#nyxie is a luddite

[nyxelestia]

...ya'll know you can use adblock on mobile browsers too, right?

guy who installs an adblocker and forgets about it and lives in a beautiful world where online ads have become much less frequent

[nyxelestia]

spikeluv84 replied to your post “danascullys: ah, follow forever season a time for seeing lists from...”

It's basically a shout-out to your Tumblr friends you've been following since you came to the site.

...this site is so weird.

[nyxelestia]

screaming-towards-apotheosis answered your question “Why do I keep seeing my own post on my dash?”

is it tagged with a tag you follow?

Yup. But why is it showing up repeatedly/constanly? (Over ten times in the last few hours). And why now, instead of two weeks ago when I posted it, or at any point in between?

[nyxelestia]

Why do I keep seeing my own post on my dash?

It's the same post, an old one from two weeks ago, and it keeps appearing on every other page. (I can't use infinate scroll, so I go through pages of my dash, with ten posts per page). It's showing it as MY post, so it's not just reappearing because people are reblogging it or anything, it's showing as if I just posted it (even though I didn't).

[nyxelestia]

There's an editing app called HemmingwayApp, and it uses different colors to highlight things like run-on sentences, qualifiers, adverbs, passive voice, etc. I've seen a very interesting divide in writing communities between people who view it as a nice tool and people who hate it for ruining their writing. The latter used to confuse me until I realized the latter group thought the way you use this app is by editing EVERYTHING the app highlighted. In their minds, the "goal" was to get rid of all the highlights. Since then, I've lost track of the number of people baffled when I said that's not the goal, and indeed you'll often leave many or even most of the 'errors' in. The point of the app wasn't "if it highlights a trait, that means it's wrong and you have to fix it"; the point was "the things it highlights are writing common weaknesses that are hard to spot, to enable you to decide for yourself whether you want to write it that way or not." Computers are really good at identifying, but not so good at deciding. Most AI problems boil down to people trying to use an identification tool to make decisions for them.

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

[nyxelestia]

How to search for things on Tumblr?

Trying to find a post I saw on my dash just before the Tumblr mobile app collapsed. Tumblr's actual search function only seems to look for tags and users, not the text content of the posts themselves.

[nyxelestia]

I'm going to disagree with one of OP's points and say that nobody should be posting their age or even age group in their bio at all. You don't owe anyone that age. If you post that you are a minor, that makes it easier for predators to target you. You deserve to have your boundaries respected and you are obligated to respect other people's boundaries no matter your age, and the age you have in your bio or that other people have in theirs should have no bearing whatsoever on this. No one needs to know your age to be respectful, and you shouldn't need to know someone else's age in order to respect them. But otherwise, yes to all of this. And added bonus about reasons to protect your privacy online: I once guessed half of someone's Social Security Number using their answers to a Star Wars Name meme, an implied location in a post, and their age and name in bio. It took me about half an hour, and I was doing the whole thing manually/without any kind of AI or analytical software.

Hey. Minors following me. Internet safety is key!! NEVER include these in your bio/byf:

Medical diagnoses - this is nobody's business but yours. You don't owe anyone an explanation for why you are the way that you are

Trauma - same reason as above

Triggers - people can use these against you! Don't give people tools to hurt you. No one has to know what tags you block. Just block tags to stay safe!

Age - age is okay for adults to include but is iffy when you're a teen. Predators want this information, don't give people more than they need. Just state that you're a minor, that's all that anyone needs to know.

In general: stay safe. If you're not comfortable with every stranger out there having access to this information, you shouldn't post it on the internet.

Play devil's advocate and ask yourself about what would happen if someone searched for your information with intent to hurt you. You do NOT owe anyone an explanation!

[nyxelestia]

Going to add that rather than kids today being faster touch-typers, increasingly it's quite common them not to touch-type very fast or at all. A lot of them grew up on smartphones or tablets, which understandably do not allow for touch-typing, and many interacted primarily in non-text media platforms (Instagram being image-based, TikTok being video-based, lots of voice chat options in video games, etc.) This is not to deride Kids These Days for having different skills than us. Younger kids have a knack for videography, photography, and editing that I quite frankly find astounding whenever I try to follow along. Different generations need different skills. But when I look at how much technological innovations are getting overtaken by capitalistic greed - i.e. how Google becomes increasingly useless due to advertising, how YouTube has become a radicalizing agent, how Tiktok relies primarily on recommendations, etc. - I worry about the soft skills younger generations lose alongside the hard skills. Maybe they don't need to learn handwriting or even touch-typing, but when we lose the classes that taught these, our schools often also use the opportunity to cut more relevant things like critical thinking (which is NOT taught in English classes like it was in the 60s), media analysis, recognizing advertising and misinformation, etc. And THAT is what worries me about what younger generations are and aren't learning.

we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.

when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.

the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.

my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.

when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.

and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.

in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.

[nyxelestia]

If you have uBlock Origin, then this-

! 2024-02-07 https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com##ytd-playlist-video-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-playlist-video-renderer.style-scope www.youtube.com###scroll-container

-will block recommended playlists appearing at the bottom of your own playlists.

