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[cherryhatter-deactivated2015072]

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

[visibun]

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

[drtanner]

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

[bananonbinary]

the thing about "detecting" ai is that, when it gets down to it, the question being asked is "how can we stop people from CHEATING at WRITING?"

and the answer is: you don't. this is a non-issue. people are going to do it, and some of the are going to lie about it, and that's that. that's true of literally everything, and in this case, it doesn't really cause any new problems.

yes even in college and academic papers. yes even in news writing. the thing you need to realize is that people who are uninterested in doing the actual thing would have found a way to "cheat" anyway. there were already sloppy news articles with no fact checking. there were already people paying other people to write their college assignments. and there DEFINITELY have been people writing terrible content farm type garbage in like 2 weeks, or just finding a ghost writer. this has not shattered the world yet, because none of these issues really actually cause unusual levels of harm. the bad articles are something you should always be wary of anyway. the college students are only really hurting their own learning prospects. the fiction authors are actually not really harming anything at all, beyond annoying people. at least its not the abysmal working conditions of a content farm.

[gamblingenderman]

I do think the matter of scale and accessibility of tools is relevant though. Yes, the cheating and lying always existed, but making it exponentially easier to lie and cheat is going to put strain on the systems designed to catch cheaters and liars. You're right that it doesn't create *new* problems, but it does exacerbate existing ones.

The rhetoric of your argument here sounds to me like anti-gun-control rhetoric. "People who want to do [bad thing] will always find a way to do it, so banning [tool used for bad thing] won't help." And while I agree with you that the scope of harm due to AI writing is nowhere near the harm of gun violence, it's not *zero* harm. Making it easier to produce misinformation will quite obviously increase the amount of misinformation in the world.

[penultimate-step]

It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.

[apricops]

Trying to do this myself and learning firsthand that the reason so many people do this is because if you stick to a theme of structural problems than it’s very very very hard to have any kind of narratively satisfying ending. The most obvious resolutions are, from most to least satisfying:

1. you go full-throated modernist and say “and then nothing the protagonists did actually mattered because we are all crushed into paste beneath the vast unfeeling gears of capitalism” (YES that is modernism and NOT postmodernism because we are LAMENTING the powerlessness, that the center cannot hold, that the individual facing the institution is like the romantic cavalry charge facing the rip of a maxim gun behind barbed wire).

2. the protagonists aren’t able to fix the world but they are able to chip away at some part of a larger, more intractable problem (if you portray this as a good thing then online communists everywhere will call you a neoliberal bootlicker and publicly fantasize about your violent death. If you don’t portray this as a good thing then everyone on bluesky will send you their Aaron Sorkin monologues. both outcomes are equally obnoxious and miserable)

3. your protagonists are so good at understanding the assignment that everyone just needs to give them total power to reshape the world and then they fix everything (you just did the CEO-of-racism thing with extra steps)

One might even make the case that the conventions of storytelling itself push back against most attempts to address and discuss structural problems. And if one really wanted to, one could make the case that this means the act of storytelling is in and of itself regressive and reactionary: ‘protagonist’ is merely the modern signifier of the proverbial Good King whose ill treatment by the Bad Boyars (antagonists) both excuses his abuse of authority while justifying his desire for even more authority.

To be clear, I’m not saying this and I think it’s stupid but there’s a one million percent chance you could become the next Žižek by sticking really hard to this line. The AI discourse still shows no signs of slowing down and if you fired off a shot like “all creative writers are fascist” into that you’d be doing big numbers overnight.

[eightyonekilograms]

[gamblingenderman]

And also you aren't allowed to have any side effects or backsliding if the protagonists *do* instate structural change. Because, as we know from history, massive societal changes have never had any side effects or backsliding.

[securityunit-ese]

All the stills from the recent Murderbot TV "It takes a village"

[bananonbinary]

i dont know anything about tv production, what are they all doing? is it a way to calibrate the color balance or something?

[gamblingenderman]

The color board is to calibrate the color balance, and the spherical mirror is (I believe) to get some 3D information about the physical space for VFX artists to pull from.

[malecaptions]

[gamblingenderman]

The easiest explanation I have for the difference is British accents. "Caught" is closer to "court" with less of an r sound, where "cot" is the way American English pronounces both words. You can think of the three sounds in "cut, cot, caught" moving from the back of your mouth to the front.

Dawn is pronounced like caught, Don is pronounced like cot.

[digitaldiscipline]

unfuck google drive by shooting gemini

Hey folks! Google is fucking you via sneaky enshittification again!

Want the shit in your google drive to load instantly again, instead of taking for-fucking-ever?

Open your gdrive (web OR app) Settings > Manage Apps

Gemini was checked "use as default" (and i sure the fuck didn't set it that way, this was a silent push)

Nuke that, and suddenly, folders that took up to a minute to populate and sort do so in a fraction of a second.

[hamthezombie]

Do check this out people. I had manually switched all the gemini nonsense off months ago, but when I went and checked just now it was all switched back on.

[bludraws094]

i love fake plot holes

little inconsistencies that at first you assume "oh, the author must have fucked up", but then later on you realize that no, it was on purpose, they wanted you to think they fucked up but they hadnt

[masterboa]

related: when you think "this has Implications the author didn't think about" and then it turns out the author was thinking about them the whole time

[bludraws094]

you get me

[gamblingenderman]

There are two very elegant examples in the first Mistborn trilogy.

The first is what seems like a small continuity error. A shapechanger ally of the protagonist warns them that the shape they need to take next will be difficult to get right, and might take a while. When they return after the process, they apologize for not warning the protagonist about the difficulty and time it would take. This is because it's actually a *different shapechanger* working for the antagonists, who killed the original and took the shape they were planning to use in order to spy on the heroes.

