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[sztupy]

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

[ayeforscotland]

Let’s fucking go

[made-in-manetheren]

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.

[depsidase]

[smol-blue-bird]

sometimes when I'm bored, I go through the list of recent bad faith Wikipedia edits that have since been reverted. a lot of them are politically contentious/offensive topics that attract crazies and trolls in general, but sometimes there are completely innocent inoffensive articles that people attack for no reason. some guy yesterday vandalized the article on the chemical element francium

[thirdchoiceurl]

Francium IS a stupid element. It has a half life of 22 minutes and barely exists at all, only naturally occurring as a product of the extremely rare alpha decay series ²³⁵U ➝ ²³¹Th ➝ ²³¹Pa (𝜷 decay) ➝ ²²⁷Ac ➝ ²²³Fr (1.38% chance). There’s less than a gram of it on earth at any given moment. It has no uses to anybody and it isn’t even the most reactive group 1A element due to relativistic effects fucking up its electron binding energies. Stupid substance.

If you somehow asked a genie to get you a gram of Francium in a sealed vial so you could do an experiment with it, the genie would just give it to you because the enormous amount of radioactivity it produces would instantly vaporize the sample and cook you alive. Absolute dogshit isotope and its synthetic siblings are just the same but worse

[bimyheel]

found the guy

[lawsofchaos1]

As a chemist, I agree that Francium is a stupid and useless element. Even the Royal Society of Chemistry agrees.

[sensiblereblogifposts]

Reblog if you think Francium is a stupid element

[kits-extreme-autism]

Fuck France, and fuck its stupid element

[hotleafbeverage-deactivated2024]

I think this does a bit of a disservice to Marguerite Perey!

The awesome (albeit French) physicist who discovered Francium. She was a student of Marie Curie and did a lot to advance the study of radioactive materials. She is one of the most sadly (in my opinion) overlooked women in scientific history.

[thirdchoiceurl]

Seeing my addition to this post going around again and this comment has prompted me to clarify something:

Marguerite Perey is one of the greatest radiochemists to ever live, and Francium is such a bullshit element that only an absolute master could identify and analyze it.

The short-lived intermediate actinide chain isotopes are mostly bullshit elements for a lot of the same reasons Francium is. Five of them (Radium, Radon, Astatine, Actinium, and Protactinium) are so scarce in nature and so ferociously radioactive that all of their names literally mean “unstable or radioactive element” because at the time of their discovery that was the only thing known about them. Isolating and identifying these bullshit elements demanded a total technical mastery of the cutting edge chemical and radiological analysis techniques in their time, as well as performing a tremendous amount of brutal physical labor. Preparing these extreme trace elements for study required processing thousands of pounds of raw uranium and thorium ores, often exposing the researchers and their assistants to high doses of radiation, just to obtain the extremely radioactive milligram-scale quantities of the intermediate isotopes they wished to study.

To even have the skills to identify Francium, Perey had to first spend years mastering the separation of transactinide decay products from raw mixed ore at the Radium Institute with her mentor and another true master in the field, Marie Skłodowska-Curie. Her work in Curie’s lab focused on the isolation and analysis of another previously discovered bullshit decay product, the obviously-named Actinium. Actinium occurs in high-grade natural uranium ores at a rate of 0.2 mg Ac/1000 kg ore, a concentration of 0.0000002%wt, so isolating enough of it to study required the painstaking and precise process of dissolving and refining thousands of tons of increasingly radioactive metals in powerful and dangerous solvents.

Upon isolation of a sample of Actinium (specifically Actinium mixed into a Lanthanum carrier) , Perey and the Curies would frantically study the element as its already intense radioactivity multiplied while even shorter-lived isotopes of Thorium, Radium, Radon, Polonium, and others grew in to the sample, obscuring its characteristics and endangering the researchers.

The decay of Actinium should have only initially produced beta radiation from its decay into Thorium-227, which in turn undergoes alpha decay into Radium-223. The days-long lifetime of Thorium-227 means that after a fairly short period of time, the Actinium sample will develop a significant amount of alpha radiation on its own. But Perey was skilled enough and fast enough to isolate and measure her samples before this process could happen, and what she found was an unexplained early spike in alpha radiation from some other very scarce very active alpha source, something that must have been decaying directly from the Actinium in minuscule quantities.

After analyzing several samples to make sure these results were reliable, Perey was confident she had discovered the elusive element 87, and asked Jean Perrin (her supervisor at the lab) to submit her findings for publication. At the time, she was a lab assistant and unable to publish papers, and did not get a degree until 1946, seven years later. She named the new element Francium, after her home country and the nation that sponsored her research.

