#microsoft teams training

[lrtrainingsolutions-oganization]

LR Training Solutions

LR Training offers training for corporations and organizations https://lrtrainingsolutions.com/blog-2/

[outsider-horseshit]

[sndwave]

what do you mean $27 an hour as STARTING pay

[icouldntfindquiet]

I think the link in the Instagram caption confirms it's Van running the account 😂

We can’t click on the link! Or he could’ve wrote “link in bio.” 😂 He’s busy advertising this gig. Also just realized I post full links in my captions too so me and you both, Van. 💀🤝

[techworld55]

🖐️What Is Microsoft Excel and Why Should You Learn It?

🧮Discover its key features, real-world applications, and why learning it is a game-changer for professionals.

[gamereporter]

AbleGamers Brasil realiza evento anual de inclusão e acessibilidade nos games

No próximo sábado, 21 de setembro, a ONG AbleGamers Brasil realizará a 8ª edição de seu evento anual, voltado à promoção da inclusão de pessoas com deficiência no mundo dos games. A transmissão, que ocorre das 13h às 21h, será feita pelos canais da instituição na Twitch e no YouTube, diretamente das instalações do Alienware Training Facility, espaço da equipe Team Liquid. O evento é parte de uma…

[ellipsus-writes]

(Read on our blog)

Beginning in 1933, the Nazis burned books to erase the ideas they feared—works of literature, politics, philosophy, criticism; works by Jewish and leftist authors, and research from the Institute for Sexual Science, which documented and affirmed queer and trans identities.

(Nazis collect "anti-German" books to be destroyed at a Berlin book-burning on May 10, 1933 (Source)

Stories tell truths.

These weren’t just books; they were lifelines.

Writing by, for, and about marginalized people isn’t just about representation, but survival. Writing has always been an incredibly powerful tool—perhaps the most resilient form of resistance, as fascism seeks to disconnect people from knowledge, empathy, history, and finally each other. Empathy is one of the most valuable resources we have, and in the darkest times writers armed with nothing but words have exposed injustice, changed culture, and kept their communities connected.

(A Nazi student and a member of the SA raid the Institute for Sexual Science's library in Berlin, May 6, 1933. Source)

Less than two weeks after the US presidential inauguration, the nightmare of Project 2025 is starting to unfold. What these proposals will mean for creative freedom and freedom of expression is uncertain, but the intent is clear. A chilling effect on subjects that writers engage with every day—queer narratives, racial justice, and critiques of power—is already manifest. The places where these works are published and shared may soon face increased pressure, censorship, and legal jeopardy.

And with speed-run fascism comes a rising tide of misinformation and hostility. The tech giants that facilitate writing, sharing, publishing, and communication—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the-hellscape-formerly-known-as-Twitter, Facebook, TikTok—have folded like paper in a light breeze. OpenAI, embroiled in lawsuits for training its models on stolen works, is now positioned as the AI of choice for the administration, bolstered by a $500 billion investment. And privacy-focused companies are showing a newfound willingness to align with a polarizing administration, chilling news for writers who rely on digital privacy to protect their work and sources; even their personal safety.

Where does that leave writers?

Writing communities have always been a creative refuge, but they’re more than that now—they are a means of continuity. The information landscape is shifting rapidly, so staying informed on legal and political developments will be essential for protecting creative freedom and pushing back against censorship wherever possible. Direct your energy to the communities that need it, stay connected, check in on each other—and keep backup spaces in case platforms become unsafe.

We can’t stress this enough—support tools and platforms that prioritize creative freedom. The systems we rely on are being rewritten in real time, and the future of writing spaces depends on what we build now. We at Ellipsus will continue working to provide space for our community—one that protects and facilitates creative expression, not undermines it.

Above all—keep writing.

Keep imagining, keep documenting, keep sharing—keep connecting. Suppression thrives on silence, but words have survived every attempt at erasure.

- The Ellipsus team

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party — and America

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

On the one hand, the anti-monopoly movement has a future no matter who wins the 2024 election – that's true even if Kamala Harris wins but heeds the calls from billionaire donors to fire Lina Khan and her fellow trustbusters.

In part, that's because US antitrust laws have broad "private rights of action" that allow individuals and companies to sue one another for monopolistic conduct, even if top government officials are turning a blind eye. It's true that from the Reagan era to the Biden era, these private suits were few and far between, and the cases that were brought often died in a federal courtroom. But the past four years has seen a resurgence of antitrust rage that runs from left to right, and from individuals to the C-suites of big companies, driving a wave of private cases that are prevailing in the courts, upending the pro-monopoly precedents that billionaires procured by offering free "continuing education" antitrust training to 40% of the Federal judiciary:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

It's amazing to see the DoJ racking up huge wins against Google's monopolistic conduct, sure, but first blood went to Epic, who won a historic victory over Google in federal court six months before the DoJ's win, which led to the court ordering Google to open up its app store:

https://www.theverge.com/policy/2024/10/7/24243316/epic-google-permanent-injunction-ruling-third-party-stores

Google's 30% App Tax is a giant drag on all kinds of sectors, as is its veto over which software Android users get to see, so Epic's win is going to dramatically alter the situation for all kinds of activities, from beleaguered indie game devs:

https://antiidlereborn.com/news/

To the entire news sector:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Private antitrust cases have attracted some very surprising plaintiffs, like Michael Jordan, whose long policy of apoliticism crumbled once he bought a NASCAR team and lived through the monopoly abuses of sports leagues as an owner, not a player:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist

A much weirder and more unlikely antitrust plaintiff than Michael Jordan is Google, the perennial antitrust defendant. Google has brought a complaint against Microsoft in the EU, based on Microsoft's extremely ugly monopolistic cloud business:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-files-complaint-eu-over-microsoft-cloud-practices-2024-09-25/

