Scintillations

Scintillations because I like the word. Otherwise it's just a Dump for my Head. Scintillations also because there may be some shiny stuff.

[alphacrone]

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

[redstonedust]

'being single sucks because youll be lonely' lame and untrue. 'being single sucks because a lot of groceries are portioned to make food for more than one person and you cant really take advantage of buying in bulk because it'll go bad before you use it all' this i cannot deny.

[pangur-and-grim]

killing him to death

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[apolladay]

Pet owners, what kind of name does your pet have???

A food-item (Waffles, Peanut)

A color (Pinky, Hazel)

A real-life person (Marilyn, Paris)

A fictional character (Eevee, Simba)

A type of flora (Rosie, Willow)

Animal-like (Kitty, Gator)

A trait (Lucky, Buddy)

Something else

If you have more than one pet, choose the most applicable listed (ex: you have three pets named Cookie, Cream & Rocky, so you choose the “Food” option). Also, would be interested if you reblogged your pet’s name(s) in the tags and the reason why you chose it ^^

Pet owners, what kind of name does your pet have???

A food-item (Waffles, Peanut)

A color (Pinky, Hazel)

A real-life person (Marilyn, Paris)

A fictional character (Eevee, Simba)

A type of flora (Rosie, Willow)

Animal-like (Kitty, Gator)

A trait (Lucky, Buddy)

Something else

No pet

Voting ended onJun 11

If you have more than one pet, choose the most applicable listed (ex: you have three pets named Cookie, Cream & Rocky, so you choose the “Food” option). Also, would be interested if you reblogged your pet’s name(s) in the tags and the reason why you chose it ^^

[mosswall]

"English doesn't really have any equivalent whatsoever to Japanese honorifics, so we just completely leave them out of our subtitles because there's no way that our English-speaking audience could possibly grasp their significance in explaining these character's relationship with each other"

There is a character named Robert Thomson.

At work, he's known as Robert by his coworkers and Thomson by his boss. At home, the people in his neighborhood call him Rob. His parents, spouse, and closest friends call him Robbie. His best friend from childhood calls him Robbie and also sometimes calls him Roberto. The children in his neighborhood call him Mr. Rob but when he does volunteer work at the library the kids there call him Mr. Thomson. Children in the wild who don't know him personally call him sir. When he goes to anywhere with reception, he's typically addressed as Thomson.

So explain to me again why English speaking audiences can't grasp that those kids are calling that woman Oneechan because she's a young adult woman that they aren't personally acquainted with, and more importantly why you chose to localize that to her given name and not the equivalent of "Miss" or even "Miss Given Name"? Because if your goal is to replicate the experience that the original Japanese audience would have with those characters, you're failing spectacularly. Because now not only do you have a bunch of kids going around calling adults by their given names when in the original language they're calling them a cultural equivalent to Miss or Mister, but your insistence on removing all honorifics and just using names means that there's no absolutely zero difference in the way a person is addressed by the people closest to them and total strangers. Which is not only wildly inaccurate to how the Japanese audience would experience that, it's not even that accurate to English, either.

[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.

[twofingerswhiskey]

why do humans have a built in "let me bother this animal" switch and why is it so funnnnn. like yes hmmm ☝️ i think i Will poke this cat

[sanrio-stud]

to be fair so do a bunch of other animals. for example

Why some animals have evolved a sense of humour

We think of humour as a distinctly human emotion, but some animals may also use it to strengthen their bonds.

bothering that animal is a beautiful kind of playing and having fun

[sashasienna]

This is a really fun article but this bit stuck out to me

Because if someone took me to a shelter and played recordings of human laughter, I do not think that would make me less stressed at all.

[yellow-cat]

witness her

[yellow-cat]

i see y’all appreciating her so have some more

[yellow-cat]

more! more!

[yellow-cat]

ok but i’m gonna run out of funny pictures soon

[pearlwingdraws]

Kind of enraptured by her

[syn4k]

burning text gif maker

heart locket gif maker

minecraft advancement maker

minecraft logo font text generator w/assorted textures and pride flags

windows error message maker (win1.0-win11)

FromSoftware image macro generator (elden ring Noun Verbed text)

image to 3d effect gif

vaporwave image generator

microsoft wordart maker (REALLY annoying to use on mobile)

you're welcome

[mmelete]

[carby]

[voidsentprinces]

[autism-official]

[autism-official]

obligatory reblog of this after I forgot to bookmark them (again)

[caffeinated-bibliophile]

Beloved fellow readers, may I have your attention for a moment, to beg a favor? 🥺🙏

For the magical readathon (orilium readathon) this semester, my (second) character needs to pass Restoration.