While Perey was investigating the properties of Actinium, her mentor Marie Curie developed serious anemia and had to withdraw from lab work. She died of aplastic anemia in 1934, after years of continuous exposure to extreme radiation that destroyed her bone marrow and left her body unable to produce new blood cells. Perey discovered Francium five years later.

The dangers of working with highly radioactive elements were not well understood in the early era of radiochemistry, but the experiences of the early radiochemists left a huge impact on those that followed, and Perey championed studies of the effects of radiation and devised new protection methods for researchers throughout her long career. Though she was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize, she never won it, and her contributions and talent have been largely forgotten outside of the nuclear chemistry community.

The level of skill and care required to discover an element that is so immensely bullshit as Francium is staggering, and the numbers involved are unimaginable. The labs Perey and the Curies worked in were left unused for decades until their destruction in 1981, due to the intense radioactivity from sub-microgram quantities of these highly active elements contaminating the room. It’s likely that Perey never observed more than a nanogram of Francium during her lifetime studying it, and no quantity large enough to observe its bulk quantities has ever been assembled.

I will talk shit about the element because it’s a nightmare atom, but I will not tolerate any kind of slander of Marguerite Perey, one of the best to ever do it.

[botanyshitposts]

so many creatures putting SO much effort into putting ‘special’ fluids that TOTALLY aren’t water through every organ possible to clean them so they can use them again 2 seconds later. like why not simply sit on a damp substrate and pull water through your body by evaporating the extra out pores in your leaves lmaoooo

[botanyshitposts]

‘nooo nooo you don’t get it I need the big organ to run the fast firing nerves to run the machines that make the fluid go to work the big organ’. whatever chordate. lol

[shaudo-of-a-doubt]

troubleshooting time: arid area, low on damp substrate. what do?

[botanyshitposts]

good question! you could try closing your leaf pores for a while until more appears… sometimes you can also put more tubes down and feel around until you find some. water comes from the opposite direction of the sun unless it doesn’t ❤️ glad I could help!!

[transcyberism]

omg useless advice from privileged mfs from wet climates as usual... bet you don't even use CAM.

[botanyshitposts]

ok first of all i checked your profile and of COURSE its all meadows, say youre a grass who does C4 without saying youre a grass who does C4 100% speedrun challenge. sorry i wasnt blessed with a whole separate sheath of cells for increasing photosynthetic efficiency and nothing else but some of us actually have to adapt and deal with the VERY REAL AND SEVERE effects of photorespiration... literally imagine having 30 foot deep roots posting this. second of all 'plants in wet climates are privileged' you can literally live in water and use CAM??? isoetes erasure per usual on this website, neglected by an angiosperm monocot no less. why am i not surprised

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

this is why I come to tumblr. Nowhere else could I get Botany Discourse

[cadriona]

So, a funny thing happened on trigun twitter

(amazon link where its 50% off as of May 8th: https://www.amazon.com/This-How-You-Lose-Time/dp/1534430997/)

[cadriona]

Update, “this is how you lose the time war” is now #21 on Amazon’s bestseller’s list

(semi-related note but I too have now ordered the book)

[cadriona]

another update: Amal El -Mohtar wrote a small article on her blog (https://amalelmohtar.com/i-tried-to-title-this-post-for-twenty-minutes-and-failed/), one which contains the words “[…] and the upshot of it all is that corporate marketing people at Simon & Schuster now know the name Bigolas Dickolas.”

[cadriona]

Further update!

Time war has reached #7 on the amazon bestseller’s list and is still discounted!

(thread found here: https://twitter.com/tithenai/status/1655613629604016151?s=20)

In addition:

[leebrontide]

I know it made it up to #6 at one point. Being a pre-existing fan of both Trigun and This is How You Loose the Time War made this especially enjoyable.

[kittydesade]

I’m just going to add some more Twitter screencaps I pasted into the groupchat.

The producer of Trigun Stampede. (No word from Nightow yet, I checked.)

A literary agent. To be precise, the agent of at least one of the authors of Time War.

Slate, posting their article about the whole thing.

A frenzy of mutual adoration and signed hardcover offers.

Other authors want in on the Bigolas Dickolas goodness.

Dongwon again.

Saw this on Twitter and HAH.

Bigolas Dickolas is now Alexander the Great.

And finally, the forecast is good for a livestream of Max and Amal watching Trigun.

[exsequar]

This is apparently still unfolding! Tumblr “news” is sometimes 5 years old so I wasn’t sure 😂 The latest - it’s up to #3!!