Google's choice of venue here highlights another reason to think that the antitrust surge will continue irrespective of US politics: antitrust is global. Antitrust fervor has seized governments from the UK to the EU to South Korea to Japan. All of those countries have extremely similar antitrust laws, because they all had their statute books overhauled by US technocrats as part of the Marshall Plan, so they have the same statutory tools as the American trustbusters who dismantled Standard Oil and AT&T, and who are making ready to shatter Google into several competing businesses:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/8/24265832/google-search-antitrust-remedies-framework-android-chrome-play

Antitrust fever has spread to Canada, Australia, and even China, where the Cyberspace Directive bans Chinese tech giants from breaking interoperability to freeze out Chinese startups. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the cost of 40 years of pro-monopoly can't be ignored. Monopolies make the whole world more brittle, even as the cost of that brittleness mounts. It's hard to pretend monopolies are fine when a single hurricane can wipe out the entire country's supply of IV fluid – again:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-11-cant-believe-im-writing-about-iv-fluid-again/

What's more, the conduct of global monopolists is the same in every country where they have taken hold, which means that trustbusters in the EU can use the UK Digital Markets Unit's report on the mobile app market as a roadmap for their enforcement actions against Apple:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

And then the South Korean and Japanese trustbusters can translate the court documents from the EU's enforcement action and use them to score victories over Apple in their own courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

So on the one hand, the trustbusting wave will continue erode the foundations of global monopolies, no matter what happens after this election. But on the other hand, if Harris wins and then fires Biden's top trustbusters to appease her billionaire donors, things are going to get ugly.

A new, excellent long-form Bloomberg article by Josh Eidelson and Max Chafkin gives a sense of the battle raging just below the surface of the Democratic Power, built around a superb interview with Khan herself:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-09/lina-khan-on-a-second-ftc-term-ai-price-gouging-data-privacy

The article begins with a litany of tech billionaires who've gone an all-out, public assault on Khan's leadership – billionaires who stand to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars from her agency's principled, vital antitrust work, but who cloak their objection to Khan in rhetoric about defending the American economy. In public, some of these billionaires are icily polite, but many of them degenerate into frothing, toddler-grade name-calling, like IAB's Barry Diller, who called her a "dope" and Musk lickspittle Jason Calacanis, who called her an all-caps COMMUNIST and a LUNATIC.

The overall vibe from these wreckers? "How dare the FTC do things?!"

And you know, they have a point. For decades, the FTC was – in the quoted words of Tim Wu – "a very hardworking agency that did nothing." This was the period when the FTC targeted low-level scammers while turning a blind eye to the monsters that were devouring the US economy. In part, that was because the FTC had been starved of budget, trapping them in a cycle of racking up easy, largely pointless "wins" against penny-ante grifters to justify their existence, but never to the extent that Congress would apportion them the funds to tackle the really serious cases (if this sounds familiar, it's also the what happened during the long period when the IRS chased middle class taxpayers over minor filing errors, while ignoring the billionaires and giant corporations that engaged in 7- and 8-figure tax scams).

But the FTC wasn't merely underfunded: it was timid. The FTC has extremely broad enforcement and rulemaking powers, which most sat dormant during the neoliberal era:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The Biden administration didn't merely increase the FTC's funding: in choosing Khan to helm the organization, they brought onboard a skilled technician, who was both well-versed in the extensive but unused powers of the agency and determined to use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But Khan's didn't just rely on technical chops and resources to begin the de-olicharchification of the US economy: she built a three-legged stool, whose third leg is narrative. Khan's signature is her in-person and remote "listening tours," where workers who've been harmed by corporate power get to tell their stories. Bloomberg recounts the story of Deborah Brantley, who was sexually harassed and threatened by her bosses at Kavasutra North Palm Beach. Brantley's bosses touched her inappropriately and "joked" about drugging her and raping her so she "won’t be such a bitch and then maybe people would like you more."

When Brantley finally quit and took a job bartending at a different business, Kavasutra sued her over her noncompete clause, alleging an "irreparable injury" sustained by having one of their former employees working at another business, seeking damages and fees.

The vast majority of the 30 million American workers who labor under noncompetes are like Brantley, low-waged service workers, especially at fast-food restaurants (so Wendy's franchisees can stop minimum wage cashiers from earning $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at a nearby McDonald's). The donor-class indenturers who defend noncompetes claim that noncompetes are necessary to protect "innovative" businesses from losing their "IP." But of course, the one state where no workers are subject to noncompetes is California, which bans them outright – the state that is also home to Silicon Valley, an IP-heave industry that the same billionaires laud for its innovations.

After that listening tour, Khan's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Only to have a federal judge in Texas throw out their ban, a move that will see $300b/year transfered from workers to shareholders, and block the formation of 8,500 new US businesses every year:

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-tosses-ftc-noncompetes-ban

Notwithstanding court victories like Epic v Google and DoJ v Google, America's oligarchs have the courts on their side, thanks to decades of court-packing planned by the Federalist Society and executed by Senate Republicans and Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump. Khan understands this; she told Bloomberg that she's a "close student" of the tactics Reagan used to transform American society, admiring his effectiveness while hating his results. Like other transformative presidents, good and bad, Reagan had to fight the judiciary and entrenched institutions (as did FDR and Lincoln). Erasing Reagan's legacy is a long-term project, a battle of inches that will involve mustering broad political support for the cause of a freer, more equal America.

Neither Biden nor Khan are responsible for the groundswell of US – and global – movement to euthanize our rentier overlords. This is a moment whose time has come; a fact demonstrated by the tens of thousands of working Americans who filled the FTC's noncompete docket with outraged comments. People understand that corporate looters – not "the economy" or "the forces of history" – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.

