Blob Blob

Blob! :3 He/they/any Just someone who does some math

[thalescircles]

This is such a delightful opening paragraph for a paper.

(From “Surfaces with Klein bottle topology occur in fusion reactor fields” by C. B. Smiet. Shared with me by my father-in-law, who is a physicist.)

[meowcats734]

The Shadow People were a lesser known but vital ally during World War I.

[meowcats734]

Fuck it

Adien had been a painter, once. Before the Angels of Joy and their elven masters swept through, cleansing Shaderest of goblins and adults with terrible, riotous light. Sometimes the flashes were so intense that the aftermath was a thrown bucket of paint, stone bleached white by the radiance except for the silhouettes of fleeing villagers. Other times, when there were children young enough to be molded into fresh soldiers, they used thin, pointed beams. Colors that Adien’s eyes could not parse that left twisted marks through skin and meat and bone. 

Adien’s mother survived one of the beams, at first. Then the poisonous light ate her away from the inside. Her hair sloughed off as easily as her skin, and she died in a puddle of her own black vomit. 

You defeated light with darkness, Adien knew. Not the kind that came with nightfall. That, torches could cut through. but the darkness of an ebon-snake’s scales, or of prayer-curtains drawn tight. And ebon-snakes and prayer-curtains did nothing against the Angels, but that was because they ate the wrong colors. The emerald glint of the endless grasses was just a darkness of red and blue. 

And the darkness that could stifle an Angel’s light was the bloodstained maw of a Demon of Fear. They could not be summoned, not exactly, but they could be made. From memories of terror: freely given, or plundered from the grave. But they had robbed every corpse they could reach, those that the Angels didn’t consume and sanctify, and they were still losing ground. They needed volunteers. 

He had already given all he had to give, hollowed himself out so that what crawled out might drown their enemies in shadow. All he had left was convincing others to join him.

Adien was a painter, still. And he would call a thousand demons with the stroke of a brush.

(psst! This story is part of Soulmage, a webserial about witches who wake up something they shouldn't have and realizing they weren't the first. Check it out here!)

[nosferatuprivilege]

birth of venus

[nosferatuprivilege]

this is in excel btw. and this image is exactly half green and half pink. and for each shade of green there is an equal number of "opposite" pink pixels. and this represents a major leap forward in excel macro use by me

[nosferatuprivilege]

the origin of this concept was, oh, what if you were trying to recreate an image as a tapestry? and you had, say, 24 colors of yarn? and you wanted the image to have equal amounts of each color of yarn? how would you effectively use the yarn you had to create the image? you'd have to look at all the colors of the original image, then look at your yarn colors, and find some consistent method for choosing what original colors are replaced with what yarn colors. but then it turns out there's a lot of different rules you could imagine or follow, which produce different-looking images. and you can end up with something like this:

which is cool. and it would be cool to say, find a granny square cardigan pattern with 24 squares, knit these squares, make a sick cardigan. but then i realized i don't know how to knit or anything. and once you accept that there isn't really a clear "application" and this concept lives on a screen, you open yourself up to more possibilities. a la birth of venus.

step 1: python script that looks at the original image and generates an excel spreadsheet the same dimensions (793 x 1322 pixels = 793 x 1322 cells), and each cell is populated with the hex code of the color that appears in that pixel of the original image

step 2: excel macro to generate list of every unique hex code that appears in the excel spreadsheet.

step 3: excel macro to calculate the R, G, B values of each of those hex codes.

step 4: excel macro to fill each cell with the color of that hex code (not necessary, i just like to do it).

step 5: I add in Saturation (the difference between the largest and smallest RGB value) and Lightness (average of all RGB values).

step 6: pick a color palette. i always find myself gravitating towards groovy seventies palettes with warm reds and oranges, so i decided not to do that this time. i looked on coolors and found a color palette that was all dark greens that were similar to each other. there were only like four colors or something in this palette. and to make it truly different from the other project, there should be a small gradient. so i determined the smallest possible change between colors and used an excel macro to color it. i was going to stop here and do the entire image in shades of green (inspired by that guy on tiktok that paints using only one color) but then. idk. i realized the "opposite" of each color was an equally subtly changing pink. so i imagined that the end of this process would be an "abstract" image, with subtle variations of pink and green, that would end up suggesting birth of venus.

so all told, i had 502 unique replacement colors, 251 of which are green, 251 of which are pink. (793 x 1322) / 502 = either 2088 or 2089 of each color.

step 7: find some method for finding the difference between the original colors of the image and my new color palette. I use a method of comparing, R, G, B, S and L:

((abs(R1 - R2) + abs(G1 - G2) + abs(B1 - B2)) / 3) + abs(S1 - S2) + abs(L1 - L2)

and you come up with something like this. on the left, those are colors that appear in the original image. across the top, those greens are the colors i'm replacing it with. in blue, that's the number of each new color i have to work with (it's just blue for contrast). and in the center, this pink area, that's a giant spreadsheet with the "objective" difference between each original color and each replacement color. it's pink because i have some conditional formatting applied, ignore that part.

