dirt enthusiast
pixel skylines
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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One Nice Bug Per Day
Kiana Khansmith
@theartofmadeline
AnasAbdin
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
i don't do bad sauce passes
oozey mess
Today's Document
DEAR READER
h
No title available
occasionally subtle
Jules of Nature
shark vs the universe
wallacepolsom
almost home
seen from Malaysia
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@mathematical-madness
oh I know how to make a poll's results look like the letter E watch this
what is the rightmost digit of the number of responses this poll has right now? (it should be visible before you vote.)
0, 1, or 2
3
4 or 5
6
7, 8, or 9
Younger folk are getting really good at spotting AI slop, to the consternation of marketing execs.
Found on Mastodon.
From what I remember of back when Millennials were outpacing Boomers at internet and tech stuff in general, this is going to cause a lot of issues for companies angling to use slop in marketing because the younger set are always going to be better at spotting it than the older, but the older are going to be the ones approving marketing campaigns and ads and etc. Meaning, the older people will not ever be able to tell what might actually convince the younger.
The good news is that if it persists and Gen Z and Gen Alpha continue to scoff at the generated stuff, then marketing departments aiming at them will just have to give up on using it because they won't be able to figure out how to fool their targets with it.
The bad news is that this won't apply to scams and campaigns aimed at older people, so once again we're going to have a situation where the kids will be the ones lunging across the coffee table to stop Mom from giving her financial info to that really obvious fake scam mom oh my god do NOT buy that it isn't even a real thing.
Anyway godspeed to the younger generations.
i love shipping magazines and i especially love them when they sound like they were written by a mildly aggravated cargo ship
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]
And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", but it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.
They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?
I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.
I love mathematicians so much. No one else is doing it like them. Group of people genuinely only in it for love of the game. Everyone else hates their subject and thinks its boring and useless and these guys are out here talking about how beautiful and incredible and poetic it is with a twinkle in their eyes. No other subject has such a crazy disconnect between public perception and reality. I love it.
An opinion without 3.14159 is just an onion.
Guys this isnt even funny. Please stop.
It’s ironic that AI generated “art” can never get hands right when the first art was handprints on cave walls
this deserves to be its own post. like yes. totally endorsed.
fuck. your right. we've been here since the very beginning. learn your queer history folks.
i really genuinely wish I could hit chatgpt with my bare fists and hear its pityful electronic voice fade into glitched robotic gibberish and choking beeps as I hit it before I smash it for good and it shuts the fuck up forever
no no it's fine
that's it that's the nutshell genai is in
All so weirdos can drain rivers to write bad emails & nudify children.