Like the billionaires publicly demanding that Harris fire Khan, private equity bosses can't stop making tone-deaf, guillotine-conjuring pronouncements about their own virtue and the righteousness of their businesses. They don't just want to destroy the world - they want to be praised for it:/p>

"Private equity’s been a great thing for America" -Stephen Pagliuca, co-chairman of Bain Capital;

"We are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able, most vulnerable members of that society. Shouldn’t we judge a society by how they treat the most successful? Do we vilify, tax, expropriate and condemn those who have succeeded, or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being?" -Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo

"Achieve life-changing money and power," -Sachin Khajuria, former partner at Apollo

Meanwhile, the "buy, strip and flip" model continues to chew its way through America. When PE buys up all the treatment centers for kids with behavioral problems, they hack away at staffing and oversight, turning them into nightmares where kids are routinely abused, raped and murdered:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/they-told-me-it-was-going-be-good-place-allega-tions-n987176

When PE buys up nursing homes, the same thing happens, with elderly residents left to sit in their own excrement and then die:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/24/nursing-homes-private-equity-fraud-00132001

Writing in The Guardian, Alex Blasdel lays out the case for private equity as a kind of virus that infects economies, parasitically draining them of not just the capacity to provide goods and services, but also of the ability to govern themselves, as politicians and regulators are captured by the unfathomable sums that PE flushes into the political process:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-private-equity-out-of-control

Now, the average worker who's just lost their job may not understand "divi recaps" or "2-and-20" or "carried interest tax loopholes," but they do understand that something is deeply rotten in the world today.

What happens to that understanding is a matter of politics. The Republicans – firmly affiliated with, and beloved of, the wreckers – have chosen an easy path to capitalizing on the rising rage. All they need to do is convince the public that the system is irredeemably corrupt and that the government can't possibly fix anything (hence Reagan's asinine "joke": "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help'").

This is a very canny strategy. If you are the party of "governments are intrinsically corrupt and incompetent," then governing corruptly and incompetently proves your point. The GOP strategy is to create a nation of enraged nihilists who don't even imagine that the government could do something to hold their bosses to account – not for labor abuses, not for pollution, not for wage theft or bribery.

The fact that successive neoliberal governments – including Democratic administrations – acted time and again to bear out this hypothesis makes it easy for this kind of nihilism to take hold.

Far-right conspiracies about pharma bosses colluding with corrupt FDA officials to poison us with vaccines for profit owe their success to the lived experience of millions of Americans who lost loved ones to a conspiracy between pharma bosses and corrupt officials to poison us with opioids.

Unhinged beliefs that "they" caused the hurricanes tearing through Florida and Georgia and that Kamala Harris is capping compensation to people who lost their homes are only credible because of murderous Republican fumble during Katrina; and the larcenous collusion of Democrats to help banks steal Americans' homes during the foreclosure crisis, when Obama took Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runway" with the mortgages of everyday Americans who'd been cheated by their banks:

https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/

If Harris gives in to billionaire donors and fires Khan and her fellow trustbusters, paving the way for more looting and scamming, the result will be more nihilism, which is to say, more electoral victories for the GOP. The "government can't do anything" party already exists. There are no votes to be gained by billing yourself as the "we also think governments can't do anything" party.

In other words, a world where Khan doesn't run the FTC is a world where antitrust continues to gain ground, but without taking Democrats with it. It's a world where nihilism wins.

There's factions of the Democratic Party who understand this. AOC warned party leaders that, "Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl":

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1844034727935988155

And Bernie Sanders called her "the best FTC Chair in modern history":

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1843733298960576652

In other words: Lina Khan as a posse.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/11/democracys-antitrust-paradox/#there-will-be-an-out-and-out-brawl

[pastlivesxpastlie]

::taps mic:: ok I’m back

🤭👔Coworker!Vessel trained you and kind of took you under his wing, but not without some light ribbing. He’ll hijack a question just to get a rise out of you.

📝 But you trained Intern!Vessel. He’s not your intern, you’re just the most trustworthy person there. He comes to you with every question he has but isn’t codependent. You did so well training him and he looks up to you 🥹 Maybe you’ll write him a letter of recommendation.

👔Coworker!Vessel is a certified yapper, although other coworkers will say they had never heard him laugh and talk so much until you came along. Vessel denies this and says “they just never paid attention.”

📝Intern!Vessel only talks about work things at work for fear of appearing too familiar or unprofessional. When he finally warms up to you, though, he starts asking you to meet him away from people so he can “talk to you about something.” You’re like “oh shit what did I do,” but then he’s like “last week I found this really cool band 🥺 can I send you some songs?” You’d be annoyed if he weren’t so cute.

👔Coworker!Vessel makes the shift fun and you’re normally happy to see him. He’s a part of the team that makes you think “ok, the vibes are going to rule tonight” when you look at the schedule.

📝Intern!Vessel becomes your work bestie. If you aren’t in that day, he’s sending you gossip on Microsoft Teams so you can catch up later. Turns out he can be very snarky. He also will surprise you with coffee sometimes when you’re having a bad day.

🎀But there is something they both have in common…they both can’t help but notice your little pen chewing habit. How you mindlessly tap it at your lips before chewing the top. Kind of a nasty habit. He wants to tell you that. But not out loud in front of everyone. No. That would be humiliating. He’d rather do it somewhere quiet. In some dark stairwell or the elevator. Tell you how naughty and dirty that is…all while slipping his finger past your pretty lips.🎀

[lrtrainingsolutions-oganization]

Black-Owned SEO leadership and management training Company. Providing Providing leadership development and remote communication solutions https://lrtrainingsolutions.com/blackownedseotrainingcompany/

[autistichrlady]

The Cover Letter Toolbox

Or, how to write cover letters while autistic.

One of the autistic traits I have is difficulties with what's called "expressive language" - I don't think in words, and putting my thoughts into words takes a lot of time and effort. For me, going straight from a blank page to a full sentence that makes sense is difficult, and making that sentence sound professional is even harder. So I came up with a way to avoid starting from a blank page. This is what I do instead.

When I've read a job posting and decided I want to apply, I start by making a list of qualifications and things from the job posting that I have or can do, just a list of words or short phrases like

Customer service experience Scheduling Microsoft Office

Then I go under each of those list items and make it into a full sentence.

Customer service experience: I have five years of experience in customer service.

