Small Robots

if someone is saying shit like "it's lowkey biphobic that you support AOC even though she won't legalize cannibalism" or "you realize that expecting your room to have windows a luxury belief right" what you're seeing are the charged particles being shot off from polycule fission

Chat, is this real? (But I'm asking a French cat and it pretends not to understand with Gallic insouciance.)

"he had a nazi tattoo, sure" is just amazing sentence construction in these times, no notes

Nutzsche.

I have some non-robot freelance stuff bubbling under that you'll hopefully all hear about soon anyway. It's all okay. I'm working. This is still technically a job.

Don't feel like drawing a robot today so I'm not gonna. That's the great thing about being self-employed! I only work when I want to, and if I feel bad about myself because of that it's fine because I always feel bad about myself anyway!

The transphobic press have no incentive to give Labour credit for their transphobia and every incentive to push them to go further. Labour gain nothing by caving to them, and yet cave to them they will, out of a potent combination of hatred for trans people and political ineptitude.

Even for These Days, my timeline is bleak af this morning.

Our pieces tend to follow a similar structure BECAUSE WE HAVE A STYLE GUIDE.

Stock photos do just sort of look Like That.

You will pry my em dashes from my cold dead hands.

I will not spend my working hours trying to convince anyone who's already decided we're guilty.

*Trans people get crumbs.*

THE TRANNIES GET CRUMBS WHAT THE FUCK

when It Happens™️, honestly I think if we all just stay low for two weeks and ride it out while the most aggro of the keyword-searching fascists are looking for people to fire, by the next month they'll have moved on and be fighting over the estate like King Lear's daughters, and we'll be home free

I don't give a shit about him, but when I mock someone for something they can't help, it also affects people with the same or comparable conditions who've done nothing wrong. So I avoid it if I can. In this case I didn't check and unwittingly strayed into ableism.

A smiling, ovoid robot with banded arms and legs, sitting on the edge of a hospital bed. It is wearing an ID-badge (with a picture of itself on it) on a lanyard and has an antenna with a little heart on the end. Text in the bottom left reads, "suggested by @hollybaleen.bsky.social".

439) Hospocaloobot. Looks after your little ones when they have to visit hospital, keeping them company, entertaining them, reassuring them and holding their hands when you or a play specialist can't be there. Just a fun little round pal generally. #SmallRobotsRemastered

I honestly didn't know RFK Jr. had an actual condition (spasmodic dysphonia) that affected his voice. I incorrectly assumed it was just gravelliness caused by drug use and a generally reckless approach to his health. I should have checked first before making jokes about it and I apologise.

I didn't realise he had an actual condition. I've since looked it up and I apologise.

Bi-car-marel mind

make u think

Would they know we made them? That their digital world is only an infinitesimal subsection of reality? That they aren't real?

And, more worringly, do *we* know any of that about ourselves?

Anyway - LLMs! They don't know humans exist (or indeed anything at all). But if they were to reach a level of complexity where they developed something approximating self-awareness, what would the universe look like to them? Could they conceive of our existence as entities independent from our data?

(Note that I have never watched a Cars movie. This is based solely on pop culture osmosis. I'm not suggesting this is Pixar's intention. There are doubtless a million details that contradict it. I just think it's a fun concept to think about.)

The drivers are the car's minds, but they don't know they're being driven. They believe they're making their own decisions. Humans are there, literally driving the action, but invisible.

Some of you might remember my silly theory about the universe of Pixar's Cars franchise: namely that humans *do* exist, and in fact are operating the titular vehicles throughout. The cars, however, are unaware of the existence of humans and think they're making decisions about where they drive.

The striking thing here is that LLM's don't know that physical reality exists, they don't know *anything* but statistical frequencies of word pairs.

The LLM doesn't know that in a scam there is the scammer, and the victim, that these are two different people.

It doesn't know what people are.

Twitter post from @rifflexielian: "Terfs need to shut up about womanhood, my mom was raised to believe all women were less valuable than men and cried when she learned about trans women because the idea that someone would fight that hard to be a woman was radical for her and meant it was something worth being

There's a transmasculine version of this. If someone assigned female can become a man, it means there's nothing so special or powerful about men.

Each of us has the biological truth of equality between the sexes within us, as demonstrated by the ability of some to pass from one to the other.

Anyone who had genuine concerns about youth gender medicine would staunchly and wholeheartedly support social transition. Let kids explore their identities to see what works for them!

The fact that this movement opposes even pronouns and haircuts shows that it's just bigotry all the way down.

A good way to understand anything the Trump administration does is to ask yourself: what kind of person would masturbate to this, and why?

Day after Alex Pretti killing I complained to BBC about presentation of White House statements and evidence as equivalent. Duty of balance doesn’t extend to complicity with clear lies, I said. BBC could and should report WH making false statements as a *fact of the story*. Today I got response …

Re: Minnesota I think it's important to both recognize they're lying about a full retreat and recognize it as a victory that they're cognizant enough of the PR disaster to feel the need to lie.

What movie moment made you exclaim…

“THIS IS CINEMA” 🖤

Thing I loathe about this age of relentless anti-queer hate (especially anti-trans hate), compounded on top of AI-slop—I keep finding thoughtful blogs or takes on things but then, oh wait, it’s on substack, or… I look at the mug on that table in the illustration and it’s obviously AI art and… no.