I’m currently working with an agency in the Czech Republic to move to Prague. It’s been a pain in the ass compared to China and Korea, but I’m hoping it will be worth it. I have an appointment to drop off my long term visa application in a couple weeks, so hopefully I can get out soon. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

If my application gets denied, my backup plan is to get an agency to help me find a job in either Spain or Japan.

The idea of ‘cancelling’ is public relations spin to shield people who did shitty things from accountability. A few years ago people were trying to hold people like Louis CK, Harvey Weinstein, and Kevin Spacey accountable for hurting people. Their fixers pitched it to the media as an irrational mob trying to cancel anyone who doesn’t agree with them. When people are like ‘They tried to cancel Baby Yoda!’ after there was a mild reaction to a plotpoint in the Mandalorian tv show, they’re falling prey to this manipulation of public opinion. A lot of minor celebrities claim to be ‘cancelled’ in order to appear counter-culture, but usually they’re inflating false information about themselves to make it appear like they’re a target of an irrational mob, or they’re trying to cover for true information about them. Think of the number of people who have claimed to have been cancelled in their Netflix specials, or the number of people who have been confirmed to have abused their partners and still get to come back for the next Marvel or DC movie. The reaction against ‘cancelling’ was so much greater than the reaction against abuse because people were convinced they could be cancelled at any moment for any reason, and it’s made online discourse immeasurably worse.

Currently in the US, my full time job pays me every two weeks (May is a three paycheck month for us). It’s a professional level job, but we’re not overtime exempt, so I only work 40 hours a week or I need to take flex time to balance it out the next week. I sometimes work 9 or 10 hour days, but that just means I get to leave early on Friday.

My part time tutoring job pays once a month, I turn in teaching reports at the end of the week and they use that to calculate hours.

When I was teaching in China I’d get paid on the first of the month, never had any problems with delays, but that might be owed to being a foreign teacher.

When I was in Korea they’d pay twice a month, with the only delay being the first paycheck where they forgot to take down my banking information and the last paycheck that I had to fight HR for.

The current connotation is a marketing term for a series of computer models that generate text, images, and video, none of which is actually artificially intelligent, but which many people have been swept up in with various promises of a future that’s almost certain to never materialize.

If they’re still alive and still benefitting from said art and still harming people, no. Any time, money, or attention you give to them enables them to hurt other people.

A couple years ago I saw a band I really liked live. They were really important to me because their music helped me get through the collapse of one of my past relationships. Then it came out that the singer had hurt multiple people in multiple cities on their tour. So now if I stream their music, or buy their merch, or even just listen to their music alone, it’ll be materially supporting a person’s ability to hurt other people.

It’s much easier to separate art from people who are no longer around to hurt other people. I don’t feel bad for appreciating Guernica or reading Infinite Jest because doing so doesn’t support the artists behind them causing harm.

Ocarina of Time is my GOAT. Finishing it as a kid and realizing that games could be more than just killing time, that they could be epic journeys with satisfying endings, that they could be a whole art form was really transformative.

I saw someone in advertising a few days ago saying that using AI generated images in their ads kills their sales with gen Z. Gen Z can spot errors in shadows, inconsistencies in textures, small tells that boomers and gen X largely can’t. As a millennial, I can spot a lot of AI, though every so often something slips through. But when I see a youtube channel with an AI generated image, or a business with an AI generated advertisement, or a game on steam with AI generated thumbnails, I click the three dots and ignore.

I think most advertising companies are going to find that the more Gen Z and millennial customers they have, the less they’re going to want to use generated images.

It’s good you’re being cautious about it but it would be better to not use it at all. A recent Scientific American article showed that AI autofill suggestions change how people think about a subject just through suggestion, even if they don’t use the autofill. And people who use it are often unaware of their own knowledge gaps, so self-reporting about effectiveness is useless. Using it even a little bit is probably putting metaphorical micro-plastics in your brain.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/ https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/

Protect your brain

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My current list of reasons why you shouldn’t use generative AI/LLMs

A) because of the environmental impacts and massive amount of water used to cool data centers https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117

B) because of the negative impacts on the health and lives of people living near data centers https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

C) because they’re plagiarism machines that are incapable of creating anything new and are often wrong https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-ai-limit-our-creativity/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/06/20/why-ai-has-a-plagiarism-problem/

D) because using them negatively affects artists and creatives and their ability to maintain their livelihoods https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374523000316 https://www.insideradio.com/free/media-industry-continues-reshaping-workforce-in-2025-amid-digital-shift/article_403564f7-08ce-45a1-9366-a47923cd2c09.html

E) because people who use AI show significant cognitive impairments compared to people who don’t https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

F) because using them might break your brain and drive you to psychosis https://theweek.com/tech/spiralism-ai-religion-cult-chatbot https://mental.jmir.org/2025/1/e85799 https://youtu.be/VRjgNgJms3Q

G) because Zelda Williams asked you not to https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r0erqk18jo https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-07/zelda-williams-calls-out-ai-video-of-late-father-robin-williams/105863964

H) because OpenAI is helping Trump bomb schools in Iran https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/06/openai-pentagon-tech-surveillance-us-citizens/88983682007/

I) because RAM costs have skyrocketed because OpenAI has used money it doesn’t have to purchase RAM from Nvidia that currently doesn’t exist to stock data centers that also don’t currently exist, inconveniencing everyone for what amounts to speculative construction https://www.theverge.com/news/839353/pc-ram-shortage-pricing-spike-news

J) because Sam Altman says that his endgame is to rent knowledge back to you at a cost https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-intelligence-will-be-a-utility-and-hes-just-the-man-to-collect-the-bills-2000732953

K) because some AI bro is going to totally ignore all of this and ask an LLM to write a rebuttal rather than read any of it.

Trust me, I know. They won’t stop at people of color, they won’t stop at Jews, they won’t stop at trans people, they won’t stop at queer people, they won’t stop at white women, they won’t stop at poor white people. They’ll redefine whiteness and maleness and citizenship as many times as they need to in order to take as much power and wealth as they can. But the question was specifically about the people ICE had snatched up

Stephen Miller and Donald Trump and all of those people in the Epstein cohort are white supremacists, they want all nonwhite people to die or become slaves. They might deny that, they’ll say “Oh no, we just want immigrants to come in through proper channels,” but you can look at their treatment of Native Americans and see who they really are. The endgame is just that anyone who’s not white is no longer alive, no longer in the US, or no longer a free person.

Yeah, that headline is incorrect. The laws are there specifically to surveil adults, “for child safety” is a smokescreen justification. This isn’t a “we tried to do a good thing, but there’s this unfortunate side effect,” the surveillance was the goal.