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Scylla Rhiadra

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Scylla Rhiadra last won the day on March 11

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    Women, Life, Freedom #مهسا_امینی

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  1. This is fine, I suppose, so long as AI-based NPCs are clearly labelled as such. If I end up wasting so much as 30 seconds "interacting" with "someone" whom I subsequently discover is an LLM-based NPC, I will be beyond pissed.
  2. THAT is the key, and the reason that I marvel at CDS's continued success. I speak from personal experience when I say that it can be a real struggle to keep engagement in groups that require community engagement. Anyone can put together a successful one-time event: it's maintaining that engagement over the long term, even when it's not "fun" to be engaged, that is the hard part. I think it's wonderful that CDS has managed it, and wish I knew what their secret sauce was.
  3. Thanks Spiffy! Yes, the gallery owner tracked the spamming object to a neighbour's parcel, and it was removed about 6 or so hours later. In other good news, my own contributions to the event's total donations, from sales of my pics along with my matching donation, is now just shy of L$7000, so that's nice! ETA: Thanks to a VERY generous donation from everyone's favourite arsonist, I was able to send along L$10,000 to the cause, for disbursement to Medicin sans Frontieres. Woot! Thank you to EVERYONE who contributed! It will make a real difference to people's lives!
  4. So, some absolute IDIOT has griefed the gallery hosting the MSF / Doctors without Borders in Ukraine exhibition with spamming particle memes (swastikas, communist flags, etc., the usual 4Chan garbage). I've reported it of course and notified the gallery owner -- I don't have full land perms there so I can't do anything about it myself, although I did track down the jerk who did it. What kind of an absolute POS would grief an exhibition raising money to help RL victims of war? I really don't get people sometimes.
  5. Funnily, I actually first read it as "the start of my virgin story" -- and the differences between our misreading probably say a lot about us . . . 😏
  6. By-the-book Gor is certainly pretty awful, but there have been "variant" versions, including, in SL at least, so-called "feminist Gor." Once you've strayed that far, however, I think you've left Norman and his books so far behind that you might just as well not reference them at all. BDSM, properly understood (and there are a LOT of BDSMers in SL who don't understand it), is so much more varied and, yes, based on equitable principles. It's not at all my thing (and I have issues with its underlying principles) but at its best it is loving, respectful, and can be very playful. In fact, most of the BDSMers I know personally (and my best friend in SL is a Domme) would argue (and I'd agree) that, at its most fundamental, the relationship between a Dom/me and a sub should be as much about mutual love, care, and real joy as any "vanilla" relationship is. You can even argue -- and my best friend does! -- that BDSMers are more aware and careful about boundaries than are most vanilla couples. I think there's probably something to that.
  7. I think it will settle down once the actual benefits and limitations of AI become more evident, and the inevitable hype cycle has passed. I think AI is certainly going to have an enormous impact on . . . everything. But I'm reasonably hopeful that we'll be managing it sensibly before any really lasting damage is incurred. New technologies are like this, right? In an academic context, I remember 15 years ago when the hype was around "MOOCs," or "Massively Online Open Courses," with 10s or even 100s of thousands of students enrolled in a single online course with automated grading and evaluation, etc. MOOCs were going to render mortar-and-brick universities obsolete, and put most academics out of a job. Well, we have more online courses now, for sure, although that may owe more to COVID than to MOOC hype. But universities aren't going anywhere.
  8. No, it's not, as you say, especially new -- in fact, I had an extended discussion (a mostly friendly one, happily) on my blog 10 years ago on just this subject with an academic who had published a piece in an Eslevier journal on marriage in Second Life. But there is a difference between "cost sharing" when one is distributing the costs among non-profit institutions and organizations, and essentially subsidizing enormously profitable megacorporations who are simultaneously also attempting to corner the market on access to academic research. In Canada, the Tri-Council granting agencies (SSHRCC, NSERC, and CIRH) moved to a model about 10 years ago that made open-access publication of supported research a compulsory component of the grant. Because, on average, the fees for a Gold Open Access publication are in the US$2500-3500 range, researchers are forced to build such fees into their grant applications, with the result that the government is essentially