Once I have the most basic version of that sentence, I think about details that I can add to it. The point of a cover letter is two things-

to summarize the things from your resume that are relevant to this job, so the person doing the hiring doesn't have to read the whole thing and connect the dots themselves.

to add details and explain things that might not be in your resume.

So some details that I want to add here are that I didn't just talk to customers myself for five years, for part of that time I was a manager responsible for training other people to give good customer service. And I was good at that- we always got good results on our customer surveys, and we also always hit our goals for stuff like signing people up for the loyalty program. So now I've got a second sentence:

As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.

Another thing from the job posting that I want to address with this bit is that the job I'm applying for involves helping people over the phone a lot. So I want them to know that even though my experience is in a different environment (retail instead of an office front desk) I did still have to answer phone calls and help people over the phone. This is the type of detail that's not in my resume and that someone wouldn't necessarily guess, but I really did answer a lot of phone calls working in retail.

I also added a little bit of Flavor, so it's not just assisting customers, it's "welcoming, respectful assistance". Yes, I did try like five different words there before picking these ones. Usually I look back to the job posting and pick something that relates to what they've said they want. But I find it a lot easier to figure out details like this after I have the basic structure.

This is what I ended up with for my Bit About Customer Service:

I have five years of experience in customer service, providing welcoming, respectful assistance to customers over the phone and in person. As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.

If I really wanted to add a lot of detail, I'd put numbers in here- how big "our entire team" was, what the "best results" were and how we were measuring it. But the position I'm applying for is with a small organization, and probably doesn't involve measuring sales in the same way, so I decided not to add that. If I was applying for another retail job, I'd include those things.

I repeat this same process with each of the qualifications from my list, copy-paste each of those bits in order of how important they are, and then I need an opening and a closing. For the opening, I start by stating the obvious.

Dear hiring manager, I am applying for/interested in/etc. [this position]

and then I apply my school-essay-writing techniques and do a one-sentence preview of the qualifications I just got done writing about.

I am confident I have the customer service skills, computer expertise and organized mindset to excel in this position.

For the closing, this job posting specifically mentioned putting your contact information in your cover letter, so I did that, and then I like to thank them for looking at my application because that's a nice polite note to end on.

I can be reached at [contact info]. Thank you for taking the time to consider my application, and I look forward to hearing from you. [signature]

Extra Bonus Brownie Points:

Go to their company website and add something that shows you have looked at their company website. Like yes, the main reason you're applying for this job is it's available and you need money, but besides that, there's gotta be something at least a little interesting about this company that might be cool if you get to work for them. In this case they had a whole big section about charities they donate to and how they get involved in their local community, so I added this right before my closing:

[this company's] contributions to charities such as [things from their website] are truly admirable. I've grown to love [this city] since moving here, and I would be honored to be part of an organization that does so much to contribute to the community.

Now wait before you go here's the important part:

I don't delete any of this stuff.

I copy/paste out the finished bits into a new document to send to the recruiter, but I keep that list of qualifications with sentences under each one.

Now I have a document with a list of qualifications I have and nice professional-sounding descriptions of those qualifications, and for the next cover letter I write, I can reuse them if they're relevant, so I don't have to redo all this work of making words make sense. If I decide to change them a little bit for the next job, I'll keep the new version next to the old one under the same heading. I also keep my openings and closings.

I used to have a big file like this but I apparently didn't back it up before my old computer died, so I'm having to re-create it, but you guys this saves me so much time I would otherwise spend staring at a blinking cursor. And it's easier than saving the full finished cover letter and trying to pull sentences out of it, because all the Bits are already organized by topic. (And it lowers the risk of accidentally copy-pasting the wrong company's name.)

I <3 my cover letter workbox.

[yet-another-deanw-girl]

Chapter 16: Sweat It Out

||The Prophecy Series||

She knew for 15 years that this day would come. She knew her destiny had already been written. That her death had been foretold.

She knew she would have to stop him. She knew she would have to kill him. And she thought she was prepared for all of it. But the day she met him she realized how wrong she was…

Set in Season 10

Pairing: MoC!Dean x Female!OC

Warnings: the usual SPN, language, Dean having some... not so appropriate thoughts about Ema

Episode mapping: During episode 15 of season 10 "The Things They Carried"

Note: The events of this story are following season 10 of Supernatural and are taking place between October 2014 and July 2015. I tried to make sure that all the references to weapons, tech, etc. are accurate with the time period.

AN: This is my first time writing a fanfic but the story has been in my head for too long and it just needed to get out. I hope you like it.

AN: English is not my first language, I apologize for any mistakes.

"Dean is in trouble…" Sam walks in my room, closing the door behind him. "What happened? Is he ok?" I frantically ask.  Sam tells me about Dean killing Cain. "So? He used The First Blade? And he resisted it?" "He did but he is not ok. And he will need help… Your help..." I look at Sam, not understanding his point. "He's given up looking for another solution." Sam continues. "He…" "I still don't know how to stop him. And I don't know how I could possibly help." "He's given up on himself but he will keep fighting so he can save you." "This is absurd… There is no saving me!" "I know my brother. You may believe there is no other way, but he believes he can save you somehow. And, right now, you are the only reason he has not given up yet. And he needs to be reminded of that! Constantly!" He pauses, taking a deep breath. "You need to stay by his side. I… I need you by his side." I look at him dumbfounded. I only suspect how hard this is for him…  To ask me for help…  To ask me to be constantly by Dean's side…  Especially when, until this moment, his priority was to keep me as far away from him as possible. "Ok…" He releases a breath nodding. "Thank you!"

"I'm either coming with you on your hunts or I will find cases of my own. I'm done staying in this bunker! You have two choices, you let me help you or you stay out of my way!" "What's going on?" Sam enters the kitchen. "Sweetheart, I am not letting a tech geek hunt monsters. That's not going to happen! Not on my watch!" "That's it!" I poke at Dean's chest with my index finger. I'm pissed.  "Training room! Now! And do not sweetheart me, Winchester! I'm not one of your bar conquests!"  I storm out of the kitchen heading to the training room. The brothers on my heels. "We are going to settle this once and for all. If you can pin me to the ground in the next 10 minutes, I'll stay here." "Ema, I'm not going to fight you!" Dean looks to his brother for help. "Oh! You think you can actually hit me?" I say, removing my jacket.

