[wyrmicelli]

me tongue-deep in a sandalwood candle: 🤤

the tjmaxx employee loading a fourth tranquilizer dart into their blowgun: i need backup

[snowown]

[belladonnabedlam]

Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to know…

What is your AO3 user ID?

I’m an OG user 5 digits or less

Six figures baby!

I’m in the millions…

Voting ended onJul 27

I’m so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!

[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.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

actually I think you should be normal about ordinary citizens of authoritarian countries and yes that applies even to that country you're thinking of right now

[dragon-in-a-fez]

"but they support [dictator] and [violent action]!" okay is it possible that a combination of propaganda, election rigging, and authoritarian crackdowns on dissent could lead a population to look like it supports something most people would find distasteful under more reasonable circumstances

[faustandfurious]

There’s something truly exquisite about stories where the real tragedy is the price you paid to stand on top of the world

[faustandfurious]

Hollow victories … sacrificing your humanity on the altar of what you perceive to be the greater good … the loneliness of godhood … regret for the person you used to be … the realisation that there is no way back … *chef’s kiss*

[vanilla-extraction]

[diasdelfuego]

the thing about art is that sometimes you'll be moved to tears by stuff that is not very good

[my-tardis-sense-is-tingling]

[bells-lettres]

local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣

Translation by me. :))

[elodieunderglass]

“Even a slightly increased possibility of summoning rain is still an ability to summon rain” is such a good point

[roscolux]

need to beam this tweet directly into everyone's minds right now

[hunter-rodrigez]

So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

[these-violet-delights-fic]

People love simple, extremely practical things. I hope you win!

[zmpl]

reddit but in the pokemon universe

[thanatos-girl]

Tbh i think the disabling nature of a lot of work is sort of criminally overlooked by a lot of otherwise excellent labor analysts

[thanatos-girl]

Like im a janitor, I clean all day, and at 23 I am developing serious upper back pain that is echoed in my older coworkers ten-fold. It's a job that demands you to be up and moving constantly and often bent over or scrubbing something. We (janitors) have much higher rates of back, joint, and muscle problems and injuries compared to the population average, as well as significantly higher rates of sickness and chronic illness. It's a job that literally destroys your body.

But whenever people talk about my profession, it seems like their main concerns are the (accurate) ideas that the labor we do is wildly devalued and invisibilized and that it is a gross and thankless job to clean up after others. While this is a major aspect of the work I do I feel like it undercuts the serious physical toll of the work itself and the ways that impacts our ability to experience life out of the workplace.

[thanatos-girl]

Obviously this doesn't just apply to janitorial work, and tbh its perhaps an issue of imp-core labor and its failures to understand itself given that the most dangerous jobs with the most disabling effects have largely been outsourced to the periphery at this point, creating a sort of buffer for the modern imp-core worker where the largest problem with most jobs truly isnt the literal material effects of the work upon the worker

[mattpearson]

ISAAC HENDERSON AND TORI SPRING IN HEARTSTOPPER FOREVER (2026)

[gayvampyr]

if you want to dress gay but aren’t sure how, you need to focus more on finding clothes you actually like and that make you feel good when you look in the mirror. develop your style independently of what you think looks gayest and trust the homosexuality will follow. it goes where confidence and self acceptance are

[tabloidsores]

Two dudes in my group chat have been playing league & slowly but surely have shifted from saying "wanna play league of legends" to "wanna play some geego legends". At this point their average post is just @ing the other and going "geegogagand?" and I feel insane

[tabloidsores]

What is going on

[rohie-deactivated20191102]

“Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

— I Know What You Think of Me, Tim Kreider for the New York Times

[owlmylove]

after YEARS of seeing this quote online and finding it to be the most deeply and resoundingly profound writing i finally found the source article and absolutely nothing could prepare me for this opening paragraph

[bi-icon]

Okay but the whole article is really interesting and also contains this quote which I’ve never heard before but really like:

“Anyone worth knowing is inevitably also going to be exasperating”

[disco-machine]

anyone else absolutely guzzling the shit out of some wadder? a fucking boddle of wadder?

[carry-on-my-wayward-butt]

“i also choose this guy’s dead wife” was easily the #1 funniest thing to ever be written on the internet.

[carry-on-my-wayward-butt]

you can know the punchline but you can’t stop it from punching you.

[mighty-meerkat]

i do also feel the need to add that phil8248 really liked the joke. he said his wife had always had a dark sense of humour, even about her illness and death, and seeing the joke made him feel like he was laughing with her one last time.

[moonlitstargazer]