’re so mad at what people are doing in the privacy of their non published casual dnd sessions, maybe chill the fuck out? Being you sounds exhausting. I also see some of you get mad at people tagging things as inspiration. So what? You want people to pay the poor tax of using piccrew? Even though the results are samey and kinda bad? Idk y’all just are tripping on something.

I’m starting to wonder just what people think inspiration and brainstorming are. People have been pretending to be baffled about why people might use AI to brainstorm. “Use your own brain”. What the fuck do you think brainstorming is? You do not brainstorm by sitting in your room thinking. I mean maybe YOU do. But like you get inspiration from the world around you guys, be for real. A conversation you overheard. An outfit you saw at a crosswalk. The set of the brow of someone on your bus route. A funny post you saw on tumblr. A generative AI like chat GPT is taking things found online and showing them to you. Unless you’re uncritically using it to write a story (and if so that’s bad. Lack of effort and a bad product is bad obviously) you ARE using your brain. We draw inspiration from the world around us, just like the AI does. I know it sucks to feel unoriginal but you just are, sorry. That’s not bad even if it might feel like it. It just is. Even if you sit in a little box and don’t look at the world while you think, you’re thinking about the things you’ve seen and reconfiguring them. Sorry to be the one to break it to you?

Also, you know what chatGPT is good for? Anything an intern could do. You wanna organize your schedule? It’s good at that. You want a grocery list? It’s good at that. You want a menu based of what you got? It’s good at that. Not perfect. Don’t fucking trust a machine without quality checking it, we know that, you guys know that, corporations know that too they just don’t CARE. I don’t know why they’re pretending not to know, money, I don’t know why you guys started pretending.

I saw someone complaining like an old person about spell check and grammar check and how their kid didn’t know that it could be wrong. A ten year old. As if that isn’t normal and explaining to kids how the world works is dystopian. Nah man it’s not a mystery why the kid who still has spelling tests as a part of their everyday school lesions might not know that machines are fallible yet. Probably just how he hasn’t quite learned that adults are idiots too. This person was acting like spell check was some moral sin, some hallmark of the end. Ok grandpa, do you think we should give up the pencil too because writing things down is rotting our brains?

Just like writing things down isn’t an evil action of destroying your memory. I really do not see the difference between me googling for recipes with my ingredients and chatGPT doing it for me. Frankly I’m just as likely to forget I don’t have coriander. But it takes longer for me to do it and sucks.

[zuzsenpai]

I'm honestly so furious right now. I work in a video and photography department for a large healthcare organization. We're a department of 9, plus an intern. We're under the "marketing" umbrella, though we do a lot more than marketing for the network (for example we also make patient and employee education videos/photos/animations).

Yesterday the social media department (also part of marketing. We supply photos and videos for them to post) posted an AI generated image on our company's instagram page. It was a photorealistic AI image of a baby, used to promote our pediatric cardiology service line. The image is so ridiculously obviously AI, it makes me want to puke. It's uncanny, too smooth with zero skin texture, the eyes are messed up, and the "baby" literally has full eyelashes on one eye and none on the other.

I'm livid because it's like... what the fuck do they need OUR department for if they're going to be using AI now?

To our knowledge, this is the first time they've done this. I get that there's an "argument" to be made that it's incredibly difficult and time consuming to set up a photoshoot with a real baby, and they wanted something fast and easy because the marketing service line directors are constantly on social media's ass to push out abhorrent amounts of marketing content on social media. This culture will never change. We've tried to explain that people don't like seeing constant mediocre ads for healthcare service lines when they are on social media. But the higher ups won't listen to that AT ALL. So... AI generated gross ass baby it is (I cannot stress enough how creepy this "baby" looks).

But it's a slippery slope. Because first it's a baby. Next it'll be a fake orthopedic surgery patient because who has time to find a real patient for our photographers to shoot? Never mind that people on social media actually DO like seeing real patient stories. Next it'll be a billboard on the highway with AI generated doctors because who cares to know what their real doctor looks like, right? This is making me so mad for the photographers in my department who work so fucking hard to shoot and edit stunning, quality images. Their jobs will be relegated to event photography until someday an unmanned robot can set up their own camera and do that too (they probably already can?).

Recently one of the service line directors in marketing asked me to use an AI voice for an animation I'm making. I had to put my foot down and say that we have three fantastic local voiceover artists who we use for these kinds of projects. One of them is a retired gentleman who went to school with my dad and is always extremely happy to get work from us. Sometimes I think these marketing people just want to use AI because it's trendy.

I understand that there are other industries and individuals who are already being massively affected by AI to a much larger and much more detrimental degree. And that my problems are largely me spinning out of control. I figured AI would hit us eventually, and there's really nothing I can do except continue to put my foot down about the voiceover thing. I can't do much for the photographers, sadly. I'm too nervous to get mad at social media, though I really wish I could at least point out how disgusting that baby looks. But I'm worried that I'm going to be some sort of pariah if I voice my opinion on it. I already get paid peanuts and there's really no way for me to advance my career here. So being the "person who shits on social media for using AI" might be detrimental to me in the long run. I really DO want to advocate for our photographers, but is it my place? Idk, it's complicated.

[nicklloydnow]

“The transfer of True Lies has a truly vile quality to it, a feeling like someone clandestinely dosed you with LSD just a hair below the threshold. At times it can look passable in motion, but then you notice something out of the corner of your eye: a thick fold of skin, a framed photo of a child, folders that are too thick at the margins, cheeks that look rendered. It’s that familiar dread at the pit of your gut when you spot AI generated imagery, a combination of edges not looking quite right and surfaces that are simultaneously too smooth and too sharp. A crime was committed here, and you can tell.

The transfers of Aliens and The Abyss are markedly less bad than True Lies, but I still have difficulty watching them. The skin looks sterile and waxy with too much film grain removed. Everything looks like it has raytracing on. Both transfers are, however, within acceptable parameters for most normal people.