Created with Microsoft Designer GIF from Pinterest

"Just remember, I didn't want to do this!" Dean says, swinging at me but I quickly dodge his hit, smirking back at him. He smiles and attacks again but I swirl around him and kick his legs underneath him. He ends up flat on his back and a frustrated huff leaves his mouth. "Done already?" I ask looking down on him. "I really thought you could last longer." "Oh… princess, you want me to show you how long I can last." He stands again assuming a fighting position. "Promises, promises…" I tease.

GIF from Pinterest

10 minutes later he is lying on the ground, panting. He did actually manage to lay a couple of hits on me but nothing too serious. "Look… I do understand that me being a Commander of a tactile team does not have any meaning for you. But… You keep forgetting that I was sent here to stop a possible demon attack on this bunker! By myself! That should have told you enough." I smile at him from above. "I'll see you in the garage in 30 minutes." "I was holding back!" He yells after me. "I didn't want to hurt you!" "30 minutes, boys!"

Created with Microsoft Designer

"Agents, I gather."  I walk confidently in the sheriff's office, my heels clicking on the tiled floor, Sam and Dean following me closely. "Uh, was it the suits, or do we give off some sort of a Fed stench?" Dean jokes "It's the suits. What can I do for you?" The sheriff responses. "Well, uh, we are here investigating the death of private Jackie Prescott." I smile politely, taking the lead. "Sorry to waste your time, agents, but we wrapped that one up. Guy that did it was a special forces officer: Rick Willis. His fingerprints were all over the storage room out on the base where he did it. He even left his dog tags by the body." "So, is he in custody?" I ask. "No, the bastard drank a boatload of gasoline, then lit himself on fire. Left a wife and a baby. Third suicide we seen in six months... Military town…"

Military towns, those always hit me hard…  I look around. America's military towns look nothing like the ones in Eastern Europe. But they have similar feeling. The quiet present of discipline, honor and duty. We found out from Rick's wife, he had been acting strange since he had got back from his last deployment and he was constantly thirsty. She pointed us to another family, Kit, the husband had the same symptoms and his wife was worried about him. We are just walking out of their house when I see a man leaning against Dean's precious car. "Recognized your wheels." He says. I guess the boys know him. "What the hell are you doing here?"  And… they are not happy to see him, jugging by their reaction. It seems like they have history. "I think I'm gonna be coming with you." Cole, that's the man's name, says. "I stick to you two like flies on roadkill." He points at the Winchesters. "Make sure my buddy comes home in one piece. Look, I know what you two are thinking, but we are not gonna hunt my best friend, who happens to be a friggin’ war hero, by the way. We are gonna find him. And that's the difference." "Another one for the ride." I hear Dean complaining when I move to my car. "Nice wheels!" Cole says to me, before getting in his own Jeep. I just smile.

We follow Cole to a cabin deep in the woods. Dean was right, he won't just step away from this.  I hear the sounds of stuff breaking and the boys rush into the building.  Before I can get out of my car a man runs out from the cabin, hiding in the woods. I pull out my gun and follow him but I quickly lose him.  He is too fast.  Faster than a normal man.  I circle around going back to the cabin and I meet Dean in front of it. "I lost him." "Me too." He responds and we enter the small one room building. "Oh, God! Oh, God! Something went down my… throat." Cole gasps. "Something moved. It's alive, Sammy." "All right, well, we're gonna get it out of you, okay? We'll figure it out. " Sam tries to reassure him. "A couple years back, Dean and l worked a case. We got stuck in a cannery with this worm. It would get into people's bodies and… last time, electrocution made the worm leave the body." "All right, fine. Electrocution it is! I'm game!" Cole tries to act brave but I can see through him, he is terrified. "Alright! You get to work. I'll go look for Kit." Sam says and I leave the cabin after him. "I will go with you." "No!" He turns around facing me. "Sam, it's not the time for your animosity towards me! Kit is dangerous! You will need help." "It's…" he starts raising his voice but he stops and continues quietly. "It's not about me not liking you. I actually… I do not dislike you… But… You need to stay with Dean. You promised me." I nod and turn back to the house. "Just be careful." I whisper to myself.  I know nothing will happen to him, not while I'm alive, but I can't help to worry about him anyway.

"I almost took you off the map. Who would be saving me now?"  Dean had already connected the jumper cables to the battery of Cole's Jeep. "Hey, hey, hey!" I stop him before he can press the jumper cable clamps onto Cole’s forearms.  "Belt!" I reach my hand out expectedly.  He starts to say something but I interrupt him before he can utter a word. "And don't be a smartass about it."  I snap my fingers.  "Now, Dean!" He rolls his eyes and removes his belt. I give it to Cole to bite on it. "All right, let's fire this puppy up." Dean says "Well, you say that like it's just another Tuesday." Cole jokes in an attempt to act nonchalant before he clenches the belt between his teeth. "Oh, buddy, it's only Monday!" Dean presses the jumping cables to Cole's arms.

"All right! Again!" Cole demands. "No! No, we're done playing 'Operation'. If he zaps you again, you're toast." I stop the two men. "We need a new plan!" "Okay, what do we know about this thing?" Dean asks Cole. "Uh, sucker dries you out. I'm thirsty already, man." Cole starts.  "It likes water. Then when that's not enough…" "Blood. l don't know. Maybe the lack of fluids makes the thing hostile." "So? What now?" Dean asks me. "You are supposed to be the smart one!" "What do you think about rapid dehydration?" I turn to Cole. "Big fan! Just make sure you squash that sucker when it goes AWOL."

It might be the middle of March but the cabin is hot as hell and I'm sweating like never before. I remove my flannel and walk into the kitchen to avoid the heatwaves as much as possible. I lean against the table, so I can have a direct view of Cole.

