Popular Comments Across MetaFilter

By jscalzi in "Zero Sum Gaming the System" on MeFi

jscalzi — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:21:03 GMT

Fuck all this, I'm going to write however the fuck I want to write, and if some "AI"-detecting "AI" says I write like a machine, it's because the fucking machine was illegally trained on my fucking writing and it and anyone else who says I write like "AI" can go fuck themselves.

PS: fuck

By flabdablet in "Size matters" on MeFi

flabdablet — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:01:58 GMT

as the doctor at the Tennessee Men's Clinic put it, "It isn't going to look like your God-given penis, only larger. It's going to look like you've had work done."

mar a lago face for dicks

By philip-random in "The creative writing students using AI to write fiction" on MeFi

philip-random — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:59:51 GMT

from the article:

Going forward, my policy is now plainly stated: I don't want students using AI to write their work. I want their words. I want access to their thinking, their voice, their struggles to find what they want to say and the best way to say it. I want to see what happens when someone tries to move through language without an intermediary finishing the thought.

This is a pedagogical position, not a moral or technical one. The workshop only works if there's a writer in the room, someone whose thinking is visible on the page, and who can speak directly to that thinking. Using AI to write not only nullifies the entire peer review concept – we're here to workshop each other, not to workshop AI slop – it also guarantees a weakening of the muscles needed to wrestle with writing.

works for me

By Sing Or Swim in "The creative writing students using AI to write fiction" on MeFi

Sing Or Swim — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:18:28 GMT

How would you feel about people who responded to the Trump administration this way? 'Look, Trump ISN'T GOING AWAY. The train has left the station, maybe we should just reassess what it means to have democracy, freedom, and human rights.'

>a writing course might be better off just accepting AI and teaching students how to use it,

Reading and writing are how we learn to think. Using AI doesn't help you do those things, it prevents you from having to do them.

In design as well, there's no "learning how to use it". It's not a tool. It is a dispenser. What it dispenses is mostly determined by 1.) randomization, and 2.) the training data. Its purpose is to make expertise irrelevant, and produce some lowest-common-denominator slop so that people don't have to pay human designers.

>This is a chance to both educate students about AI and also re-assess what it means to teach students writing.

Why on earth would you reassess what it means to teach people writing? You can't teach people to write by using a thing that does the writing for them. Why would we redefine 'writing' for the convenience of billionaires who are trying to put everybody in the world out of work, and who don't care if you don't know how to read or write? Because we already lost and we should just accept it?

By an octopus IRL in "The creative writing students using AI to write fiction" on MeFi

an octopus IRL — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:10:58 GMT

I do wonder, though, if this train has fully left the station and a writing course might be better off just accepting AI and teaching students how to use it, instead of pushing against it.

I will not go gentle into that good night.

By tommasz in ""What do you think happens when we die?"" on MeFi

tommasz — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:14:47 GMT

I lost my wife of 42+ years in March, and this just broke me. It's the truest thing anyone has ever said.

By jokeefe in ""the biggest student data privacy disaster in history"" on MeFi

jokeefe — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:27:34 GMT

Can't these people do something useful for once (release the full Epstein files, for example)?

By Mayor West in "What's a hunch you've had that turned out to be true? Free Thread!" on MeFi

Mayor West — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:18:56 GMT

Not at all related to the prompt, but something I wanted to share.

It is just happenstance that things lined up this way, but: on the first day of Mental Health Awareness Month, my already-extremely-mental-health-aware self had the second large-scale breakdown it has experienced in as many years. Horrible anxiety, crushing depression, and a general sense of hopelessness that has destroyed both my personal and professional lives, twice in recent memory. As I began filling out my FMLA paperwork yet again, I was fortunate enough to have my longtime psychiatrist squeeze me in for an appointment. As I rattled off my list of symptoms, I used a couple of phrases I hadn't before, describing things like "feels like I'm driving a car but the steering and the brakes don't really work" and "but the worst part is, I have moments where I feel unstoppable, and I can do things at my old pace and feel like I'm not a man-shaped pile of garbage for a few hours before I crash and it's even worse".

