@matuzalem

Es verdad. (Y gracias.)

@AskTheDevil @Tacitus_Kilgore

I'd settle for empathy winning out over so-called intelligence *or* brawn at this point.

If we can't change our tribalism, we're doomed. And not because of war - we've always warred - but because we're doing our usual tribalist warring with tools exacerbating global warming to a point of no return: 7 of 8 planetary metrics already surpassed with no sign of them on the decline anytime soon. Our brains cannot conceive the scale of harm our oil imperialism has done.

@AskTheDevil

Ha. I just wrote the same in my reply!

@Tacitus_Kilgore

@Sr0bi @Tacitus_Kilgore

Neanderthals had more gender equality, demonstrated in the far-ranging materials in female teeth and diets and the wear on bones indicative of shared labours. It's considered to be one of the reasons our ancestral strain triumphed: more role specialization, with all the cultural issues that came with it.

I wouldn't be so quick to suggest that the "better" strain of early hominin won out.

But I know you're having a rough go, too, so take care of your heart, eh?

@matuzalem

Bajo la capa del cielo, no hay casa libre de duelo.

Sometimes it just hits super hard that we went from pandemic to this immoral nightmare.

I remember the gut punch of February 24, 2022: the feeling that a last gasp at order had been shattered irrevocably.

It seems so quaint now.

We've demonstrated so little decency, integrity, and capacity to surmount dehumanizing and anti-democratic forces since then.

I can't believe how much time has been spent rationalizing cruelty.

Or that the US election is still tight.

What the hell is wrong with us?

@janallmac

Hi Jan. Sorry to hear it's been rough on your end, too. 🫂

World-grief is a part of it for me; I'm so thoroughly tired of our overall cruelty, selfishness, and indifference.

But last week, I also had to do some unpleasant things that might easily backfire and do me damage in turn. Still, they had to be done, and now I just have to wait for the fallout.

I hate having personal mess while the world is so awful.

I hope you're taking good care of yourself amid the lows on your end. 🫂

I was feeling like a piece of shaving cream yesterday, but the utopian leftist comedy #Podcast SRSLY WRONG had me covered with a silly meditation on the difficulty of moving through a world with so much shaving cream, and so many people who feel like it even when they shouldn't.

@BosmangBeratna, this might be up your alley. I don't mean to suggest that your alley is made of poop, but sometimes life feels like a poop shoot, eh?

#YouAreNotAPieceOfShavingCream
#OnlyHuman
https://srslywrong.com/podcast/320-you-piece-of-shit/

There's a lot of highway in this one, but I'll have more time for post-production work next week.

Today, it's just about getting back into a work groove.

This piece discusses a recent so-called AI issue in SFF submission queues, and the broader issue of hype cycles and artificial notions of success in publishing today.

Just some musings, really.

More reviews again next week.

#WritersOfCoSo #WritingCommunity #SFF
https://youtu.be/X_nEV4BSzkU

@Jorro

I wouldn't say it's just you; fear of scams has skyrocketed alongside the wide range of new online scams afflicting young and old demographics (younger people more often, but older people for higher financial hits).

The problem is that this fear reflects an overall rise in small-c conservative distrust in shared systems, which has huge consequences for our politics. A lot of bad *political* actors benefit from us losing our trust in systems in general.

So it's not you! It's The Times.

@Jorro

Our society has so thoroughly degraded, in terms of our overall social welfare, that I'm awash in everyday calls on social media for help with rent, electrical bills, medical fees, etc - "If 65 people could Venmo $10, you'd be doing this disabled single mom of four a great kindness!" just showed up on BlueSky today.

It doesn't help that there are tons of scams online.

There's also a lot of unmet need and people suffering.

Tough to navigate it all with any sanity intact!

@Jorro

The same as for any other fundraiser; these sites are set up by people who can be investigated, and are.

When it comes to folks in Gaza, sites like Instagram & TikTok make it super easy to see the person involved, & other social media follows the same pattern of introducing you to the full family. It's no different than any other fundraiser.

So if you're not a fan of fundraisers, not an issue!

But war-based GoFundMes are no more likely to be scams than ones for medical bills at home.

And for #Science and #Technology folk interested in so-called #AI, here's an excellent paper released this month on the limits of LLMs:

"We hypothesize that this decline is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data. When we add a single clause that appears relevant to the question, we observe significant performance drops [across all models.]"

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

This is an excellent meditation by Charlie Stross on the failings of the language we use to depict #Space travel and settlement.

Worth the time of anyone writing in #SFF, even if you might wince at the comment about TNG!

(But we've all had our "throw-book-at-wall" moments with SF media, no?)

#WritersOfCoSo #WritingCommunity #StarTrek lovers beware

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html

@LlamaMountainStudioArts

🫂💜 I hope you have the resources you need to take care of yourself. I'm sorry things are so very rough right now.

Here's a fun little #SFF film to brighten your day, folks.

Or create nightmare fuel for it.

Either/or.

https://youtu.be/CXhnPLMIET0

@Jorro

This isn't to say that scams don't happen, but that's true for all GoFundMes, so if the skepticism is simply because people in a war scenario are sharing fundraisers for surgeries to remove lingering shrapnel, and not for someone from Kansas who needs help with the funeral costs for their pet parrot, it's worth considering that part of the suspicion here simply comes from the type of ask being outside your usual exposure set.

@Jorro

When the war in Tigray broke out, one of the first horrific realizations I had was that none of my go-to NGOs could reach people in need. Armies wouldn't let them. War breaks down organizational response.

I know here on CoSo there's a bit of a bubble, so people here aren't as acclimated to seeing the suffering in Gaza. It must be shocking to have it suddenly show up in your feed, but families have been reaching out small-scale, the same as GoFundMes are used in the US, from the start.

I've had a rough few days, and I'm still trying to get my heart for things back.

Hope everyone's doing okay.

One step at a time, if you're not.