Renbymon 💜💛🏳️‍⚧️ @renbymon@computerfairi.es

asking the important questions

“When the AI provided an incorrect result, researchers found inexperienced and moderately experienced radiologists dropped their cancer-detecting accuracy from around 80% to about 22%. Very experienced radiologists’ accuracy dropped from nearly 80% to 45%.”

https://www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/tech-and-the-brain/2024/why-ai-can-push-you-to-make-the-wrong-decision-at-work-090324

Fun* fact in this video: the 'disposable' vapes thrown away in Britain alone contain enough lithium batteries to make 1.2 Million e-bikes.
I've been independently powering things with vape batteries that I've rescued before seeing this video. Pull out the cell, add a cheap usb charging module and you have a fully rechargeable 3.7v power source. If you need higher voltage you can put them in series and you can even get multi-cell balancing modules for next to nothing if you want to have a few in parallel for more current.
I don't trust them for anything critical, but they're great for low-budget projects as the cells are completely free. My bike lights are all powered by them (one can run a flashing bike light for a couple of weeks' use), as well as various other things that had their batteries die, or that didn't come with rechargeable batteries.
I also only charge them somewhere flameproof, though I haven't had any issues so far.
#making #electronics #reuse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehp23hrrEHY

To anyone playing #Satisfactory right now:
PLEASE use the official wiki: https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/

Ignore the Fandom wiki, it's bad. It's nr in 1 search results, but it's bad and the wiki.gg is so much better

(Wiki.gg is also what the devs recommend btw)

Please don't ask children to 'get into pairs (or groups)', without grouping them yourself or setting ground rules to include everyone.

This is traumatising each time, to the rejected or invisible children who get left out.

#Education #School #Teaching #ActuallyAutistic

Next Patreon reward, a squirrel sorcerer!

What do you think she is casting? Magic MissileAcorn? MeteorWalnut Swarm?

#FurryArt #MastoArt

#NoBillionaires #Unionize #TaxTheRich #EatTheRich

@kianga @keeya Wait, why only use one hungry demon when you can have two?

#fursuit

Let’s go enjoy the nice weather together! ^^

📸 by CaffeineRed_ on X

Lionizing Terry Pratchett's work as universally progressive and incisive denies the early stuff where he happily used racist tropes for a cheap laugh, and the *climb* he made from there to where he ended up.

This is important because it's not just any given book saying "We can do better"; it's the author, doing better, as you go.

Pivot to AI did a better job than me of noticing the wild claims and manicured results from the #GameNGen research. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/09/07/googles-gamengen-ai-doom-video-game-generator-dissecting-a-rigged-demo/

“I genuinely believe Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history. It’s easy to attack them for being musically regressive: after all, they didn’t just Stop The Clocks, to quote the title of their 2006 best-of, but rewound them by 30 years. But the real problem is that they set social attitudes back even further.
…
It’s no coincidence that Oasis are the band of choice for flag-shaggers and Reform voters”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/28/stop-the-celebrations-oasis-are-the-most-damaging-pop-cultural-force-in-recent-british-history

#oasis #neanderthalRock

Okay, so we all know that JK Rowling is a transphobe, and fascist apologist, but an important question is *why*?

Why is Rowling like this?

To understand, we've got to step back and analyze the *world* of harry potter, to understand the thematic assumptions of the world, to really understand why JK Rowling's fascism and regressive views aren't a contradiction of the story of "you can do anything" magical empowerment, but instead a logical consequence of it.

Let's look at the underlying assumptions of the world that Harry Potter sets up. Keep in mind that when an author writes a book, the things that they draw attention to are the things that they *want* the reader to take away from the book, and things that the author doesn't draw attention to, that are background details where the author says "and this is true and we're moving on," these are things that, on some level, the author takes for granted about how they see the world, and they want *you* the reader, to accept that assertion of the world as well.

This isn't always true, and the opposite may be true for authors who have an intentional political message that they want readers to understand, but in the realm of fiction for entertainment, authors tend to draw the world in this way. This is the nature of imagination and storytelling. The limit of a story is the limit of the storyteller's imagination, and when an author is writing about what they think a better world would look like, you'll find the limits of how different they can imagine that world could be.

So, moving on. What are the underlying assumptions of the world of Harry Potter?

There's Better People, and there's Worse People, and it's the Responsibility of the Better People to use their power and authority to take care of everyone else, and to keep the Worse people in their place, blissfully unaware of the existence of the Better People.

There's wizards and there's muggles. The muggles' little brains would explode if they knew about magic, so even if wizards could totally fight all the muggles, they have a whole magic bureaucracy responsible for preventing the muggles from remembering anything about magic. The conclusion of the books, especially in the later books, with regard to how institutions can be used to exploit and abuse people, isn't that having such a powerful tool and institution is bad, but that having the *wrong people* in charge of it is bad. Don't do anything to change the structure. The structure is the way it's always been, and will always be. Don't change the structure, go into the structure and fight it from the inside.

There's Teachers and there's Students. In one of the later books, the school is taken over by Evil people, and they stop teaching the Students how to fight against Evil, which is bad. Instead of saying "fuck this, we're out' the students form their own class... but there's still a Teacher. It's just that Harry Potter and his friends promoted themselves to Teachers. The whole Room of Requirement storyline isn't really about peer empowerment and group learning. It's about how it's the Responsibility of the Better People to Teach the Worse People what they need to know.