I could almost hear the click in the brain of aforementioned psychiatrist. She prescribed me something to break a manic episode in bipolar patients, and. You guys. Is this what regular people feel like all the time? No racing thoughts, no free-associative maelstrom of doom-and-gloom, no constant roaring chorus of disapproval? Because that's what it's been like in my brain for literally my entire adult life, becoming more debilitating with every passing year. Over 20 years I've bounced off of half a dozen therapists who kept trying to teach me strategies to avert catastrophizing behaviors or redirect intrusive thoughts, because how do you avert them when the tone and message change every half-second and you're fully engulfed in the next awful speculation before you have time to even contemplate the first?

Now it's... quiet. You don't notice quiet, typically, even after a barrage of noise, because it's a return to what you consider "normal." But what happens when your frame for "normal" has been warped by decades of disordered thinking? I don't know what to do in the silence. I've been burning 95% of my brain's bandwidth maintaining walls to segment off the noise, and now it's just... gone. I can focus on something without struggling to keep out the interloping distractions and uncontrollable urges to gameplan the dozen different ways things could go wrong. On Thursday it was a beautiful day and the magnolia blossoms were in full bloom and on the way to pick up my son from school I rolled the windows down and sang along to the music because there was nothing competing with it for my attention. The last time I did that, we were all wearing New Year's Eve glasses with two big 0's for eyes.

I went from the worst anxiety episode of my life, to a heretofore-unknown calm, in a little less than 48 hours from the time I took that first dose of haldol. It's scary, haldol is. It's embedded in my mind as the stuff they use to anesthetize psych ward patients suffering from delusions, Nurse Ratched style. No one wants to swap "anxious neurotic" for "comatose burnout." But all it does is rebalance some desperately-overtaxed dopamine receptors. You don't even have to stay on it to reap the long-term benefits, after you break the cycle. I've been taking it for nine days. And, my dudes: what if it could be like this all the time?

By stilgar in "Welcome to the life of a beta mother" on MeFi

stilgar — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:56:36 GMT

Just throwing out that the idea that a mom, or a couple have to do all the child raising is a pretty new thing. We used to have communal structures that helped ease the load on parents, and we could go back to that if we want. There have also been social models in some countries where the state offers help in the form of free child care, and other services. We could also try that again.

We also have a strange cultural fascination with moms, and their activities, even going so far as to blame them for mental conditions a child might be born with.

Taken together it feels like a hyper-individualist society run by patriarchal capitalists ideals is leading to a lot of suffering.

By Imperfect in "The creative writing students using AI to write fiction" on MeFi

Imperfect — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:28:40 GMT

If it's to be a workshop on learning how to write well, you absolutely have to actually write. You cannot let AI in this class in the same way you could not let students have ghost-writers. I can't believe that's even vaguely controversial or non-obvious.

Once you allow students to effectively turn in something that is not their own work, you have changed the nature of the course entirely, and you may add well rewrite the syllabus and rename the course. I can suggest a few:

"Plagiarism 101"
"Pretending To Write Without Putting In Effort"
"Giving Up And Giving In"
"Whatever, Everyone Gets An A, You're All Just Chasing Grades Anyway."

By Frowner in "Size matters" on MeFi

Frowner — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:26:01 GMT

Yeah, my goodness, this is sad.

Culture is so sad lately. It really is so kind of apotheosis of the awful, all enabled by clicks and misery.

In some ways being a fat, homely weirdo has served me well - I absolutely had to seek out people who would like me for myself, because no amount of striving was going to turn me into a slim, attractive, normatively socially adroit person. But I could see that if you were a regular person but insecure, you might very well think "ah ha, this one modification and then I will be PERFECTLY HAPPY". In the long run, I really think you're better off if you don't fit in and have to deal with that rather than if you do fit in and have to worry about losing your place.

