Sarcasm Quantized

A Potpourri of Engineering, Computers, Trains, Space, and Photography.

[geometryprime]

Another dragon! This guy started out as a bit of lineart a few years back that I sorta forgot about - very glad to get him finished up as a proper piece!

[only-cat-memes]

[mugfulis]

@kittybroker

[kittybroker]

Sad and lonely kitty make you stay up wishing for more! Get addicted to this kitty for $14.55!

[risualto]

Oh, yeah, happy Pride and all. I hope everyone has a moment of sheer euphoria this month that you are you. Whether it happens in public at a parade or in private with your favorite story, at a bar falling in love or seeing your true self in the mirror, from a song on the radio or in the smile of your best friend, with soaring discoveries or nestled in coming home.

The right ways to do Pride are the ways that keep you safe and happy.

[cosmeretrek]

Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.

[just-another-cat-blog]

pride month!!!

[lemonsharks]

Is that a miette?

[jeanjauthor]

Pride for you!  Pride for a thousand years!!

[lost-and-cursed]

you COME OUT to miette? you come out to her as queer? oh! oh! pride for mother! pride for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

[cheaphalloweencostume]

Patagonia is posting notes app social media half-added apologies over their lawsuit 😭😭😭

[cheaphalloweencostume]

i mean. i’ll always side with the human over the company anyway. but these are markedly different

[cheaphalloweencostume]

guys, she can keep performing, she just has to cow to the brand and give up her identity and redesign all her shit despite the fact that they’re both named after a geographical region! the brand simply MUST have first dibs and then the human can live her little life or whatever!! why are you guys so excited to suck corporate boot? am i going fucking crazy? again?

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

[yesterdaysprint]

The Cincinnati Enquirer, Ohio, February 21, 1947

[shiftythrifting]

the joots. found in socal

jigh highs

[duckbunny]

remember when websites were written on purpose, and not generated by autocomplete in the instant you run the web search? anyway, unrelated, this webpage purporting to relay expert knowledge on which plants are safe for my snake's tank just told me I would know if he was biting them and getting irritated because he would start pawing at his mouth.

[tarragonthedragon]

i mean, that sure would be a sign something was wrong

[duckbunny]

the plant that makes you grow extra legs

[thisusernameisunique]

Wait. Is that what the internet is doing?

My god. This explains why everytime I visit a search result its all just surface level repeats of vaguely related information.

Like I've started not trusting any website that doesnt have pictures within the text blocks.

If I scroll for a mile with no images on any website I'm considering it all ai slop.

[gettheorion]

[glowing-disciple]

[creature-adjacent]

Carnivorous plants doin this is so funny to me

They don't wanna eat their pollinators :(

[questionablepastries]

[alientitty]

💀

[fagcrisis]

i hate the word spicy can we bring back calling things erotic

[maryoliveoil]

rolling up to Wendy's to get an erotic chicken sandwich

[classhattery]

"How erotic do you want your pad thai, from 1 to 10?"

[rapidlydecayingcorpse]

i feel like people aren't getting how dire ai is. we are running out of drinkable water. our brains aren't engaging as much with what we see and hear. people near data centers don't get clean water and experience electricity blackouts. it's being used to make pornography of underaged people and women. it often just lies. it affirms everything. it lies. it has made people kill themselves. it lies for gods sake. and people act as if im dramatic for being staunchly against it. 'now i KNOOW you hate ai and whatever, but look at this cute video' this isn't me being a new age puritan about internet videos, this is about the fucking earth and our future living on this planet. people are suffering now, people will suffer more, and my friends and parents will roll their eyes and think im annoying for despising ai so explicitly. we need to wake up because we cannot live like this

[painted-starsys]

i dont miss this place lmao

[verycoolfirefly]

grace bad pilot where are we question

[startrekprodigyfan]

One of the most common complaints about Star Trek I saw growing up was “why don’t they use the holodeck more? If you were living in that time period and you could just make anything you wanted anytime you wanted and live out fantasies forever, why aren’t more people addicted to the holodeck?”

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.

And that’s the fact nobody wants to deal with generative SLOP.

[nerdy-chaos-gremlin]

This made me think of something—if Data makes art, does that technically make it ai-generated art?

[startrekprodigyfan]

Actually… yes! And it’s one of the better character arcs that is explored throughout the series!

Data is always trying to mimic humanity and learn, but often he’s hampered by his programming. People fall asleep at his poem recital, don’t enjoy his music or paintings, and even playing Sherlock became boring… all because he kept defaulting to an algorithmic perfection. Both his poems and much were technically flawless, but they had no soul. His paintings could only imitate other artists styles. And because he memorized all the Sherlock novels he was able to instantly solve the mystery before it even began.

It wasn’t until Data gained the ability to dream did his art and creativity start to become his own thing.

[ljspencerauthor]

Also, AI is only as good as the people who teach it, and Data shows that well. His teaching from first Soong and then Starfleet Academy let him get by, but it was when Picard and Geordi, along with the others, particularly started teaching him about stuff (art, consent, boundaries, etc) that he really started to become more. They took the time to teach him compassion and what it means to be human, and, I think most importantly, gave him perspective to know that while he may have superior abilities, he is not superior to *any other being*.

And that, I think, is the most significant.

And I also think that’s why Starfleet folks are realistic about the holo deck, too. It’s there to govern experiences during long deep space exploration so that you can get a hit of not being confined to a ship, but it can’t replace real life. They are taught boundaries and limitations of everything.

(which a lot of folks aren’t really taught in our time)

[startrekprodigyfan]

If there’s any clearer example of how bad generator ai is (even in the Star Trek universe) it would be in the TNG episode “Schisms.”

Because in that episode Worf asks the computer to generate a table with one side lower than the other.

And it goes from looking like this:

To looking like THIS:

I’m sorry… but in what conceivable world would asking to make the table with one side higher than the other produce THAT enormous monstrosity??? Only generative ai could come up with that!