Dvandm

Schwas are passe, just drop extr vowls.

[dvandom]

New account following me? Don't look like a bot!

Apparently at least one common method of signing up for a Tumblr account requires people to follow some number of accounts and tags before they can do things like add a profile pic or make posts. I guess it's supposed to discourage bots, but bots know how to follow stuff.

Bots follow so much stuff that I just report and block any blank account that follows me. While it's possible to fall through the cracks anyway, I suggest anyone with a new account following me make a post as soon as they possibly can, to establish their non-bot-ness. (And yeah, bots will probably start auto-posting soon too, but at least I can evaluate the content of posts to decide whether to block.)

[yearofdoodles]

Do you ever think about how mythical and godlike Murderbot must be to the other rogue secunits in Platform Decay? More importantly do you think they all have a crush on it??? *murderbot shoots me with a sniper rifle killing me instantly*

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Wacky Packages stickers - Topps (1979 reissue)

[70sscifiart]

Wow, I hadn't heard of these!

"Known affectionately among collectors as Wacky Packs, the Topps stickers that parodied well-known consumer brands were a phenomenon in the 1970s―even outselling the Topps Company’s baseball cards for a while. But few know that the genius behind it all was none other than Art Spiegelman―the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novelist who created Maus." -this book

[dvandom]

I was alive when these came out, and I don't recognize all the brands being lampooned....

[twinklecupcake]

Magical girl who had wanted to be one so badly but never had that magical mascot/mentor encounter so she summoned a demon to contract with instead.

It's not a dark story or anything, the magical girl is just as cute and cheery and friendly as factory standard and never loses that faith and optimism, she's just Pact-bound to a frightening demon from the underworld instead of a cute teddy bear mouse.

[twinklecupcake]

“What if he’s manipulating her to evil-“ No.

“What if she needs to eat souls to survive-“ No.

“What if she becomes horrified with what she’s becoming-“ No.

[writingamongther0ses]

Demon being viewed as weird for making a pact with a cute, cheery schoolgirl.

At every demon party where they show off their pacted there's evil, terrible, and frighteningly beautiful and then there's this teenager in a cute magical girl dress.

[pb-dot]

"I don't get you Goragog." "Listen, it's nice. Just nice! Can't things be nice? Is it a sin for things to be nice?" "No and that's part of the problem..." "You're just jealous Samantha created a "bffs forever" blingee with me. When was the last time one of your warlocks did something like that for you?" "*on the verge of tears* it's been DECADES!"

[twinklecupcake]

Meanwhile on the other side of the room...

"So what do you get in exchange? I get eternal youth and beauty."

"Yeah, and I get all my enemies smited."

"And my guy gave me immeasurable wealth. What'chu got, kid?"

"This super cute compact! Isn't it pretty? The heart-shaped jewels are so sparkly, and the mirror is always spotless!"

"...."

"And since we're pactbound, we're basically roomies now, so I also get a cool best friend and sleepovers on weekends!"

"...."

"Oh, and I also got my magical powers, of course."

[aroaceauri]

Er'trian, Harbinger of Eternal Night, Defender of the Shrieking Chasm, and Lord of Eight Furies stared at eir favorite rival in confusion.

"But it's a pact," ey said. "A deal. An exchange is built in! You can't just Bestow Magical Powers for nothing in return. So what are you getting out of this, Goragog???"

Goragog's dark eyes wept their endless ichor. A halo of eldritch nightmares flickered around his head. With deliberate slowness he turned to meet Er'trian's accursed gaze.

"The power of friendship."

[digitalchristian]

[dvandom]

In an Infinite Staircase campaign I was in a few years ago, the Warlock was literally doing this. She was a pact-bound Magical Girl (demonic patron) and all of her spells had special verbal and somatic components. Eldritch Bolt was throwing her tiara, which could zoom around and strike multiple targets, for instance.

[teathattast]

[machine-saint]

we justifiably give Biden a lot of shit but I think "at least 3" is the funniest possible response to some right wing dipshit asking you how many genders there are

[madnessofmen]

wait it gets better

[dvandom]

Too bad that Biden didn't show up to the debate. Sigh.