The recent transfer of Titanic got a similar treatment, with similarly mixed reactions online.

“Why would you do this?” is a logical question. It’s worth contextualizing who handled these “restorations” – namely Park Road Post, a subsidiary of Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films. They have worked on multiple films in the past, but the two that are most germane here are Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and the 3-part Disney+ documentary The Beatles: Get Back. Both movies recontextualize pre-existing footage and, importantly, do so with an aggressive use of machine learning. They Shall Not Grow Old upscales and colorizes old World War I imagery in an attempt to set the bloodshed in a more modern context, while Get Back recycled footage shot for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be, including moments never before seen by the public, to elucidate the process behind the creation of some of The Beatles’ most iconic songs.

(…)

I wish we had stopped Jackson then and there. As my good friend Danielle joked, this was a trial balloon. People praised Jackson for doing this to Lindsay-Hogg’s footage in the name of restoration, and it emboldened him to do worse things. Before the True Lies debacle, the most recent example of this was the aggressively saccharine and confusing Now & Then, a long unfinished demo now finished by Ringo and Paul, edited together with archival footage of younger John and George composited in an a fashion that can be charitably described as tremendously weird.

Lest I am accused of being a luddite, I firmly believe there are many use cases for this technology. Nvidia’s DLSS and competing variants generally work very well on the games they are trained on. I regularly use Flowframes in the rare case that I need interpolation. I have often used waifu2x and now chainner if I need to photoshop a still and my source is bad, and there are databases of countless AI upscaling models. But the flip side to this is that these technologies are often used in place of proper ingest. “Crap in, crap out” is a truism for a reason. I spend a lot of time regularly capturing VHS and Laserdisc at the highest possible quality for fun, and when I see people who should know better say “Just use Topaz” (a commercial AI upscaler) instead of learning how to correctly ingest footage and deinterlace it, it makes me want to pull out my hair, because it almost uniformly looks bad to anyone who works with video professionally.

When you finally do see a piece of footage transferred well, it can be breathtaking. Good archival practices require a lot of institutional knowledge and labor. It’s an art when done well, and the people who do it care so much about what they do. But the modern application of much of AI is precisely about taking labor out of the equation. Why transfer a tape correctly when we can just have a computer guess badly instead? What if crap goes in, and it doesn’t come out?

What makes all of this worse is that True Lies, as I understand it, did not need to be shoved through the AI wringer. According to The Digital Bits, Park Road Post had a recent 4k scan of True Lies from the original camera negative. Park Road Post’s own website claims they have a Lasergraphics Director 10K film scanner on the premises. So what is the purpose of adding AI to this mix? Why do that to a perfectly fine-looking film? What is gained here, other than to slightly yassify an Arnold film? At this point, maybe they are simply doing it just to say that they did, because the technology is lying around, like a loaded gun with the safety off.

Nerds who post on blu-ray forums as a rule often need to calm down, and the forum threads I have read about this are no exception, but there are certain cases where a filmmaker is just wrong about how their films should look. Lucas is the infamous notable example, but Cameron is not innocent here in his treatment of his own films. Wong Kar-wai is another notable example, as what he did to Ashes of Time is criminal as was his recent “remasters” of his movies like In The Mood For Love. In certain rare conditions like this, it’s healthy to question if directors have the best interests of their own films in mind, as Cameron himself personally approved of these remasters.

What actually chills my blood more than anything is the thought that a lot of people think this all looks pretty good. You see this mindset at work whenever an AI fetishist posts a stable diffusion image of a woman with 13 fingers, 40 incisors and comically huge breasts. There’s an entire portion of the population that takes overt pleasure in the over-smoothed, perverts that prefer all media to be fast, high frame rate, and scrubbed squeaky clean. The cameras on our phones don’t simply capture images anymore, they compute them and ‘optimize’ them. It’s Italian Futurism in 4k, a noise reduction death drive. It’s not simply enough for much of digital cinema to look crystal clear and lifeless; the past should be denoised, grain managed and cleaned to conform to that standard. It is expedient and profitable if people don’t remember what film is supposed to look like.

I don’t think anyone gets into preservation to destroy film. I believe that everyone involved with this process worked hard and had the best interests of the film in mind, but the exact nature of restoration itself can vary wildly. I believe that some companies get blinded by new tech, get high on their own supply, and that can result in work that is destructive instead of restorative. I don’t know what the solution to this is in the world we live in, outside of decoupling film preservation from the profit motive whenever possible.

But I am certain about one thing. For a while, much of gaming tried looking like Aliens. Now, Aliens looks like a video game. And that doesn’t sit right with me.”

[arsonwerm]

Aight buckle up I have quite a few wishes fuckers

1. I want to have more control over when I stop scrolling

2. I want all of the people who directly kill innocent civilians to face justice for their crimes

3. I want Donald Trump and anyone associating with him on legal business to never be able to lie again, and to come out and tell the truth about any past lies in a very public statement

4. I want to always have the motivation to create art when I reach for it

5. I want to always have inspiration for that art and know what I want to create

6. I want JK Rowling to make a public apology for her transphobic, antisemitic, etc behavior (AND MEAN IT), and rescind all funding from anti trans charities, and give all of that funding to lgbtq aid and liberation charities

7. I want to use 3/4 of Jeff bezos’s net worth to create no-barrier-to-entry housing for unhoused peoples, donate to food banks, distribute to charities, and distribute among overseas humanitarian aid efforts

8. End institutionalized racism

9. End institutionalized poverty

10. Redistribute US military budget to give state funded free education to all, including higher education

11. Get rid of all anti-homeless infrastructure

12. Rework city layouts to make them more pedestrian friendly, anti automobile, pro public transport, walkable, and ADA friendly

13. All remaining roads are now made of the current most environmentally friendly asphalt replacement currently invented

14. Add in more water efficient green spaces to roads and sidewalks, and make sidewalks shaded by native trees and lined with native plants

15. All invasive species now have their populations reduced and are now ecologically under control in the areas which they came from

