virtually massless space

welcome to whatever the hell this is

[wizardarchetypes]

SOOOO beyond thrilled rn bc i just renewed my library card so i can keep accessing libby back home on the island and all the cards feature work by local artists and i was about to pick one with a lovely lino print by my own friend but then i saw one is a full color drawing by a teen featuring colorful red and green and gold wolves all reading in the library together.

the librarian said im the second adult so far to pick it and i was like can i get the contact info for the first we have much to discuss

[lilithsaintcrow]

"This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking."

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — Th

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise t

[spockvarietyhour]

Google Chrome Secretly Downloads Huge Local AI Models

Google Chrome automatically installs local neural network components on user systems via default configurations. The browser downloads a 4GB

Procedures for disabling it

[chelmnik]

pick your favourite crazy ass Australian beast

Wombat

Cassowary

Platypus

Kangaroo

Tasmanian Devil

Bilby

Quokka

Bowerbird

Echidna

Dingo

Cockatoo

Koala

Voting ended onMay 2

have only included warm blooded beasts as the field is already too wild without bringing crocs and skinks and black widows into it. if your favourite beast is not on the list… I don’t care just pick from this dozen

[lugworms]

had to google some of these then google put a quokka in my house

[chelmnik]

reposting for AR quokka but also because i think australians will be online atm

[chelmnik]

ok i am going to keep reposting this til there's a decent sample size but also to avoid giving the AR quokka an unfair advantage here are all the beasts in the poll and a fun fact about each:

WOMBAT:

takes minecraft ass cube-shaped shits

CASSOWARY

glows under UV

PLATYPUS

incredibly difficult to choose just one platypus fact but their funny little bill gives them electrolocation powers

KANGAROO

their unique digestive system lets them produce additional energy instead of methane from their diets so they have climate-friendly farts

TASMANIAN DEVIL

those chompers can bite their way out of traps and through wire fencing

BILBY

bilbies don't need to drink water - they get all the hydration they need from a delicious grub-based diet

QUOKKA

there's a quokka area 51 somewhere in mainland western australia - a new population was discovered in 2024 but their location is being kept secret for their privacy and conservation

BOWERBIRD

bowerbirds are known for the elaborate bowers males construct to impress their mates. the regent bowerbird even uses its spit to create a kind of paint that they use leaves to apply!

ECHIDNA

an echidna penis has four heads, only two of which work at any given time, and they don't even need to use any of them to piss

DINGO

dingoes have been subject to long-running taxonomic beef as to whether they should be considered just a breed of dog or a subspecies of wolf or a secret third thing (dingo), in one of those cases of scientific debate being a lot more vibes-based than one might anticipate

COCKATOO

these birds live a long ass time - 'Cocky Bennett', the beloved cockatoo of a hotel in new south wales, apparently lived around 120 years from the late 18th C to 1916

KOALA

the koala has a tiny, smooth brain, possibly because their eucalyptus-based diet is too nutritionally poor to sustain a big wrinkly one

[jodjuya]

Why didn't you have lyrebirds on the list? 😭😭😭😭

[jodjuya]

(Satin) Bowerbird propaganda: they're nature's Tumblr-user. They're fixated on the colour blue and collect as many blue objects as they can to decorate their bowers (to impress the ladies)

(some other species prefer other colours)

Bowerbirds: Meet the Bird World’s Kleptomaniac Love Architects

They display, they dance, and they collect baubles like a jealous horder. Meet Australia’s incredible bowerbirds.

To our eyes, these bower decorations might look like a random mess. But scientists decoded the great bowerbird’s decor philosophy, discovering a sophisticated system of optical illusions. The basic bower structure is simple: an “avenue” of upright, reddish sticks with a semi-circular display court at each end. Curious female bowerbirds sit inside the avenue, and the walls limit their visual field. Then males pop their heads in and out to surprise them, and flick or wave colored objects across the female’s field of view. Researchers from Deakin University discovered that bower materials alter the females’ perception of color. The reddish sticks help induce “chromatic adaptation,” which creates a more heightened experience of red, green and lilac colors. Not coincidentally, those are the exact colors great bowerbirds use to decorate their bowers, and the colors on their nuchal crest.

(the male Great Bowerbird's nuchal crest is kept completely hidden at all times unless they're trying to impress the ladies. Then—sproing—out pops the neon pink mohawk)

When presenting prized objects to potential mates, males keep their multicolored objects out of sight, presenting one after the other to females in a non-random order. It gets even more interesting. Those same scientists discovered that the grey and white stage items (often shells and pebbles) are precisely ordered from smallest (near the bower) to largest (at the outer edge of the court). This arrangement creates an optical illusion that helps the male appear larger when he’s displaying.

How do great bowerbirds construct perspective illusions?

Abstract. Many animals build structures to provide shelter, avoid predation, attract mates or house offspring, but the behaviour and potenti

[leespinoodle]

[bludraws094]

get one of the options to have over 90%. the closer to 100% the better you did

‎ ‎

‎ ‎

Voting ended onApr 30

not saying which one. choose with your heart what you think the masses will choose

[unyieldingsilence]

‎ ‎

[zoestorm]

Hey I have a question for y'all.

From where you are right now, could you reach the nearest sea or ocean by foot in less than a day?