And seconding the strong recommendation for blocking YouTube shorts.

[nyxelestia]

🙏🤞

gonna buy this god-forsaken web site and charge all y'all $8 a month to edit reblogs.

[nyxelestia]

It used to be a joke in my middle school that basic computer class was an easy A for most of us because it was usually things we already knew. But like..."most of us" is still not "all of us." A lot of kids back then did not have computers or any digital technology at home, so they had to learn all this in a classroom environment, while those of us who had even shittiest functioning computer on the market could spend class dicking around after finishing the day's work in the first few minutes. We are, in a sense, circling back to this - so many kids have SmartTVs and tablets and phones...and no computer. That's special, niche technology for only a few people who need it, not consumers. We've circled right back to the late 90s/early 00s, it's just that nobody realizes it because they've become so used to thinking of smart devices *as* computers.

So this was originally a response to this post:

****

****

Which is about people wanting an AO3 app, but then it became large and way off topic, so here you go.

Nobody under the age of 20 knows how to use a computer or the internet. At all. They only know how to use apps. Their whole lives are in their phones or *maybe* a tablet/iPad if they're an artist. This is becoming a huge concern.

I'm a private tutor for middle- and high-school students, and since 2020 my business has been 100% virtual. Either the student's on a tablet, which comes with its own series of problems for screen-sharing and file access, or they're on mom's or dad's computer, and they have zero understanding of it.

They also don't know what the internet is, or even the absolute basics of how it works. You might not think that's an important thing to know, but stick with me.

Last week I accepted a new student. The first session is always about the tech -- I tell them this in advance, that they'll have to set up a few things, but once we're set up, we'll be good to go. They all say the same thing -- it won't be a problem because they're so "online" that they get technology easily.

I never laugh in their faces, but it's always a close thing. Because they are expecting an app. They are not expecting to be shown how little they actually know about tech.

I must say up front: this story is not an outlier. This is *every* student during their first session with me. Every single one. I go through this with each of them because most of them learn more, and more solidly, via discussion and discovery rather than direct instruction.

Once she logged in, I asked her to click on the icon for screen-sharing. I described the icon, then started with "Okay, move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen." She did the thing that those of us who are old enough to remember the beginnings of widespread home computers remember - picked up the mouse and moved it and then put it down. I explained she had to pull the mouse along the surface, and then click on the icon. She found this cumbersome. I asked if she was on a laptop or desktop computer. She didn't know what I meant. I asked if the computer screen was connected to the keyboard as one piece of machinery that you can open and close, or if there was a monitor - like a TV - and the keyboard was connected to another machine either by cord or by Bluetooth. Once we figured it out was a laptop, I asked her if she could use the touchpad, because it's similar (though not equivalent) to a phone screen in terms of touching clicking and dragging.

Once we got her using the touchpad, we tried screen-sharing again. We got it working, to an extent, but she was having trouble with... lots of things. I asked if she could email me a download or a photo of her homework instead, and we could both have a copy, and talk through it rather than put it on the screen, and we'd worry about learning more tech another day. She said she tried, but her email blocked her from sending anything to me.

This is because the only email address she has is for school, and she never uses email for any other purpose. I asked if her mom or dad could email it to me. They weren't home.

(Re: school email that blocks any emails not whitelisted by the school: that's great for kids as are all parental controls for young ones, but 16-year-olds really should be getting used to using an email that belongs to them, not an institution.)

I asked if the homework was on a paper handout, or in a book, or on the computer. She said it was on the computer. Great! I asked her where it was saved. She didn't know. I asked her to search for the name of the file. She said she already did that and now it was on her screen. Then, she said to me: "You can just search for it yourself - it's Chapter 5, page 11."

This is because homework is on the school's website, in her math class's homework section, which is where she searched. For her, that was "searching the internet."

Her concepts of "on my computer" "on the internet" or "on my school's website" are all the same thing. If something is displayed on the monitor, it's "on the internet" and "on my phone/tablet/computer" and "on the school's website."

She doesn't understand "upload" or "download," because she does her homework on the school's website and hits a "submit" button when she's done. I asked her how she shares photos and stuff with friends; she said she posts to Snapchat or TikTok, or she AirDrops. (She said she sometimes uses Insta, though she said Insta is more "for old people"). So in her world, there's a button for "post" or "share," and that's how you put things on "the internet".

She doesn't know how it works. None of it. And she doesn't know how to use it, either.

Also, none of them can type. Not a one. They don't want to learn how, because "everything is on my phone."

And you know, maybe that's where we're headed. Maybe one day, everything will be on "my phone" and computers as we know them will be a thing of the past. But for the time being, they're not. Students need to learn how to use computers. They need to learn how to type. No one is telling them this, because people think teenagers are "digital natives." And to an extent, they are, but the definition of that has changed radically in the last 20-30 years. Today it means "everything is on my phone."