and in this situation, you have some choices to make. in the original image up there, i used a schema prioritizing light and dark--i.e., i looked at the darkest color (pure black) that appeared in the original image, then found the closest replacement color (i.e., the replacement color with the smallest number). then did the same with the lightest color. then the next darkest, next lightest.

but i'm going to do it slightly differently this time. and i don't know how this image will come out looking.

if you look at the "first" green, closest to the left, and sort by smallest to largest:

you can see that these colors on the left are closest to the "first" green i've decided to work with. that might seem odd. i mean, #7F9800--> #00a94f are pretty close, but #A95400 is red. but that's just a difference in hue. really, #A95400 and #00a94f are very similar in lightness and saturation.

and this also calculates the number of times that color actually appears in the original image. that first specific green, #7F9800, only appears twice. but some colors, like actual black #000000, appear something like 46,000 times. and if you add all the numbers in the "frequency" column, it should exactly equal the sum of each replacement color (2088 ish x 502).

step 8: excel macro again. this one is complicated. basically it sorts that first "green" column (column E in my spreadsheet) from smallest to largest. then it adds each cell in the "frequency" column until it reaches or surpasses the blue cell above column E, which for this particular color is 2089. it copies those "original image" colors and their respective frequencies over to another sheet. for the color that surpassed 2089, it splits in two. then it deletes that column E. Then it makes sure "frequency" and "replacement color sum" still total. then it runs again on the new column E, until the whole spreadsheet is used up. and it generates something like:

[color from original image] [number of times that color appears] [replacement color, filled in]

and there's approximately 8000 lines of that.

i have the replacement colors in the order above. starting with vivid green, slowing transitioning to dark green, switching abruptly to bright pink, slowly transitioning to pale pink.

step 9: another excel macro. this one looks at original image broken down into hex codes, then looks at the generated list and replaces each [original] color with the replacement color, that exact number of times.

end result of these macros, following different "rules" of assigning replacement colors to original colors, is this:

which looks different, obviously. but it is the exact replacement colors, and same number of each replacement color, as the original up there.

at maximum efficiency, it took about 20 minutes to complete step 8 and 9. i have a vision of creating a series of these, each time "starting" with the next replacement color, and then making a gif of it. idk how to make gifs though

[dragyndyke]

@magnetictapedatastorage seems up your alley

[yakyuu-yarou]

@ex-libris-craux

[fractally]

Ultimately I suppose my take on "AI" is something like

Anything branded "AI" is automatically grift-adjacent. "Artificial intelligence" is a non specific term which truly means nothing. It can apply to basic statistical models, massive natural language models, image processing models, to prediction or categorization or input-output models. It's just completely non specific in a way that makes it useless. If something is called "AI" the first question should be "No but what is it actually? What math are you actually doing?"

Chatbot style input-output LLMs appear to be uniquely horrible for the human brain. We are very bad at interacting with something in natural language (even very broken natural language) and not projecting human intelligence on it. This is well know as the ELIZA effect and it appears to be pretty hard coded into human cognition. Humans have a strong tendency to hand over their critical thinking to these tools in a process known as cognitive offloading. This alone makes me believe that chat interfaces should be effectively banned from consumer facing products, and question if they have any use anywhere. It's unclear if this effect is unique to the chat interface or inherent to natural language models of all kinds, but regardless we should not be rolling these tools out in schools until we know.

"AI" companies have essentially exclusively behaved badly. They kicked off their products with the largest scale theft of intellectual property in history, one that's unlikely to ever be prosecuted. They peddle their products as tools to help people cheat, lie, and grift. They openly valorize men who say truly despicable things (one, two, three to start). They're rotting the US economy and betting the entire house on rolling snake eyes. They're using underhanded tactics to get their products into businesses and schools, and to spam their polluting energy hungry data centers across the globe. They're categorically untrustworthy.

Statistical modeling, in general, is fine. We need predictive algorithms to tell us how bad the next heat wave is going to be. Translation tools, in my opinion, are a net good for travellers and those living in foreign countries. Image detection algorithms have made huge strides in medicine. All of this is good. But "AI" companies are doing none of it, and they're making it harder by driving up the price of compute (because the price of compute is what their stock price is pegged to).

[hartsnkises]

Alan Turing and Ada of Lovelace did not invent computer science for the girls and the gays to claim they can't do math

[algebraic-dumbass]

HEARTBREAKING: guy has to make the isomorphisms that have been implicit for the last 10 pages explicit

[huiopl064]

"are you a girl or a boy?"