Created with Microsoft Designer

Ema is leaning against the frame of the portal, separating the kitchen from the living room. Her arms are crossed in front of her, her head is tilted back and her eyes are closed. She had removed first her jacket and then her sweater, leaving her in a simple gray tank top. Her dog tags leaning against her cleavage. Her braided hair is damp and a drop of sweat starts rolling from it, down her exposed neck and slowly disappears between her breasts. I want to trace its path with my lips… Son of a bitch… Fuck… me… I try to swallow the lump in my throat. This woman is going to drive me crazy… I hiss when a drop of sweat falls on the cuts on my face and then I realize I was no longer keeping an eye on Cole. Fuck! "What is it?" Ema quickly opens her eyes and inspects my face. "You must have cut it when we were chasing after Kit?"

GIF from Pinterest

She takes a towel from the kitchen counter and damps it with water from the bottle sitting there. She stops in front of me and I stiffen when she positions herself between my legs. "Come here!" She says and carefully cleans the cuts. I can't stop staring at her eyes.  She is the most controversial woman I have ever met… She kicked my ass this morning without really trying… And now she is careful not to hurt me while cleaning my cut… And she is so fucking beautiful… And I don't care if Metatron was just trying to mess with me. Not anymore… "This should do for now." She smiles at me. Her phone rings and she goes out to take the call.

"I get it… Why you did it, Dean. My dad wasn't my dad anymore. If l go down that same road… I want you to do that to me, too." Cole says when Ema leaves us alone in the room. She is out speaking with some of her contacts to see if anyone had to deal with this kind of parasite before. "That road? That means giving up! If you think that's where you're headed, then you've got it ass-backwards. You're gonna fight harder than you ever have! You understand?" "Deano. Will you do me the honor of tying me to this chair?" He asks me looking at the water bottle on the table.  I start to tie him up but he slips away grabbing the bottle. I slap the water out of his hand and hold him down at gunpoint.  "You are gonna sweat this one through!" "I can't, Dean!" "Yes, you can! Listen to me! Yes, you can. Think about your family! Your wife, your kid. You hear me?" "I appreciate the talk, coach. But honestly, all l can think about is slicing your wrist and drinking you like a fountain. Guess that makes me a monster, doesn't it?"

"What's with her? She's kinda bossy." Cole asks me. He is calm again. "I didn't imagine you to be into that kind of a woman. But… Now when I think about it… It actually makes sense… I get it… she is…" "Oh… no, no, no… me and her… definitely not!" I try to hide my real thoughts about her. I'm  starting to sound like a broken record, even to myself.  "You sure?" Cole asks with raised brows. "It definitely looked like something in the kitchen!" "You should be careful with her!" I laugh at his attempt at matchmaking. "She can kick your ass without breaking a sweat, believe me!" "Oh, I believe you and I intend to stay far far away from her… and from you for that matter… Once this is over, you will never see me again! So… Who is she?" He points with his head to Ema, she is still outside, on the phone. "She is here to stop me when I go down this road. When I become that monster again." "Are you… going down this path again?" "I'm trying to fight it with all I get…"

"We were right! One of my contacts in Tokyo confirmed that dehydration…" I walk back in the room the moment Dean is stomping on the worm with his boot.

We couldn't save Kit. When Dean called Sam to tell him that we had succeeded it was too late for him. And Sam blames himself. "I can't help it, Dean. It feels crappy." "I know it does. You know, you can do everything right. And even still, sometimes… The guy still dies." I have the feeling Dean is no longer talking about Kit.

Chapter 17: Spilling truths between the lies >>

||The Prophecy Series||

[mariacallous]

There’s a growing trend of people and organizations rejecting the unsolicited imposition of AI in their lives. In December 2023, the The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. In March 2024, three authors filed a class action in California against Nvidia for allegedly training its AI platform NeMo on their copyrighted work. Two months later, the A-list actress Scarlett Johansson sent a legal letter to OpenAI when she realized its new ChatGPT voice was “eerily similar” to hers.

The technology isn’t the problem here. The power dynamic is. People understand that this technology is being built on their data, often without our permission. It’s no wonder that public confidence in AI is declining. A recent study by Pew Research shows that more than half of Americans are more concerned than they are excited about AI, a sentiment echoed by a majority of people from Central and South American, African, and Middle Eastern countries in a World Risk Poll.

In 2025, we will see people demand more control over how AI is used. How will that be achieved? One example is red teaming, a practice borrowed from the military and used in cybersecurity. In a red teaming exercise, external experts are asked to “infiltrate” or break a system. It acts as a test of where your defenses can go wrong, so you can fix them.

Red teaming is used by major AI companies to find issues in their models, but isn’t yet widespread as a practice for public use. That will change in 2025.

The law firm DLA Piper, for instance, now uses red teaming with lawyers to test directly whether AI systems are in compliance with legal frameworks. My nonprofit, Humane Intelligence, builds red teaming exercises with nontechnical experts, governments, and civil society organizations to test AI for discrimination and bias. In 2023, we conducted a 2,200-person red teaming exercise that was supported by the White House. In 2025, our red teaming events will draw on the lived experience of regular people to evaluate AI models for Islamophobia, and for their capacity to enable online harassment against women.

Overwhelmingly, when I host one of these exercises, the most common question I’m asked is how we can evolve from identifying problems to fixing problems ourselves. In other words, people want a right to repair.

An AI right to repair might look like this—a user could have the ability to run diagnostics on an AI, report any anomalies, and see when they are fixed by the company. Third party-groups, like ethical hackers, could create patches or fixes for problems that anyone can access. Or, you could hire an independent accredited party to evaluate an AI system and customize it for you.

While this is an abstract idea today, we’re setting the stage for a right to repair to be a reality in the future. Overturning the current, dangerous power dynamic will take some work—we’re rapidly pushed to normalize a world in which AI companies simply put new and untested AI models into real-world systems, with regular people as the collateral damage. A right to repair gives every person the ability to control how AI is used in their lives. 2024 was the year the world woke up to the pervasiveness and impact of AI. 2025 is the year we demand our rights.