[cadriona]

LMFAOO YEAH I JUST SAW IT HIT #3 been trying to keep this post updated but didn’t want to spam, and the speed at which these things have been happening is beautifully astounding so:

trigun, following bigolas dickolas, has also become a trending topic in business and finance

Interview with Bun (or Mr. Bigolas)

Crossover art (https://twitter.com/xxrat__punkxx/status/1656446745088278529?s=20)

thread of semi-current placements on the book

memes

and the situation very much escaping online confinement xD

[cadriona]

A significant number of hours later (and too much to summarize):

Time War summary: reached #3 on Amazon overall, #1 (and 2, And 3) in science fiction romance, #3 in lit and fiction, social media presence overseas, and- 

printing with a bigolas dickolas sleeve and so much more

Bridging the two: so many articles

slate article

techcrunch article

insider article

kotaku article

Gizmodo article

tor.com

polygon

and etc

And then on the bigolas dickolas trigun side-

And then after tweeting @ dark horse for a potential trigun maximum (trimax) reprint due to the eng verison being out of print for several years by this point:

so everything can now basically be summed by by this tweet!

(I don’t know if i’ll keep updating this thread considering how many branches there are and idk how much more this can escalate, but I’m keeping an eye on the situation so we’ll see!!)

For those asking what time war is about, per Mr. Bigolas’s post: DO NOT look up anything about it. Just read it.

For those asking about trigun, it is an amazing manga, anime adaptation, and new reboot anime.

[cadriona]

its been over a year since all this first occurred, but felt it was necessary to tack on that bigolas dickolas declined the Hugo that the infamous tweet was nominated for 😂

[dduane]

…It’s an amazing world. :)

[frightfullytreeish]

no nuance you have to decide

would jeeves have succumbed to the one ring?

no, he would diminish and go into the west and remain a valet

yes, he can't resist such power (burn bertie's ugliest trousers)

the ring has no effect on him, tom bombadil style

Voting ended onApr 5

[frightfullytreeish]

4 days left in the most important 'thoughts had just before going to sleep' poll I've ever made

[foxofninetales]

"Well, Jeeves," I said, "That seems to be that."

"A consummation greatly desired," Jeeves agreed.

"The forces of darkness vanquished, the rightful king upon his throne, and all that. And, even more importantly, Tuppy Glossop disengaged from that horsy female and returned to the bosom of my cousin Angela."

"Indeed, sir."

"Rather a shock running into the Reverend Aubry Upjohn riding that fell beast, what?"

"I though you displayed great alacrity in relocating to that ditch in the nick of time, sir."

Far below us, the molten lava did a rather spirited impersonation of boiling soup. I mopped the p. off the b. with a handkerchief I'd improvised from an orc loincloth. I had been to some deuced uncomfortable country estates in my time, don't you know, but at least there one had been able to toddle downstairs and pour oneself a quick W. and S. as needed to stiffen the sinews. Galadriel's Buck-U-Uppo was excellent at vitalizing the limbs to forge on the last dreadful mile and all that, but it lacked the comfort that speaks to the soul.

I contemplated the glowing river. "Redirecting the army of Aunts to that Isengard place was a stroke of brilliance, I thought."

"You are too kind, sir."

"Still, all things must end, as they say. Travel is broadening to the mind and all, but it is past time to attend the call of heart and home. Among other considerations, I think something took residence inside this mithril shirt somewhere around the Morgul Vale and has been wandering about biting hither and thither ever since, and I am filled with the desire to strip it off and do battle with the blighted thing."

"Understandable, sir."

"I heard rather a good one the other day: Sing hey! for the bath at close of day that washes the weary mud away! -and by Jove if I don't think they were on to something, Jeeves."

"It is undeniably felicitous to be surrounded by the comforts of home," he assented, and yet I couldn't escape a certain sense of firmness about his gaze.

I sighed, for I knew what he wanted. Well, I mean, I'm all for taking a firm stance and not being trodden on in one's own home and all, but as far as rallying around to save the young master goes, none could have rallied more greatly than Jeeves. If a little firmness was the price I had to pay, well, so be it.

Slowly I undid the old school tie from around my neck. It was harder work than one would have thought; as if it could hear what was rattling around in the old brain, the ring that was threaded on it put in a last surge of effort in the gleaming and enticement department, filling my mind with heady visions: Freddie Widgeon gnashing his teeth as I sank yet another dart into the bullseye, Aunt Agatha wreathed in tears and begging my forgiveness for ever having misjudged me, Jeeves gazing admiringly as I displayed my newest waistcoat for his edification…

It was the last that broke the spell. Cursed objects of all-consuming power were all well and good in their sphere, but there were limits, don't you know? And yet I hesitated. "You don't think I could slip it on and just have a quick total domination of the world before I toddle around to the Drones for a stiff one?"

