PelicanPersuader

Lots of podcasts anymore have subscriber-only exclusive episodes. Is there any reliable place to find those? I'm interested in locating the episodes for podcasts like Savage Lovecast, Swindled, Dr. Death, and Sex and Politics.

I'm looking for a little advice because I'm feeling pretty lost. Without going too far into it, my manager at work is using things that she knows are part of my disability, autism, to give others a negative impression of my work performance and conduct, and causing me to be disciplined. I believe she's trying to have me fired or get me to quit. She's also been giving me an excessive workload, being rude, not giving me feedback or information, and outright lying about me. I've been with the company for almost a decade, she's been with it for less than two years, and I've never had any issues like this. I'd always disclosed my disability, which is how she knew about it, but never requested accommodations because no one gave me problems. My director and VP seem to be on her side and working with her to get rid of me.

After dealing with this for a few weeks and turning into a nervous, stressed out mess, I replied to an email she sent and outlined exactly how things she was saying was discrimination and a legal liability for the company. I asked to be reassigned to a different manager. I sent it to a bunch of higher ups on Friday evening, including the head of HR. I've also been going through the formal accommodation process and my doctor got them the paperwork on Thursday.

I'm now terrified to go into work on Monday. I'm scared I'm going to be dragged into a meeting room and intimidated into recanting my statements or told that what I've experienced isn't really discrimination. I'm worried they're going to say no to any accommodations, no matter how narrowly I've constructed them. I'm afraid they all hate me and want me gone or they're going to fire me. I don't want to go in at all.

I was wondering if anyone else has gone through anything like this and can give me advice for what to do beyond just documenting everything as I've already been doing. Has anyone dealt with this and come out on top? Had similar experiences? How do I not feel so afraid?

I watch a lot of commentary channels on YouTube. My feed is filled with hot takes on the latest online trends and happenings, often dealing with topics like racism, sexism, abuse, and harassment. More and more, I've noticed YouTubers bleeping (or rather muting) words that might be flagged as being "advertiser unfriendly" and get their videos demonetized. Sometimes that's profanity, but more often it's words like abuse, Holocaust, kill, suicide, sexual, and abortion. Words that aren't inherently 'bad' but that brands wouldn't want to be associated with videos containing them. Similarly, TikTok creators change the spelling of words or use other terms in their speech and captions to avoid filters there.

At the same time, I heard someone comment on how they keep hearing people in real life say 'unalive' rather than 'suicide', with the former being a word often used to avoid filters. There's no doubt that online terminology creeps into our real lives. We use words and phrases that originate online in our speech vocabulary and they become a part of our culture.

Lately I've had this creeping concern that the filtering of words that advertisers don't like will have a larger societal implication on kids growing up right now. I fear that they'll view normal words like abuse as 'bad' and avoid using them because creators online can't use them, and that the fight for abortion rights will be hindered because the very word abortion can't be said in videos. Maybe I'm overthinking it or being too much of a downer but every time I watch a video that removes a normal, innocent word, it makes me wonder what that means for society.

Do you think that advertisers and platforms discouraging words and topics which can be controversial will have larger effects on society?

I was thinking about this after a discussion at work about large language models (LLMs) - the initial scrape of the internet before Chat GPT become publicly usable was probably the last truly high quality scrape of human-made content any model will get. The second Chat GPT went public, the data pool became tainted with people publishing information from it. Future language models will have increasingly large percentages of their data tainted by AI-generated content, skewing the results away from how humans actually write. To get actual human content, they may need to turn to transcriptions of audio recordings or phone calls for training, and even that wouldn't be quite correct because people write differently than they speak.

I sort of wonder if eventually people will start being influenced in how they choose to write based on seeing this AI content. If teachers use AI-generated texts in school lessons, especially at lower levels, will that effect how kids end up writing and formatting their work? It's weird to think about the wider implications of how this AI stuff will ultimately impact society.

What's your predictions? Is there a future where AI can get a clean, human-made scrape? Are we doomed to start writing like AIs?

I'm a long time lover of filk, especially about space and scifi. This is an excellent compilation of classic songs.