olde farte

Bones, 33. Desi. She/Her. Liberal with the block button

[saltiecattoz]

[parkchanwoohoo]

The world could be so beautiful

[junglejim4322]

Some of the edgiest queers in the world who constantly talk about romanticizing cannibalism and gore is punk or whatever will turn into the literal pope when confronted with anything realistic having to do with sex like im sorry but people fuck in the park at night sometimes always have and always will and you’re going to have to go about your life without advocating for them to be skinned alive in Alcatraz

[junglejim4322]

I will never forgive the fact that this post is what made me learn the term “reichblr” and the fact that even exists because someone who writes nazi fanfic replied being scandalized by the idea of public sex

[dogpuppy]

[mandywondering]

I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.

[dietspam16]

if you go from biology to physics without dying first you don’t go to heaven the uber driver went over this already

[hitmyvape-deactivated20251006]

how my coworker gave me a cigarette yesterday

[troutreznor]

https://blinkies.cafe

[infestuous]

this post really attracted the lamest people in the fucking world

[joeyclaire]

[goryfluff]

Nautilus expedition live streams (+ their commentary) | 2024

[konoko]

[vitariesocks]

just received the best text message I’ve ever had. from my mom

[vitariesocks]

2 pics. no caption

[meggettes]

The introductory description of Lady Sybil changed my life. I cannot recall reading a description of a female character anywhere near this ballpark, which is a damn shame, but also doesn’t particularly surprise me. As a not-that-tall but broad-shouldered and barrel-chested woman* I feel deeply affirmed every time I revisit this passage.

Here it is to live on my blog and yours forever:

Even shorn of her layers of protective clothing, Lady Sybil Ramkin was still toweringly big. Vimes knew that the barbarian hublander folk had legends about great chain-mailed, armor-bra’d, carthorse-riding maidens who swooped down on battlefields and carried off dead warriors on their cropper to a glorious roistering afterlife, while singing in a pleasing mezzo-soprano. Lady Ramkin could have been one of them. She could have led them. She could have carried off a battalion. When she spoke, every word was like a hearty slap on the back and clanged with the aristocratic self-assurance of the totally well-bred. The vowel sounds alone would have cut teak.

Vimes’s ragged forebears were used to voices like that, usually from heavily-armored people on the back of a war charger, telling them why it would be a jolly good idea, don’tcherknow, to charge the enemy and hit them for six. His legs wanted to stand to attention.

Prehistoric men would have worshiped her, and in fact had amazingly managed to carve life like statues of her thousands of years ago.

—Guards! Guards! by Sir Terry Pratchett

[zooophagous]

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

[qonphuceingey]

I’m really starting to think you people don’t understand what university is for. You’re buying the accreditation that you can do these things. It doesn’t matter how you do them.

[zooophagous]

I can assure you if you're going to school to be an xray tech or a surgical assistant it does very much matter how you do the stuff your accreditation says you can do. We aren't all business majors.

[qonphuceingey]

Yes, but you actually can’t do an X-ray without an X-ray machine and you can’t do surgery without scalpels. We already rely on technology for everything. Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more. If you can do your job with chatgpt, but can’t without, you can still do your job. I’m sure you would find university much much harder without access to google or the internet too.

[zooophagous]

Do you think scalpels are magic and do a little song and dance and perform the surgery themselves like Beauty and the Beast characters and the surgeon is there to conduct the background music

[darlingofdots]

What do you think will happen when your employer, who hired you because they saw you have a certificate to say that you have specific skills and knowledge, starts expecting you to have and use those skills and knowledge and you can't because you think a university degree is just a piece of paper that you buy

[ariaste]

"Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more"

When you're in school, the cognitive tasks are there for the explicit purpose of being brain exercises. It's weightlifting. It is FOR building your mental muscles and making you a stronger thinker and planner. "Offloading the cognitive tasks", then, is just Not Doing The Weightlifting. What happens when you pay for your gym membership and just stand around messing around on your phone? Nothing. Nothing happens. Just money leaving your wallet. Nothing else.

