One Too Many

I'm not overweight. I fluctuate between chubby & curvy. - Mindy Lahiri

[nondelphic]

editing is just you vs. past-you in a duel of questionable comma placement and emotional instability

[sprinkledsalt]

Black prisoners are assigned harsher living conditions in Ontario jails—thanks to AI ⋆ The Breach

Ontario jails are using a program that claims it can predict prisoners’ behaviour, disproportionately putting Black prisoners in higher-secu

Excerpts:

And I can already picture the anti-anti-AI people saying “but racism existed before AI—!” No shit, but it’s bad to have AI models spit out shit based on the biased data that it’s fed (this isn’t the first time AI models have fed into prejudice due to being given biased data, either), and the issue is that when AI is seen as this objective, infallible truth that you can’t question, it validates prejudice in the minds of idiots.

[fawnpalmer]

quarterly reminder that if i reblog something ai-generated it is 110% and always an accident and for the love of god please tell me so i can delete it from my blog

[thepromiscuousfinger]

[mandatoryrollercoaster]

Future Imperfect

[bob-belcher]

[dduane]

Meanwhile, via Bluesky...

(See also the video here from ITN.)

[shofarsogood]

Larry is the only competent British politician.

[deathdovesong]

https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/pets-animals/2026/07/22/chief-mouser-larry-the-cat-london-downing-street-uk-prime-minister-andy-burnham/91009645007/

[autie-j]

Remember when Xbox was going to basically ban used games for the xbox one, and Playstation made fun of them with that video titled "how to share games on Playstation" and it was just one guy handing another a game disk? And now Playstation is getting rid of physical disks entirely

[larken-the-skies]

It’s like they expect us to just forget their original marketing schemes in favor of more and more money grabs.

[i-suggest-piracy]

i have a suggestion

[etraytin]

Today’s Best Reddit Exchange

[whitepeopletwitter]

[plurdledgabbleblotchits]

THE LANGUAGE NERDS- The Fastest Spoken Languages.

linguists measure the speed of languages by how many syllables are articulated per second or per minute.

1. Japanese:

Japanese is the fastest recorded language. It has a rate of 7.84 syllables per second.

2. Spanish:

Spanish is right behind Japanese and is nearly as fast with a rate of 7.82 syllables per second.

3. French

French lags just a little far behind with a rate of 7.18 syllables per second.

4. Italian

Italian is relatively slower than Spanish and French with a rate of  6.99 syllables per second.

5. English

English is among the slower languages with a rate of 6.19 syllables per second.

6. German

Before last is German with a speed of 5.97 syllables per second.

7. Mandarin

Mandarin is the slowest recorded language with a rate as low as 5.18 syllables per second.

[kokkuri3]

So this is something I’ve read about!

While these languages are all spoken at different rates, each will communicate about the same amount of information within a minute. That’s because the speed a language is spoken is inversely proportional to how meaning dense it is relative to its syllabary- basically, the more syllables it takes to communicate a concept in a certain language, the faster that language will be spoken on average.

Compare these sentences in Japanese, Spanish, English, and Mandarin.

まだ何もなかった時、神は天と地を造りました。 (mada nanimo nakatta toki, kami wa ten to chi o tsukurimashita. = ~23-24 syllables, depending on how you categorize ‘syllables’ in Japanese) Dios, en el principio, creó los cielos y la tierra. (= 19 syllables) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (= 15 syllables) 起初，　神创造天地。 (qǐchū, shén chuàngzào tiāndì. = ~7 syllables)

All are translations of the same line, and communicate the same amount of information. However, Japanese takes more than three times as many syllables as Mandarin to do so.

This correlates directly to how much meaning is in each syllable. In Japanese, only 5-7 of the spoken syllables out of 23-24 have any meaning on their own (including all particles). In Spanish, 5 out of 19. English, 7 out of 15. In Mandarin, each syllable has its own meaning, if modified by others.

Time has a good article about this particular subject, actually citing this same study (which originally included Vietnamese as well.)

[adventurecore-suggestions]

my grandma embroidered little flowers on her clothes like i do and she taught me how to cook asparagus so it actually tasted good and she wrote about grief so simply that i could make sense of it when i was a child that had just lost a grandfather and sometimes i wonder how much of me is made of her and how much of me is my uncle and how much is my best friend and how much is my little sister. i wonder how much of them is me.

[mothdogs]

A few years back, I got really interested in this topic. I read a book by a man named Douglas Hofstadter, who’s the director for the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. One of the foremost American researchers of the science of cognition, Hofstadter has written a lot of books, but the one I’m most familiar with is called I Am a Strange Loop. Strange Loop’s focus is on determining how, exactly, does consciousness—individuality, thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, desires, a sense of personhood—arise from inert and unthinking molecules? After all, atoms don’t have personalities. But yet people, who are only atoms all told, somehow do.

The crux of his argument is that humans are self-referential feedback loops. We take in information from the world and incorporate it into how we react the next time we receive information. A whole section of Strange Loop is dedicated to Hofstadter’s concern with the memory of his late wife, Carol. She died suddenly and he was left wondering what parts of her, if any, can “survive” in his memory. And he eventually concluded that every human is a combination and response to all the other humans they’ve ever interacted with:

As long as you remember someone—a dead friend, a relative, a beloved pet—your experiences with them, the way their personalities influenced you, in turn affect the way YOU act and interact with others. Personhood is a self-replicating concept. Your actions ripple out in ways that can never be fully seen or understood. In a vast, cosmic sort of way, no one ever really dies–they live on in their friends :-) 

[clementiens]

“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).”

[victusinveritas]

If not executed, then left to rot in the Hague.

[nattousan]

"But surely you've at least wanted to try using AI-"

[seasideseals]

compilation of some good shrimps ! 🦐

[contrastparadoxx]

My uncle just sent this to me

He understands my level of humor

[tpwrtrmnky]

Tbh I think the "but data centers are important infrastructure, not just AI" talking point misses that like

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

That is the problem.