#non-essential case

[conanmythbusting]

The Kidnapping of a Popular Artist Case

Chapters 144-146

Deaths: 0

Days: 1

Essential: Not as far as I can tell.

Note: We're starting to get to the part of the series where my memory gets vaguer and vaguer, and my god this was filed in my head as "anime original", did not expect to find this here.

[lizzisgeek]

Crowley, ordering a coffee: Black coffee, please. As black as my soul.

Nina: Got it. A cup of milk coming right up.

[kays-artstuff]

I can't watch many streams this week F

BUUT have this mha oc i made a bit ago

i actually have a lot of work to do this week so i can't do a lot of doodlin buuut i have a character here for you, I want to note i gave them a lot of drawbacks that i didn't write down on the doodle like this ability is actually rlly bad for close combat unless they're trying to blind someone (also they can't control what smear the onject comes out of and need to be able to actively time things)

(I don't associate with the community/fandom :skull: some of y'all are scary /hj)

[flarebean]

*slaps valorant* THIS bad boy can fit SO MUCH found family in it. also GET you a media that can do BOTH (found family and romance and enemy drama)

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[pastafossa]

Hi Pasta!!

I have a random question that popped up in my head the other day

Does Jane do the thread work in every city she's lived in? Like, does she ever do random jobs for anonymity purposes, ones that aren't linked to her abilities? I imagine it's much easier to track down a psychic than it is to find someone who has been working as a preschool teacher or someone working the front desk at a dentist office.

Again, just a shower thought that came to me during a reread🤣

Oooooh now this is a good question and it's not one I think will ever come up in a meaningful way in the fic so I feel free to answer it, too!

So she doesn't do exactly what she's doing in every city, no, although she often finds ways to use her threads to her benefit - I've mentioned before when she first hit Los Angeles as a teen, she got roped into a new-agey sort of shop, doing tarot like a very poorly paid trick pony - she'd use her thread abilities to make accurate enough predictions that she was worth keeping around. She pulled similar tricks in other cities early on (she's quite good at reading tarot now for others, ironically), and then on and off in various cities after, because it's hard to walk away from all the money on the table. The psychic business category alone is, if I remember my research correctly, around 90k businesses in the US, and makes about 2 billion annually. It's likely even bigger of a business in the TRT universe since the existence of enhanced people might encourage more people to go looking for psychics to help with their problems. That means billions and billions of dollars changing hands.

And money, as we know with her, is a big lure. BUT, as you said, yeah, she quickly figured out hey, I can't do this every time because that forms a pattern (which is bad). Some of it also depends on where she is - there might be way more (real or not) psychics around for her to hide amongst like in NYC, or there may be fewer. The latter cities are where she's more likely to find a different job - and she's not above faking her qualifications to get in, as long as it's a job she can actually do. She knows how to manage a store, she knows how to draw blood and so has done a round or two as a phlebotomist. Hell, she did construction under the table for a bit in Pittsburgh.

But she keeps coming back to psychic.

She's got a method for those cities now - there's a reason she's working alongside Maya, and why Maya's name is the big name on the business and hers is advertised by reputation only (hiding herself beneath two extra layers of names, essentially). There's a reason she targets specific kinds of rich - she wants the rich who are either smart enough to follow contracts (Wesley), or wary enough that they're worried about others stealing away their favorite psychic and so keep their mouths shut (or decide to hire her on at a high enough rate that she can work solely for them). And above all, her rule is to run before she gets too big. Essentially playing psychic is a tradeoff - a larger payday in exchange for a shorter timeframe in the city, as opposed to the slow and steady trickling of another job where she can stay longer. She's followed that rule for years now - either quiet jobs to take the heat off, or short bursts of psychic activity that make her a ton of money before she fades out and vanishes in 6 months to a year, finding a new name, and a new city.

Until New York City...

And until Matt...

Click go the dominoes.

[arolesbianism]

You see Jackie is great because she has a similar appeal to me as Maxwell but she's a lesbian and also not british so she's automatically a billion times better and more interesting

[binch-i-might-be]

btw big shoutout to the old lady at my register today who bought four whole cases of wine and a bunch of meat products from the butcher and then when her total came out to 130€ just looked at me and said "yeah that can't be right." sorry I just stared at you like you were stupid (you are) and said "ok". I was really tired and you were annoying ❤️

[ugisfeelings]

i can't do this gentrification discourse why are y’all pulling up dictionary dot com trying to one up each other 💀

[finely-tuned-line]

RP:

ARCHIVED - PRIVATE TRANSMISSION

DD: it was actually a spice! the idea that it was a food is a common misunderstanding! very few cities thought it was a good food by itself, and some went to the extremes that eating not as a spice was... sacrilege!

SNS: kind of drastic, it's just a spice?