Yes

No

Voting ended onApr 30

(reblog for sample size)

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

nearest place to your home that you can buy a food item? any food item.

less than 100m

less than 500m

less than 1km

less than 1.5km

less than 2km

less than 3km

less than 4km

less than 5km

5km or more

Voting ended onApr 25

Instant free online tool for kilometer to mile conversion or vice versa. The kilometer [km] to mile [mi, mi(Int)] conversion table and conve

americans can use this

[akajustmerry]

friend sent me an Instagram reel yesterday with 1000s of likes that was basically like "pride and prejudice is timeless actually because it's about an autism4autism romance 🥰" and then the creator proceeded to cite moments in the book and film where Lizzie and Darcy are "socially awkward" and....listen. I'm far from an Austen scholar, but I have taught Austen novels as an educator and this kind of psycho-pop analysis that views characters as individuals with autonomy over their actions, rather than tools in a story written at a particular time to say something about that time, pisses me off more than I can say without sounding like an asshole. I'm sorry but Darcy isn't rude and awkward and even cruel to Lizzie because he has autism, he says and does those things because he's a wealthy upper class land owning man raised to see a middle class woman from a large family with no male heirs like Elizabeth as inherently beneath him which he expresses to her multiple times because it is socially acceptable for him to do so in a society where someone like him is privileged above almost all others. He is "socially awkward" around her because of misogyny and classism (PREJUDICE) and she is "socially awkward" around him because a woman of her standing at that time simply wouldn't have had much to do with the gentry but to actually push back against the shit that Darcy says would be social suicide for her whole family so she protests the only way she can which is refusing his advances (PRIDE). not to be the "context collapse is the death of media literacy" guy. But this is the problem with the kind of head empty, let people enjoy things, if I can't relate to it what's the point type crowd. Youse think you're being so quirky justifying incoherent and anachronistic interpretations with your rampant individualism, ensuring that other people never confront anything that challenges them in these stories like patriarchal misogyny and classism. Pride and Prejudice becomes an "autism4autism romance", completely undermining the historical context of its status as one of the great social satires about the class and gender politics that Austen so expertly observed around her. This attitude is why we have nonsensical historical dramas that actively hate history like fucking edgy bdsm "Wuthering Heights", Bridgerton, The Buccaneers, and even a 2025 Frankenstein movie where the monster is just misunderstood and does no wrong uwu etc. because individual relatability and catharsis is king over anything actually saying anything about anything now. Everything is relatable and nothing is meaningful.

[mysimpsonsblogisgreaterthanyours]

[eletaniia]

really enjoying the book I'm reading currently, right up until the meandering, centuries-spanning narrative landed in the late 1820s and the main characters started simultaneously talking about 1) the lovely new fashion for Empire waist gowns (that was 15-20 years ago babes, by the late 1820s you're back in BIGSKIRTS town. also SLEEVES) and 2) the agonies of tightlaced corsets (less anachronistic in this social strata but still not really a thing for another few years, like the steel eyelet has literally just been invented the year this is set)

on top of which these two characters have just ducked out of a party to play cards, and one asks the other to decide between "cribbage, euchre, or whist"

well you should probably go with cribbage, seeing as it's the only two-person ga- nope, no, I guess they're playing whist, somehow, with two people. okay.

don't get me wrong, it's still a very good book and I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but if you're going to (partially) set a book in the height of fashionable society in 1827 and include no small number of mentions to the dresses, how hard is it to google "1827 fashion plate" to get an idea of what these characters would actually be wearing. or to do 10 seconds of googling to pull the names of a few period-appropriate two-player card games

[mothcub]

[xalatath]

INDEED.COM IS A BASTION OF DECEPTION AND DEVILRY

[zoesupreme]

they put Copilot AI in Windows 11 Notepad app and I guess had to add Markdown support to Notepad to make that work or something? anyways Notepad has to have a network connection for Microsoft's AI assistant now and so for the last 9 months this has been a thing people could send a .txt file with a hyperlink that can download and run whatever malware you want to infect their computer with. usually Windows will give you an alert whenever an app tries to execute a file in the background but there's no alert like this for Notepad bc it's Notepad. also antimalware usually doesn't look at Notepad for this type of thing bc it's Notepad. so there's just this wide open attack vector that's there now that no one is prepared for bc we're being sold an AI assistant to write phone numbers and shit in a little white box for us

[thebartlets]

what is the top tag in your saved fics? (bookmarks>additional tags)

fluff

angst

smut

hurt/comfort

alternate universe

romance

humor

slow burn

pwp

dead dove

found family

something completely unrelated to the other options

Voting ended onApr 12

tags taken from among the top tags on ao3

[manipulated-pieces]

Why is it easier and more comfortable to sit in a position that actively damages my joints than it is to just sit with okay posture. Why does my body crave its own destruction

[eletaniia]

14 fucking years and this cat still refuses to accept that standing on top of a blanket whilst screaming does not expedite the process of being let under said blanket, but all it took was three early-morning vet visits for her to work out that travel mugs = she's going in her carrier

[eletaniia]

I don't know why I persist in the delusion that someday I'll transform back into someone who Wears Real Bras, but literally all it took was 10 minutes with the embroidery snips and suddenly I have three cute lacy bralettes that I'll actually wear instead of a pack of torture devices hogging precious drawer space

[podcastwizard]

i don’t know how many people on tumblr know about “verticals” - they’re cheaply made soap operas that are filmed vertically so you can watch them on your phone. they’re infamous in the acting world because of the poor writing and nonsensical plots - almost always has something to do with a mafia boss or a vampire or a werewolf - and they always have insane titles like “pregnant with the ceo’s baby” or “forced to marry the alpha king.” i come across tons of them on casting websites and they all have wild titles and descriptions but none of them, None of Them, have truly grabbed me like the title i saw today:

Dr. Fangs: He Prescribes Bites