I’ve reached that point in the year where regulating my nervous system requires a couple of hour of mail order catalogue models having a go at acting (made for TV Christmas films) and at least one giant mug of hot chocolate. One week to go until holiday.

Clarke told us advanced technology is like. Well, I’ve been thinking about the flip side… (mic pass)

I love how this is all the context we need.

My favorite genre of cringe is watching some mediocre white guy incorrectly lecture a woman about something related to the field where she is an expert.

Thirty years ago self-publishing was “vanity publishing”. Now, “traditional publishing” has become even less accessible and this year I knew I had a book that wasn’t traditionally commercial or an easy fit to a category so chose to self-publish. I’m not chasing money; I did it to say something.

Happy There Is A Circulatory System Walking Through The Kitchen Day to all who celebrate.

LLMs are trained to give responses that humans like. Unfortunately, humans tend to prefer "Confident and Wrong" to "Uncertain but Mostly Right".

A few of us indie perfume brands and Sainte Cellier, an independent retailer of multiple hard to find perfumes have organised a pop-up shop in London this November. Do visit! Meet the founders, try the perfumes.

Packing the first round of book orders today and it’s quite emotional. www.demoaccords.com

10 years ago I started investigating and writing about fragrance regulations because they seemed so inconsistent. They still seem that way to me today but I have learned some stuff along the way. Read my free blog here: substack.com/@pialong/

A small Lofoten tourism group announces they're shutting down their guides and possibly going bankrupt thanks to the loss in revenue from chatbots that steal and rephrase their content None of this shit is inevitable. Fuck the slimy tech bros. www.instagram.com/p/DPyRB-tDBf...

If the cost to us all wouldn’t be too high, sometimes I wonder what calling Reform’s bluff would look like. Who would they have left to blame if they were in charge and managed to chuck most of us foreigners out? It would just leave their unmasked racism towards locals, and that can’t be allowed.

Hello

Nigel Farage doesn’t have to become PM; his policies have been adopted by successive governments and now by Labour, too. 10 years until Indefinite Leave to Remain and “not a penny in benefits” is pure xenophobia, classism, racism and stupidity. Citizenship costs £2k and may not be an option for all.

History shows that when democracies face crises, strengthening and reinvigorating democratic participation is essential to prevent democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism. This is not that.

Trans rights are not the rights of a tiny minority, trans rights are everyone’s rights to self-determination, control of our bodies, and a society where opportunity and aesthetics are not restricted by sex assigned at birth You should support and defend trans people because trans people are people

Sky News and the BBC repeatedly mention the "migrant crisis" in doing so they are normalising and legitimising far right talking points. There is no "migrant crisis", there is only migrant hysteria, which the British media is feeding into instead of countering.

Not to be all FBPE-pilled, but at least with the EU ID cards (and Irish passport card) you can travel with them around the continent fine. What will the BritCard have? An ugly flag, and it will give all our information to some dodgy faceless company. It’s giving gauche, it’s giving midlife crisis.

Mmmm, yeah. The most dangerous thing for us immigrants in UK is that both Tories & Labour have been pandering to Farage, but that just legitimises Farage and eventually we’ll end up the political chess pieces on a board that he has shat on.

At this particular point in the American psychodrama I’m no longer convinced that releasing the Epstein files would even tank Trump’s support. He is a mere representation of the radicalisation of the far right and their hunger for full-blown fascism. The latter is what needs to be defeated.

This, but in perfume reviews: “I don’t like 80s fougeres, but anyway this one also doesn’t do it for me, one star”

The urge in me to do something RADICAL is directly dampened by the exact 2 things that restrict everything else for me, too (money & disability). The best I’ve managed is a 100 page book that uses my craft as a secondary narrative device & would now be classed as a terrorist manifesto in the USA.

The state of our world, explained in seconds.