[chappydev]

Future of LLMs (or, "AI", as it is improperly called)

Posted a thread on bluesky and wanted to share it and expand on it here. I'm tangentially connected to the industry as someone who has worked in game dev, but I know people who work at more enterprise focused companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. I'm a developer who is highly AI-critical, but I'm also aware of where it stands in the tech world and thus I think I can share my perspective. I am by no means an expert, mind you, so take it all with a grain of salt, but I think that since so many creatives and artists are on this platform, it would be of interest here. Or maybe I'm just rambling, idk.

LLM art models ("AI art") will eventually crash and burn. Even if they win their legal battles (which if they do win, it will only be at great cost), AI art is a bad word almost universally. Even more than that, the business model hemmoraghes money. Every time someone generates art, the company loses money -- it's a very high energy process, and there's simply no way to monetize it without charging like a thousand dollars per generation. It's environmentally awful, but it's also expensive, and the sheer cost will mean they won't last without somehow bringing energy costs down. Maybe this could be doable if they weren't also being sued from every angle, but they just don't have infinite money.

Companies that are investing in "ai research" to find a use for LLMs in their company will, after years of research, come up with nothing. They will blame their devs and lay them off. The devs, worth noting, aren't necessarily to blame. I know an AI developer at meta (LLM, really, because again AI is not real), and the morale of that team is at an all time low. Their entire job is explaining patiently to product managers that no, what you're asking for isn't possible, nothing you want me to make can exist, we do not need to pivot to LLMs. The product managers tell them to try anyway. They write an LLM. It is unable to do what was asked for. "Hm let's try again" the product manager says. This cannot go on forever, not even for Meta. Worst part is, the dev who was more or less trying to fight against this will get the blame, while the product manager moves on to the next thing. Think like how NFTs suddenly disappeared, but then every company moved to AI. It will be annoying and people will lose jobs, but not the people responsible.

ChatGPT will probably go away as something public facing as the OpenAI foundation continues to be mismanaged. However, while ChatGPT as something people use to like, write scripts and stuff, will become less frequent as the public facing chatGPT becomes unmaintainable, internal chatGPT based LLMs will continue to exist.

This is the only sort of LLM that actually has any real practical use case. Basically, companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Meta etc license an AI company's model, usually ChatGPT.They are given more or less a version of ChatGPT they can then customize and train on their own internal data. These internal LLMs are then used by developers and others to assist with work. Not in the "write this for me" kind of way but in the "Find me this data" kind of way, or asking it how a piece of code works. "How does X software that Oracle makes do Y function, take me to that function" and things like that. Also asking it to write SQL queries and RegExes. Everyone I talk to who uses these intrernal LLMs talks about how that's like, the biggest thign they ask it to do, lol.

This still has some ethical problems. It's bad for the enivronment, but it's not being done in some datacenter in god knows where and vampiring off of a power grid -- it's running on the existing servers of these companies. Their power costs will go up, contributing to global warming, but it's profitable and actually useful, so companies won't care and only do token things like carbon credits or whatever. Still, it will be less of an impact than now, so there's something. As for training on internal data, I personally don't find this unethical, not in the same way as training off of external data. Training a language model to understand a C++ project and then asking it for help with that project is not quite the same thing as asking a bot that has scanned all of GitHub against the consent of developers and asking it to write an entire project for me, you know? It will still sometimes hallucinate and give bad results, but nowhere near as badly as the massive, public bots do since it's so specialized.

The only one I'm actually unsure and worried about is voice acting models, aka AI voices. It gets far less pushback than AI art (it should get more, but it's not as caustic to a brand as AI art is. I have seen people willing to overlook an AI voice in a youtube video, but will have negative feelings on AI art), as the public is less educated on voice acting as a profession. This has all the same ethical problems that AI art has, but I do not know if it has the same legal problems. It seems legally unclear who owns a voice when they voice act for a company; obviously, if a third party trains on your voice from a product you worked on, that company can sue them, but can you directly? If you own the work, then yes, you definitely can, but if you did a role for Disney and Disney then trains off of that... this is morally horrible, but legally, without stricter laws and contracts, they can get away with it.

In short, AI art does not make money outside of venture capital so it will not last forever. ChatGPT's main income source is selling specialized LLMs to companies, so the public facing ChatGPT is mostly like, a showcase product. As OpenAI the company continues to deathspiral, I see the company shutting down, and new companies (with some of the same people) popping up and pivoting to exclusively catering to enterprises as an enterprise solution. LLM models will become like, idk, SQL servers or whatever. Something the general public doesn't interact with directly but is everywhere in the industry. This will still have environmental implications, but LLMs are actually good at this, and the data theft problem disappears in most cases.

Again, this is just my general feeling, based on things I've heard from people in enterprise software or working on LLMs (often not because they signed up for it, but because the company is pivoting to it so i guess I write shitty LLMs now). I think artists will eventually be safe from AI but only after immense damages, I think writers will be similarly safe, but I'm worried for voice acting.

[lemonadedino]

Have a snippet of landoscar enemies to lovers background story from the much ado about nothing au fic below the cut 🫶

I have to prove to myself that I’ve actually worked in it lol

As he walked back to his seat, amid all the polite clapping, he heard him.

“That Piastri guy had the most boring presentation ever, I swear. I was actively falling asleep. And don’t get me started on the slide choice, Carlos! Where was the color? The variety? The fun, engaging design elements? It was just all so bland, mate. Blergh.”

Oscar was pretty sure the curly-haired man currently launching a vitriolic attack on his PowerPoint was named Lando Norris. He vaguely recognized him from his presentation earlier in the day.

Oscar had heard his name floating around the office break room. Supposedly, he was the office prodigy, some sort of comp-sci genius poached straight out of Oxford. Public opinion on Lando seemed to deem him as an intensely likable and cherubic, if slightly hyperactive, team member with a strong work ethic and sharp sense of humor.

