theamandamunroe

[theamandamunroe]

Map shows just how successful Chengdu, China has been at growing their metro system over the past 14 years, compared to Toronto, Canada’s woeful performance during the same period.

by datastuffplus/instagram

[theamandamunroe]

Definitely what that means, yes yes.

[theamandamunroe]

I like your art, keep it up 👍

YES

[theamandamunroe]

[theamandamunroe]

［FANBOX］https://infinote.fanbox.cc/posts/8307075 　　　［Fantia］https://fantia.jp/posts/2900811

[theamandamunroe]

Fuck forced feminization! Especially of a trans man. That is disgusting.

I started getting these wierd ass asks. I responded by saying i didnt want feminizing hormones. Because I don't. I'm a transman.

That doesn't make it any less uncomfortable. I then pointed out I didn't want that shit.

I got this a response.

I pointed out this was not funny. And also that this bullshit makes me dysphoric. I reminded her that I'm a transman

How great, misgendering.

[theamandamunroe]

What an entitled asshole. I'm sorry this all happened to you.

I want to detail an insane landlord story that happened to me earlier this year. It's going to be long, so everything starts after the "read more."

From August to September, I rented a room in a house in a different part of the state for my new job. Preceding this was a few months of searching for rentals in the area, with me deciding on this specific location in the end.

I was able to tour the house beforehand, with the outgoing tenant showing me around. It was then that he warned me that the landlord, who at the time I had not met in person with, was very finicky about the temperature setting keeping it at around 74F in the summer and only about 68 in the winter. This was apparently so bad that one of the other tenants had filed a lawsuit against her over this. This was the first red flag, but I paid it no mind, mostly because the rent was relatively cheap compared to other places.

After locking in on the location, a few weeks later, the landlord asks me to pay a refundable "holding deposit," aka. a security deposit, so that she could hold my room in place without selling/showing it to other people until I moved in on August 8. The deposit was equal to a month's rent, so I paid like she asked. She said that she needed my Driver's License so that she could write a lease agreement for me to read and sign.

This was my first mistake. I should have asked for a lease before paying anything, because as it will be apparent later in the timeline, she kept kicking the can on providing me a lease, even when I reminded her multiple times.

Soon after, she texts me that the move-in date is pushed to either August 9 or 10, because the outgoing tenant whose room I'd be moving into, had changed his mind about the 8th but seemed to be still unsure. I was frustrated, and she tried to placate me by saying that if I needed a room by the 8th, she was willing to have me stay in another house temporarily for a few days.

I first found this rental off of Craigslist. By the time she mentioned owning other properties, I grew suspicious of her. I got her name through Zelle, so I Googled that as well as her email to find that she appeared to be affiliated with a shady realtor company in the state, that doesn't even have their own website, and has a lot of bad Google reviews. She wasn't some ordinary woman leasing out her house to tenants, but appeared to be a slumlord owning multiple properties.

A few days later, she tells me that she is planning to replace the roof and carpet in the house before I moved in, from August 10-20, the implication being that I wouldn't be able to move in until the 20th. This of course was infuriating. She again tried to say that I could temporarily live in the other house, for about a week in the living room and without Wi-Fi. Again, she still hadn't sent a lease yet, but continued to change the terms of our agreement after I had paid, so I felt like I was trapped.

At the end of July, she finally sends me the lease...written as an entire long format text message with broken English. On the lease, it mentioned that the move-in date was August 8 as originally agreed on, which I found a bit strange given how she brought up the renovation shit. She also wanted to make my utilities cost 25% of my rent (700$, so 175$) instead of the agreed upon flat 80$ per month. She mentioned how the contractor needed to reschedule but did not give a date yet, so it was possible that I could move-in on the earlier date as normal. She continued to give me confusing and misleading information. At this point I was done.

A few days later, I tell her that I am no longer interested in signing the lease. She tells because she was "holding the room" for me, the deposit was nonrefundable, even though she said otherwise earlier, which she tried to justify by saying that the refundability only applied when the lease ended and I moved out. After a bit of arguing, she said that the renovations were no longer happening and that I could move in as normal.

I was thinking about my rights as a tenant and what legal options I had to fight for my deposit back. The biggest issue was that, up to now, a lot of our agreements was just through text, or verbally, so it felt like it was not really binding, especially when she kept changing the terms to benefit her. I'm not a combatitive person, so I decided to forgo taking the matter to court.