DD: eh, its the ancients. pretty difficult to question anything

SNS: you're probably right on that! where'd you even dig this up, it seems... well, ancient.

DD: the ancients didnt slowly phase out the "indulgence of food" til abt... at least 3250 cycles before the discovery of void fluid?

DD: i got into an argument with someone rly far away from us... nothingness and no regrets was number name i think? number city had rly good archival practice, and num was incredibly eager to disprove the "wrong" information that i had. cant even learn anyth new these cycles without arguing over it and goading them into it

DD: but from what ive picked up, before high-quality food was largely forbidden amongst most of the cities, some ancients were rly good at... cooking? it was considered art, some even dedicated dozens of their lifetimes to it

SNS: it sounds really interesting!

EP: Nerds.

SNS: i'm not the nerd here! i'd say that that would be Doubt's Dichotomy over there. she's the one who knows all of this.

DD: >:0

DD: i WILL stip talking to you

EP: I wouldn't take a misspelled sentence seriously, if I were Songs of the Negative Sunlight!

DD: YOU TOO, THEN

EP: There, there... No need to get so worked up...

SNS: maybe stop teasing it now?

EP: You're right. Sorry, Doubt's Dichotomy.

DD: its alright!

SNS: either way, hello Echoes of a Paradox! Haven't heard from you in a couple of cycles.

EP: Sorry. Was running a specific iteration of my latest attempt. Probably should have checked in earlier.

SNS: it's alright, don't worry about it!

SNS: did you succeed?

EP: You'd have heard of it by now if I had.

SNS: you're right in that matter, indeed.

FTL: I'd think that a futile try is still better than nothing.

EP: ...Right you are.

SNS: Finely-Tuned Line! haven't heard from you in even longer.

FTL: As always, I have been running various experiments. Nothing exuberantly special or outstanding to report, in any imaginable generally applicable category.

SNS: alright. take a break sometime, maybe?

FTL: I will not be doing so. I am - we are - not designed to take breaks, I will not be doing so. If you apply other thinking to yourself, that is up to you to deal with the consequences. I'll deal with mine.

EP: I'll check in more often, Songs of the Negative Sunlight. Will be leaving for now.

SNS: okay, thank you. stay safe.

FTL: I will be doing the same. That is, exiting for the meantime. No guarantees of consistent reports from me.

SNS: affirmative. you also stay safe.

SNS: ...i suppose i'll be doing the same.

SNS: contact me in any case necessary, that's what i'm here for.

DD: GOT ANOTHER. AN ENVOY TO THE OPEN FIELDS! AND SHES GOING TO TELL ME ABOUT ZIR CITY WILLINGLY!!

DD: fianlly. no one even talks to me anymore in groups unless i use an alias

DD: ...hello?

DD: anyone?

DD: guess ill celebrate on my own.

[conanmythbusting]

Alpine Hut in the Snowy Mountain Murder Case

Chapters 99-101

Deaths: 1

Days: 2

Essential? Not a bad case, but non-essential.

[bonyato]

I already couldn't choose wether to watch the 2001 or the 2021 anime adaptation....and now I wanna switch to the manga too......Ughjoegh—!!

[mihotose]

ive gotta be honest i have no idea why the plasmic manifestations post has nearly 1k i was thinking about inframaterialism whats everyone else thinking about

[falesten-iw]

To Those Who Still Hold Onto a Shred of Morality and Humanity - Stand with Us and Don’t Forget Us.

Over 40,000 lives have been lost, with 70% of them being children and women. Among these numbers are my own family members—many of whom I’ve already lost.

My family, my cousin, aunt, their children, and grandchildren were all directly targeted by Israeli airstrikes. I’m sharing a video of my aunt and cousin to reveal the harsh reality we are facing in Gaza. In this video, my aunt bravely shares her story about how the Israeli army airstruck them along with their children and grandchildren. Even if you don’t understand Arabic, just watching her speak will help you grasp the immense suffering we are enduring in Gaza. You can see the vedeo in this post.

The few family members who remain are in grave danger, and I’m terrified of losing them too. We have a chance to make a real difference and give my 24 surviving family members a chance to live.

In Gaza, jobs are non-existent, and nonprofit organizations like the UN have drastically reduced their work on the ground. Basic necessities such as milk, food, and medicine are almost as expensive as gold. My family is struggling to afford even the essentials, and my mother urgently needs medication that we simply cannot afford.

I’m also sharing another video that shows the daily struggle people face just to get clean water. The suffering here extends far beyond my family; it’s a genocide affecting every aspect of life in Gaza.

Thanks to the generosity of those who have already donated, we’ve raised $535 toward our goal of $190,363- august 17th. I’m deeply grateful to each of you, but we still have a long way to go, and I need your help more than ever. Imagine if it were your family—how would you feel if they were in this situation?