Using AI is a short term pleasure that is going to fuck you over in the long term, and by the time you realize that you didn't build the necessary muscles you need for the cognitive tasks required of your ACTUAL JOB (or, like, adult life in general), it's going to be too late to do anything about it... except going back and doing the real work all over again to get you up to speed.

And if your response as a college student is "Ugh i'm already good at this though, i don't need the practice" -- sweetie, you have no idea how good at it you could be though. If you're good at it now but you keep working on it, you're going to ASTONISH yourself in a couple years with how good at it you can get. I was a good writer when I was in college; I am an ASTRONOMICALLY better writer now, because I put in the work. But you have to lift the weights and build your muscles to get there, even when it's tedious. There aren't any shortcuts for this. You can be content with your own mediocrity, or you can believe that you're capable of growing towards brilliance. Which one will you choose, mediocrity or brilliance? You get to pick right now.

[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.

[sinnegantheworm]

here's my super-quick, easy-to-digest summary that i use when i can't spend more than like 15 seconds on it but need someone to know the basic distinctions:

generative AI - bad evil AI. chatbots, LLMs, image generators, etc. this the one that steals shit.

analytical AI - helpful medical AI. this the one that helps detect cancer early.

game "AI" - fake AI. 100% human created and dictated. this the one that determines game mob behavior n stuff.

[resemblingthegrave]

losing the battle with my own self-control so will briefly comment and say that categorizing certain types of ai as straightforwardly good and other types as "bad evil," even for the sake of summary, doesn't really hold water. just to give two counterexamples to the distinctions drawn above, large language models ("evil") are being used by human rights groups to parse huge datasets about police abuse while analytical ai ("helpful") is also the kind of ai that animates facial recognition software and the increasingly ubiquitous searchable license plate databases that police are using to stalk people. the goodness or badness of a given ai tool has less to do with its type and more to do with things like scale and scope, transparency, ownership, and contextual application.

[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.

[kinky-cas]

i miss s5 cas he was so bitchy and intense and badass and autistic. he never blinked and he talked to dean from 3 inches away and he was rebelling against heaven and he branded enochian on his friends ribs and he found a liquor store and he drank it and he absolutely wrecked shop in knife fights and he carved banishing sigils into his own chest and he called raphael his bitch and he ate a million cheeseburgers and he never understood references and i love him so so so much <3

[kinky-cas]

(via @smutscholar ) exactlyyyyy you get it!

[the--framed--maelstrom]

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

[vaguedisapproval]

for those unaware of the situation, an indian engineer, activist, innovator, education reformer, and environment activist who refused to patent his inventions, so that people could use them freely, and built a free school for underpriviliged kids, went on a hunger strike to demand accountability from the indian government for the massive amount of exam paper leaks that have occurred during this current government's rule. his name is sonam wangchuk, and today, on the 20th day of his hunger strike, he was forcefully apprehended by the delhi police, and taken into custody. so far, we have no idea where they've taken him, and during his apprehending, a large group of men forced their way onto the dais he was lying down on(because he's no longer capable of even sitting up in his current state), and held up screens to prevent people from even seeing or recording what they were doing to him behind them.

as a result of the latest paper leak-which was a medical entrance exam-20+ kids committed suicide. this man saw their plight, and decided to use a form of peaceful protest, that indian freedom fighters used, to fight against colonial rule. it's something that has barely gotten any media coverage, as most news channels and newspapers are tightly controlled by the government. there were plans to conduct a peaceful walk to the parliament, and before that could proceed, the police-armed in tactical gear-kidnapped a frail old man, who can't even stand without assistance. this is plain and simple fascism, please talk about it on your various social media platforms to put some pressure on the indian government for the immediate release of this man.

update on this post: we now know he's being kept at safdarjung hospital, and has not been allowed to leave, or have access to his phone or the internet. they have essentially arrested him for practicing his right to peaceful protest. a colleague of mine who works at safdarjung, has not been able to meet him or check on his condition.