SarahATX

@purplelotus13
198 Followers
455 Following
3.3K Posts
Texpat (recently relocated to the UK 🇬🇧), TC professional, SFF enthusiast, mother of cats, rebel fighter, cyborg, lover of language-related things, over-user of ellipses...
pronounsshe/her
«Everyone has their own way of solving problems»

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116496411504697248

I HATE TO BE THAT GUY but even as this paints the security in a bad light… do we know if this wasn't aislopped?

we don’t.

and that's the point of #AI : it’s a complete rejection of The Social Contract on how we agree on the truth.

we need the #infosec community to help us create new, defensive fact checking protocols. the oligarchy wants to own reality, and define the truth. pushback on giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Y’ALL DID AND WE LOST THE RIGHT TO ABORTIONS, AND VOTING RIGHTS

Vultures eat anthrax, botulism, rabies, & cholera for breakfast.

Their stomach acid is among the most corrosive in the animal kingdom, with a pH around 1, low enough to dissolve the bones, hide, & pathogens of dead animals that would kill almost anything else.

A vulture eating a diseased carcass isn't a vector for disease, it's the end of the line. The disease chain ends in the vulture's gut, & that's pretty hardcore.

When vulture populations crashed in India in the 1990s, rotting livestock carcasses sat where vultures used to clean them.

Feral dogs and rats took over the cleanup, both of which actually do spread rabies. Researchers later linked the vulture collapse to roughly 500,000 deaths in India over the following decade.

The same collapse is now underway in sub-Saharan Africa. 6 of 11 African vulture species are threatened with extinction, primarily from poisoned poaching baits.

The animals nobody finds cute are doing more public health work than most of the species we actively protect.
#Birds

We went from precise web search with boolean operators to "natural language models" of AI search.

You can tell nuerodivergent, Autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, etc folks created the early internet...

...and you can tell that neurotypical folks are now leading the current overlays of the internet.

We used to have very precise search mechanisms. Specific words found in web pages with boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc) to filter out the web pages that contained specific words and did not contain other words.

Now, we search for web sites (or don't even search for web sites, yay abstraction layers that separate us from actual raw information) using "natural language" to try and coax out info.

Have you ever been frustrated when you use very precise and direct language to communicate a specific idea with someone who then takes those specific words and adds obscure meaning and connotations and personal fears and bias to what you said... thus completely misunderstanding you... only to then try and clarify what you said with more precise language only to have that further degrade the conversation?!

Yeah. That's the internet with AI "search" now.

They took something that worked precisely and directly and muddied it.

We've introduced the "double-empathy problem" to web search.

I'm noticing that everyone in my circles, family, and especially work that are nuerotypical LOVE LOVE LOVE the new AI search mechanisms. They'll tell me exactly what the answer they received was - regardless of whether it's right or has multiple possible and conflicting answers. They just repeat what the AI said like it was the Gospel Truth.

And they love talking to it like it was a "real person."

It certainly takes my search parameters and adds its own interpretation to which I have to clarify and correct which is then misinterpreted further...

I haven't tried vibe coding, but I can only imagine the horror.

Can you imagine vibe pentesting with Claude / Mythos?!?!?!

You know how neurodivergent folks gravitated towards IT because it was precise?

Yeah, that's gone now.

#AI #LLM #Claude #Mythos #infosec #Autism #ADHD

If you want to piss me off, it's easy: just breezily assert that our tech regulation problems are the result of the fast pace of technological change racing ahead of the plodding speed of governmental action:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/22/uber-for-nurses/#go-meta

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something

1/

This study has been going viral - especially on X - for purportedly showing that ivermectin and mebendazole (another anti-parasitic medication) can cure cancer.

It's one of the worst examples of bad science I've ever seen. Let's take a look at the paper together.

Saw this great policy from an employer and wanted to share it with y'all to also enjoy.

"We aim to be an ethical employer, with a 1:4 ratio between our highest and our lowest paid staff."

https://www.quaker.org.uk/our-organisation/give-time/jobs/jobs

Quakers in Britain: Job opportunities

Find a range of jobs with Quakers in Britain. With a 1:4 ratio between our highest and our lowest paid staff, we are a Living Wage employer.

Quakers

"AI is built on the collective knowledge of humankind."

No. Nononononono. It is not built on _knowledge_, it it built on _data_. And not everyone's experiences are available as data, many communities are excluded. Also: "Collective" implies some sort of collaboration and shared activity. But "AI" is just accumulation by a few powerful.

So No. It's not collective but extractive, not knowledge but data, not humankind but the hegemonic western view. Everything in that statement is wrong.

I couldn't stop thinking about this so I had to make it and share it