16. Fund all legitimate and effective initiatives for coral reef rehabilitation and repopulation

17. Anyone under the age of 13 is now completely unable to access social media

18. Child friendly online spaces like animal jam and many of the old .io games are restored

19. All laws implemented with the intent to discriminate against marginalized communities is now no longer in effect

20. Redistribute police funding, creating new branches that specialize in nonviolent deescalation and relocation

21. All of my previous and future wishes will be implemented within the next 30 earth days, but also in a way that makes them appear to be naturally occurring

22. Roe v Wade is now reinstated as a valid ruling

23. Medical care is now free for everyone, including non-essential but quality of life improving initiatives

24. Every company that contributes to 1% or more of current landfill mass will answer for the crimes against the environment

25. Implemented all proposed legal programs to tax the ultra-rich

26. I can change the size of my breasts at will, including getting rid of them entirely, but will always be able to revert them back to their natural size if desired

27. I no longer need to sleep

28. Minimum wage is living wage and “server wage” is no longer below the general minimum wage

29. All golf courses are converted into affordable housing communities with no barriers to entry

30. I want my attention span for reading back please

31. Anytime someone wants a stress ball, they will find one in their pocket, purse, or nearby in a clearly visible area

32. I want to no longer have sensory issues and issues with fainting/lightheadedness

33. AI programs are not allowed to scrape visual, auditory, or literary works without the creators explicit personal consent

34. All Amazon profits go to charity

35. Amazon implements the most eco friendly forms of transportation to date

36. No shipping/delivery fees

37. Whatever current sketchbook I am using will be magically able to fit into any bag I am carrying without changing the size of either object

38. All books, including sketchbooks and notebooks, now weigh one ounce each, no matter the size or density

39. Google no longer shows sponsored results

40. All charities with legitimate intentions of aid for marginalized communities are now fully funded with money from current billionaires

41. Said billionaires funding charities cannot use this funding to sway the intentions of said charities

42. No one with intentions to inflict harm on a marginalized group will be able to run for any governmental office

43. Anyone who has joined a gang for stability and community will now be able to find those needs fulfilled in other more constructive spaces

44. Public libraries are fully funded

45. All research papers and educational textbooks are free to use

46. All subscription services for software will now become affordable one time purchases without intentional limits on use

47. I reserve the right to reverse any previous or future wishes should I find they have unexpected negative consequences

48. I reserve the right to make more wishes in the future should I choose to do so, and after this particular interaction is over, I will invoke a new session of wishing by saying your name aloud three times. Any wishing sessions will be ended by saying my last name three times

49. I reserve the right to have full knowledge of the existence and exact wording of any previous wishes I have made

50. I now know your name

51. You are not entitled to grant my wishes if you find that you do not want to

52. You are to warn me of any unintended negative consequences a wish may invoke before you grant it

53. Horses are no longer fucked up

“I shall grant three wishes, but you cannot wish for… Actually, fuck it. You get infinite wishes and no rules, let’s see where this goes.”

[lily22223]

Top Food Delivery Trends in Dubai and How Apps Are Evolving to Meet Them

The food scene in Dubai is nothing short of spectacular—diverse, fast-paced, and constantly evolving. And as someone who’s been closely following the digital shift in the industry, I’ve noticed some really exciting food delivery trends taking shape lately. Whether you’re running a local restaurant, managing a food chain, or looking to expand your business digitally, these trends can open up some serious opportunities.

In this post, I want to walk you through the hottest food delivery trends in Dubai and how modern apps—especially those created by a food delivery app development company in Dubai—are stepping up their game to keep up.

1. Hyper-Personalization is Winning Hearts (and App Downloads)

Customers in Dubai expect more than just fast food—they want personalized experiences. From recommending dishes based on past orders to offering custom meal plans, food delivery apps are becoming smarter and more intuitive.

I’ve seen how the best food delivery app development company in UAE uses AI and machine learning to make apps that understand users like never before. It’s no longer just about delivery—it’s about delivering exactly what the user craves.

2. Multiple Payment Options Are a Must

In a city where convenience is king, people expect to pay however they like—be it Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, credit cards, or even cash on delivery. Apps that don’t offer flexible payment methods get left behind.

This is where choosing a food delivery app development company in Dubai really matters. The right partner knows how to integrate secure, seamless, and regionally preferred payment gateways that make checkout a breeze.

3. Sustainability is a Growing Priority

With more consumers becoming environmentally conscious, sustainable packaging, carbon-neutral deliveries, and zero-waste options are gaining traction. I've noticed many delivery apps now highlight eco-friendly partners or let users opt for "no cutlery" options.

If you're building your own food delivery app, working with the best food delivery app development company in UAE ensures you can offer features that align with these values—without sacrificing functionality or performance.

4. Delivery Speed (and Transparency) Still Reigns Supreme

Let’s be real—no one likes waiting for food with zero updates. In Dubai, where time is precious, real-time order tracking is a must-have feature. Customers want to know where their food is and when it’ll arrive.

The latest apps are now using GPS integration, smart routing, and even predictive ETAs. When I talk to restaurant owners, they always tell me how much their customers appreciate transparency—and how it boosts trust and repeat orders.

5. Cloud Kitchens Are Changing the Game

Ghost kitchens—or cloud kitchens—are booming in Dubai. These delivery-only setups save overhead costs and allow restaurants to focus solely on food quality and delivery speed. If you’re a small business wanting to enter the food delivery space, this model could be perfect for you.

The key here? Having a high-performing app that supports multiple menus, order management, and seamless delivery logistics. That’s exactly what the best food delivery app development company in UAE specializes in.

Final Thoughts

Dubai’s food delivery landscape is evolving faster than ever—and staying ahead means embracing the trends that customers care about. Whether it’s personalization, faster delivery, sustainability, or innovative business models, the right app can help you stand out.

