Mastodawn

The enormous elephant in the room regarding the increasing demands on our electricity grid is simply this: we don't actually _need_ AI. It's not in any way a public need for public good. It's a private and public want. If you turned off every major GAI tomorrow nothing would demonstrably change except for our power consumption would go down and nvidia's stock would crash.

Addendum: I am talking here about the slop machines, which are the drivers of this overconsumption. I fully recognize that generative systems are being used for legitimate purposes and research, I literally help run one of them.

legallyvoid Sep 17, 2025

Lesley Carhart

Sep 17, 2025

I do not know another way to express to people that trying to appease fascists by “being a good minority” or totally deferring to them publicly has saved absolutely no marginalized group or profession in human history. They are coming after us anyway. Even if you scold peers for not being nice.

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legallyvoid Sep 17, 2025

Then I do this thing where I imagine the words coming from the actual person's mouth and think about what they might have intended. I mean, I was taught this was the way to read other people's words, and it took a long time to apply it. Maybe I'm too autistic and that's too literal a way to be? Because everything apparently has to be veiled in subtext (/s <- look a tone indicator) 2/2

legallyvoid Sep 17, 2025

I'm endlessly exhausted by attempting to be clear and concise in text form and still being misunderstood. Because the "tone" was off. What tone? The one you imagined in your head when you were reading it? Why do you assume the way you're interpreting this imagined tone is obvious and correct? Why are words on a screen "heard" and not taken at face value? Personally I've learned over time that the tone I'm hearing in my internal dialogue is *mine* when I'm reading someone else's words. 1/2

legallyvoid Sep 16, 2025

Matthew Sheffield Sep 16, 2025

Pam Bondi deleted a government study showing that right-wingers commit more terrorism. The right cannot think coherently so instead of making their own studies, they censor legitimate ones.

But don't worry Pam, we saved it for you! https://web.archive.org/web/20250911165140/https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/306123.pdf

Wayback Machine

legallyvoid Sep 16, 2025

Qasim Rashid, Esq.Sep 16, 2025

Trey Reed was found hanging from a tree.
Let me repeat that. He was Found Hanging From A Tree.
In Mississippi. In the state that lynched more Black people than ANY OTHER STATE IN THE COUNTRY. And police have the audacity to summarily conclude "no foul play."
It's just as horrific that we don't have a competent DOJ to independently investigate this. My God. Horrific. Just horrific.

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legallyvoid Sep 12, 2025

So when Nazis can make an environment hostile to minorities and the minorities are punished for making a hostile environment to racists, and the nonracists are trained and biased referees, you create a game where minorities fail out and Nazis win. That's why they're an invasive species. No one else is allowed to exist where they're tolerated. 12/12

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legallyvoid Sep 12, 2025

dropping in on other people's meetings and pushing out minorities. He wouldn't have felt so bold saying out right racist shit including that diversity was the enemy of white people and needed to be stopped.

What they did was create a negative paradigm where there was zero incentive to not be a racist since white people in the industry would keep running cover and minorities would just have to tolerate harassment. 11/x

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legallyvoid Sep 12, 2025

people actually broke down that Jon Callan was actually kind of shitty as his job. The ingrained belief was that Nazis shouldn't be purged from the environment. We must be kind to the invasive species.

Jon Callan himself said he was terrified when people started punching Nazis.

Where white people failed both the minorities they were trying to get into the industry and Jon Callan is by not saying racism will not be tolerated. He wouldn't have felt so confident 10/x

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legallyvoid Sep 12, 2025

the Nazis said "We got the ideas from the US." From forced sterilization to the holocaust. So when the new inheritor of these ideas is shot in the street, you think "Oh no. What about our peaceful discourse?"

Why diversity failed, is because whenever I brought up how Jon Callan was a racist people would say, almost as a conditioned response, "And I'd still hire him." When asked why he was so good as to be worth hiring a racist, 9/x