Hopeless Dreamer

Anything That I Find Interesting. Seriously, Anything.

[talontarget]

jkr is literally posting upskirt photos to her social media. when will it finally get through to harry potter fans that their support makes her feel confident and correct enough to do things like this

[yorickalas]

[gaslit-dipshits]

[appalachian-werewolf]

PoweredByWho — Who's Building Data Centers in Your Backyard?

Follow the money behind America's data center boom. Track 2,300+ projects, PAC spending, and the politicians who sign off on it.

[liberalsarecool]

The incompetence is the plan. Corporations need regulations lifted and penalties eliminated.

The conservatives inability to criticize their daddy figure or white supremacy is the fascist pathway towards authoritarianism.

[grapnel]

An example of why one should use the Oxford comma.

[sepdet]

LOL. I think they tried to fix it.

Nice try. Still no.

[rivendellrose]

Wake up, babe, a new example of why the Oxford comma is a really good idea just dropped...

[depsidase]

[r2x2]

The Amnesty International report that JK Rowling is trying to censor through legal threats.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

[cbarc]

Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.

[amygdalae]

I absolutely adore dogs but I think dog haters are (usually) more justified than cat haters wrt their reasoning

[amygdalae]

your average cat hater: I don't like how they r bitchy and ignore me/ won't let me manhandle them

your average dog hater: I have been mortally endangered by an ill-trained dog

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[theconcealedweapon]

[voidartisan]

Rewatching the prequels this week was NOT supposed to make me emotional about the jedi order but it was just the way obi-wan walked into the youngling's class and they all paused and said hello and yoda used it as a teaching moment and took the kid's answer seriously and gently poked fun at obi and the fact that jedi masters go by their last names with politicians and dignitaries but all the other jedi including the padawans and the younglings call them by their first names and how when the temple was attacked the younglings ran to the council chambers to find the wisest most powerful members of the order to help them fully believing they would find protection and instructions-

[caffeinewitchcraft]

A 75 yo man proudly came into the cafe wearing an Ultra Maga hat. I excused my barista from the register to handle the transaction.

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

Anyone wearing that type of shit and preying on workers for their own spank bank material is a brainless fucking sheep.

[headedoutleft]

something i want to mention because i’ve seen it growing as a trend online is that not only do people do this just for their own gratification, but watch for glasses. smart glasses are a growing segment of the consumer market, and creeps like this are harassing people in public in order to gather content without the victims being aware they’re being filmed

good job on how you handled it, op!

[croquettish]

KCD Memes

[liberalsarecool]

Trump brand is entirely cosmetic. A thin veneer of fools gold overtop lies, stupidity, and grift.

It will take us generations to erase his stain.

[penny-anna]

Cross stitch kit instructions: make sure you wash your hands before touching the aida to make sure you don't get any chocolate on it

Me: lmao what kind of idiot gets chocolate on their aida

Me, later:

[mamoru]

sorry to be brave on the internet but I think food labels should list every single ingredient and that there should be harsher penalties for mislabeling and deceptive labeling

[olloollo]

addition from @turtlesandfrogs:

We have these:

[nentuaby]

Yeah, that's exactly what the complaint was about.

[psychic-waffles]

We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.