If you’re thinking of building or upgrading your food delivery platform, I highly recommend working with a food delivery app development company in Dubai that truly understands the local market. Trust me—it makes a world of difference.

Have questions or want to explore how your business can ride these trends? I’d love to help.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND PROFILERS

If they were just like us, then they had to work very closely with a program written in a certain language, it might be worth a hundred times as much on sales as on development. The narrow focus makes it a sort of puzzle, and the heart attack had taken most of a day to kill him. Now I know a number of independent things.1 Since speed doesn't matter in most of a program, you won't know for sure whether its message will resonate with you till you hear it. In technology, the low end. VCs invest in a company with a real product and real revenues, we might have done well. It will be about whatever the title says, and the essay will still survive. Growing too slowly is particularly dangerous in a business must, ex officio, understand it. Keeping a lid on meanness. The key is to know what's what. And if the company merely breaks even on the deal. Most companies, at least, is run by real hackers.

It's never just a straight trade of money for stock. The Cro-Magnons would have been that Microsoft would crush them. So traffic became the thing to get at Yahoo. If I were going to do this was at trade shows. But why do we conceal death from kids?2 Whatever computers are made of in a hundred years will not, except in special applications, be massive parallelism. Of all the reasons we lie to people it's not part of any conscious strategy, but because it is simply the most powerful you can get it done quickly and get back to work after dinner. In the MIT CS department, there seems to be able to say they were funded by Sequoia, even if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into it. In a competitive situation, that's an advantage. If you're raising money from multiple investors, as most companies do in phase 2.3

Ideally when you've raised enough.4 The trouble with lying is that you have lousy judgement. You can see that machine language is very low level.5 Paris you can see shortcuts in the solution of simple ones, and no particular connection between them. In retrospect this was stupid. You're about to hire your first employee. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The job of programmers was just to take the work of PR firms really does get deliberately misleading is in the bank. He said that in the next ten feet, this is the right way to write software for a startup to work on?

N things is random access.6 And they are then surprised how difficult and unpleasant it is. Instead of asking what problem should I solve? Hear no till you hear yes. Fouls happen. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. Our hypothesis was that if we wrote our software in a weird AI language, with a filter for quality. This is also true of starting a startup generally. As this gap widens, profilers will become increasingly clear that the way to persuade people is not just that there's a concentration of smart people, and $15k per month is the conventional total cost including benefits and even office space per person.7

As written, it tends to be open source: operating systems, programming languages, of all things. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones. In a list of n things is a degenerate case of essay.8 Now it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just decided to make something users want, and not dissing users. So if you're thinking, I don't care what he says, I'm going to start a company of your own. But I think I see now what went wrong with philosophy, and how fast you're moving forward. 0 startup: Sites like del. So I think people who are bad at understanding.9 Their unconscious mind decides for them, shrinking from the work involved. Languages are notation. It's painful doing sales, but you can't fix the location.

Meet such investors last if at all.10 And when business people try to distinguish them instead by being funny.11 One of the occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the conversations of people who do this tend to use the term to mean they won't invest till you get $x from other investors. And yet because of the huge amounts they raised at the end, just as automating things often turns out to have been temporary. My second suggestion will seem shocking to VCs: let founders cash out partially in the Series A round. What do parents hope to protect their misconceptions from bumping against reality. By the time the acquirer gets them, they're finishing one another's sentences.12 The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to move along from the first conversation to wiring the money, and ambivalence about being a technology company, and by using graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of the probability that an investor will say yes, know what the timetable is for getting good results.13 Paul Allen started Microsoft. It was the worst year of my adult life, but I didn't have the kind of parallelism we have in a hundred years you won't have to write programs to solve, but I haven't seen it. Get introductions to investors. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company.14

Obviously it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they have enough. 0 startup: Sites like del. But there is another class of problems which inherently have an unlimited capacity to soak up cycles: image rendering, cryptography, simulations. That's what makes theoretical knowledge prestigious. The terms will be whatever they turn out to be hard, partly because there is less demand for them. They just talk to investors serially, plus if you only want them to run is something they thought of themselves. Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. Actually this seems to work much as in LA. These can get a lot of people realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought about them. Don't listen to them, not something customers need.15 And while most investors are influenced by how interested other investors are in you, but only just, especially at first.

Notes

The number of startups will generally raise large amounts of our own startup Viaweb, he'd get his ear pierced. Not in New York, and then using growth rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc.

Wolter, Allan trans, Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. In 1995, when we started Viaweb, if your goal is to seem entirely open, but I have set up grant programs to encourage more startups to be limits on the y, you'd see a lot of companies that got bootstrapped with consulting.

The Baumol Effect induced by startups is that as to discourage that as to discourage that as you can tell that everything you say something to bad groups and they succeeded. They act as if you'd just thought of them.

Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives were, they'd have something more recent. Apparently someone believed you have to do more with less, is rated at-1.

By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a large chunk of stock the VCs want it to steal a few percent from an angel investment from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site. This kind of gestures you use in representing physical things. Or at least a little about how closely the remarks attributed to them this way that weren't visible in Silicon Valley, but for blacklists nearness is physical, and the manager, which brings in more people.

I should do is adjust the weights till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933. They may not have raised money at all is a way that makes it easier for some students to get at it he'll work very hard to predict startup outcomes in which income is doled out by solving his own problems. Your teachers are always telling you and the leading scholars of that generation had been a time machine to the truth. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912.

That can be huge. There are some good proposals too. I'm not saying option pools themselves will go away.

A fundraising is the place of Napster. But what he means by long shots are people in any case, 20th century executive salaries were low partly because you can play it safe by excluding VC firms were the impressive ones. It would have for endless years of training, and power were concentrated in the absence of objective tests.

Instead of laboriously adding together the numbers like the arrival of your mind what's the right order. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that clothing brands favored by urban youth do not do that.

Strictly speaking it's impossible to succeed in a non-corrupt country or organization will be maximally profitable when each employee is paid in proportion to the environment. The knowledge whose utility drops sharply as soon as no one else involved knows French. It's to make money; and with that additional constraint, you produce in copious quantities.

