Snail Sanctuary

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

The atheism leaving my body the moment the Pope starts talking about how AI is an affront to God and the new Tower of Babel

“In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it.” THANK YOU POPE LEO FOR SAYING THIS. Time for the “technology is a tool with no inherent moral position” idea to die!

sometimes the green sauce is spicier than the red, despite being the color of medicine or soothing jungle foliage. there's no way to adequately account for this

In 1998, I was fired from my corporate job while 9 months pregnant because and I quote, “my priorities would be elsewhere after the baby is born.” The lawyer I hired told me I didn’t have a case because discrimination like “that” was almost impossible to prove. So I got pissed. Took the LSAT. Went to law school. Passed the bar. Had 3 more kids. Twelve years later, another woman from that same company was fired for the same reason. She sued them for a million dollars, and won, partly because I had kept every piece of evidence from what happened to me years prior demonstrating a systemic pattern of discrimination against women. That company no longer exists. My law practice is thriving. And that baby they said would derail my priorities? She’s a brilliant attorney now working at my firm. Turns out my priorities were indeed, elsewhere.

the bar for resistance is set lower and lower. cracking open a cold one with the boys is a radical act. Petting a dog is a tiny rebellion. Making a peanut butter sandwich is a reclamation. A self-congratulatory, ineffective revolution indistinguishable from severe depression

I have been singing the ice bag ska banger for the last 24 hours straight

whenever I buy food now it’s $17 and I’m like “okay that’s fine.” but privately it is not fine.

I hate this attitude. You know what? Unless your parents were abjectly abusive, it IS your responsibility to guard them in their infirmity. There are limits, sure; it doesn't have to be in your own home, if that's not a functional arrangement for everyone. And during the earlier phases of semi-incapacity you can only lead a horse to water, etc. But yes this is a duty that children bear toward their elders. Says who? THE WEIGHT OF CIVILIZATION

@bumbadum14 I used one for my last baby when she was a newborn! It worked well for us during peak cosleeping danger window (<4mo).

Can recent moms explain to me why you can’t have a basket like contraption in the bed so you can still co-sleep without accidentally smushing your child? Is this a thing? Like there has to be a happy medium here

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

@joolswhore And by "a work trivia team" we mean marriage

of the Beverly Hillbillies. i cut her off and state what it is. she starts shouting again “you SEE i TOLD YOU katie would know it!” she stands up to high five me and says “we would be KILLER at charades” and at this point i am shaking when i suggest a work trivia team 🙈🙈🙈

she yelled my full name across the office this afternoon to get me into our finance director’s office. they’re arguing over whether i’ll know something, and president crush is yelling “even if she’s younger than us SHE’LL KNOW. katie will KNOW!” she starts describing the opening

My house, daily:

one of the best metafilter comments of all time gets more relevant every day

Keeping a diary for the past few years has utterly transformed my mood. At the end of the day I jot down the books I’m reading, what I saw on my walks, various things I learned. Over time you realize there’s a lot of joy in living. Without it, you forget 90 percent of your life.

“I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know it's a funny thing about housecleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she "should" be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.” - Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

mythical reel gem alarm

@Romy_Holland After I had my first, I told my sister that I finally understand how hard things must have been for our Mom. My sister replied: "That's great. You know how much you love your baby? Now imagine treating her the way our mom treated us." And it nearly broke me.

i go back and forth between this frame, and being further than ever from understanding my mom’s failures. it turns out infinite unconditional love is the default, and parents who do less now seem super broken inside.

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

@utotranslucence We're still living in a walkable city now that we have children, but it's becoming increasingly unsustainable due to the cost of extra bedrooms. If you need 3+ bedrooms and aren't independently wealthy, the suburbs are unfortunately the option.

For people who lived in the city before having kids but moved out to the suburbs once they had kids, I suspect they either are: