sorta spooky @empospective - Tumblr Blog

theflowerhat on ig

excerpt from the original post: this is dictamnus albus—commonly called gas plant. on hot days, it emits a citrusy, flammable oil that briefly ignites when exposed to flame. it’s completely harmless to the plant, but incredible to witness.

homunculus-argument

A good rule of thumb for AI is "would you trust a trained pigeon to do this?"

"We trained a pigeon to recognise cancerous cell clusters and somehow they're really good at it" okay great, that's something that could plausibly be a thing.

"We trained a pigeon to recognise good CV:s and left it in charge of sorting through all our job applications" uh perhaps consider not doing that.

sweetd3lights

kenyatta

The social media system we have at the moment was designed by engineers. And what engineers like is keeping a stable thing going through feedback, whether it be your central heating or a bridge or anything like that. When you're trapped in a feedback loop, as we are often with these stories, it feels like chaos. It feels like a total wave of endless chaos and apocalypse. And in a funny way, there is a kind of stability to it because you know in your heart of hearts that next week there'll be another apocalypse. I did a film about a guy called Vladislav Surkov who used to advise Putin, who worked this out very, very early on. You tell people that you're messing with their heads, and then they don't know whether you're messing or not. And when you play like that, you can give the illusion of complete chaos, when in fact, actually, not much is really happening, except the old systems of power grinding away outside the theatre.*

Adam Curtis - Nick Grimshaw BBC Radio 6 interview - June 10th 2025

(*paraphrased -- I moved some of the sentences around to make a more complete quote but it starts at around 9:37 of the YT link)

digitalfossils

rnismatch

snuck into area 51 and i saw a spawner with a rotating unabomber in it but the cia had placed 4 torches one on each side

loneberry

Alice Notley

philosophybits

“How the years go by! … What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “White Nights”

slowspinningredemption

when I was a kid I wished I had nosebleeds. I had some friends who had them and I was like. that looks so fucking cool. you're just sitting there and suddenly you're covered in blood. it looks so dramatic. it looks so... and here my language failed me. at such a humble age I did not have the vocabulary to describe the sublime. I just sat in incomprehensible jealousy. I turned out totally normal by the way

carbomcoco

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

dxctorwhx

this magnificent artist ... @sunnnliwx is their @ on most things I believe . please show your support because this is absolutely beautiful .

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

each year congress people should be required to go on a field trip where they each get dumped in the middle of a random u.s. town & handed a phone with google maps & forced to find their way back to washington solely through the use of local public transportation systems.

to be clear i don't think this would improve our political reality in any way, but it would be fun to watch