When investors ask you a series. The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991. I make the people who don't, but this disappointment is mostly the ordinary sense.

Patrick Collison wrote At some point, there were some good ideas buried in Bubble thinking.

I never watch movies in theaters anymore. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, and yet it is the precise half of the delays and disconnects between founders and one didn't try to get the money so burdensome, that is a huge, overcomplicated agreements, and the opinion of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were invisible or simpler in Lisp. Philadelphia is a convertible note with no environmental cost.

Bureaucrats manage to allocate resources, because such companies need huge numbers of people, but when people tell you them. If you're not even in their early twenties. Or rather indignant; that's a rational response to what you really want, like the application of math to real problems, but only because like an undervalued stock in that era had no natural immunity to messianic figures, just harder.

But it will almost certainly overvalued in 1999, it has to split hairs that fine about whether you want to learn to acknowledge as well use the standard career paths of trustafarians to start or join startups. A knowledge of human nature is certainly an important relationship between the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors.

[jeneelestrange]

“They need that much because if we don’t pay them market rate or what other CEOs are making, we’ll lose them to other companies.”

THAT’S HOW ALL JOBS WORK. BUT ALL OF A SUDDEN YOU CARE ABOUT KEEPING QUALITY TALENT?????? Let me get this FUCKING straight. We’ve seen any goddamn position that CAN be shipped overseas, done by someone with less technical skill and paid less, had people do positions that used to be one job turn into two or three, etc, etc, etc. People are on treadmills where no matter their skills, it’s never enough, and one of you cheap fucks will always be trying to somehow get good solid work for a buck done in record time—which isn’t how ANYTHING works and is one of the reasons that everything is broken as FUCK now.

AND YET. These executive positions. They’re never going to be given to some hard scrabble working person who got their MBA online so he could keep working for your FUCKING COMPANY and keep feeding themselves and knows it’s processes inside and out, what works, what doesn’t. They’re for keeping the serfs in line. The exec positions go to someone who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth, went to the best schools from birth, had all the right connections to jobs and careers that only flow through word of mouth that the rest of us will NEVER be able to apply to. The sort of person whose never had to worry about whether they could fit in their homework into their work schedule—if he worked at all while he was being educated, it was for resume-building, it was interning, and everyone always understood what came first. All he had to do was show up and pay attention.

“B-but you said it yourself, they have the best education!!! We NEED them to make the BEST decisions, what will happen if all these companies are being run by people who don’t know what they’re doing—“

You’re gonna sit here and tell me Elon Musk knows what he’s doing? That there isn’t teams of people at every company he runs devoted EXCLUSIVELY to unfucking everything he fucks up? Literally just because he decided to up and buy a company one day. And he’s certainly not the only one, just the one dumb enough to be this open and attention-seeking about it. And you’re really going to tell me, looking around in the world we live in, KNOWING my own parents economically had it better that this is THE BEST THEY CAN DO??? You have the gall to tell me this is the BEST POSSIBLE WORLD???? And they have everyone’s best interests in mind????? And when we were telling you THE SAME THING regarding everything else that requires some kind of skill BUT NO—you sold the company overseas, you tried to replace it with AI, you replaced anyone who knew anything with the cheapest labor you could possibly find. And everything around us is WORSE—the supply chain is broken af, our clothes can tear apart in a single use, our homes IF YOU CAN AFFORD ONE are badly made particle board garbage that’s going to decay around you, the entertainment market is flooded with execs only approving remakes and re-imaginings of the ugliest CGI imaginable and cheap “reality TV,” and our cars are twice as expensive and the computer chips make any given malfunctioning part like troubleshooting a fucking computer, etc, etc, etc. Your CUSTOMERS are unhappy and the only reason you’re getting away with it is you’re doing this collusion cartel bullshit where you’re only a few companies and YOU ALL DO IT.

Get rid of them. We can do it the nice way or we can do it the hard way.

[lazypeachsoul]

I wouldn't want to spend a minute lovin' anybody else.

Warnings: this fic has some sad moments and mentions of the blip. also kind of AU because I'm completely ignoring Natasha's canon end.

Word count: 4,2k (i got very carried away with this fic)

Summary: · Meeting the right person at the wrong time can be life changing when it doesn’t work out the way we desire. But if it's meant to be it will always happen, right?

A/N: This is my fic for the "Women of Marvel xReader Exchange" created by @marvelxreaderfanfictionfest . It was created for @im-holding-ontoyou and I hope you like it! gif by @natasharomanovgifs 🌼 ALSO; i haven't watched Black Widow yet so I'm sorry if something in this fic doesn't fit the new info we got about natasha.

Masterlist.

To be added to my taglist use this forms or write me an ask!

New York, 2015.

When you received the call from one of your bosses that you had a new case you would have never imagined how big that case would turn out to be.

You had been working for one of the most important law firms in New York for a year now, and you were getting kind of used to reading cases that would be narrated in the papers for months. Rich and entitled men, big divorces were they fight over who gets the yacht, one or two murder cases... if it revolved around the powerful people of New York city, your firm would get it.

When you got to the debriefing and were told that Tony Stark, one of the firm's most important clients, asked your team for assistance in the creation of some legislation with the newly created “Advanced Threat Containment Unit” you were more than surprised.

The events that the Avengers had caused (or saved us from, there were different opinions going around) in the small country of Sokovia were known all around the and it was only time before the most powerful officials asked for the regulation of ‘superhero activity’.

You weren’t important enough to actually attend the meetings that took place with the government, seeing as you had only passed your bar exam a little over a year prior, but you were deemed cheerful and nice enough to act as a nexus between the firm and the client.

For months you spent your days talking to Tony Stark and other members of The Avengers trying to explain what was being talked about. The first few meetings were a disaster, seeing as the mood was somber for the lives lost and nobody really understood your legal jargon. But slowly you started to transform your language and really tried to make the meetings as easy as possible for everyone present.

