Green Laughter

This blog is purely for reblogging funny and cool posts I find! My main blog is @greentrickster

[iamthemaestro]

found this at an antique shop the other day and was immediately like oh this belongs on tumblr. sniles sneetly. fwowns fwangry.

[foxes-in-love]

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[dumbpuppyfag]

UNGRATEFUL tech companies are saying things like "turn off your ad blocker" and "we need your photo id" instead of "thank you so much for not just pirating our shit, youre so handsome"

[only-tiktoks]

[devantnuit-ladeluge]

[cryoverkiltmilk]

The absolute contempt for these locks is palpable.

[k-wame]

[pangur-and-grim]

I won't publish the ask (they asked me not to), but I thought I'd still answer it publicly!

no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.

when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.

an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).

advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.

this isn't meant to discourage anyone from seeking out writing as a career! however, there is a reason that many authors have alternate jobs with writing on the side. or, you know, rich spouses.

[pangur-and-grim]

this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!

buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....

if I can offer one alternative to pirating: asking your library to stock the book also helps authors, and doesn't cost anything. the only downside is the patience required.

[pangur-and-grim]

OOPS yes, @stjohnstarling makes a good point! everything I'm saying is from the perspective of traditional publishing, but it's a very different game if you're a self-published author

[madame-helen]

[spicyvampire]

The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

[dollsahoy]

I think there are people here who will appreciate the blatant use of sprue frames on this super low budget spaceship

[dollsahoy]

I usually play MST3k in the background, not always paying attention. I just realized there was a part near the end of Starcrash where the riffers start naming random objects that might have been used to make the spaceship in a scene where the camera is very close to it as it flies past

Servo: And the Starship Container Store moves into action

Crow: Oh, look, there's a Barrel of Monkeys, some of mom's rollers, Hungry Hungry Hippos. There's a Rubik's Cube!

Jonah: Salt and pepper shakers from the 99¢ Store Servo: Dixie cup dispenser, thermos, couple of garters, one marble

Crow: Oh, and one of those things from an air hockey table

I do think it's funny that there are several things that are so very clearly spray paint cans, and, still, so much sprue. USE. EVERYTHING.

[notpedeka]

This technique was not only used on zero budget movies. Before digital effects models were used to build other models ALL the time. My father used to do overflow model work for films when the few studios that did movie models were overwhelmed. I know for a fact that the spaceships at the beginning of 2001:A Space Odyssey were made from WWII model boats and planes and ping pong balls. The prototypes are in my mother's basement. These things were all mostly made from a junk box and spray paint, even for Stanley Kubrick.

[dollsahoy]

Oh, yeah, Star Wars very famously kitbashed off-the-shelf model kits, too, and I think a lot of people have made the effort to figure out which exact model kits were used for Star Wars

but

they generally cut the pieces off of the sprue first, instead of blatantly gluing the entire model kit's sprue frames to the "spaceship," one right next to the other 😅

[greenlaughter]

The original Star Trek, being also availed of a budget of two bits of string and some chewed gum, were also constantly doing this. Monty Python, too! They literally couldn't afford enough extras for that final charging army in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so they nipped over to a nearby town and went, "Okay, we can't pay you, but if you're willing to bring your own costume and run around in the nearby field like a bunch of lunatics for a bit, you can be in our movie." To which a sufficient quantity of townsfolk went, "Neat, bet," and showed up to help make what turned out to be one of the most popular comedies of all time.

[heyfruitcake]

Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

L'Odissea di Nolan tra "scheletri spazzatura" e relitti: Arpa al lavoro in Sicilia, che succede

Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i

[ignitelimelight]

They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government

[digitaldiscipline]

This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:

[greenlaughter]

All Jessicas are good Jessicas! <3

[ivfhnyfubpx]

this scene is so fucking funny the english dub of this show is so good

[laughconfetti]

loud warning

[notajerusalemcricketd-deactivat]

[nunnatheinsanegerbil]

[teaboot]

Rolling on the floor sobbing and crying and losing my mind at “GET INSIDE THE VAAAAAAAAAAN”

[its-your-mind]

finally. an appropriate name for my ‘time to leave’ alarm.

[c-53]

I have a bisexual guppy and its funny as hell to watch because it seems like he’s only bi out of desperation. Like all of the female guppies are unimpressed by him, and dont accept his mating displays, and every time he fails, he goes over to a SPECIFIC male guppy (the prettiest male guppy in the tank) like PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE and that male guppy always lets him????

[domnika-deactivated20250923]

i would read that fanfic ngl

[c-53]

About my fish??

[graceful-not]

HELP?????

[everyfandom-girl]

YEAH THIS IS SCIENTIFICALLY RECORDED

WOMEN LOVE GAYBOY

[tea-and-hockey]

FUJOSHI FISH????

[coughloop]

Worlds oldest haunted house has passed away at the age of 207

[coughloop]

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of... maybe everything actually

[thempregguy]

category of blorbo called "technically i like them but fanons obsession with them to the exclusion of other characters pavloved me into having a negative reaction whenever i see them"

[emptyblissdotmp3-deactivated202]