Museum of Curated Nonsense

[quasi-normalcy]

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

[nudityandnerdery]

From the media that brought you "Millennials are killing [insert industry here]" articles for years and years and years, now we have....

"Hey, Gen Z, we're gonna relabel vacations into something else now and tell you how you really should be wary of taking vacation because it might impact your financial future."

This is a goddamn dystopia, we know this, right?

[rabid-transcendentalist]

[marciaillust]

the memoir of a ghost

[ebonykain]

“The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about Basketball Diaries?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.” In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.”

— Roger Ebert (via flowersofthecity)

[depsidase]

[emmaklee]

[pourquoiwhy]

I learned a new concept

Graceful degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The purpose of graceful degradation is to prevent catastrophic failure. (Tech Target, first result on the search engine)

[biglawbear]

Literal opposite of planned obsolescence. I love you graceful degradation.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Oh neat the first time I heard of the concept the guy described it to me as "catastrophic functionality".

He was talking about it in the context of designing robots that would go in and stop nuclear reactor meltdowns, something that would 100% destroy the robot, but they would be designed to keep functioning and fighting the meltdown for as long as possible. He had some designs where over 80% of the robot has died and it was functionally dragging its corpse around by its one working arm because one more minute of functionality might save thousands.

I've been having a few bad years mental health wise, and thinking about those robots a lot .

[maddie-2022]

This is also why NASA missions usually keep going so long after schedule. They are *masters* of graceful degradation, able to keep machines limping along on minimal power and after sustaining heavy damage

[azspot]

“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”

— Everyone Into The Grinder

[victusinveritas]

Like this sort of thing? Follow sluttyprimarysource on Threads and think about reading Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson.

[sreegs]

One of the common mistakes I see for people relying on "AI" (LLMs and image generators) is that they think the AI they're interacting with is capable of thought and reason. It's not. This is why using AI to write essays or answer questions is a really bad idea because it's not doing so in any meaningful or thoughtful way. All it's doing is producing the statistically most likely expected output to the input.

This is why you can ask ChatGPT "is mayonnaise a palindrome?" and it will respond "No it's not." but then you ask "Are you sure? I think it is" and it will respond "Actually it is! Mayonnaise is spelled the same backward as it is forward"

All it's doing is trying to sound like it's providing a correct answer. It doesn't actually know what a palindrome is even if it has a function capable of checking for palindromes (it doesn't). It's not "Artificial Intelligence" by any meaning of the term, it's just called AI because that's a discipline of programming. It doesn't inherently mean it has intelligence.

So if you use an AI and expect it to make something that's been made with careful thought or consideration, you're gonna get fucked over. It's not even a quality issue. It just can't consistently produce things of value because there's no understanding there. It doesn't "know" because it can't "know".

[sreegs]

its been just over a year since i posted this and i still encounter people saying things like "i asked chatgpt and..." or "i made this with chatgpt and...". and these arent like teenagers or students they're adult professionals using this shit for their job. i dont know how people live like this

[sreegs]

I don't know how to make this any more clear but if you use ChatGPT to do work you're only hampering yourself.

If you stop using it (or Co-Pilot or any other bullshit AI helper) you will learn and grow more, develop new skills, and become a more valuable employee at work and/or do better at school. There's no shortcut to developing useful skills, you just gotta keep working on it.

[sreegs]

SURPRISE SURPRISE

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”

Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use.

[oldshrewsburyian]

#it is easy to say this now but it was also incredibly easy to say this at the start and at every point along the way ( @qqueenofhades)

[theconcealedweapon]

As long as this remains possible, every single cop is complicit. Every single cop is a sexual predator. And not a "potential" predator.

It's not "just a few bad apples". If a cop is able to do something bad and trust that the system will protect them, then the entire system is guilty, and all cops willingly chose to get a job upholding that system.

[datsmeyellin]

you ever think about how we used to be able to eradicate diseases

[mattoidal]

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

[cock-holliday]

2 NYPD cops got into a chase over an alleged stolen car. The car crashed and burst into flames and the cops left the scene, leaving the occupants to burn to death, and then did not report the incident to their precinct.

These monsters killed someone over *maybe* stealing a car. Left them to die, and then clocked out with utter indifference. The remains couldn’t even be identified.

Every time you think NYPD—any police department—couldn’t sink lower, they do. Every day.

[depsidase]

[fuckyeahanarchistposters]

Sticker campaign: if you see something, leak something

[halalchampagnesocialist]

Sorry but this is so fucking funny ajsjdjsj

[themilfking]

Omg what a disproportionate response from Hamas :( can't believe they ruined your shower

All your violent ethno-state did was bomb and kill 700+ Palestinians in the last 72 hrs