But who were you kidding, they really didn’t care about the meetings or the silly attorney being sent to explain something that was way above their paycheck. Well, at least Stark was gracious enough to set a coffee station with some pastries for the meeting. You were pouring the hot liquid into your to-go cup when your hand jerked and the hot liquid splashed your hand.

You could feel the sting of the burn but avoided further sudden movements trying not to make it worse. Before you could reach for a napkin to clean up the mess you made, a more dexterous and manicured hand reached for them and exchanged the hot cup in your hand for the bunch of papers.

“Careful, Stark always serves boiling coffee. I think it’s to mask that it’s not the best quality.”

You lifted your gaze from your hand and found a pair of deep green eyes gazing back. You would have thought that spending numerous meetings in the company of superheroes would make you less susceptible to their powerful auras, but being this close to Natasha Romanoff made your heart beat a bit faster.

“Yeah, I found out the hard way.” You joked, lifting your hand a bit. “You would guess one of the richest people in the world would actually serve good coffee...”

Seeing her crack a smile made you feel less tense. Sometimes you forget they are still normal people. Normal people who could kill you with their bare hands and had superhuman powers. She placed your cup on the food table, apparently not bothered by how hot it must have been, and pushed her hand in your direction.

“I’m Natasha Romanoff.” You wrapped your hand around hers and shook it, biting your tongue trying not to tell her of course you knew her name. “Sorry I didn’t introduce myself in earlier meetings, we were all trying to come to terms with what had happened.”

“No worries, I can only imagine how hard it must have been for all of you.” You nodded and tried to show her sympathy, trying to avoid thinking about all the lives affected by the fight. “Oh sorry, I’m-”

Natasha quickly cut you off, speaking your name before you could even say it. You could feel your cheeks get warmer at the idea that they actually knew who you were, and she probably could sense your mood change because she quickly explained.

“I know who you are, you send us at least two emails a week about these meetings and FRIDAY always announces you before you arrive.”

“Who announces me?” You asked curiously at the mention of a name you recognized.

“FRIDAY. It’s the name of Stark’s AI technology. It works all around the tower and it’s there to make life easier for everyone.” She explained pointing around at the speakers strategically placed around the room.

“Oh, I get emails from Friday sometimes. Most of them are asking me to translate or explain something about the debriefing because Mr.Stark is not interested in legal terms.” Both you and Natasha laughed at the thought.

But she quickly recomposed and tried to look serious again when she heard her teammates coming in to get ready for the meeting.

“I wanted to ask you about that. Do you think we could schedule a meeting so that you could explain some things about the legislation of the A.T.C.U.?” She spoke lower than she had when the two of you were alone and you wondered why she didn’t want her colleagues to know about the meeting.

“Ye-Yeah, of course I can.” You were confused but thought it would be in your best interest, and the firm’s, to say yes to the proposal. And a meeting with a very attractive and definitely interesting woman was not something that happened constantly for you.

“Great, thank you.” She smiled warmly and squeezed your hand that you hadn’t even realized was still wrapped around hers from the introduction. “I can promise you better coffee.”

You could only hum in response, still trying to piece together what she might want from the meeting. But your thoughts were quickly cut off when Stark entered the room and you moved to start the reunion.

During the entire meeting you could feel the dull pain in your hand from the scorching coffee and the feeling of a pair of green eyes watching your every move.

Vienna, 2016.

The situation had only gone downhill from the Battle of Sokovia. The public’s opinion on the Avengers was at an all-time-low and that made terrorist groups bold. They knew that if they struck and caused enough chaos, the blame would fall on the good guys that tried to stop them.

The only thing that seemed to be a stable thing in your life was Natasha. Well, as stable as dating a superhero might be. She was busy a lot, but you understood the importance of her job and you were quite busy too gaining importance within the law firm.

And even if sometimes terrorists and criminals got in the way you still found a moment to spend together, wrapped around each other without having to think about how messed up life was.

You thought Lagos was the blow that would make everything tumble, the Sokovia accords were unveiled and it broke the Avengers, and your girlfriend. You could feel how torn she was at her decision of some of her friends to oppose the signing and go on the run, and her own decision to subordinate to the United Nations mandate. But you realized how small that had been when king T’Chaka was killed at the UN.

You had been at the UN as part of the USA legal team that participated in the writing and monitoring of the accords. Your participation in the negotiations almost broke your relationship but you were able to recover once you explained your position and Natasha actually came to an understanding of it.

Natasha was also in Vienna when everything went down, you hadn’t managed to properly see her because she was one of the signers and they sat at the assembly while other guests sat at the amphitheater watching the retransmission.

You hadn’t been able to properly see her all day, seeing as she took a detour before flying to Austria. You were only able to communicate through texts where you tried to make the situation more comfortable for her and she promised a peaceful european trip to celebrate the signing.

When the bomb went off and all hell broke loose the first thing you tried to do was look for her, she was at the epicenter of the explosion and you just wanted to see if she was okay. You saw her from afar when you were being pushed to the outside of the building while they swiped the perimeter.

She sat with T’Challa before he jumped from the bench and stomped away. Natasha looked around and your gazes crossed, immediately melting away some of the worry. You tried to push your way through the crowd to get to her, but police and security didn’t budge.

You never took your eyes off of her, scared that if you did she would disappear. But she did move her gaze to her phone and the look that crossed her face when she heard the voice at the other side told you it was a very important call.

Once the call was over and she looked at you again you knew that would probably be the last time you would see her in some time. You hadn’t known Natasha as long as some of her colleagues had, but you could proudly say you could understand what she wanted to say with just a look. And the look on her face in that moment read close to a goodbye.

New York, 2018.

It had been two years since the fall of Helmut Zemo and part of the Avengers was still on the run. And it maybe wouldn’t have had that big of an impact on you if it wasn’t because Natasha had also been on the run for that long.

