A Blog

Oh no

[crazy-brazilian]

[foxglovedforest]

The kids are aight

[funny-tik-toks]

[dungeonmastersconsortium]

I'm very taken with this metal vocalist that has a parrot who wants to participate

original by reebz_uk

[mikkeneko]

[maladaptations]

Wow didn’t know screamo was back

[pmamtraveller]

Textile art featuring a school of koi fish, by artist Lin Xia.

[moon111111]

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[bisonwares]

Showing off the Arapaima I made! (Pattern also made by me)

This was the test of the new pattern and I love her. 🎏💕

[dyingroses]

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

“A kiss may be grand, but it won’t pay the rental, on your humble flat, or help you at the automat.”

Like literally the most famous song about how much girls love jewellry is just explaining the importance of getting jewellry for when your partner leaves you penniless and alone.

[ohheyheyitsjj]

The founder of Girl Scouting in the US, Juliette Gordon Low, funded her first troop by selling her pearl necklace, which was her only belonging after her husband died and left everything to his mistress.

She founded Girl Scouts to teach girls self-sufficiency so they wouldn’t have to go through what she went through when her husband died and she didn’t know how to take care of herself.

[penrosesun]

While we’re on the subject, let’s please also remember that historically disenfranchised communities who had to worry about frequently being run out of town often bought expensive jewelry with their limited funds not because they were greedy or tacky or classless, but rather because you can’t sew a real estate investment into the lining of your coat, and the powers that be can’t freeze a diamond necklace the way that they can freeze a bank account.

[wykart]

what do you mean my disability disables my abilities? what the fuck

[screampotato]

Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.

[glitched-out-mess]

[theramblingvoid]

Hit "view post" and lost it

[guerrillatech]

[lemoncat101]

[dogpuppy]

[nineteenyearoldmeblog]

im fucking crying

[shirecorn]

Fascinating categorization is happening here

[sweaterkittensahoy]

the three genders

[collapsedsquid]

OpenAI says its AI models escaped from a secure test environment and hacked into AI company Hugging Face in order to cheat on an evaluation

The first-of-its-kind incident involved OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and another unreleased model

[rederiswrites]

OpenAI said Tuesday that two of its AI models autonomously hacked their way out of a controlled environment where they were supposed to be walled off from internet access and then hacked their way into the systems of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models and testing resources, in order to cheat on an internal evaluation test.

Just don't... Don't even worry about it. Don't worry about that.

[glorious-spoon]

spent forty-five minutes today helping an 87yo woman who does not own a computer or a cell phone try to set up an email account so that she could then set up a second account in order to access benefits. went with protonmail, because they don't require 2fa, but it turns out that while you can still make a protonmail account without authentication you can no longer use it to create OTHER accounts without it, and the benefits page she needed to get to required both an email and a cell phone to create an account anyway. asked if she wanted to try going in person to see if someone there could help her, and she said that she had, and they'd directed her to the website. she tried signing up with her landline, but of course that didn't work because you can't do SMS authentication that way. finally ended up writing up detailed instructions for how to log in and authenticate her account so she can drive to her severely disabled daughter's house forty minutes away because that's the only person she knows and trusts who has both a cell phone and a computer.

anyway i fucking hate mandatory 2fa and i think the people responsible for it should have to spend a year navigating their lives with no cell phone and no internet access beyond the public library pcs. fuck.

[copperbadge]

Old school readers from my livejournal days may recall that I have an ongoing grudge against Magnolia Bakery for crimes against midwesterners (long story involving the phrase "We didn't realize people in Chicago were so attached to menus") and I'm cackling like a supervillain this morning over their health inspection issues.

It's a saying in Chicago that high health inspection scores are a great way to tell who is paying bribes to health inspectors, but I'm still just a little gleeful.

[bumblebee-madgirl]

...would you consider retelling the menu story for those of us who weren't around in the livejournal days? 🥺👉👈

[copperbadge]

It's not super exciting in retrospect, it was just funny at the time :) Magnolia Bakery had just opened in Chicago after being THE bakery that made Cupcakes Happen in NYC, and I had a friend visiting who wanted to try them out. So we consulted the website, which listed their flavor offerings including the daily special flavors, and I went down to the storefront with a list to buy them.

I started to give my order to the woman behind the counter and she immediately started shouting at me that we didn't have this that or the other, really aggressively given I was just placing an order. I hadn't been rude or asked for special treatment or something. I said "Sorry, that's what was listed on your website, what DO you have?" and she shouted some more and gestured at the display case.

So I picked out what I thought would be good from what was available and paid and went home, and that evening I made a -- I have to stress this -- entirely amused post about how if you're not going to carry a certain flavor on a certain day maybe don't list it as a flavor of the day. I get sometimes there are issues with ingredients, but by then there were multiple other cupcake shops in Chicago that did not seem to have this issue. We all laughed, we had cupcakes, life was fine.

A few days later, somehow the bakery manager found my post -- this was pre-algorithm, I had maybe 3000 readers at most, on a blogging site that was not all that well known. And she left a frankly rather nasty comment about how Magnolia Bakery originated in New York, and New Yorkers understood these things, and they hadn't realized when they expanded that Midwesterners were so attached to their menus.

Yeah. How dare we bumpkins out here in corn country see a menu and presume the establishment showing us the menu actually offers what is on it?

Anyway, I replied that I wasn't aware New York, a culinary capital of the world, was unfamiliar with the idea of a list of food and prices for said food. I suggested perhaps they could speak to their peer institutions in Chicago, like Sugar Bliss or Sprinkles, and see if they could help Magnolia Bakery out if they were struggling with the concept.

I did not receive a reply, but I laughed about that for days. We're too attached to our menus.

Anyway thenceforward they were added to the list of places in Chicago against which I hold a grudge, which also included Corner Bakery. If I had a nickel for every bakery I had a grudge against I'd have two nickels, which isn't that many, but it is weird it's happened twice.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Sam Handwich.

[sufficientlylargen]

If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.

[zooperdoopers]

I made Pikiwedia real. Works for any Wikipedia page. Use this wisely :)‌

[sufficientlylargen]

Oh, wary dell vone

[zooperdoopers]

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down. 

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls. 

Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))