[nyxelestia]

Key excerpts:

This was how Renee experienced a moment that most of us have heart-pounding 3 am stress nightmares about. All 10 of her works in progress—some 222,000 words across multiple files and folders—were frozen. Not just frozen, but inaccessible on her phone and tablet. When her husband fetched her laptop, Renee logged into Docs and tried sharing the documents again. Then she received her own message from Google. “Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text.

-

Posting, under your own name, that your content has been found “inappropriate” means that search engines, Google among them, might associate your name and that word together forever. There is a genuine potential for social stigma when making a complaint of this nature in the public square—which is to say, online. And given the way that large language models dredge everything written online in an effort to sort which words belong together in context, the words most commonly associated with any individual name gain greater semantic weight and are more likely to be reproduced when users of these models “ask” the model for an “answer.”

-

Appropriate is a word with two usages and meanings in common parlance. The first is as an adjective, as in the message Google sent to Renee. It describes suitability in context, fitness to purpose. The second usage is as a verb, and it’s much closer to the original Latin appropriatus, which means “to make one’s own” or “to take possession of.” Whether we’re discussing the “appropriation” of cultural slang or a piece of real estate, we mean a transfer of ownership. But both meanings of the word spring from that Latin origin and its antecedent, the word privus: the word that begat (among others) the words private, property, and proper.

-

I still highly recommend people don't use GoogleDocs at all - but of course, that's not always possible. If GoogleDocs is your best option, make sure it's not your only one. Regularly download copies of your works and make sure they are backed-up and stored somewhere Google can not access.

dang LOOK its chuck tingle talkin to wired magazine about the danger of technology functioning as unchecked corporate utilities. was nice to give this little quote. good article

[nyxelestia]

1. Top typing speed on a phone (2-4 fingers tops) will always be slower than a full keyboard (up to 10 fingers). 2. While there are extremely precise touch-screens and digital pens, at present they are very professionally niche. The vast majority of consumer mouse devices still have more precision than the vast majority of commercial touchscreens. 3. Use limitation. Phones, tablets, and any app-based device is designed to keep users locked within tight systems with limited functions and pathways. This has the advantage of being incredibly easy to use and quick to learn, but it also INCREDIBLY limits the things you can do with your device, and this in turn often gets used to squeeze every cent out of you possible. If you don't have access to internal files, then you HAVE to continue paying a specific company for access to, say, a book or music you already own your copy of. Imagine owning a book, but there was a padlock forcing the covers together so you are unable to read it. You own it! But you can't use it, not unless you pay the bookstore a monthly subscription for access to the key. THIS is what app-centric systems do with digital media.

this can't be true can it

[nyxelestia]

What we are currently calling "Artificial Intelligence" is more accurately known as a Large Language Model. It means that as the bot 'fills out' or generates a sentence, it's using statistics to predict what the surrounding words will be. It's an educated guess, but it's still fundamentally a guess.

today in "google AI is fucking useless because it hallucinates things that never happened", i bought a couple CVS thermometers that have both been acting up, tried to search if there had been a problem with the whole product line:

there is no record of this product recall. it did not happen. the date "feb 8 2024" is the date someone listed a thermometer for sale on ebay.

[nyxelestia]

Current theory on the subreddit seems to be that they received too many opt-out e-mails at once. The opt-out e-mails seem to be passive-aggressively guilt-tripping authors using a smoke-screen of ableism and classism against those who don't want their fics utilized by the app. So I want to take this opportunity to remind people that Lore.FM is not doing anything that existing accessibility tools do not already do, and that everything on AO3 is completely free to read. Yes, in theory, Lore.FM (as it was structured in the above iterations) could have made accessibility more convenient or pleasing than existing tools. However, this is not worth the drain on kudos, comments, and other interactions, not to mention the app and its makers make me concerned about data-scraping and large language models (aka AI).

Hey I don’t know if this is being talked about on Tumblr but thankfully the AO3 subreddit has a conversation going about this app that just went live.

TikTok user unravel.me.now has just launch an app (lore.fm) she is calling “Audible for AO3”. It’s an app that uses AI voices to read out fics.

🚨She is requiring any authors who do not want their fics to be on this app to OPT OUT by emailing team@lore.fm 🚨 🚨She has not given an actual template or how you’re supposed to prove you’re the author or said how her team will process this or how she will keep these requests secure🚨

I do not have this app. I haven’t seen anyone use it yet. According to Reddit users, unravel.me.now’s earlier TikToks stated she envisions the app being able to create libraries stored on that app and to have version of “Spotify wrapped”. That implies that eventually data collection must happen, if it’s not happening currently.

I don’t know the actual capabilities of this app. I don’t know the legalities. I do know that it personally feels like this app is trying to turn AO3 into a content generation source and I haven’t heard of the app allowing you to leave a comment or kudos or interact with the original work.

I’m just sad about this.

[nyxelestia]

Gonna remind people that if you've ever written in a browser, Word processor, GoogleDocs, etc. and did not have spellcheck actively disabled, then you have ALSO used a writing assistant software.

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.