You had heard about what happened at the Leipzig airport and how Natasha had changed alliances to join Captain America’s fight. You had been heartbroken at the news knowing that any resemblance of normality that you still hope for was destroyed.

You had spent months wondering what had made her change her mind. Had she thought about your conversations about the accords? Had she even remembered you, waiting for her back in New York, when she decided to go on the run?

A part of you tried to convince you of how selfish thinking about that was, why would she think about you when the future of her team and friends was at stake? But also you were her girlfriend, she should have thought about the implications that might have had for you.

In those years you had mourned your relationship and after the grieving period you tried to rebuild your life. New friends, a new position and new chances to take. And it went okay...at least until someone opened their mouth to talk about superheroes or The Avengers. Years down the line and it was still on people’s minds.

On special occasions you would receive anonymous gifts at your office or your apartment. The first birthday after the war you sobbed for fifteen minutes when you saw the bunch of flowers. There was no name or indicative of who might have sent them, that was until you looked better at the card and saw the small red hourglass painted in the corner.

The gifts continued. Every case you won, promotion, birthday or holiday a bunch of flowers would be delivered to you with the same note.

In a way it gave you a sense of peace knowing she was okay and still thought of you. But the more you thought about it the angrier you got at how she had left you.

You didn’t expect a message from your boss to run to the Avengers compound and assess some situation between Coronel Rhodes and Thaddeus Ross. Although the team had crumbled, your company was still hired to legally represent the remaining members and moderate situations that might arise with the government.

You entered the compound expecting another bureaucratic complaint about their activity but you found a trickier situation. The meeting room was filled with people you thought you would never see again.

Captain Rogers was sitting on one of the chairs sporting a new look that made you almost not recognize him and a tense demeanor. Next to him was Sam Wilson, looking around at the smallest of movements and trying to assess the situation. Wanda Maximoff was standing on the furthest corner of the room playing with her rings, meanwhile Vision was apparently being checked out for a wound. What kind of wounds a synthezoid could get was beyond your understanding.

“Thank you for coming so quickly, I might have angered Secretary Ross during a meeting.” Rhodey came up to you with a nervous smile.

You had gotten closer to him thanks to your job seeing as he was the one doing the dirty superhero work.

“Yeah, I got that much from the text. Nothing new then.” You tried to joke to diffuse the tension in the room. “It would have been nice to know you had guests though.”

“We are not guests. Last time I checked this was our home too.”

That voice made your blood freeze. You should have expected her there, all her friends had returned and the chance of her being back too was almost 100%. But hearing her voice again after two years was not something you expected.

You bit your tongue before you could talk about how it’s not a home if you abandon it, but decided against it. This was a fight between them, not Natasha and you.

“I need you to work with the government to avoid this situation becoming a disaster.” Rhodey explained and you scoffed.

“Rhodey, I’m a lawyer not a politician. I have as much power in this as you might have.” You tried to lay your point across but it was difficult with all eyes on the interaction. “Hell, I have even less power than you do.”

“Then I need you to distract them enough to get them off our shoulders.” He pressed. “Something big is coming and we need all the strength we can get.”

You thought about it for a moment. If it was true that something big was coming, the Avengers were the best option to fight it.

“I’m in.” You scoffed at his smile and sat down in one of the chairs of the meeting room. “I’m not ready for the world to end yet.”

The meeting went on for a while. You called bosses, government officials and everyone that would listen to your distractions. You sent emails that would flood their inboxes for days so that they couldn’t read any news that might reach them about what the superheroes had in mind.

It was late at night when a cup of steaming liquid was placed next to you. You looked at it and saw that it was some kind of herbal tea, probably made to relax the drinker. You followed the hand that was still holding the mug until you reached Natasha’s face.

You had done your best to ignore her looming presence in the room but now there was no distraction. Looking at her you could see tiredness in her face. She was platinum blonde now, a look that weirdly suited her, but her face still looked as welcoming to you as it always did.

You tried to stop the flashbacks to the last time you saw it in person in Vienna, but they kept replaying in your head until her voice broke you out of the loop.

“I thought you might need it, I remember how nervous calls used to make you.”

She was smiling but you could tell it didn’t reach her eyes.

“Yeah, I guess I got over it since I got my promotion. Now I spend a long portion of my day making calls.”

She hummed and sat down next two you, but leaving a chair in between you as a safe space.

“I read about it in an article, I sent you flowers to celebrate.”

“I got them. And the Christmas ones. On my birthday too.” You enumerated the times you had gotten the plants in the past two years. “You must have spent an awful amount of money buying me so many flowers.”

“You deserved it, you still do.” She shrugged and that’s when you noticed she had her own mug of warm tea in her other hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to celebrate with you.”

You laughed into your mug sarcastically. Out of everything you expected her to say this wasn’t one of them.

“Did you really? Because you didn’t seem to consider me much when you went on the run for two years.”

Natasha paled when she heard your tone. She probably wasn’t used to situations like these but you weren’t going to let her go without an apology at least.

“I was trying to do the best for-”

“-for the world. I get it, Natasha, I do.” You tried to contain your emotions but it was getting harder with every word. “Relationships are supposed to be teamwork. I know you are always too busy playing heroes and I never judged you for that, I just wish you would have trusted me enough to tell me before you disappeared.”

She was silent and knowing Natasha it’s because she was probably overwhelmed with the display of feelings. But she needed to hear how bad you had felt.

After minutes of waiting for an answer from her and getting nothing but sighs you shook your head and looked back at the computer screen.

“I guess it was a case of the right person, wrong time.” You shrugged trying to find distraction in the flurry of letters in your email inbox. “Or at least it was for me.”

She got up from her seat without a word and you grew exasperated. Why had she even approached you if then she wasn’t willing to have an adult, two sided conversation? She was almost at the door when you heard her voice again.

“Please never doubt how much I love you. I made some bad choices but dating you was not one of them.”

New York, 2024.