Jeeves gave a gentle cough of reproof. "I think you will find it for the best, sir."

It was a wrench, but one could not deny the man had earned it. With a heavy hand, I held the ring out to him. "Take it, then. You will know what do with it, I'm sure."

He took it from me with the sort of shimmer that showed he was exceptionally gratified. "Thank you, sir."

I watched as the ring fell from his hand into the depths below. It hit the lava and rested there for a moment before slowly sinking beneath the glowing surface, and as they caught fire I almost felt that the Old Etonian colors glowed brighter in approval. That Wooster, they seemed to say: not much in the brains department, but he gets the job done.

Outside, there came a hideous wailing as of something ages old abruptly losing the power which bound it to this mortal plain and all that, which I took as our signal to leg it down the nearest drainpipe before things got sticky. The road goes ever on and on, what? Yet I paused there, at the end of all things, because some things have to be said.

"No, thank you, Jeeves."

[nellachronism]

THANK YOU for understanding the assignment, bally good work, this.

[chaosaccountant]

@elodieunderglass I suspect you may enjoy this

[elodieunderglass]

Hahahaha; thanks @foxofninetales well done!

[tieflingkisser]

[lesbianslimefriend]

here's where to find it on windows 10

[the-tiny-dragons-tea-room]

Ugh, it was in mine. It's off now.

[the-tiny-dragons-tea-room]

IT GETS WORSE

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

LOBOTOMIZE YOUR MACHINES

[elusiveladydjinn]

[gremlininho]

[peach-foxgloves]

No one ever tell me anything bad about the person who runs this account.

the person who runs this account, Katie Gouldin, is an evolutionary biologist who has an EXCELLENT podcast called Creature Feature which compares and contrasts the weird behaviors of man and beast! she is super cute and funny too!

[lavender-lily]

oh thank GOD

[andypantsx3]

just want to add i love how much she hates elon

[yeahokayillreblogthat]

yeah okay ill reblog that

[baddywronglegs]

She is also credited by the Audubon society with coining the word “birb”

[madlori]

Also source for probably the best reaction image in history:

[orcboxer]

you shoulda seen the size of those rooms, man, it was like, floor to ceiling

[bardjulus]

fuuuuuck dude that’s class. were they wall to wall?

[orcboxer]

they were wall to wall too bruv it was mental

[lamignonette]

[cheddar-baby]

i need to gush about how incredibly seamless her compositing is in these. Compositing is incredibly hard and time consuming work on a crisp clean digital image. But compositing into what seems to be a scanned photograph that was shot on film? Insane work. The film grain + photo paper texture is matched perfectly as well as the varying softness from being slightly out of focus in different amounts in each image. Each film stock has its own specific tone too some are warmer, others are more purply, or green and they all handle contrast with light and shadow completely differently. There was so much to take into account doing this and i really dont know how she did it other than maybe finding those locations again and shooting with the same film stock on a day with similar lighting. I cannot stress enough that for professional photographers doing complex compositing is mostly relegated to having a fully locked down camera set up in studio under controlled repeatable lighting. Super impressive and a really fantastic photo series truly.

[sunflowersosa]

Nigerian Pride 🏳️‍🌈🇳🇬

I meant to have this out yesterday. Happy belated pride. :)

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

[prokopetz]

I enjoy a joke about fucked up German fairy tales as much as the next nerd, but it's genuinely striking how often the source for the really fucked up stuff turns out to be "yeah, this is only in the Brothers Grimm version and doesn't appear in any extant oral tradition, and we're like 80% sure they added it themselves". To a large extent it's not German fairy tales that are fucked up, it's two specific German dudes.

[thelovers-thedreamers-and-me]

in retrospect we probably should have given the fairy tale writing to the Brothers Happy instead

[takaraphoenix]

"average German fairy tale is full of fucked up shit" factoid actualy just statistical error. average German fairy tales are no more fucked up than others. Fucked-Up Shit Enjoyers Wilhelm and Jacob, who lived in cave & wrote fucked up fairy tales each day, are an outlier adn should not have been counted

[shutyourmoustache]

*whispers* holy shit. he’s done it again.

[petulantpony]

i’ve said it before but i wish vaginas didn’t cost money

[petulantpony]

you literally can not have a vagina without paying for it. vaginoplasty for some, period products for others, if you want to stop buying period products that’s gonna be expensive medicine or an expensive procedure, recovery from surgery requires time off work and vaginoplasty specifically requires money spent on dilators. our bodies shouldnt cost us this much on baseline. having a vagina shouldnt have such a hefty tax on it. it makes me feel like i’m in a fictional dystopia written for middle school classrooms when i think about it.