Listening to the Brit’s increasingly passionate tirade, Oscar wasn’t so sure about the first part of that descriptor.

Unaware that he now had an audience, Lando kept on ranting to his companion, gesticulating wildly.

“I can’t believe he used Times New Roman, Carlos. Times New Roman! That’s literally the worst possible choice. It means you intentionally didn’t want to use the default font, Arial, but still couldn’t branch out and be more exciting! Oswald is right there!” His voice gradually climbed in volume. “Also! Who actually adds transitions to their slides? That’s some George type shit.”

“Mate, yours wasn’t much better.” The words came spitting out before Oscar even registered that his mouth had opened. Clearly, four hours of sleep had lowered his normal inhibitions surrounding conflict avoidance. Two sets of eyes snapped to look at him, one pair unnervingly reminiscent of watercolor and the other velveteen brown.

Oscar swallowed. Well. There’s no backing out now. He might as well fully commit.

“At least I didn’t use brain-meltingly bright neon colors and an overcrowded SlidesGo template. And a soundtrack? Really, Norris? Where did you even find that?” Oscar was on a roll now. There was something oddly liberating about it. “What are you, a five year old who got access to Microsoft Office for the first time?”

Lando pouted, which in theory should look absolutely ridiculous on a full grown man. It certainly didn’t help him fight the “five year old who got access to Microsoft Office for the first time” allegations. Yet somehow, on Lando, it was adorable. Oscar shut down that train of thought as soon as it sprouted.

Lando pursed his lips, primed to respond, no doubt with another jab at Oscar’s presentation.

“Oscar! Great job, dude!” Logan suddenly hollered from across the room, eagerly waving him over. Oscar had never been more grateful for his best friend. He would definitely be buying him one of those Arnold Palmers that the American so adored from the office café in thanks.Taking the opportunity to escape, Oscar waved back and slipped away.

He heard Carlos chuckle as he left.

“He’s really got you there, Lando. You know, I quite liked his presentation. He’s a good speaker. Very articulate,” the older man said.

“Shut up. That’s my new Sworn Arch-Nemesis you’re talking about.”

“A bit dramatic, don’t you think? What happened to Betty from HR being your Sworn Arch-Nemesis? You were complaining to me about her just yesterday.”

“I’m not being dramatic, Carlos. Can’t you see it? Betty’s been ousted. Oscar Piastri is an infinitely more qualified candidate for the role of my Sworn Arch-Nemesis.” Lando paused. “Plus, I’m pretty sure Betty is nearing her 70s. She talks about her grandchildren all the time. I don’t want to deal with the hassle of finding a replacement after her retirement.”

Up until that moment, Oscar had been planning to chase Lando down after the conference, buy him a coffee, and apologize effusively for his outburst. Sure, it had been rude of the Brit, but it didn’t justify Oscar insulting his presentation. He didn’t know why he had reacted so strongly to Lando’s snarky commentary. Truly, Lando’s presentation hadn’t been that bad. He’d seen way worse. Oscar actually thought that the soundtrack was a nice touch.

But if Lando was already dead set on treating him as his Sworn Arch-Nemesis, Oscar didn’t see why two couldn’t play at that game. He had to spice up his workday somehow, after all.

Since then, for the last couple of years, there had been a constant stream of traded barbs and petty jibes, more often than not sent via Microsoft Teams, because Lando transferred to a new division based across the country a year ago.

Oscar would never admit it, but he had started looking forward to opening his inbox every morning, eager to see what creative insult Lando had launched at him. Obviously, he shot one of his own right back.

[noyoucannotpushthevoid]

Part One of Two, because I'ven't done one of these in forever and have a backlog of quotes lol

"Unfortunatey his lifeless corpse is lifeless" - Adam Raucous cheers of "Lenin" - Blue "Wouldn't you like to know fed boi" - Blue @ Gansey "Look [I] can't help [I’m] a shopaholic, okay?" - Henry  "The whole thing behind buttchugging" - Kavinsky "Okay Squidward" - Henry "Little known red gem fact: the gem is red" - Ronan "Have depression? Just sleep! Have exams coming up? Just sleep! 50,000 dollars in debt? Just sleep it off!"- Ronan "If you're sleeping you can't hear the IRS” - Ronan "I am a tree person basically" - Blue "[Gansey] has [Ronan] trained" -Kavinsky   "Very craisin" - about Gansey’s brain "THE JORTS ARE BACK" - Henry "Bugs are like fish, they don't have feelings" - Ronan "The land animals are safe, the fish have sinned" - Ronan "Too big to be an ankle biter, it's a calf biter now" - Ronan about Blue "Oh damn, diva down for real this time" - Henry "Silly little guy. Don't mind him and his icbm shaped suitcase" - about Nathan "Ga[nsey] pulled a Karen moment"   "You can't spell arson without sin" - Ronan "Advanced eepy" - about Adam, or Ronan, or Declan. Really just take your pick lol "If there's no blood, there's no bood alcohol level" - Kavinsky "Raised by my father's wife" - Kavinsky "How dare you say the fuck word to my small approachable [Noah]" “The reservation at Yapplebees is over!" - Blue kicking her boys out of Nino’s at closing time “Woke Lewis Caroll be like: Jab-her woke-he” - Henry “On the girl math glaive grind” - about Henessey “[Ronan] goes straight for pride month” - Henry “My girl does not have kind eyes” - about Blue “The middle-aged mother thing, which is look at me” - Adam “I love when 18 year olds are in kindergarten” - Kavinsky “Henchson” - about Declan “If [you] had a fursona, it’d probably be one of the anti-drug PSA animals” - Henry @ Gansey “I see pretty people, I say AWOOGA!” - Adam “Since when do we have a murder limit?” - Ronan “I’m not well versed in hot dog” - Gansey’s rich ass “So anyway, I got rizzed up on Microsoft Teams” - Adam “Me when I’m straight” - Henry