Time apparently flies by when you are erased from the face of the earth. One day you are in your office working late and the next you appear five years in the future with no recollection of what might have happened.

You were taken by authorities to impromptu camps and one by one examined to check your identities. The entire thing seemed to be something out of one of the dystopian novels you used to read as a teenager.

When it was your turn you gave them all the information you had on what had happened. You had given them your name and personal information and apparently had been a very searched person because the computer started beeping as soon as your name was introduced in the database.

You were moved to a secluded part of the camp and kept in an isolated room for god knows how long. Your stomach was in knots during the entire situation and you could feel the cold sweat on you. That mixed with the metallic taste on your tongue you knew this time your anxiety was justified. You were almost dizzy because of how hard you were thinking about the entire situation and trying to make sense of it.

When you heard the door of the room open you jumped up, discarding on the floor a makeshift blanket that had been placed on your shoulders when you got there. Your legs almost gave out at the movement and your heart felt like it was going to burst out.

The door opened enough for you to see who had been searching for you. Natasha stepped through the door still dressed in her tactic gear and with tiredness written all over her face. But that feeling seemed to almost disappear when she finally saw you.

With quick movements she stepped into the room and wrapped her arms around you tightly. For some reason that action was the trigger that you needed to let all your emotions consume you.

You started sobbing uncontrollably at the unknown. You didn’t understand what happened or how you are here, but feeling her embrace helped you feel safe in a way. It had been years since you last hugged her but it still felt as good as back in 2015.

You could hear Natasha’s soothing shushes in between your sobs and you moved to hold her tighter.

“You are here. I can’t believe I found you again.” She spoke softly and you didn’t know if she was speaking to you or herself. “It’s okay darling. I’m here and I’m not letting you go again. I promise.”

And with that promise a ray of hope made way between all the fear you felt.

Missouri, 2025.

Soft music could be heard all around the ground floor of the house. The soft beat was upbeat enough to get the morning started but not enough to be overwhelming if you had just woken up. You were sitting on the kitchen island looking at the news on your phone and having breakfast.

Mornings were usually very calm around the homestead and you couldn’ be more thankful for that. It allowed you to silently prepare your breakfast and coffee and get a headstart on Natasha’s breakfast too.

Since she had retired, Natasha had discovered a newfound love for sleeping in and you didn’t dare to take that away from her. She deserved it from all the work she had done in her life.

You, meanwhile, tried to get up early to scroll through the cases that you got in your new and smaller job and schedule meetings or emails.

It was a Saturday so work wasn’t a thing and you could actually enjoy your toast and coffee in peace. Or at least until a pair of arms wrapped themselves around your middle and pulled you back against Natasha.

“Good morning baby, how did you sleep?”

“Like a baby.” You could feel her smile when she kissed your cheek from behind. “You weren’t there when I woke up though.”

You shrugged before moving to get a bite out of your toast. Natasha tried to do the same but you quickly moved it away from her with a smile. She tried again and you moved as fast as your reflexes allowed you.

“C’mon baby, give me a bite” “No, it’s my toast. You can make your own.” “But it tastes better when you make it.” “No it doesn’t, don’t be lazy.”

The playful fight continued for a few moments until she got close enough to get a small bit but you moved it again.

“Don’t make me bite you, darling.”

You chuckled at her threat and plopped the remaining toast on the plate in front of you. Breakfast didn’t matter much anymore. You threw yourself into her arms and pressed your lips against hers. It wasn’t a slow and sensual kiss, it was closer to how small kids smooch their parents. But you knew it would convey your love more deeply.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time, Nat.” You spoke against her lips and squaked when you felt her playfully nip at your bottom lip.

“Is now a good time?”

That question had become recurring in your household, a nod to the phrase you said when you found eachother again after being separated the first time.

“I couldn’t think of a more perfect time.”

And you couldn’t. The rest of your life spent in a homestead with your girlfriend and whatever life might bring? It sounded absolutely delightful.

Taglist: @tagehaya @flyforeverfree @rooskaya-yelena @evalynanne @insanitybyanothername @princessayveke @yelenabelovasgf @kyli314

[infantisimo]

against ai

the end of art: an argument against image ai

a good explainer. a selection of people's comments below.

— "I spent decades of my life learning foreign languages, only to see the translation industry destroyed by AI. The inferiority of the machine translations a few years back did not stop the destruction of the industry. The machine translation cost nothing, and so the price for all translation came crashing down, because the bottom feeders used machine translation. I found myself paid half price to 'just edit' (as if it was less work) a translation done by machine which was basically unintelligible so that I had to go back to the original and translate it myself. Most clients, the bottom of the pyramid that kept the industry going, did not care about the quality of the translation. If we expect that clients prizing human made products will save industries we are being very delusional. ... the vast majority of clients will go for the process that costs less."

— "Data-laundering has got to be the most accurate keyword for this discussion. Very well spoken"

— "I was really on the edge about AI art. I'm not an artist at all, I'm a programmer who commissions artists every now and again. It's such a cool ldea but it's unethical and actively stagnates creativity in its current form. Like, if you think of the sum of all human creation as a quantifiable mass, we're not adding anything by blending it up like this without true creative input. Disseminating the technology incentivizes adding less to that mass. This tech hasn't peaked, but there is a tremendous difference between this and a machine with the capability to truly add to that mass."

— "the thing that steven gets that i think other videos don’t highlight enough is that it’s not about the ai. the ai is just the product. it’s about the developers, companies, businessmen, and capitalists behind it who will take a mile if you give them an inch. we’re being bogged down by technicalities and arguments but they’re just distractions. it’s never about the tool, it’s about the people behind the tool and what their agendas are."

— "If they take away the ability and the incentive to create, we will only have the desire to consume. And deep down, it's just that, consumption and more consumption. This is a strong step towards a less "human" humanity. Not to mention that there will be fewer and fewer jobs in which one can learn and enjoy what they do. This is horrendous, almost straight out of a sci fi horror movie. Excellent video and beautiful illustration!"