My friend, also naturalized and from Venezuela, knows he’s not safe. We’ve talked. It sucks.

I think you’re saying that we/I in the USA still see/have the trappings of normalcy: ads for BB&B, our Amazon packages are still delivered, we still have our treats.

Y’all outside of the USA don’t care about our treats. Y’all’s news is showing all the human rights erosions and ignoring that I got new prescription glasses by mail just 2 business days after ordering them (what a successful and stable country this must be/s!).

(sidenote, maybe prescription glasses aren’t treats, but I’m very excited because my prescription has changed and maybe I will stop with these eye strain headaches)

I don’t know what my dad’s death certificate says, just that when the doctors removed him from the breathing machine he died. I blame Obamacare. /s

(And I haaaate when people ask me what “he really died of”. Like, seriously. Do they hear themselves?)

Also that the COVID death numbers were inflated because COVID doesn’t kill people, pneumonia and not breathing kills people.

TIL. I’ve bought freeze dried lamb lung for my pups (they love it), but didn’t realize lung is banned for human consumption in the USA.

Oh yeah, I get that there’s more than 2 reasons to be upset about AI scraping. I work in the academic library world and the vibe here is

1. bots are rude
2. AI is not a reliable source of facts

We work with facts and information, and I have no expectation that my collection of facts is something to defend against replication.

On the other hand, I’d be pissed AF if someone stole my research paper on 1800s family drama and reprinted it without attribution, or AI-hallucinated new pseudo-facts that were not in the source materials.

Edit: my situation isn’t that of others and I totally get why artists and authors would be upset about AI bots stealing their work.

Tbh, I’d be less testy about bots scraping my sites for AI input IF they respected my robots.txt file and didn’t slam the server. They’re just rude and I don’t like it. Sometimes they’re so rude it’s effectively a DOS attack.

Tbh, my sites exist to get information out there and I don’t care if someone mirrors my sites, as long as the information is still accurate.