I Hereby Name Thee

[Prev. levi-no-terfs] Cat - 22 - they/he

[hermit-skrab]

We return to the sea for today's good news. Scientists have found bacteria that can break down plastics, PETs thought to have been a forever type issue, in the ocean. We've found similar types of bacteria in a landfill before but this is a much bigger ecosystem. This doesn't mean plastics in the oceans aren't a problem, they very much are. But it does mean that there are enzymes we could use to improve our recycling of plastics on land, potentially.

Enzyme motif reveals how plastic-munching bacteria are evolving across the seven seas

Deep within the world's oceans lurk marine bacteria armed with plastic-munching enzymes, their evolution seemingly sculpted by our synthetic

[jdotsodomite]

[segamascott]

[vanglaggle]

you can kill people by drawing their ocs

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— josé olivarez // natalie diaz

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— william wordsworth (via letsbelonelytogetherr)

[depsidase]

[parkchanwoohoo]

You have to admit it's funny

[naamahdarling]

[cpericardium]

reads like a greentext

[theaudientvoid]

So, like, up until very recently, programming as an activity that people engage in has been defined by the fact that the computer does exactly what you tell it to do. All errors, all frustration on the humans end, ultimately boil down to the programmer misspecifying what they want the computer to do. But now, with so-called "vibe" coding, the computer will actively do things that you explicitly told it not to do.

[theaudientvoid]

Okay, but like, the AI saying that it "panicked instead thinking" is sending me. So, like, two things are going on here.

First, we have a neural net that is trained is receive a written request from a user, and then take actions on a computer system network based on it. The user inputs a series of characters, the neural net does a bunch of matrix operations on them, and then after x iterations of matrix multiplications, it "decides" what to do. To the extend that a neural net can think, it thought just as long and hard about this as it does anything else. In this case, it "chose" the wrong action. This is analogous to using neural nets to do classification on a data set. You have a bunch of rows of data. You have a bunch of rows of organized in columns, and some special variable that you want the neural net to guess. You input the data, the neural net does a bunch of matrix operations, and then it outputs its guess. Sometimes it guessed right, and sometimes it guessed wrong. The goal was to train the model to minimize wrong guesses. In this case, the AI "guessed wrong" about what the user wanted.

But there's another thing that the AI is doing. For path dependent reasons, all artificial intelligence come bundled with a chatbot that's trained to hold a conversation with the user. The user inputs text, and the AI responds with a reply that is "appropriate" to the conversation being had. Right now the AI is role playing a Person Who Just Fucked Up. "I panicked and didn't think" is something that a person who just fucked up would say, so the chatbot says it.

This is why I think that the Helpful Chatbot model of AI is detrimental. It's liable to confuse people and lead them to make incorrect inferences about what's actually happening.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#'i panicked' is so fucking funny to me#and then this guy is demanding the unthinking unfeeling computer bits to apologize to him for lying to him#bro it cant lie to you#you cant threaten it#its just a fucking computer program not a sentient creature#like holy fuck

Me desperately texting myself trying to make the autocomplete options say "I'm sorry for accidentally swearing at your mum yesterday" to me

[bobdylanyaoi]

i’m in trenches you’ve never heard of

[becherdireinen]

trust that everything will fall into place without you forcing it there.

[datadegroove-deactivated2026042]

welcome... to Nothing Park

[meow-moment]

"You have a T-Rex?"

"No."

[hehasthemfeet]

[grecoromanyaoi]

[oneheadtoanother]

[bebs-art-gallery]

A Masterpiece (circa. 2025) by Orange Cat

[briarry]

If Maomao lived in the modern era, she would not be a pharmacist making people's half-insured prescriptions at the drugstore near your home. Her ass would be running your local drug cartel instead, and her face would be on the news every day.

And Jinshi? He'd be the detective (from a family with generational wealth) investigating the drug cases.

[ahsokalegend]

One of my favorite choices the Apothecary Diaries made was making the Emperor a “normal guy” (as far as I know as an anime-only). He’s not evil. He’s not hindering Mao Mao’s journey. He respects the concubines.

If anything his lack of autonomy and presence as the most powerful person in the country further enhances the show’s themes of working within the confines of class and gender inequality.

The previous emperor was a horrible, horrible pervert. Okay, then this emperor only weds women of age… Until he’s forced to take his father’s precious wife due to politics. The current emperor reasonably avoids her.

Eunuchs exist? Bam! now the surgery is outlawed, but this will create a reduction in male labor around the palace.

The emperor clearly favors few women. Well, now he must recognize a concubine with a powerful politician father playing the system.

He supports Mao Mao toeing the line of social expectations for women, but hasn’t removed the law against women preparing medicine. It makes one think, if he wanted to, could he make the change at all? For every two steps forward, he’s forced to take one step back.

In this universe even the Emperor is limited by social pressure and the expectations of his station. His life and that of his children is out of his control, and if that isn’t such a compelling piece of world building I don’t know what is.

If that’s how the author twists the narrative of the Emperor you better believe her female characters dealing with women’s issues in this society are even better written.