During our argument, she offered to reduce the lease to just one month. I felt that it would be the most civil and quickest way to get my deposit back, so I accepted it. She again stated that the room would be available on August 9, despite the fact that the lease she showed me said it was available on the 8th, again saying that I could temporarily stay a day in her other property for a night without Wi-Fi. Thankfully, I was able to make accomodations beforehand, meaning I didn't need to deal with the hassle of moving into a place for one night and then out again the next day, so I made the 9th work.

On the day I moved in, the first thing I see when I go through the door is the landlord arguing with another tenant. In the midst of this, I move my things up to my room and sign the lease proper, which...ended up being her copypasting the lease she shittily wrote in text into an email, sending it to me, and asking me to "agree" to it. This was so fucking scuffed. Going back to the roommate, she claimed that the landlord had not only trespassed into the house without the tenant's permission, but also barged into her room without her consent. The tenant called the police, so the two went outside to give their sides of the story to the cops, as I just stayed in my room unpacking. Eventually, everyone leaves, with the landlord driving off. I did not see her in person for a few days. This apparently wasn't the first time she trespassed on the property.

I learned from that tenant (C) that the landlord has been causing a lot of trouble with the people she leases rooms to, such as the one tenant (P) who filed a lawsuit against her over the temperature issue, which has gotten so bad that one of the tenants had to buy a hotel room to stay off the property. The filing tenant seemed to be successful in his lawsuit, but as it was a pending legal matter, he wasn't allowed to stay on the property, or probably chose not to given the conditions. Another tenant (A), the outgoing one whose room I moved into, told me that he hadn't gotten his deposit back because the landlord claimed he left the bathroom uncleaned, which reminded me to take photos of everything in the house so that it could not be used against me later. Fuck, the roommate later told that one time, the cops found live chickens in the bathroom, and the landlord tried to run past them and out the door when confronted on it. I wasn't sure if that was actually a real story though.

The state has a judiciary case search database where you can search names of people to see their history of cases they filed or had filed against them, my landlord had quite a bit going back and forth over neglect and failure to pay rent.

The house was in quite, poor condition. For one, there was no trash can inside the house, meaning for a few days, my roommate and I had to use a garbage bag hanging on a cupboard doorknob. The kitchen, while mostly well stocked with utnesils and other wares, likely from tenant P who wasn't living in the house, didn't have any knives either. I had to buy several things from Walmart. The first weekend I moved in, after a short power outage in the area, one of the smoke and fire alarms kept beeping at intervals, which drove all of us in the house crazy. I had to call the manufactures, and apparently those alarms were over a decade old and needed to be recalled???

One morning, as I got up for work, I saw the landlord in the house, without prior notice, alongside a repo man, as the went up to my roommate's room while she was at work, used the key to open the door, so that the landlord could remove the mattress, which she owned. She owned the mattresses for us to use in our rooms. She tried to justify it by saying that she was only taking what belonged to her, and not touching anything else. I didn't want to be involved, so I ran off to work. When I came back, I found my roommate pissed, as she apparently left some money under the mattress that was now missing, so she called the police to report theft. I gave my side of the story, as I was a witness. My roommate would eventually file a restraining order on the landlord, preventing her from entering the house. This would lead my landlord to correspond with me through text and phone, on the house's condition and other issues. She would also begin to traumadump on us about the way she was being treated by tenants C and P, who she had been battling with in court back and forth over various matters such as unpaid rent and neglect of upkeeping.

Another morning, I woke up and saw that the kitchen was covered in ice cubes, and that the fridge and stove were unplugged for some reason. I initially thought it was my roommate who did this, so I fixed everything and went back to normal. After work, my roommate tells me she saw the same thing, and believed that our landlord must have snuck into the house the previous night to mess with our stuff. It sort of checkes out, because lately, she had been asking me multiple times if I cooked in the house, to which I said I do occasionally, but I found it weird that she asked, because I pay for utilities in my rent, I had a right to use the stove.

A few days later, I come back to work to find my landlord in the house again. Apparently the court allowed her back in, as she had a right to check on the condition of the house and do repairs. However, it seemed that, while she was under the same roof as my litigious roommate, she was not allowed to speak to her or go up to her room. My landlord even spent the night in the house, printing out legal documents for her next court date. I also learn from her that someone plans on moving into my room, and wants to do a tour. However, I finish work at 5:30PM, and he wanted to come around 3, so she asks me to leave my room unlocked before I left for work, which I was absolutely not ok with. Thankfully, she instead asked for photos to send the prospective tenant, and that settled the matter.

