Martin Polley @martinpolley - Tumblr Blog

kikokuso

I have a new favourite batshit rail idea

Please build it for the funny please please please

vacuously-true

You're right. I SHOULD be able to take the train from Minneapolis to Berlin.

martinpolley

Why stop there? I want to take a train from London to Patagonia.

depsidase

prokopetz

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.

xeansicemane

Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.

We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.

I've seen it pointed out a few times that the various toxins mentioned above did technically have the desired effect, given humans started cultivating the plants and thus protected them from predators/insects, and spreading their seeds far and wide. I just like the idea of evolution/DNA in the examples above being like a benevolent Monkey Paw for the plants.

headspace-hotel

Gotta love humans. Fucking weirdos.

crashlandia

“Slavoj Žižek once said that people need three basic things to be happy. First, to have most but not all of our material needs met—for example, the store should run out of coffee once a month so we know what a privilege it is the other 29 days. Second, to have a government on which we can blame all our problems, since most of us can’t handle the horror of admitting we’re incapable of self-rule. And third, to have a vision of paradise that’s close but not too close: it must be close enough not to lose hope, but not so close that we recognize the same banal existence we already have.”

brucesterling

*The guy is a real-deal philosopher

sluttynurse

probably the worst attitude tumblr unintentionally cultivates is "the world out there is completely dangerous for you and no one can possibly understand you, so you should isolate yourself from it and avoid interacting with it as much as possible"

windsweptinred

Time to roll out the Andrew Marr quote again...

"If you put away social media and you walk out into the streets and you look at real people, three-dimensional people, they mostly smile back at you. If you look around you- you see perfectly decent, ordinary people getting on with their lives and inclined, by and large, to rather like each other, that is the real us. Let us not be fooled."

rederiswrites

lovely story from a friend today.

dicaeopolis

rederiswrites

Look, this post has been wildly more popular than I thought it deserved, apparently at least in part because "don't burden others; be independent" is far more ingrained in people than I realized. So here's the thing: society works when people help each other. Helping others gives people a chance to know each other, and gives them an investment in the people they help. Helping creates bonds. People enjoy helping, and you are doing a good by letting them help you if they so wish.

Offer help; accept help. You will be a part of creating a helping culture. Which, incidentally, weakens capitalism and the fractionation between people that benefits those who would use us.

netherworldpost

A horrifyingly few years ago I realized asking for help builds trust, too.

If I ask you for help then I demonstrate you can ask me for help.

That.

Was a difficult lesson.

the-haiku-bot

If I ask you for

help then I demonstrate you

can ask me for help.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

avidcollectorofdust

Really glad predictive text exists. Should i bring my own parking lot

depsidase

south-africa-official

i never really got it when people made posts about light pollution and seeing all the stars for the first time and crying. i always assumed that everyone has gone on a road trip to a bortle 1.0 place and seen stars like that, and it's fantastic, but not like life changing. and then i went to europe last month and was in a mountaintop village of like 300 people and could see about 5 stars in the sky. like fewer than i can see from my home in a big metropolitan city.

my apologies to the non-africans, i did not realise how fucked your sky is

cazort

the thing that makes me mad about light pollution is that so much of it could be fixed by downward-facing light fixtures and doing that would also massively reduce energy usage bc all that light cast upward is wasted energy

depsidase

theaceofwords

It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.

It has always been possible. It is still possible.

gaydiation-poisoning

@isuggestrevolution

fuckyeahchinesefashion

OP: How to fold a flying pig. (cr简开JK)

(The name flying pig/feizhu飞猪 is inspired by Nezha’s mount the Wind-Fire Wheels. In the animated film, the Wind-Fire Wheels normally take the form of a flying pig.)

maswartz

$fractally blog's avatar$

fractally

This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.

depsidase

i feel like its necessary to point out, again, that a lot of the world is going all in on renewable energy. fossil fuels have become bad business. yes, even under profiteering capitalism.

a lot of the biggest investors are not interested in investing in fossil fuels anymore and have been divesting from fossil fuels because its too risky and unstable and destined to become stranded assets that will stop turning a profit. a good portion of the money going towards fossil fuels is from governments (like the u.s and canada) that are propping up these industries with government subsidies. basically, the taxpayer is flipping the bill.

and governments are using the general population's ignorance when it comes to renewables and electrification to convince the tax-paying public to continue supporting the oil and gas industry with this untrue data-defying argument that doing so is necessary and important for the future of the economy.

fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, coal, etc—have no viable future. and its actually going to be economically detrimental to nations that don't take the opportunity to transition to cheap renewable energy sources because energy-hungry industry will go where the electricity is cheapest and the electricity is cheapest where it's powered by solar, wind, and hydro.

enki2

thebdelliumlady

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.

chapscher

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).