The second seems like a small copy editing error. A prophecy shows up in the second book, both in snippets as epigraphs at the starts of chapters, and in a section when a main character is researching it. The version the character researches is subtly different from the one that appears in the chapter epigraphs, because the text is being manipulated by a malevolent deity in order to obfuscate what the heroes need to do to stop them.

[planetarywanderer]

The Death of U.S. Science

The President's budget request for FY2026 came out yesterday, and it includes catastrophic funding cuts to NASA, NIH, NSF, NOAA, USGS, and more.

I cannot begin to express how much of our daily lives have been enabled by the work that these agencies carry out, from big things like cancer treatments and hurricane predictions to things we take for granted like the ability to take a photo with our cell phone and post it to the internet.

Funding for science in other countries is already barely enough to support their own scientists; this is not a situation where other countries are able to step up and take over the work.

If you are in the US, PLEASE CALL your Congressional representatives and tell them to reverse these cuts. Call after hours to leave a voicemail if you don't want to speak to a human. Every representative has multiple phone lines; keep calling until you get a person or are able to leave a voicemail. The U.S. Capitol Switchboard is [phone], but if you look up your reps' websites you can find numbers for all their local offices as well.

[i-am-a-fish]

[noah-wyles]

spin this wheel

you're now this mythical creature, congrats!

how do you feel?

i love it!!!

i like it

it's okay i suppose...

why would you do this to me?

i hate it!!!!!

nuanced answer / i don't know

Voting ended onMay 17, 2025

[pookapufferfish]

[pookapufferfish]

^

This man is getting pet a whole lot lately

[theghost-trickinglurker]

@creatures-in-posts

[creatures-in-posts]

[prokopetz]

Writing fantasy and speculative fiction is actual Hell because achieving verisimilitude demands that you, the author, have a clear idea of how the speculative or fantastical elements of your setting work, but the story will almost always be improved by not explaining it to the reader.

[prokopetz]

("Ah", you say, "this is what the tie-in tabletop RPG is for"; this is true to an extent, but now your problem is that if you don't base it on Dungeons & Dragons nobody will read it, while if you do base it on Dungeons & Dragons you'll have to do tremendous violence to your clever worldbuilding to make it fit, which defeats the purpose!)

[gamblingenderman]

Actually, if you're a big enough name, you can just partner with a game company to develop a new TTRPG based explicitly on your setting and set a new record for most-funded game-based Kickstarter campaign.

Being a Brandon Sanderson fan has been a wild time for the last few years.

[bananonbinary]

ugh ive been having the weirdest fucking jaw pain. this is the second uhhhh episode? where it's just suddenly been really intense pain all down my lower right jaw. not especially localized to the joint, does not get worse with food or temperature or chewing, and anyway when i went to the dentist they didnt see anything on the xray that would cause this, and last time this happened like a month ago it just...stopped after a few hours. this time i'm still a bit sore the next day, but the intensity was only horrible for a few hours

??????????????????

[gamblingenderman]

Uhh hey, I don't mean to alarm you but jaw pain is one of the signs of a heart attack that primarily shows up in women. It's lesser known than other symptoms because, y'know, the medical profession historically hasn't given a shit about women.

While it's not likely that the jaw pain on its own means you're having heart problems, it might be a sign to keep an eye out for other symptoms, particularly if you have a family history of heart issues.

[kedreeva]

Do you know about these christmas traditions?

I know about /do not participate in the Christmas Cracker but not the pickle

I know about/do not participate in the Christmas Pickle but not the cracker

I know about/do participate in the Christmas Cracker but not the pickle

I know about/do participate in the Christmas Pickle but not the cracker

I know about both and participate in neither

I know about and participate in both

What the fuck are you talking about

Voting ended onDec 22, 2024

I have just learned something and now I must see who else doesn't know things

[hollyevolving]

I learned about Christmas Crackers when I was around 10-ish years old from the American Girls dolls, because Molly McIntire's birthday set came with crackers (out of season, but that was the first reference I saw of them).

I learned about the pickle in my mid-twenties from a boyfriend's family who kept that tradition.

[chetungwan]

I've been real busy lately because it's December and I work at the post office, so of course I am

But that doesn't mean I can't show up with an unprompted PSA

Hey! Have you ever mailed a letter to Santa Claus? Have you ever wondered what exactly happened to that letter? Well wonder no longer! If it had a stamp and a return address, then odds are that it ended up on the USPS's Operation Santa page!

Every year, the USPS collects letters to Santa Claus, and processes them to black out any identifying information. Last names, addresses, things like that. Then, the letters are posted on the Operation Santa webpage and people can adopt the letters.

Once you adopt a letter, you can buy gifts for them, wrap them up, and package them. Then you get a barcode from the website, and bring them to a post office. The clerk there will scan the barcode, which prints out a label with the address on it, and sends out the gift.

It's anonymous on both ends, and is generally just. A really nice thing to do.

I highly recommend it if you have some money to spare this year and want to give a kid a moment of magic this year

It's one of those things that the post office just happened to be positioned to do, and ended up knocking it out of the park. Unfortunately, I don't think they advertise this nearly well enough, and most letters end up going unanswered

Hopefully, a few more will be answered this year

[chetungwan]

Almost forgot to add a link!

USPS Operation Santa® Program

Adopt a child's letter to Santa this holiday season with the USPS Operation Santa® program. Spread holiday cheer and help make a child's hol

[pookapufferfish]

[glowcowboy]

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

[its-your-mind]

the reblog map is all of us holding hands btw

[beautifulterriblequeen]

We are each other's night sky. No one is alone here.