subsidizing enormously wealthy publishers who were actually restricting access to publication for the right to make available government-funded work that was intended to be public. It's also had the effect that it's now difficult to write and publish academic work without a grant if you want it published in a high-profile journal (as one generally does for a variety of reasons, as I'm sure you know), because most ordinary academics can't afford the open access publication fees. The entire system has pivoted so that it is centred on the financial well-being of the for-profit publishing companies. If it's not in some ways benefiting an Eslevier or a Springer, that odds are increasingly that it's going to be difficult to publish academic research in a form that is high-impact.
  9. Journals, or at least the good ones, are edited and managed by academics who receive no financial compensation for their work, in exactly the same way that academics aren't paid for the scholarly articles they submit for publication. Publishing academic work is simply part of most academics' job description. A great many journals publish at a loss, and are kept afloat only through grant money or institutional support. It's a really precarious existence, sometimes. But increasingly over the past 30 or more years the old model has been challenged by huge publishing conglomerates, such as Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, etc., that DO work on a for-profit model, and are quite happy not merely to cut corners to increase profitability, but also seek to paywall everything. In fact, they will often charge authors for the right to publish their own research. Many institutions and governments now insist that government- or institutionally-supported academic research (i.e., books and articles) also be made available in some form (usually a pre-print version) freely, as an "open access text." Generally, in order to do that, the author has to pay the publisher for the right to print an early draft in open access. This is what is sometimes called the "Gold Open Access" model, and it literally means that you are paying Elsevier or whomever for the right to disseminate your own research. tl;dr -- the system sucks, academic publishing is becoming more and more corrupt and ethically suspect, and researchers are losing control over their own research.
  10. Well, this is Elsevier which, despite being one of the largest and most important academic publishers in the world (they own Lancet, which is the premier medical journal in the world), is also notorious for . . . dumb and highly questionable doings. They're unethical as hell, and got caught a few decades back "publishing" fake medical journals in order to boost their metrics.
  11. Academic Twitter, or at least my little corner of it, has been full of discussion about the intrusion of AI into published STEM research. This is a screenshot from an actual article published by (of course) Elsevier:
  12. We have a dedicated senior administrator with staff who is now tasked with developing a university-wide policy on, and approach to AI. Most of us assumed that the point of the appointment was to develop ways to deal more effectively with submitted work "authored" by AI but submitted as the student's (or researcher's) own. Wrong! He's an enthusiastic advocate, and tells everyone who listens how AI is going to be a wonderful cost- and time-saving tool!
  13. I received an email yesterday from a graduate student researcher who wants to talk with me because he is working on a form of AI that will automate the grading of work (essays and essay answers for tests) submitted by students in the Humanities. In other words, we'll apparently soon have AI grading student work generated by AI. No humans necessary at all! The Singularity has arrived.
  14. Yes, it's an utterly appalling concept. It is premised on the idea that women are naturally inferior and submissive to men: so-called "free women" are considered unfortunate because they have not yet been claimed by a man. In the novels in any case, physical punishment and even femicide are considered acceptable ways of "managing" one's women. I quote again John Norman, speaking in his own voice in an interview from 2011: Norman actually wrote a "guide" to RL sex built on these sorts of principles. But that's not to say that all Gorean RP need be equally appalling. There are Gorean "lifestylers" in SL, people (oddly enough, mostly men) who actually believe this crap. But there are also a great many who just RP it because they find the idea fun and sexy. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, but that's me. You should ask @Amina Sopwith about it, however: she has some utterly hilarious stories about Gorean RP. ETA: One final point: Gor is not BDSM. It lacks the fundamental focus upon consent and power-exchange upon which BDSM is premised, and, unlike BDSM, it is also fundamentally gendered.. And in fact Norman himself has said that he dislikes BDSM, because it is not "beautiful" in the way that a one-sided gendered relationship is.
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