i cant even

i like visual novels

[megaceros]

All of the canidae! (fixed the raccoon, who was a common raccoon dog and added the red wolf :3)

[megaceros]

all the seaaaals!

[diseases-for-center-control]

yayyyyy hard times!! yayyyy

[parkchanwoohoo]

Heard this stupid dad joke that killed me: Which Chinese word takes the longest to write? "Friend" (朋友) because it takes two months just to write half of it

[parkchanwoohoo]

Which character is faster, hot (热) or cold (冷)? Obviously hot, which has 4 legs to cold's 1

[parkchanwoohoo]

Why do Chinese vampires hate spicy food? They only drink 不辣的

[claire-witch-project]

[official-linguistics-post]

official orthographic comedy post

[botanyshitposts]

scientists in the 1990s, putting a Get More Purple gene attached to a harmless plant virus into an already purple petunia: please get more purple

the petunia, sensing an apparent honest to god Get More Purple Disease, using the previously undiscovered RNAi antiviral ability to shut down all other purple genes along with it just in case: you put VIRUS in petunia? you infect her with the More Purple?? oh! oh! her children shall bloom white! jail for mother, jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

[flipocrite]

[clickityweasel]

[catboybiologist]

Btw the thing this discovered is like. A foundational lab technique now and has revolutionized genetics

[bogleech]

Its been a month since the last time I went on this same tangent but neural networks, their history, their potential, and the intentions behind those who pioneered them are actually all really fucking incredible and cool and it cannot be emphasized enough how unfairly they've been perverted by capitalism right now. Some of you think you understand that but I still see you very quick to dismiss that there was ever any merit to the technology at all.

The data centers aren't needed for it to exist, or even for it to be used for entertainment or novelty. The data centers are because it's being crammed into a billion times more than that, because they're inserting it into literally everything several billion people are using every second of every day.

[weenie-extraordinaire]

I remember years ago reading about how excited medical researchers were, because they created one of those that scanned like, 20,000 healthy scans of tissue, and a thousand scans of unhealthy tissue, and they started feeding it scans of tissue and it would identify healthy from unhealthy tissue with a staggeringly high accuracy rate? I remember it was being touted as a medical breakthrough.

[bogleech]

This is still advancing as far as I know. Picking things out from sets is one thing that it's best at!

But there's a downside we unfortunately all could have guessed, too, which is that actual doctors using ai assistance become more careless and lazy at doing it themselves.

https://archive.ph/whVMI

...On the other hand, though, pretty much all medical work has BEEN understaffed, pretty much always, and the staff they have is therefore constantly over-worked, right?

Virtually everyone is overworked in all industries. That's...the original reason we wanted robots.

So I have to wonder, like, is it also possible the human's "20% drop in effectiveness" is just what it looks like when something else can shoulder what was already unhealthy burden? Was the average doctor doing 20% more than the human brain and body was really comfortable handling? Would their personal efficiency have also similarly dropped a bit if they just had more human help, too?

This has still been a net positive where it's been implemented, with the combination of computer and human saving more lives together, but when lives are on the line we obviously still want both of those at their best.

[headspace-hotel]

ChatGPT is the same concept

understanding the actual scientific applications of neural networks makes it easier to understand what fucking garbage the AI chatbots and "Assistants" and this and that are.

Show it lots and lots of a certain thing, and it will become really really good at finding patterns in that thing.

But with the AI chat bots, the thing they showed it lots and lots of is...Language. they crammed every sentence on the whole entire internet into it basically

So the AI is really really good at finding patterns in...how people write sentences online.

Which means it can create sentences that follow the same patterns as sentences that real people write on the internet.

The devastating error has been that when "language" is the thing the AI is trained on, people mistakenly think that the AI "knows" a lot about the things the sentences appear to be about and not sentences themselves

[depsidase]

[enki2]

[thebdelliumlady]

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.

[chapscher]

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).

[maryoliveoil]

ChatGPT's Impact On Our Brains According to an MIT Study

The study, from MIT Lab scholars, measured the brain activity of subjects writing SAT essays with and without ChatGPT.

The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.

[tpwrtrmnky]

"Net zero information post" is funny and all but I really like when a false claim is debunked and then supplemented with an explanation of where the error came from and like, extra information that helps inoculate against future misinfo

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[beemovieerotica]

[nawilla]

I don't know whether the ancient continents would lend themselves to tornado development, but I imagine a sauropod faced with high winds (tornado, tropical storm, sandstorm) would probably lay down and tuck in head and tail like a camel and hope not to die, rather than get lifted up like that cow in Twister. That being said, I also wonder if evidence of tornadoes would show up in the fossil record.

[calware]

i really love this genre of image

[lunarthesugarglider]

[villaqueen]

The best part of that video is that the owner found the ORIGINAL plush later on the beach and took another video with it after their grandmother stitched it back up

[i-am-a-lonely-nerd]

I love the death grip after the toy was fixed up. Lessons were learned. Try to steal it this time you fucking bird. I dare you.

[bovineblogger]

can you guys watch my squab for me im gonna go on my smoko

[kcrossvine]

baby need smoko

[bovineblogger]

BABY DOES NOT NEED SMOKO

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

my toxic xennial trait is that i believe something should either be software (in which case after i download it i shouldn't need to be connected to use it) or a web page (which shouldn't require me to download anything to use it, however badly, in a browser). fuck your mandatory single function constant connection apps

[opiates]

cats will be like please i need you to watch me wiggle around on this carpet please hey look look please look at me i’m wiggling

[gracefelldownaflightofstairs]

I love showing my non-Doctor Who friends the clip from the five doctors where everybody gets abducted by the weird triangles without context and refusing to elaborate

[polarity-disturbed]

I love this show

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yes.

[pi4nobl4ck]