For those who have created special posts or reblogged to amplify my voice, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your support means everything to me and to my family. If you haven’t yet shared our story, please take just one minute to do so. Your voice could be the lifeline my family desperately needs.

You cannot continue to treat human lives as mere numbers. This is a genocide that demands immediate action. How many more should be killed before you all wake up? Will 40,000 lives be enough to stir us to action? 50,000? 100,000? 150,000?

Asking for donations and charity is something we never imagined having to do in Gaza before the war, and it’s heartbreaking that it has come to this. But if everyone who saw my last post donated just $10 or $20, we could reach our goal in no time. If you’re looking for a way to contribute, consider giving up your coffee, tea, or other “cup” for one day, one week, one month, or anything in between. Then, donate what you would have spent to help me. Please help us and donate now!

This is about more than just donations—it’s about preserving human lives and upholding our shared moral values. Your contribution can make a world of difference in our survival and ensure I don’t lose more of the people I love.

Demanding an end to this suffering is a matter of basic humanity. You cannot remain neutral in the face of such genocide. Please, let’s stand together. Enough is enough.

Every donation, no matter how small, brings us closer to hope and healing. Thank you again for your kindness and support. I will never forget it.

Vetted and shared by @90-ghost: Link.

Verified and shared by @el-shab-hussein: Link

Listed even as number 282 in "The Vetted Gaza Evacuation Fundraiser Spreadsheet" compiled by @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi : Link

Additionally, Al Jazeera News has documented apart of my family's case: Link

Important note: ** 105 Swedish kr is just 10$ ** 1050 Swedish kr is just 100$ ** 10500 Swedish kr is just 1000$

Please share !

@humansofnewyork@intersectional-feminist @intersectional-feminists@intersectional-feminism @intersectional-feminist-killjoy

@thepeoplesrecord@socialjusticekitten-blog @socialgoodmoms @nowthisnews @socialgoofy

@theblogofawesome@fightforhumanity-rpg-blog @fightforhumanity-rp@queerandpresentdanger @progressive-pride

@radicalsocialworker @activistminds @mybelovedworld @hopeandresist @solidarityisimportant-blog

@solidarityissbliss @solidarityisnotaslogan-blog-blog @unified-multiversal-theory @feministacansada

@feministactionsupportnetwork @globalvoices @save-the-world-but-lose-her @save-the-world-one-day-at-a-time

@save-the-world-tonight @wip-wednesday @daily-writing-prompts @allthingswordy @writerscorner-blog

@fictionfood @wordsthat-speak @writerscunts-blog @storyshots-blog @wordsnstories-blog

@writeblr @thewritingcaddy @fictionwriting2 @inkstay @creativepromptsforwriting @interact-if

[meme-loving-stuck]

not paying attention to numbers everywhere but id be willing to bet my life savings that every single new variant of covid comes from california

[communistkenobi]

They put Tayy Dior’s name in quotes as if that was a fun little nickname her friends called her. It places emphasis on the fact that her name is ‘unofficial,’ and given that legal name changes in places like the US can be expensive, difficult & time consuming, the ‘unofficial’ nature of transgender peoples’ names is commonplace. Using deadnames of trans people in media reports is an endorsement of the difficult nature of this process.

It also highlights the absurdity of appealing to ‘official’ legal records of name and gender marker - which official records? even when you go through a legal name change process, it’s not a single application that changes it everywhere. At least in my experience in Canada, and I believe this is the case in other federated states, you have to separately change your photo ID(s), your birth certificate, your federal/national records, your tax records, your employment and tenant records, your bank records, your billing records, and so on. These are all separate applications/appointments. And legal name and gender marker are separate applications. I had to essentially obtain a set of permission slips from a provincial office that allowed me to change my name and gender marker on municipal, provincial, and federal records. There isn’t one single ‘official’ record that informs all other records of your ‘real’ name and gender marker, it is a collection of diffused departments & offices that do not communicate with one another and must be altered one at a time by the individual themselves. In many cases, states retain a record of your original name and gender marker even after applying for a change, meaning it is literally impossible to ever fully change your name and gender everywhere, administratively speaking.

So, which record is the ‘official’ record for trans people? Cis people treat ‘official’ records of legal names and gender markers as if they are uniform, centralised, and coherent in order to contrast the ‘unofficial’ nature of a trans person’s “preferred” name and pronouns, to highlight the fundamental fraudulence of our lives that go against the rational objective nature of the state, but there is in many states no single official record, for trans and non-trans people alike. That is because when cis people insist on calling trans people by their deadnames and ungender them, they are not actually referring to official records - as official records can conflict, and there is no agreement on which single record is the authoritative one - but are instead treating sex and name assignment at birth as if it is sacrosanct. This first ritual of naming, of gendering, and of recording the results of this ritual is the actual ‘official record’ they are referring to, a ritual that can never be altered or forsaken.

