Did you know...

...the Martians still scare their young with stories of Teddy Roosevelt? Or that there is a Viking colony on Ceres? Nobody knows how it got there.

[neviditelny]

This is my tag-finding post.

[fuck-customers]

[ruinedchildhood]

[atlinmerrick]

I just laughed for one year watching this. The casual walk-off is just deadly.

[teathattast]

[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.

[jellyfishforest135]

Activated them like sleeper agents

[atomicwrongs]

Having your interests mocked as a kid and general low self esteem will have you insulting the things you like even when they're generally considered very good. Because you like it, and historically when you like something it's stupid and not worth anyone's time. So you will say nonsense like "I recommend this book/game/film, but it's okay if you hate it, it sucks, I really enjoyed it but that's because I'm an idiot" and you are recommending them the Citizen fucking Kane of that particular media type. And importantly: you need to stop doing this it is killing you

[blogs-georg]

was info dumping to my mom yesterday abt the og spirk shippers and early fandom culture and was feeling a little embarrassed about my interests until she went on a rant about how she always preferred spones to spirk, including her reasoning and yeah. that conversation was something alright

[deeisace]

Anyone know what tree this might be?

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Linden, or lime (same tree, different names). I would guess Tilia X europaea based on the comparative size of your fingers. I love it as a tree because when it panics about its environment it sends up a ton of suckers from the base, called epicormic growth, but what causes them to panic (usually related to water levels) varies wildly from tree to tree, so it's basically tree anxiety.

[deeisace]

Amazing, thank you!

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

You're welcome!

Tree anxiety seems to be delighting people in the notes, so for the record it looks like this:

In this case, the whole row is freaking out. But sometimes you get a row where one or two are going 'OH GOD IS THE WATER LEVEL RIGHT' and all the others are like 'For the sake of Christ, Mari, would you calm down.'

Like this:

Spot the anxious tree

[maidthings]

"this is unbecoming of me" is genuinely a useful thing to have in your mental toolbox

[fake-lancelot]

[bulbasaur-propaganda]

Growing up with your starters

Artist:  esasi8794 / Twitter

[chabbit]

The captions are also really cute, although they mostly describe what’s in each photo:

Bulbasaur: Somehow, nomming on my clothes… has become a weird habit of theirs.

Venusaur: That hasn’t changed now that they’ve grown, but they’re very gentle.

Charmander: It’s my first attempt, but I made a plushie so that he wouldn’t get lonely.

Charizard: That plushie seems to be his favorite even now.

Squirtle: Squirtle’s a bit timid and hides behind me at the smallest things.

Blastoise: Looks like they’re scared of the first Pichu they’ve seen. You’re not really hiding!

[notsomerryerry]

@noelle217

[gale-gentlepenguin]

This is adorable

[arrghigiveup]

They just posted some more!

[source]

[kradeiz]

And some more!

[eeveelution-appreciation]

You forgot these!!!

[cubonepropoganda]

I’m disappointed that these were left out

[a-redharlequin]

SO MANY GOOD ONES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[godofhyperrainbows]

If I ever don’t reblog this, kill me

[clevermanka]

🍁 Xavier 🍁 (@xavierck.com)

Here are 543 images (1.5GB) of items at the Philadelphia Museum of Art arms and armor exhibit You're free to use them for anything, even c

[the-ocean-is-trans]

casual reminder that this museum has their entire collection digitized and available free for public use: https://art.thewalters.org/ and they have armor/weapons there

[peregrinethegryphon]

I made something cursed but hopefully helpful to artists.

[pmamtraveller]

Insomnia by Vincenzo Lamolinara

[liliumlief]

trying to get your friends into your fandom like

[bretzkysbs]

It turns out the cookies are real — sort of.

They are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern for Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.

The recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.

The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely. “Kind of like a dog treat,” MacLean says.

Before she reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind “Sesame Street” used versions of rice crackers and foams to make the cookies. The challenge was that the rice crackers would make more of a mess and get stuck in Cookie’s fur. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they broke apart.

Cookie has been portrayed since 2001 by David Rudman, who took over the role from Frank Oz. Rudman’s right hand moves the mouth, which is eating, and his left hand holds the cookies. Both work in concert to break the cookies, which means they have to be soft enough to fall apart.

Rudman said soft cookies are best, adding, “The more crumbs, the funnier it is. If he eats the cookie, and it only breaks into two pieces if it’s too hard, it’s just not funny,” he said. “It looks almost painful. But if he eats a cookie and it explodes into a hundred crumbs, that’s where the comedy comes from.”

MacLean has perfected a recipe that is “thin enough that it’ll explode into a hundred crumbs,” Rudman said. “But it’s not too thin that it’ll break in my hand when I’m holding it.”

Not every (human) guest realizes that the cookies aren’t meant to be eaten. Adam Sandler appeared on an episode and decided to share in the muppet's delight by spontaneously eating a cookie with him on set.

“As soon as the cameras cut, he was like, ‘Blech!' ” MacLean said.

[not-evil-anymore-beasty]

[neviditelny]

It's not summer until i get a weird sunburn from sleeping on the boat

This year's? Both my upper thighs and the right side of my right shin

(The dog was on my left leg. That waterproof labrador coat isn't just good for swimming)