"you've just assumed the law of the excluded middle"

[depezblob]

I’m not gonna lie after reading a bit of it and a few other texts hartshorne is kinda dogshit. Most overrated text ever

Still gonna continue reading it though

[frierenburger]

take your age

divide it by 0

how did you do that

[bagnificentmastard]

Gee, thanks. I will go fuck myself then

[sapphickerfuffle]

thank you all for participating in stab caesar day, however, we have received some complaints from the community:

the necromancer's guild requests people stop taking “souvenirs”. it makes the resurrection ritual for next year's stabbing more difficult and expensive. we instead direct you to the gift shop which is open from 9-7 on weekdays

while we appreciate the creativity in everyone's choice of weapons, we ask that you limit yourselves to only knives. molotov cocktails are not designed for dense enclosed spaces

if you wish to dispose of the murder weapon please use a sharps container. the department of sanitation really does not appreciate having its employees stabbed - especially by non sterile knives

do not lick the blood.

please take down any recruitment posters promptly after the assassination. seriously, residents have reported seeing some still up in october

the blacksmiths guild would like to advertise their “buy two get one free” knife sale with the discount code “ettubrute”

despite popular belief, teabagging the corpse is allowed. if you have a problem with that, bring it up to the senate

that's all for this year. thanks for reading and death to caesar!

[dorothyk]

the axiom of choice does seem to me more of a magic trick to deal with uncountable sets rather than a genuine axiom. there. i said it

it's very funny how people think math is all that strict and logically rigor when in reality math often is so cursed and broken

why. just why

[depezblob]

Have you considered that perhaps the problem you have with vitali sets sucking and making no sense isn’t a problem with the axiom of choice and is rather a problem with real numbers generally being pieces of shit?

- with love, hopefully a future algebraic number theorist

[catherine-clover]

it's always crazy when you're doing some complicated calculus problem or smth and it simplifies to basic arithmetic. like woah, kindergarten jumpscare

[sapphickerfuffle]

with wic having so many close calls with death i'm left wondering, what happens when death eventually comes? now consider: what if he's revived by his family and re-indoctrinated but far more thoroughly than ever. as wielders of the remnants of divine magic, the halovars are likely one of the very few who maintain the power of resurrection. and once revived how easily would he be convinced of the error of his escapades? after all his family were there for them when his friends led him only to his death

and for tyranny, how cruel would that be to see your friend who was on the brink of self-discovery and reclaiming his life before his untimely demise to return, but far far worse. worse to know he could cast her back into the abyss at a moment's notice

EDIT: What if resurrected wic keeps tyranny alive as a spy on the rest of the party allowing the halovars to track and counter their growing opposition while also giving them a reason to keep tyranny around without yeeting her character

[yuumei-art]

Windswept I'll never get tired of making Princess Mononoke fanart. Still my favorite movie of all time

[shitpostingkats]

Almost everything about Kaito Kuroba's life sucks if you think about it for more than 2 seconds. But in a comically mundane way. His dad died. His mom abandoned him and can barely be bothered to call every few weeks. He lives in a massive house, entirely alone, except for his 15+ doves. He has 1,284 obscure skills he picked up from various hyperfixations because if he has to sit alone with his thoughts he will probably self combust. He idolizes his dead dad and clings to the memory of a myth, because he never got to grow up enough to glimpse the man beneath and realize he was a flawed and vaguely shitty person. It's his neighbor's responsibility to make sure he actually eats meals.

Now, critically, Kaito Kuroba has never let himself think about his life for more than 2 seconds, so in spite of all this he's actually having a grand ol' time.

[mazsola01]

This is the major reason why I believe the "father is not dead actually" twist is CATASTROPHIC for Kaito's character. As a disclaimer: I have not see the latest movie with KID in it but I have heard that both Toichi being alive and Shinichi being Kaito's cousin is confirmed in it (but the cousin thing is a different matter entirely). I fully believe that Kaito, after discovering that his father is alive, negating his entire emotional reason for becoming KID and risking his life (people are actively trying to kill him. He's 17.), living completely alone with like only 2 people who care about him, SHOULD BE GOING INSANE. I can't stress this enough. I'm not saying this in a "I want to see this happen" way. I'm saying this in a "this is what makes sense based on his character" way. He should snap. Go off the rails. How could his parents do that to him. I'm being entirely truthful, I don't think the author can write Kaito's character going forward in a way that fully satisfies it after this revelation. This is the teenage boy who looked his father's assumed killers in the eyes and told them he would oppose their one singular important goal as revenge. Toichi being alive is NOT something that can be brushed off by the story. And I don't think I'll be satisfied with what they do with it.

[antigoneprogone]

I close my eyes. I enter my Mathemagical Mind Palace. I see the object before me. I'm working out the differential equations. The derivative of the function with respect to time is equal to a constant times the second derivative of the function with respect to distance from the origin. A billion vectors rendered in with ray-tracing. I see the phase portrait. I see the three-dimensional manifold in a four-dimensional space. The shadows on the wall and the ancient beings who make the shadows. I peer into the amethyst eyes of the unyielding serpent. I have done my calculation.

Out of the suggested cooking time of "18 to 20 minutes", I will be cooking this pizza for: 19 minutes.