A week in artisan roses. 💛💛💛 🌹Rose Mercurial by Vireo Perfumes 🌹Rose Face & Body Balm by Aftelier 🌹Queen by Eau de Boujee @perfumer-pia.bsky.social (Pia Long) Discover more unique indie and artisan rose fragrances in my blog 🔗✍🏻🥀 www.isniffbeforeisleep.com/a-week-of-in... #perfumesky

Mabel being a tourist crowd-pleaser in York. Yes, I have wet wipes.

Why has the British media amplified Farage? Why have they platformed, talked about and featured far right rallies and grifters over and above things like war protests, trans pride, green topics, you name it? There is barely any journalistic balance left in a clickbait world and it’s killing us.

I wrote a book! And 10 perfumes to go with it. The formulas are published in full. Preorders are now open for a month and the official launch is in November.

One begins to suspect that very rich people are constantly and openly committing unspeakable crimes together, recreationally.

"They're good for tedious data tasks" sure, famously in data, accuracy isn't important

What is the use case where it doesn't matter if anything they output is correct and also that the user gets measurably dumber??? List them motherfucker

Every person who says "of course there are some uses for LLMs" should be forced to immediately list what those uses are, taking into account that: a) they cannot be accurate and there is no way to make them accurate b) they have been repeatedly shown to make users dumber and worse at their jobs

Thank you for the mention! Every conversation about our tiny indie brand helps us 🥰

The issue of American society fully adopting make-believe as its mainstream epistemic culture has predictably led to people not believing in real things, logic, or even the evidence of their senses; and to only believe what they imagine to be true in their desires

Google developer #1: "That's it. Our search engine is simple, efficient, and reliable. It's perfect. We're done." Google developer #2, presumably: "But wouldn't it be *more* perfect if the first search result was always a robot who mansplained your search results to you incorrectly?"

90% of writing is editing. About the same with perfumery.

Between hallucinating “AI”, Google becoming useless and the overwhelming amount of people who just make shit up and start “educating” others, are we actually at an end game for the brilliant future the Internet information ecosystem was supposed to become? Now what? Soon we can’t trust anything.

Hi, #gamedesign people: please create a game that’ll be mostly like designing spaceships in MOO2 + designing species in Stellaris + playing Valheim on Dev mode for buildings + a bit of Diablo horadric cube & alchemy from BG3… I just want to research, discover, design and make stuff. 🥹

Plus, "gender critical" is such a horrid euphemism. At the point were someone calls themselves TERF, "professionally taking part in fascist campaign against a queer minority" would be more fitting.

Perfumery can only be learned through a LOT of practice. Any of the other stuff is really about access, employment, preferences and more.

For once, I’m looking for advice [on the INTERNET? Are you quite well?] and since I don’t have much of a presence here, this might be DOA. #indiepress and #selfpublish people, niche #authors - I’ve written a multidisciplinary book & would love self pub recs & top tips.

I always think of Futurama when this topic comes up (but on a serious note - this is a thoughtful thread).

That’s a great example. I think people have a hard time because there’s a bit of a fear that haunts western rational liberal thinking about the fragility and limits of our rationality, which is part of what drives the cultural obsession with exotic representations of cults, brainwashing, etc.

The same people who know you can’t cost-cut a business into growth would have the world believe people can cost-cut their lives to get out of extreme poverty.

“It’s just a tool! People used to hate on photoshop too.” Take away my photoshop, take away my tablets, I can still draw. Take away your plagiarism machine and what are you gonna do? Shout prompts at me?

Don’t mind me, just up in here posting a thirst trap. Will not delete later. #art #ThirstTrap

The capacity for denial might simultaneously be the most useful and most deadly human trait. Some of the current burnout comes from trying to switch between the type that helps us survive & the type that needs to be challenged.

Thank you for the lovely mention!

Everyone wrote about "agent" like it was "promising." Why are we treating OpenAI like a gifted child? If I submitted a blog post that I typed with my elbows and some of the words were right would you say this was a promising new modality of writing?