Tayy Dior’s name is not a nickname, it is not a quotation to insert into her “real” “official” deadname, it is not a preference. It is her name, and the media - even “trans inclusive” media - is making sure that it is, at best, the second thing they call her as they gleefully report on her violent murder

[phantomrose96]

The conversation around AI is going to get away from us quickly because people lack the language to distinguish types of AI--and it's not their fault. Companies love to slap "AI" on anything they believe can pass for something "intelligent" a computer program is doing. And this muddies the waters when people want to talk about AI when the exact same word covers a wide umbrella and they themselves don't know how to qualify the distinctions within.

I'm a software engineer and not a data scientist, so I'm not exactly at the level of domain expert. But I work with data scientists, and I have at least rudimentary college-level knowledge of machine learning and linear algebra from my CS degree. So I want to give some quick guidance.

What is AI? And what is not AI?

So what's the difference between just a computer program, and an "AI" program? Computers can do a lot of smart things, and companies love the idea of calling anything that seems smart enough "AI", but industry-wise the question of "how smart" a program is has nothing to do with whether it is AI.

A regular, non-AI computer program is procedural, and rigidly defined. I could "program" traffic light behavior that essentially goes { if(light === green) { go(); } else { stop();} }. I've told it in simple and rigid terms what condition to check, and how to behave based on that check. (A better program would have a lot more to check for, like signs and road conditions and pedestrians in the street, and those things will still need to be spelled out.)

An AI traffic light behavior is generated by machine-learning, which simplistically is a huge cranking machine of linear algebra which you feed training data into and it "learns" from. By "learning" I mean it's developing a complex and opaque model of parameters to fit the training data (but not over-fit). In this case the training data probably includes thousands of videos of car behavior at traffic intersections. Through parameter tweaking and model adjustment, data scientists will turn this crank over and over adjusting it to create something which, in very opaque terms, has developed a model that will guess the right behavioral output for any future scenario.

A well-trained model would be fed a green light and know to go, and a red light and know to stop, and 'green but there's a kid in the road' and know to stop. A very very well-trained model can probably do this better than my program above, because it has the capacity to be more adaptive than my rigidly-defined thing if the rigidly-defined program is missing some considerations. But if the AI model makes a wrong choice, it is significantly harder to trace down why exactly it did that.

Because again, the reason it's making this decision may be very opaque. It's like engineering a very specific plinko machine which gets tweaked to be very good at taking a road input and giving the right output. But like if that plinko machine contained millions of pegs and none of them necessarily correlated to anything to do with the road. There's possibly no "if green, go, else stop" to look for. (Maybe there is, for traffic light specifically as that is intentionally very simplistic. But a model trained to recognize written numbers for example likely contains no parameters at all that you could map to ideas a human has like "look for a rigid line in the number". The parameters may be all, to humans, meaningless.)

So, that's basics. Here are some categories of things which get called AI:

"AI" which is just genuinely not AI

There's plenty of software that follows a normal, procedural program defined rigidly, with no linear algebra model training, that companies would love to brand as "AI" because it sounds cool.

Something like motion detection/tracking might be sold as artificially intelligent. But under the covers that can be done as simply as "if some range of pixels changes color by a certain amount, flag as motion"

2. AI which IS genuinely AI, but is not the kind of AI everyone is talking about right now

"AI", by which I mean machine learning using linear algebra, is very good at being fed a lot of training data, and then coming up with an ability to go and categorize real information.

The AI technology that looks at cells and determines whether they're cancer or not, that is using this technology. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that can take an image of hand-written text and transcribe it. Again, it's using linear algebra, so yes it's AI.

Many other such examples exist, and have been around for quite a good number of years. They share the genre of technology, which is machine learning models, but these are not the Large Language Model Generative AI that is all over the media. Criticizing these would be like criticizing airplanes when you're actually mad at military drones. It's the same "makes fly in the air" technology but their impact is very different.

3. The AI we ARE talking about. "Chat-gpt" type of Generative AI which uses LLMs ("Large Language Models")

If there was one word I wish people would know in all this, it's LLM (Large Language Model). This describes the KIND of machine learning model that Chat-GPT/midjourney/stablediffusion are fueled by. They're so extremely powerfully trained on human language that they can take an input of conversational language and create a predictive output that is human coherent. (I am less certain what additional technology fuels art-creation, specifically, but considering the AI art generation has risen hand-in-hand with the advent of powerful LLM, I'm at least confident in saying it is still corely LLM).

This technology isn't exactly brand new (predictive text has been using it, but more like the mostly innocent and much less successful older sibling of some celebrity, who no one really thinks about.) But the scale and power of LLM-based AI technology is what is new with Chat-GPT.

This is the generative AI, and even better, the large language model generative AI.

(Data scientists, feel free to add on or correct anything.)