A few days later, I learn from my roommate that apparently my landlord was arrested at court. The trial seemed to have gone in my roommate's favor, and my landlord, frustrated, "threw papers" at her, which the cops put her in handcuffs for acting inorderly in court. The arrest happened in my final week of living at the house, so I wondered if she'd be there to do the final inspection. So I messaged her, and she seemed to be fine, even showing me photos and videos of her playing pickleball, and continuing to traumadump on me about how "badly" she was being treated. However, the day of moving out finally came, and she wasn't present, instead asking me to record a video of the room and bathroom to her.

A few days after I got settled into my new rental, my landlord returned my full deposit to me. I was so relieved to have gotten it back without any issue. I learned my lesson about what I need to do as a tenant before moving into a rental from this affair, and I'm very lucky that I basically netted zero in expenses.

I currently rent in a different place now, and it's much better to live in, with a more understanding landlord. However, there are a few other issues there, but nothing as bad as the house I just mentioned.

[theamandamunroe]

Gods yes. But it would need to be for someone else besides thirsty men...

World's End Harem is such a dogshit manga, but I'm not going to lie, the concept of a world where 99% of the men die off due to a virus leaving mostly women is pretty ripe potential for yuri, and there were a few yuribait moments in the series even with an actual lesbian character. It should have been about her and that instead.

[theamandamunroe]

You might have heard of 32-bit and 64-bit applications before, and if you work with older software, maybe 16-bit and even 8-bit computers. But what came before 8-bit? Was it preceded by 4-bit computing? Were there 2-bit computers? 1-bit? Half-bit?

Well outside that one AVGN meme, half-bit isn't really a thing, but the answer is a bit weirder in other ways! The current most prominent CPU designs come from Intel and AMD, and Intel did produce 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit microprocessors (although 4-bit computers weren't really a thing). But what came before 4-bit microprocessors?

Mainframes and minicomputers did. These were large computers intended for organizations instead of personal use. Before microprocessors, they used transistorized integrated circuits (or in the early days even vacuum tubes) and required a much larger space to store the CPU.

And what bit length did these older computers have?

A large variety of bit lengths.

There were 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit mainframes/minicomputers, but you also had 36-bit computers (PDP-10), 12-bit (PDP-8), 18-bit (PDP-7), 24-bit (ICT 1900), 48-bit (Burroughs) and 60-bit (CDC 6000) computers among others. There were also computers that didn't use binary encoding to store numbers, such as decimal computers or the very rare ternary computers (Setun).

And you didn't always evolve by extending the bit length, you could upgrade from an 18-bit computer to a more powerful 16-bit computer, which is what the developers of early UNIX did when they switched over from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11, or offer 32-bit over 36-bit, which happened when IBM phased out the IBM 7090 in favor of the the System/360 or DEC phased out the PDP-10 in favor of the VAX.

[theamandamunroe]

AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.

I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:

We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.

Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.

Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.

For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.

Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?

Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?

As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)

There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.

In summary:

Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.

There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.

Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.

[theamandamunroe]

I didn't realize I needed this in my life. C- Kayla and Hobbes were so fun to read when I was little. To imagine that the tiger's companion was a trans girl like me...It warms my heart.

[theamandamunroe]

Watch out, bud, or I'll retroactively forcefem you. I'm not gonna make you take E or put on the maid outfit, I'm gonna go alter your chromosomes before you were born. You're AFAB now, and always have been.

[theamandamunroe]

We literally don't do that! (consistently, anyway)

You wouldn't critically analyze the media you consume and think deeply about it's themes and what it is trying to tell you

[theamandamunroe]

We didn't actually know plural pride day was a thing, somehow (it's every 3rd Saturday of July).

So, happy plural pride day to systems and plurals of all kinds. Systems of all origins, structures, member counts, disorders or lack thereof; you are real, you are valid, and you have a place in this world just as anyone else. People will not always be accepting, but that goes for any identity. Their perception of you does not define you or your reality.

The future is plural. Be proud.

[theamandamunroe]

Me: while the Nazis had many goals, the philosophy itself is built on the idea that Jews are the Reason The World Sucks. You can see it throughout their writings. They literally say so several times.

Someone who has never read nazi writings: THEY HATED POLES AND QUEERS AND DISABLEDS TOO YOU ZIO FREAK

Me: are you aware of the concept of "Side Quests"

[theamandamunroe]

Well put.

x-men’s inherent flaw in its storytelling is that it always has mutants with useful powers telling mutants with actual curses to be proud of their powers 

“you should embrace your gifts” says Orgasm Dude, the dude with the power to give anyone an orgasm

“yeah thanks” says Will Explode If He Gets A Boner Man 

[theamandamunroe]

Morning cuddles 💞