By Pendragon in "the blood dripping from his mouth and eyes" on MeFi

Pendragon — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:44:20 GMT

Or a Samantha Bee. I miss Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

By pdb in "The creative writing students using AI to write fiction" on MeFi

pdb — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:22:58 GMT

in_lieu_of_fiction: "Can you imagine taking a class from this insufferable pedant? "

"Going forward, my policy is now plainly stated: I don't want students using AI to write their work. I want their words. I want access to their thinking, their voice, their struggles to find what they want to say and the best way to say it. I want to see what happens when someone tries to move through language without an intermediary finishing the thought."

WHAT A MONSTER

I'd rather have a professor challenge me to use my brain in a writing class than accept the outsourcing of my brain in order to complete a task. The point of writing is not to check a box saying I DID A WRITING. The point is to take your life and filter it through your own words, in your own way, whatever that way is. That's what this professor is asking of his students, nothing more. And he's going to encourage them to do it. I see nothing pedantic about that.

By honey-barbara in "What's a hunch you've had that turned out to be true? Free Thread!" on MeFi

honey-barbara — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:31:08 GMT

It is not my intuition as such but yeeeeaaaars ago, maybe 25-30 years ago, I was into seeing palmists, psychometrists, psychics, getting my tarot read - a phase that lasted for about three months after a tough break up. This one fortune teller said I had an older sister and I said nah, I am the oldest. She looked really perplexed and asked more questions. Had I lost a child? Had I lost a close female relative? I guess I showed a 'ha, you're a phoney!' face because she said, "I have a distinct image of a young girl of three or four on a farm, and your mother's deep feeling for her" but then dropped it. She didn't really recover in the session, although she was kind and professional. Another person at a similar psychic fair also asked about the older sister.

You can probably see where this is going. I didn't think of this interaction much as it was amongst many other psychic reading episodes and I moved on to do something else with my break up feelings, including eschewing all woo angles of vision on my destiny. But five years later, a year after my mother died, my maternal aunt set up a dinner and overnight stay for me with her out in the country. She gently told me that I had an older sister that my mother had relinquished when she was a teenager. She was telling me because my mother's ovarian cancer gave her daughters a risk factor and this other daughter should know to get scanned regularly. The weird thing I felt was recognition of something I had known.

It became a quest for me to find this child and let her know about her genetic inheritance. My husband at the time helped me with Child Services in Western Australia. I discovered through my interactions with them that a family member comes looking for a person like I was looking for a person *every day* in that department. I learned further that 80,000 babies in our small population state had been 'adopted' [some were illegally taken and many aboriginal women, and white women, were lied to about their babies which were reported to the mothers as stillborn] up to the 1980s. Women were shamed and in many cases beaten and verbally abused during their labour. They could not see their babies after birthing them. My mother was fortunate enough to have an influential and supportive aunt who attended the birth, so she was able to hold her child, but she was seized before the 24 hour legal limit stipulated by law. She was left with the hospital and legal transfer bills, as a teenager.

I guess the upshot of this is that the image of the little girl at 3 is significant. I found out that, very sadly, she had died in a farm accident at the age of three. She had been adopted by a loving German family who had taken up farming in a town not more than 2 hours away from where I grew up on a farm.

I am not a person who puts any stock in psychics or that family of information, but this chapter does make me feel that there are all kinds of ways of knowing.

By BlahLaLa in "Boston Moving Day conundrum " on Ask MeFi

BlahLaLa — Sat, 09 May 2026 01:42:57 GMT

You know, I have to say that I happened to look at Metatalk and see the thing about Metafilter on Reddit, and I hopped over there just in time to see the people there making fun of this question and me. Huh. I really feel like this is an authentic ask, but I guess to defend myself, let me say that I myself have had the great good fortune not to have moved since literally the mid-90s. At that time, Mr. Blah and I didn't own much and we were able to do it ourselves, plus we had a full month of overlap between the purchase of our first home and our old rental lease expiring.

And KidBlah, who is really wonderful, is straight out of undergrad and working a 70-80 hour week + travel more weeks than not, and is 3000 miles away from here, and doesn't know how to handle it since it's his first-ever move, with the added difficulty of Boston's famous Moving Day.

Under those circumstances, I don't think it's particularly idiotic for me to ask this question, even if someone on Reddit has a hot take on my use of the word "conundrum."

