I don't care; I'm still free

Down to 424 fandoms!

I already did a sweep where I dropped “webcomics with only 1 fic, and it was posted more than a year ago.” This past month, I’ve been doing a sweep where I drop “webcomics with no more than 5 fics, and the latest was posted more than a year ago.”

And this is the one that finally pulled me under the 450 limit.

Haven’t reached the end of the alphabet, so I’ll probably do a final October update, just to record the final low for posterity. (And then, at long last, I can figure out a new regular routine for “picking up never-wrangled webcomic fandoms in small batches, cleaning up the tags, and letting them go quickly instead of sitting on them.”)

Currently only 15 have any tags to wrangle. Most of the un-canonized crossover fandoms I mentioned back in July are, in fact, canonized by now.

Also: I handed off one of my Always Has New Tags Every Week fandoms. One of my very first fandom-dropping tactics was “yeeting all the tiny obscure Dracula adaptations that never got fic anyway,” but I kept the original novel (and the AMT), to field the regular stream of incoming tags. This past month, I finally realized “the existing tags could use some review, I’m not enthusiastic about doing it, and this is an enduringly popular book that must have plenty of other wrangler fans. I can and should pass it on to someone new.”

So I did. And they’re already doing great with it! A good choice.

AMT check-in: Fake News, Narbonverse, and Cutie Honey proposals are all still hanging out on the requests page.

…related, I did scoop up the recently-renamed Pundit & Broadcast Journalist RPF (the “US” got knocked off the end), to do some much-needed cleanup in the tags there. But I still flatly refuse to be the wrangler who sorts out “which of the shows/networks in the hundred syns deserve their own subtags.” I will do stuff like “make sure somebody’s favorite obscure news anchor finally gets a canonical character tag” — that is the limit of the responsibility I’m taking, here.

"One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides “what is taking up all my cloud storage?”) is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don’t want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment."

The process of making them is bad:

"Datacenters in America used about 17 billion gallons of water during 2023, triple the amount they used a decade earlier in 2014, according to an estimate from US Congressional Research Service (CRS)."

"“I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside,” Boxtown resident Alexis Humphreys said through tears, holding up her asthma inhaler during a public hearing about the turbines on April 25. “How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”"

"Many companies are surely trying to build their own; after all, we are reliably informed that AI is going to take over the world and the companies that come out on top of that race will be worth untold amounts of money. [...] Large-scale criminal organizations (to the extent that they are distinct from governments) probably also want to have their own models. These tools are seen as weapons, and there is an arms race underway. The Internet as a whole is caught in the crossfire."

"I am a writer. A writer who also happens to be Kenyan. And I have come to this thesis statement: I don't write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. Or, more accurately, it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape."

"AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. In India, this labour is increasingly performed by women, who are part of an workforce often described as “ghost workers”. “The first few months, I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I would close my eyes and still see the screen loading.” Images followed her into her dreams: of fatal accidents, of losing family members, of sexual violence she could not stop or escape."

But don't worry! The results are also bad:

"Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate. [...] So Luna can’t turn a profit, doesn’t sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any “decision” it makes."

"I've had multiple heated arguements with people trying to defend AI, by explaining to me that "AI might be bad, but it has benefits for accessibility!" Using the very disabled people being thrown under the bus by AI as a shield, when my quality of life has substantially worsen ever since AI turned up everywhere, because I've lost access to all the good accessibility tools that I use to depend on."

"In another case, an AI scribe confused the drug the GP had prescribed with a different one of a similar name – a blunder which again the patient, rather than the doctor, identified. On another occasion an AI-generated summary letter did not say that the hospital consultant had told the patient to seek a repeat prescription from their GP for their migraine, which could have left them unable to get their medication."

Reread thread for Pet Shop of Horrors chapter 41 “Disappearance”.

Heads-up: These final 3 chapters all flow together, and I’m expecting a lot of “how well is this explained/paid off by the end” type of reactions. So there’s going to be a lot of implicit spoilers, even for things I don’t say straight out. If you’re avoiding those, maybe go finish the series yourself before coming back to this.

Originally liveblogged on Mastodon / Bluesky, posts collected here. Affiliate links for the whole Collector’s Edition.

I finished the Little Sister D darkfic, probably gonna get to that D/Tetsu FWB fic next. Feels like I should switch up the tones instead of posting too much angst in a row, and this one’s mostly sweet, with a happy ending.

 

( …so, hey, you know those lizards that can drop off their tails to escape a predator, and grow back a new one later? )