[therobotmonster]

Albert Sauros, Noted Spiritualist, knows his audience. They don’t have patience for a full-length holy book. As soon as he finds a print shop, he’ll be passing these out to every egg-layer he finds.

IRL, this is composed from modified art from numerous public domain sources, mostly comics.

[dailynarnia]

is jake gyllenhaal gay??

why would you ask us, a narnia blog, this

[helloitsbees]

happy pride month to this post specifically

[movementnudge]

Movement nudge, getting up off the floor!

X

[cat-mermaid]

real talk, i saw this other vid 7 years ago where a trainer like this lady gave some of the most important physical health advice I ever heard that changed my life:

#1. You should be able to lay down on the floor (face down or back) and be able to get up without your hands. If you can't? Spend a little bit every day just doing that, laying on the floor and getting up again no hands style, then laying down again (you'd be surprised how fast it wears you out after a few times)

#2. You should be able to get up out of a chair without using your hands or grabbing on to anything. Can't? Fucking start training mother fucker! Just a few uppies every day could save your damn life when you get older!

#3. You should be able to turn your neck to the side without twisting your upper body in the same direction, you should be able to turn your head freely without moving your shoulders, chest or torso! Start looking up loosy goosy neck exercises! It makes such a HUGE difference!

#4. You should be able to motherfucking stand on one foot and keep your balance for longer then 15 seconds. Haha sounds easy right? Thats what I thought when I tried after watching that vid, i was horrified to find how hard it was! I started doing "one leggy style" standing any chance I got, when I'm in line somewhere, when I'm watching a video... just do a few rounds of 10 seconds on each leg for like 5 min every day!

You get older and you think you still have all the same limberness as you did when you were 8, but whens the last fucking time you ran around and played like an 8 year old? You loose that flexibility so subtlety and then one day when you need it? BAM ITS GONE

Start getting into these habits now, i don't care if you're 18/25/30/45/50 OR WHATEVER JUST START YOU WON'T REGRET IT!

[dvandom]

I will say from experience that no-hands style can take more room, because you may need a few tries to get your legs into the right positions. So, when practicing, do it in a clear space, or you might knock stuff over. (If it's an emergency, a little mess is better than lying there waiting for help that may never come, but no sense making a mess when practicing.) I do have some trouble with it, especially on a harder floor, but that's more a function of the willpower to put up with the pain and not put a hand down. (I'm 55 and fat, but most of the fat is above my waist, so I can get some really painful pressure spots sitting on wood or concrete.)

The "stand on one leg" thing isn't just about flexibility, either. If you start getting neuropathy (diabetes is a big cause, but not the only one) the reduced feedback will make balancing on one foot increasingly difficult. Because I DO have diabetes, I regularly make sure I can still balance on one foot, although it can be a hassle when my gout is flaring up.

Flexibility goes away over time. As a kid, I wasn't quite at the Weird Al style "leg behind my head" level, but I could raise my foot and put it flat against my face. Last time I tried that, I regretted it for about a week. My arms remain freakishly flexible, and I work to keep it that way because it's nice to be able to scratch an itch anywhere on my back without resorting to tools. (A few years ago due to injury, I couldn't move my right shoulder as far, and when I demonstrated for my doctor she didn't see the problem until I practically wrapped my left arm around my neck.)

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Democratic leaders across the country are all in for Pride Month: "Pride is joy. Pride is courage." - LGBTQ Nation

"It would take far more than a month to honor the contributions of queer and transgender New Yorkers," wrote NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Morons who Don't Vote: (Or worse, vote for third party candidates) Both Sides are the Same!

Me, a person who wasn't dropped on their head as a child: Well one side is celebrating and embracing the LGBTQ community and the other side wants us to be put in death camps

So I'm going to go ahead and say no

No they're not

WE COULD HAVE HAD EIGHT YEARS OF THIS WOMAN AS PRESIDENT

We could have had a President whose actually a fucking human being with a soul

But no, you fucking morons were too busy finding reasons to call her "problematic" so that you could instead an antisemitic homophobic, transphobic and racist fucking pedophile and serial rapist to squat his braindead ass in the white house for another four years

This is what you people fucking cost us and to every non-voter and third party voter this pride month, I just wish to say?

[dvandom]

"But it's just a crass vote-grab, no more sincere than corporate rainbow-washing!"

