Whatever

J, 28, just vibing tbh

[frightfullytreeish]

I want to watch an emergency responder procedural that starts off as normal with improbable disasters every week, but as the series goes on the characters become increasingly aware of how statistically unlikely their local rate of disaster has become, and the country and civilians react accordingly. mass exodus of the rich, influx of meteorologists and other relevant scientists, a local doomsday cult flourishes... the emergency responders are still responding to their emergencies but the show has slipped sideways from straight procedural to scifi as the disasters have to keep ramping up to top the previous disasters. like by the end of season two they're battling an alien invasion, an archaeologist has uncovered an ancient cursed artefact in the catacombs under the town hall and absolutely everyone has ptsd

[taraxippos]

Akira bike sliding on a horse

[taraxippos]

concept art

[taraxippos]

concept art

[byjove]

The funniest part of A New Hope is that Luke Skywalker is a 19 year old who has not locked in yet and plays with toys and sleeps in his childhood bedroom at his aunt and uncle’s house and Leia Organa is a 19 year old with a mission to save the galaxy from fascism. Luke has never left his hometown, Leia just watched her planet be blown up. He’s peeved his uncle is asking him to do his chores, she’s imprisoned for resisting the government. You relate to them both but they’re on complete opposite sides of the 19 year old life stage spectrum.

[fidelcostco]

can't believe the only options are 30 minutes early or 10 minutes late. if only there were some other way. but what can you do

[stellarskyes]

[argumate]

I keep thinking this! very frustrating

[argumate]

fuck!

[redstonedust]

phenomenom thats been bothering me that i could only express via an mspaint reverse boomer comic

[kinkydorah]

troy and abed with the vaaaaaampires 🎵

[stargirlsofthegalaxxy]

Pastel Padme

[emwheezie]

Gamer cats

[secretlywritingstories]

I feel like generative AI is much like the mechanical bird in the story The Nightingale by HC Andersen.

I grew up with Andersen's fairytales and many of them has made a permanent home in my heart. The nightingale (or nattergalen, as is the original title) has always been amongst my favourites.

It is the tale of how the emperor of China learns that a great bird exists in his empire and he asks it to come and sing for him. The song deeply touches him and all the people at the palace, and the little bird is celebrated for his voice and song.

One day, a box is sent to the emperor, and within is it a golden mechanical bird, an artificial imitation of the real nightingale. They are asked to sing side by side, but it doesn't work well. The nightingale improvises and goes with his mood, while the mechanical bird can merely repeat how it has been programmed.

Still, hearing the mechanical birds makes the crowd ooh and ahh, and it can sing without mistakes and much more often than a real bird. It is wound up again and again for the amusement of the emperor and the people. The real nightingale leaves discouraged.

But as the time goes on, the mechanical bird starts to break down, and eventually, it doesn't work anymore at all. When the emperor becomes deadly ill, the soft song from a nightingale is all that can save him, but his little wind-up toy cannot help him.

The real nightingale comes back and saves the emperor's life, for it had been so touched when it first sang for the emperor and it made him shed tears. It remembers that first touch of something oh, so special as sharing its voice. The emperor learns the error of his ways.

Gen AI can only ever be an intimidation of the real thing. It is stuck in the same grooves as a mechanical bird. It can do it "perfect" and faster than humanly possible, but it is and always will be an imitation that cannot stand on its own. It might be enough to impress but it is not sustainable.

Only with the real music, art and writing can what is special be perserved. It must be created by living beings. We are able to adapt and change and create stuff outside of set parameters. But it is very understandable that it is highly discouraging to see gen AI spit out music, art or writing that to the untrained, or uncaring, eye is praised.

I reckon that the well will dry up eventually, whether it will be a crash, or behind a high paywall, and everyone who grew accustomed to it will cry out in despair. The mechanical bird is broken. Death will come and sweet song is not there anymore.

The nightingale flew home and continued with his life. He kept singing to the forest, but in another version of the tale, maybe he had stopped singing. It would have been a tragedy for both himself and all the people who eventually realised their folly in depending on a mechanical bird over the real thing.

So keep creating. Keep making music. Keep making art. Keep writing. Gen AI is imitating us, and it is arguably trying to replace our works, but it is not as good as the real thing and it cannot last.

[sabriel-writes]

Murderbot, absolute monarch of haterism. It gets friends for the first time in its life and immediately designates one Mortal Enemy [if anyone touches him they're dead]. It runs away, meets another intelligent bot, and immediately gives it a nickname that starts with Asshole. It goes to Preservation and starts one-sided beef with a hauler bot for no fucking reason. IT'S ENRICHMENT

[uovoc]

They say it's still out there, roaming the unaffiliated zone, waiting to sideswipe the unwary traveler…

[skrankku]

From that episode where the writers decided to squeeze in all their personal ships.

[deepshitpostsnine]

Not exactly an episode title I just think it would be neat

Title card generator: https://trek.epicrandomness.com made by @beans525.bsky.social

[calamitys-child]

40 days. One email. Your name on the right side of history.

Good letter template for contacting your MPs re the new code of practice. We have a month. Make the biggest stink you can. As stated at the link, this template is useful as it contains specific Procedural questions, which are harder for unsympathetic MPs to shoot down than exclusively Ideological ones (though there's space for that in the template too!). It took me less than ten minutes and I wrote like two paragraphs.

If you're in the UK, this is one of the easiest ways to do Anything about this bullshit. If not, you very well might have friends or followers who are, so send this their way. Regardless of where you are, please do all you can to support the trans people here.

It isn't a solution but its a fuckin sight better than not trying.

[mortalityplays]

so I spent a lot of last year working with / around this local activist group mostly made up of your typical ambiently queer, ambiently leftist college students. like every loose affinity group it struggled with the sort of unpredictable fluctuating capacity problem of most participants being tied to day jobs or college term times, variously disabled, turning up when they could make it and then vanishing for months at a time. it's to be expected with that kind of organising but it does also make for kind of a pain in the neck.

anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.

about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.

now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.

this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.

in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.

so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.

you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,

or the MLM MLM LLM MLM if you're nasty.