Without Harry Potter and his friends, what would the students of the school have done? Nothing? No one else in the entire school would have had the idea "hey, maybe we can teach each other how to do this"?

There's People and there's Elves. The Elves exist to serve People, and without People to tell them what to do, the Elves are purposeless. Even if elves are freed, they still seek out masters to tell them what to do.

And even within the story, the storyline whose whole point is that freeing the elves is *good* is *undercut* by the story's own refusal to let go of these ideas of power and control and hierarchy.

When Dobby is freed (through trickery) the first thing he does is attack his former master, *in service of his new master, Harry Potter*, From the perspective of his former master, his refusal to release the bondage of his elf is completely justified by the fact that the *first thing* that Dobby does when newly freed is *attack him*. Regardless of whether or not Dobby is justified in doing so, from Lucius' perspective, the sudden freedom of his elf is a sudden grave danger to his own health and well-being, which he correctly attributes responsibility for to Harry Potter. Again, my point isn't that Lucius is a good person, or blameless, but that the assumptions that underlie the whole world are rotten to the core.

And now we get to the larger structure of the world. The old buildings, the old-timey food and drink. The old-timey dress and the wizarding world stuck in time.

The *aesthetic* of the world is what JK Rowling draws the reader's attention to. Flying buttresses and old-timey speak and quaint little shops with quaint little shopkeepers. It's an appeal to *tradition*, bringing attention to the traditional values that the author sees as being lost and forgotten, but not in this world! In this world where nothing ever changes and everything stays the same forever, you can imagine this magical perfect world where the british empire froze just shy of the industrial revolution.

The conflict of the world isn't that this hierarchy exists, but that Evil People take this supremacy *too far* and it's the responsibility of the Good People who are Right, to save the world from the Evil People who are Wrong. There's no questioning the assumptions and structures that underpin the world, that lead the Evil People to the conclusions. A more creative anti-authoritarian author may have gone the direction of Star Vs The Forces Of Evil, and abolished magic, or perhaps from a progressive perspective, may have taken the story in the direction of releasing magic to the whole world, to be the right of all people.

Even the exceptions to the rules of the magic world still betray Rowling's true beliefs. I firmly believe that Hermione Granger is Rowling's self-insert. She sees herself as someone who came from a "non-magical" world, and through her intelligence, dedication, and commitment, has worked her way into the hierarchy of the Better People, and now holds in intense dedication to upholding the Hierarchy. We don't really meet many other muggle-born magical people in the world. We don't really see what non-magical people do in their day-to-day lives besides be shitty or boring. JK Rowling literally can't imagine non-magical people doing literally anything of note. If you're non-magical, but you somehow come from a magical background, then the most that you can hope for is living a boring life in a magical house, as though there's no place for historians or storytellers or any kind of art in the magical world that isn't itself magical.

This is a world where a person's nature is determined at birth, and while someone can excel within their nature, they can never grow past it. Everyone has fundamental limitations to their capability, and it's up to the Better People to protect the Worse People, because the Worse People can't possibly know their own limitations. It's up to the Better People to protect them from coming to harm from their inherent limitations.

When taken as a whole, we can see JK Rowling's stories for what they really are. A manifestation of JK Rowling's justification for imperialism and hierarchy.

The perfect structures of the world are the structures that have always existed, and it's the responsibility of people with Power and Authority to Protect the people without Power and Authority.

The best outcome of any conflict is to return the world to the previous status-quo, and the only way to prevent the conflict from recurring is to make sure that Good People are in charge.

Don't question the structures which enable Evil People to have the authority that they do. The problem isn't the structure that enables the abuse, the problem is always and only ever the people themselves being inherently evil.

So why does JK Rowling hate trans people so much?

Because the possibility that someone can alter something about themselves that she sees as fundamental to the structure of society is very deeply disturbing and upsetting to her.

She lives in a world where the most that anyone can do is quietly toil away (and possibly excel) within their designated role.

If Trans people were narratively translated into a faction within Harry Potter, they would be muggles who found out about magic, figured out how to use it for themselves and decided to use magic outside the purview and regulation of the Ministry of Magic, and these would be portrayed as fundamentally evil and misguided people who are selfishly risking the destruction of society for their own ends.

But JK Rowling would never write this story, because to do so would violate one of the fundamental rules of her world, which is that it's absolutely not possible for non-magical people to develop magic.

This contradiction, that they are illegally seizing magic that they have no right to, and also, that it's not possible for these people to have magic, is at the root of JK Rowling's eternal outrage.

She can't admit that they've seized magic, so the only recourse is to fight as hard as possible to destroy and snuff out the magic that they have, and claim that it was never magic at all.

Information pollution.

The information available to us is polluted. It is hard to take in information without taking in pollution.

Information pollution is age-old, but our current situation is new. Generative AI is causing an explosion of information pollution, mechanizing and automating it, in a way analogous to how the industrial revolution caused an explosion of air and water pollution.

Re this from @deevybee:
https://mastodon.social/@deevybee/113095441167609490