Captcha buster is taking care of the captchas now at least. A robot that proves I’m not a robot. Is this the singularity yet?

we should not do it

Because at this point, some people are suffering damage by the use of AI. I might not be hired as a translator in the future, my income is gone. Others have had their artworks, texts, creative output stolen (plus their work isn’t needed anymore). We have delegated creative work, which should be humans’ pride and joy, to a machine. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind do such thing?

So we as humans have to have a discussion about the responsible use of AI (I think nobody who screams ‘down with AI’ has any illusions that it will ever disappear again). As with any new tech product, the discussion should have been had before it was unleashed onto the public, then again you can’t talk about it if you don’t use it. It’s also time for the researchers to pick up on that sentiment and explore the ethical uses of the great power they have created.

If those now losing work as text and image workers were retrained as IT security people or AI prompt inventors before such tech was introduced, brilliant! If the numbers about ecological sustainability and advantages for society add up, I’m on board. But I want this to be a slow process and a public discussions (maybe with time some media learn to tone down the techbro/luddite extremes), before we drown in AI-generated shite nobody ever asked for.

I was leftie before I was techie. If you don’t know anything around tech and computers you wouldn’t know what to do. Even as a fairly tech-adjacent professional it took me quite a while.

Then again, I only became a real leftie again after kicking all the corpos out of my computer.

Tech used to be (and still is) obscured by heavy gatekeeping. We who understand a little more like to joke about those who don’t, and I guess we’ll have to stop that if we really want to unite the left. Don’t ridicule, explain. The person might never have had a chance to learn the concept.

because the alternatives are just so dang labor-intensive

Not really, but our math is skewed. Fossil-fuel based activities are less labor-intensive but much more energy-intensive. Our belief that we cannot survive without monoculture is because we compare labor apples with energy oranges.

Haha I agree with this comment

I think BIG MUSHROOM cannot control what grows in my bog, and in here I decide what’s poisonous.

So beautiful, I admire artists who know how to do watercolor.

I also love this community for letting me discover both traditional and modern stuff, and such high quality. Thanks.

I like the CoC points, brief and to the point.

In my immediate surroundings: small-scale farming. The old folks all know how to run a few goats and sheep, will have a few pigs and chickens, a vegetable garden, some fruit and olive trees, grapes, small fields. Once you figure it out you can feed yourself comfortably, but it’s a steep learning curve if you didn’t grow up with it. Quite a few foreigners who move in because they dream of self-sufficiency overload themselves with new stuff and become overwhelmed. I still can’t compete with my neighbors at gardening after 20 years but I’m getting the hang of it.

Here they call the good ones coração de boi - they are just flesh, no slime. I eat them raw as salad and they are delicious. Other tomatoes only cooked into nothing in a sauce.

childeater, please

take me out of here

take what must die

so that i can live

in peace with what remains

Even a small box can grow a surprising amount of veg. My bf set up a box of about 1 x 3 m, 60cm high, filled it with manure, branches, straw and other organic matter, and planted butternut squash, sweet potatoes, chili, sunflowers. It looked mad when it reached its prime, like some c movie garden tentacle monster. So far we got 25 butternut squash, endless chili, and we have eaten the first few sweet potatoes. It’s on top of stone slabs, not even soil. Or a community garden, or guerilla gardening. Many things involving plants or animals are very rewarding and make one more happy.

I have accompanied my friend to the DV support office today and listened through a detailed account of what he did. It’s tough to listen to. Tough to come to terms with the fact that there is so little actual help available, and all of it is excruciatingly slow to arrive and locked behind bureaucratic barriers. Tough to come to terms with the fact that so many women, myself included, easily fall prey to bullshit artists on a power trip, or man sized toddlers with puppy eyes, or a mix of the two. And it’s always women who I would have thought far beyond such situations. I feel I still haven’t understood what went on inside of myself as I lived through this shit and didn’t leave, and I haven’t understood what happens inside of these guys, how they can turn from decent person into absolute shitshow within days or months.

I expect to see rather more of this as people get driven to the edge by the ongoing financial, social, political crisis all around us.

I think I got lured in when techbros had some credibility, and I hoped to learn enough to participate in creating technological solutions to remediate ecological destruction - renewable energy, e-mobility, … I was an adult student who had half of her licenciatura in EE done (like bachelors I think?), then Covid hit and it was the perfect excuse to give up university and spend some time considering the doubts that had been building up.

All the hard science just didn’t add up. Somewhere in my thermodynamics semester it just started to dawn on me that a lot of the so called technological solutions were just greenwashing bullshit while we were still celebrating endless growth, endless innovation and endless consumerist bliss. The big picture was still missing, and any ethical or philosophical training was entirely missing from the curriculum, so you have all these clever youngsters being trained to earn good money in tech and never spend a single thought about the larger implications of their activities.

I’ve simplified my life. I work as a technical translator - like I did before studying EE. My brain wouldn’t do complicated stuff for a long while, and as this capacity grows back slowly I try to put it to good use in small scall permaculture - I tinker with ram pumps and electric fence. I’ve took my drone out the other day to see if it could be used for searching lost animals in the mountains (happens often where I live), it’s too much of a fire risk this time of the year though. Solar cooking and heating is another field where I’ve done some stuff and want to do more.

I also try to figure out where using tech is useless, especially on the farm. Transporting stuff for example can be reduced to a minimum. Often the laziest method wins. We don’t bring the food to the animals but the animals to the food. We compost things in place whenever we can. We use animals for land clearing, fertilizing, weeding, removing pests. A lot of this can also be applied to non-farm life. I plan to document as much as I can, so I guess I’m in research, popular research.

No, really I just happened to have all the skills and resources needed (milk a goat, look like an at least vaguely threatening garden gnome when carrying a farm tool, have a spare rest room and some spare time etc.) and I’m glad I can. I’ve been in this situation without support and will try to help others get out if it’s within my power.

Yesterday I was a bit eaten up at the edges and flashbacking heavily after so much frustration with the aggressor and the police, thus having to write the above rant. We went and fed the animals today without more hassle and are all mentally in a better place.

She’s off to find a new place to live, and we’ll make sure the animals get moved there safely. It more often than not ends up like this - victim has to leave, as authorities cannot protect them adequately or don’t care enough to do so.

Words have power, when you use them to support others. After translating marketing lies for a living for too many years I’m always glad when my language skills can be put to good use to help someone.

Keeping a dog on its own is absolutely cruel. Of course he’s out of his mind.

Get a garden instead. You get to workout, time outdoors for some vitamin d, and grow some food. Triple win. The light-, smell- and soundscape in most gyms is horrible.

It did make me suffer a lot of nights. I’m new stepmother of 7 dogs. They bark and sing a lot. After a while of suffering I just tried to learn to understand what they are saying, and how their music works. As I gradually get better at that I have now many situations where I immediately know if something’s wrong on the farm, or a neighbors dog has come for a visit. But if they are not your dogs the noise can be awful. Especially poor dogs locked up in city apartments or tied to chains as many people do here can be tough to listen to.

As a failed (not really, but academically) engineer who is only comfortable around non-humans I find this very relatable. But is it more the human contact or the human contact with engineers in specific or the technology that gives you soul damage?

I actually love tech, but I also think a lot of modern tech is overkill and shouldn’t exist, and I can’t get excited about modern gadgetry anymore.

Often. But more often not. It’s nice to be alone, because a lot of human interaction involves unnecessary drama. Maybe it’s just our brains protecting us.