It feels really shitty for people to be making fun of me, even if they're anonymous, but I guess I'll just have to get over that. I sure wish I hadn't seen that. I feel like I contribute to this community, and I don't feel that this ask was out of line, or particularly stupid. As a matter of fact, I don't think it's learned helplessness, as someone over there said. I think it's the opposite of that: admitting that there's something we don't know how to do and asking for someone to teach me so that I can then do it.

I'll close by saying an authentic thank-you to those who have offered suggestions and solutions.

By Very Much A Work In Progress in "The creative writing students using AI to write fiction" on MeFi

Very Much A Work In Progress — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:03:57 GMT

I really appreciate this article.

The danger isn't that AI will replace writers or render the workshop obsolete. It's that students are becoming accustomed to bypassing the friction that once revealed their process.

This line really grabbed me. I am weirdly reminded of the mid-late 20th century idea that modern nutrition should be concerned with separating out the useless cruft from our food, leaving only the essential nutrients. It turns out that the useless cruft was fiber, a thing our bodies very much for digestion and gut health.

This friction that the professor speaks of seems to be an intellectual fiber, the raw stuff that the mind needs to grab onto and work over to process the essential nutrients of lived experience.

By Wordshore in "The fall of the House of Starmer" on MeFi

Wordshore — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:36:10 GMT

The Brexit (advisory) vote was on 23 June 2016.

Since then we've had/endured Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and Starmer as UK Prime Minister.

There's now a distinct chance this basket case island will be onto Prime Mister #7 (or a deputy acting as caretaker until #7 takes over) by the 10th anniversary of that socio-economic suicide referendum.

By flabdablet in "Size matters" on MeFi

flabdablet — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:56:55 GMT

when I asked Jim Capalbo, the PR person for PhalloFILL, how business was going, he said growth was exploding

that's a malpractice suit right there, surely

By blnkfrnk in "Boston Moving Day conundrum " on Ask MeFi

blnkfrnk — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:24:10 GMT

What you do is distribute the tasks further out and live with some inconvenience. Also, since there are limited cleaning and moving pros in town, book way way way ahead to reserve yours.

Uhaul pods are a great option if you don't have a car or don't want to deal with moving all your stuff into temporary storage. You reserve the pod and movers, the movers show up and pack all your stuff in the pod, the pod lives in storage until you summon it and the movers bring it to your new place.

1) Late June, early July: Pack a couple bags: just the bare essentials like a set of a week's worth of clothes, 1 cup, bowl, spoon, frying pan, and coffeemaker, etc., and anything precious enough that he'll move it himself. Book your pro cleaner, movers/packers/Uhaul pod, and potentially a motel for 8/30-9/3 NOW. Buy an air mattress if the bed is leaving before you are.

2)Begin packing everything not precious or necessary into boxes that you stage by the door. Packers/movers are faster and cheaper if they mostly are moving boxes and furniture, not actually putting things in the boxes.

3) Early August: put stuff in storage by yourself, or attend the U-haul Pod appointment in early August that you booked earlier. Appointments take a couple hours if you have just a regular apartment's worth of stuff.

4) Late August: now that 90% of your possessions are not in the apartment, all of your spare time is now spent cleaning. Clear areas and do not use them again. If you hired a pro cleaner, pre clean for them but let them do the heavy work. If you booked a motel, swap all your items over there so you no longer have to worry about messing up the old apartment.

4a) On 9/1 about 30 minutes before your walkthrough with former landlord, Swiffer the apartment for last minute dust. Just before they are to arrive, spray a cleaner with a strong smell into the air throughout. Smell is very powerful; the landlord will perceive it as cleaner than it is if it smells "clean."

5) Sept 1: Hand-carry your precious and necessary items to your new place. Sept 2-3 or later, start moving items out of storage or summon the pod. Since you and your stuff are basically safe, you can now work on setting up your new apartment at your leisure.

By potrzebie in "The creative writing students using AI to write fiction" on MeFi

potrzebie — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:34:33 GMT

It's wild to me anyone is in here defending using AI for a creative writing course! Why even take a creative writing class at all if you don't want to do any creative writing?!