The prompt is to ask for five 5-star titles.

Please, rb and tell me (in the reblog post or in the tags) 5 books you've given 5-stars to?

[tinynavajoreads]

5 books that are 5 stars coming right up!

The Martian by Andy Weir

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Vagabond by Tim Curry

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher

Hope this helps!!!

[bookcub]

Five 5 Star Books

Fustuk by Robert Mgrich Apelian

The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School by Sonido Reyes

Comfort Me with Apples by Catherynne M. Valente

As Many Souls As Stars by Natasha Siegel

The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg

[neptuncarapace]

Most recent ones:

Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta

Sword of Kaigen by ML Wang

Babel by RF Kuang

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (Wayfarer 1)

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (graphic novel)

Bonus if graphic novels are to be excluded: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

[targetedknowledge]

[withdreamsofhereafter]

Hexagonal growth in a black olive tree

[peppermintsolarpunk]

Let's play: Is it AI or Real?

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

Stay critical, and –more importantly– curious, y'all! The world is a beautiful place, we don't need fictional plants passed off as real ones for that to be true.

[auressea]

Hey @peppermintsolarpunk

THANKS! that was a big effort and I appreciate you!

[moveslikekeithrichards]

there is no greater joy on this earth than Making Lists, Categorizing, & Sorting

[flying-lemons]

oh do I have the game for you

[dancing-crow]

I could . not. put. this down for 48 hours - stayed up too late, had weird dreams about it, woke up early, and played it while I was supposed to be doing other things. the last several dozen items took a lot of googling, which I do not even begrudge it.

and then. My partner started it. And the SAME THING happened to him.

surprisingly compelling. start when you have free time. like, yanno, a snow day.

[foone]

oh my god, if you are the kind of person who gets sucked into logic puzzles, do not click that link if you have to do anything/go to sleep in the next couple hours

[steamandcream]

thinking about how when you experience a lot of shame in your formative years (indirectly, directly, as abuse or just as an extant part of your environment) it becomes really difficult to be perceived by other people in general. the mere concept of someone watching me do anything, whether it's a totally normal activity or something unfamiliar of embarrassing, whether I'm working in an excel spreadsheet or being horny on main, it just makes my skin crawl and my brain turn to static because I cannot convince myself that it's okay to be seen and experienced. because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of myself, whether I'm failing at something or not, because my instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on ANYTHING I'm doing is to crawl into a hole and die. it's such a bizarre and dehumanizing feeling to just not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being Perceived. ceaseless watcher give me a god damn break.

[steamandcream]

sorry to put your tags on blast on this insane breach containment post I have since muted, but you're right and you should say it.

It is defeatable. Go for the throat.

[wetratman]

“I asked chatgpt-“ well, I asked Piranesi and he told me that the Beauty of the House is immeasurable and its Kindness infinite.

[asthedeathoflight]

Resisting the urge to Um Actually this dragon novel because it has the dragon eggs be like three or four feet wide but there is simply a limit to how large hard-shelled terrestrial eggs can be. No matter how large the animal is, the embryo needs oxygen, and oxygen needs surface area. The larger an object is, the lower its surface area relative to volume, and the less oxygen the embryo can receive. We think of large animals as having porportionately large young because mammalian pregnancy has the unique benefit of allowing for the size of the young to scale with the adult because their oxygen is provided directly through the placenta, and almost all the megafauna remaining on Earth are mammals. But this is not the case for species which lay eggs! For fuck's sake even the sauropods hatched out of eggs barely larger than basketballs! Your hatchling dragon would be impressively enormous if it were the size of a house cat. Stop trying to make me believe that this (ROUND!) dragon egg somehow supplied enough oxygen to develop an infant the size of a large dog or even bigger. If it were possible the dinosaurs woulda been doing it!!!!

[achillbeing]

I love you /lh. Experts going off on their particular fascinating cool topics and adding unexpected context to things we take for granted is like my favorite thing this was delightful. Talk to me more about eggs and geometry and biology all you want :D

[achillbeing]

Amazing concept