Yes, and? The other side is very sincere about wanting LGBTQ+ to be DEAD+. I'll take insincere support over sincere hatred any day.

Yes, both major parties support and benefit from every kind of systemic discrimination. But the Dems will at least hem and haw and drag their feet about fixing things, and don't make it a goal of theirs to make everything WORSE.

Pick the party that's meh about your existence over the party that wants you to not exist...no amount of voting third party will make this stop being a two-party system. At best you replace one of the two parties and the rich guys just turn your third party into a copy of the old Dems or GOP.

[pekingopera]

Mongolia via PallasDav

[pekingopera]

PallasDav

[dvandom]

"Oh great, now the humans are mocking me."

[waitingforthet]

Check my Patreon out if you’d like to support the comic, even a little bit helps. Or just to check out the reward tiers, there’s some ne at bonus stuff and I tried to make them fun: https://www.patreon.com/waitingforthet

[alanaisalive]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[iguanamouth]

oh shit

[throughshadow-to-the-edgeofnight]

[alanaisalive]

As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.

[striving-artist]

At time of posting, this is at 711.6k notes

29 Days Remain

[nelc]

Only 12 days left.

[triflesandparsnips]

It’s Saturday, May 30, 3:18 PM EDT

The note count as of 3:12 PM EDT was 742.4K.

We’re almost 258,000 notes short of the Committment To The Bit Tumblr Curse goal, or what I am choosing to call:

The Bear Nessiecity

You know what to do.

[academicssay]

[kactusnz]

yeah where's the robot that picks up cat poop and wipes the floor with disinfectant? Where's the robot that loads and empties the dishwasher? where's the robot that puts away the clean washing?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Roomba's about as good as we can do with current tech

[alagaisia]

Tags made me rethink this whole situation. We DO have a robot who does the dishes for us. She’s called a dishwasher. Wow.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#couldn't you just upload photos of your utensils and tell your robot that only these exact objects go in the dishwasher#???

They're robots not Lieutenant Data.

[shitposting-hobbits-to-gallifrey]

Relevant XKCD:

XKCD 1425 Tasks

[findingfeather]

Oh god it's such a good example of the way that it's hard to understand why algorithmic shit we do have (what we so misleadingly call "AI") is honestly nothing, is literally just sticking words together in word orders, vs what would actually represent real cognition, which is the ability to load a dishwasher.

Because for organic systems - humans, other animals even - the ability to communicate in language is a super high level thing. In order to get there, with our meat brains, you have to have already gone through all the levels of cognition below, like "recognize birds" and "perform simple tasks but in multiple uncontrolled settings, reacting to changes of circumstances" and so on. In order to talk, as a human, by whatever method you talk (words, text, sign-languages, whatever) you have to do all those cognitions first, and also have probably done a solid sideline into theory of mind.

And so we assume that because "AI" can generate language, can put together sentences in order that we associate with complexity, according to common patterns, that it must be "intelligent" (or at least surely on the way to becoming so), that this ability to move words around into syntactic patterns represents the same thing for the computer as it does for us.

It just doesn't. The computer program is not working on the same physical sequence and rules as the animal (and thus human) brain. The chat program doesn't have to actually build an entire sequence of sapience and meaning and shit, built in turn on massive amounts of subconscious reactions to circumstances and so on, before it becomes possible for the computer program to move words around into ways that are deceptive to humans (because we only just keep feeding it words).

This becomes painfully obvious when you try to get these programs to actually do things. To actually react to anything outside the carefully controlled environments of the IT lab. It's why "AI" can appear to talk about existential issues, but can't actually power a robot that you can rely on to load your dishwasher.

Or identify a bird in a picture.

[krisrisk]

Not to shit on a good post, but we have robots building cars. On their own. Germany has factories where the humans only overlook the robots.

It is NOT a question of possibility. It's a questiob of making it affordable.

And I still think it could be done. It would need to have a robotic arm and the shelves within reach. The dishwasher already has a computer, it would only need upgrading with the arms software.

The thing is

It would not make your life easier.

The robot would need maintenance. It would need repair. It would need electricity. All of these are expensive even for dishwashers.

So instead of upgrading the dishwasher, jusz upgrade your life surrounding the dishwasher.

For example: there's lndustrial dishwashers which take about three minutes for a program. You have one tray where you put things on. If you add cabinets which hold trays instead of china, you can take a tray out the washer and store it in the cabinet.

Erasing about 50% of the work by adjusting to the machine. Done.

[findingfeather]

The thing is that those factories are created - and this is important - to make the robots able to make the cars.

The entire place is hyper-designed to make absolutely sure that nothing upsets, confuses or disrupts the programmed patterns of movement and action that the robots then use to make the car, and no new element of confusion is added to the whole process. The humans overseeing things are there for essentially that purpose: so that the process is maintained, the environment controlled, and if something does go askew the whole thing is stopped and that thing is fixed before it causes a breakdown all the way through the chain.

The human overseers are kept for that purpose . . . .because that's something human cognition can do!

So like yes: you could design your entire life around allowing a mechanism to cause dishes to be done. But that's not really what people mean when they say "I want a robot to do my dishes."

They want a robot to go around their home as it exists - their home full of the messy chaos of a human living in it, leaving dishes on desks and bedsides and tables, with a cat and the cat's box and that pile of unfolded clothing - and washes their own dishes, that they already have, without breaking them or the machine or causing property damage. And without washing anything they have out on surfaces that are available to the robot that looks like a dish, but is actually a decoration. And also without leaving behind things that turn out to be dishes (or dish related mess) but are not recognized as dishes. Presumably most people want this without super-invasive "smart" tagging on everything they own (designed to tell the robot what is and isn't a dish that should be washed).

So like yes: you can set up an environment that allows an automated process, even a very complicated automated process, when you've optimized that environment, and then leave that process to run with only minimal human supervision (which still amounts to "someone sitting in the oversight booth more or less all day" and still involves a loooot of fiddling, and code-fixing, and repair to the system, and redirecting of the system).

That's not the same as what people actually mean when they say "I want a robot to do my dishes", and thus does not speak to why the latter is still not something we're even close to achieving.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#so they can ‘learn’ to paint and write but loading a dishwasher is impossible

Yes that's correct. The physical dexterity it takes to manipulate a variety of unknown 3D objects of highly variable weight and friction, from a constantly changing environment full of other objects they're not supposed to touch, and getting them all into the right area without breaking them or anything else, is a phenomenally complicated task. Much, much more difficult on every level than Spicy Autocomplete. A writing algorithm doesn't even need to be able to move! It's got no arms!

These sorts of tasks have nothing at all in common with writing or drawing algorithms. These are more like roombas or self-driving cars; or I should say, step one, being able to safely move around the house, is like roombas or self-driving cars. We can just about do that part (roombas work fine 99% of the time), but the part where they recognise dishes and know how to safely pick them up and stack them into a dishwasher? Last I saw, the absolute pinnacle of that tech was "the robot can successfully open doors" and "the robot who has been programmed to pick up beer cans (object of completely uniform shape, weight and density) can pick up a beer can" and "the robot can stand back up if it falls over".

[zwoelffarben]

It's a bit further along than that in some spaces, but only just a bit. Last I checked, we're talking robot programed to pick up beer cans (object of completely uniform shape, but not uniform fullness (weight, density, center of gravity) can pick up beer cans.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Ah so they can pick up opened beer cans now. That will end well.

[dvandom]

[smbc-comics]

Brought to you by Zach hasn't studied physics in years and is trying to read through the famous Mike and Ike quantum computing textbook.

Check out the bonus panel on the site.

───── ◆ ───── ◆ ───── ◆ ─────

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print.

[dvandom]

It feels like there's a misplaced bracket, but I've never used that form and for all I know there's a reason the |1> term needs phi plus gamma in its exponential coefficient part. Still, the lack of pattern tasks me.

[psychotic-gerard]

x

[kiragecko]

[Image of text saying,

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

End ID.]

[dvandom]

The childrens gonna visit Torpenhowe Hill.

[evilwizard]

getting my little goblin minions to punch and stab me in the middle of the grocery store to try and whittle me down to half health so i can assume my final boss form and reach the top shelf

[dvandom]

(Plan A, having the goblin minions form a stack so I could climb up them to the top shelf, was...unsuccessful. Spectacularly so.)