quadtator, going dark

omnipitence doesnt exactly do execeptions ^moot points for whoever names where the quote comes from^ TAG ME IN SHIT YOU WANT ME TO GET TO FIRST

[bloodied-dagger-deactivated2024]

final song of the week is “Somewhere Out There” by acloudyskye btw. Y’all should go listen to it

[beguilingcorpse]

sorry but voltron legendary defender RULED this website for like two and a half years. you couldn’t go a day here without hearing about it. i devoted my precious high school years to its study and analysis. it was wildly popular, considered extraordinarily well-written for an animated children’s show, and revived voltron in pop culture and the public eye. and now it has been pulled from netflix (who PRODUCED IT) and the only official way to watch it is to pay for it on youtube or amazon. and that’s only the first six seasons. i’m so serious there is no legal way to watch seasons 7 and 8 of voltron. how did we even get here man

[beguilingcorpse]

you could not BELIEVE the trenches for this show. the racism. the misogyny. the queerbaiting. they confirmed the main mentor figure as gay at the beginning of the second to last season and then killed his fiancé later in that same season. there were ship wars. there was assumed incest. your mileage varied on how much you were disappointed when they didn’t actually turn out to be brothers. there were grooming allegations made against the fictional characters in the fictional universe of this tv show for children. the ‘you know i had to do it to em’ guy got involved. the voice actors got involved. people were cancelled by 13 year olds. death threats were sent to multiple members of the production team. the red one and the blue one were frankly barely even friends by the third season. the animators went rogue. the writers felt bad that all of their teenage fans guessed every twist they wrote so they drew out conflict and added new plotlines just to keep things fresh. the main mentor guy was killed and cloned at the end of the first season and instead of acknowledging that we all knew that the writers refused to give up an inch until the end of season 6. if you believed in the “clone theory” then you were viciously attacked in some circles. the zuko-esque antihero character had an entire redemption arc that was trashed in the season finale when it was revealed that he had actually been committing systematic genocide the whole time. the single prominent female character was never once given an interesting character arc and was shoehorned into a romance in the last season. and then she died. one of the most popular fanfictions on ao3 was taken down and replaced with the script for the bee movie. it was awful. it was glorious. it was truly mediocre. it was the greatest wasted potential in a television series maybe ever. and it’s gone. there is no legal way to witness the entire thing anymore. there aren’t even dvds of the last two seasons. it’s just over.

[hussarbynight]

You have become the Voltron Legendary Defender Defender

[beguilingcorpse]

this is the worst possible outcome on a number of levels. thank u

[ilovecats4ever]

nichijou wiki is a goldmine

[cristalplanetheart]

[bogleech]

I love contemplating how actually scary this is. Nothing in horror movies affects me anymore but I get the most wonderful chills from the idea of these beautiful, haunting, mindless things just hovering in this murky water like a minefield for anyone foolish enough to go swimming or unlucky enough to fall in. How it’s still not as bad as being a fish small enough for them to paralyze and consume. How they regularly paralyze and consume fish but evolved before anything like a fish ever existed. A fish is such a complex creature that can see and think and navigate and be afraid but sometimes it touches these brainless, boneless, ghostly things that were just already there, millions of years sooner, and it dies and it never understands why that is. The thing that killed it and ate it doesn’t know either, it doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t have enough of a brain to even realize it has killed and eaten something. Some of its cells simply fired little harpoons into the cells of the other thing, and squirted deadly chemicals into them, and hauled up the paralyzed body to digest it. It’s a spider’s web without a spider but it still fills things with venom and eats them. :)

[saywhat-politics]

Keep your messaging simple:

“Trump fired everyone in charge of airplane safety, and a week later planes started crashing into each other.”

That’s it. That’s the messaging. Don’t get bogged down disputing Trump’s false claims. Just blame him, in short and repeatable sentences.

[queerculus]

Trump removed bird safety regulations in his first term and now bird flu is killing so many laying hens that eggs are $5 a carton

Trump removed food safety standards his first term and now we have recalls every few weeks

Trump cut the subsidies for the solar farms under construction so now electricity costs more

Trump disbanded the pandemic response team and we now we have bird flu and tuberculosis outbreaks

[pointnclick]

i’ve watched this like 8 times in a row

[momperlman-deactivated20251022]

Me and my dog post-apocalypse after we find a broken crate of canned peaches washed up on the beach

[guerrillatech]

[austindarkness]

How do you have communist breadlines in the most brutally capitalist country in the world? And breadlines involve bread. This is eggs. Do we need to explain eggs, bread, capitalism, and communism to you, you fucking idiot?

It takes hens to lay eggs dumbass. And avian flu has killed a shit ton of them. So it wasn't bad communist planning, or capitalist planning that caused the fucking shortage of eggs. It was a virus.

[dr-otter]

It's a virus that we did a poor job of containing because state diagnostic labs are underfunded and have no power to enforce any kind of preventative measures.

Testing flocks and herds isn't mandatory unless moving them interstate or importing birds. Until recently, farms were paid indemnity for chickens (not cattle), and only since December 2024 are farms that depopulated due to HPAI required to update their biosecurity before restocking and before receiving future indemnity payments for further outbreaks. But if you don't test you don't have to depopulate! Not testing keeps those numbers down and that's good, right? Right?

Sigh

[verschlimmbesserung]

Yes! But 'do not test!' is only the first step to contain a health hazard,

Step 2, 'do not inform!' is even more important!

CDC Posts, Then Deletes, Data on Bird Flu Transmission Between Cats and People

The data, which appeared fleetingly online on Wednesday, confirmed transmission in two households. Scientists called on the agency to releas

[natsukusa-mikan]

✨ＤＥＴＥＲＭＩＮＡＴＩＯＮＳ✨

[adobsonartworks]

As someone who’s reported alt-right harassment and rhetoric on various social media sites and been told “there’s nothing here that violates our TOS,” seeing what RPGnet is doing is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Please, more social media sites need to do this.

[peregrinelight]

@ ppl in the notes: First amendment is for the government not rpg dot com where you signed their ToS u absolute morons

[clockwork-basilica-deactivated2]

SAY IT LOUDER

1st Amendment stops the GOVERNMENT from stopping your speech but jane and john doe can punch you or ban you !!

[big-tiddy-goth-ghoulfriend]

[tathrin]

[the xkcd “free speech” comic]

[anarchistmemedistro]

tumblr taking notes

[timemachineyeah]

One of the best xkcd alt texts as well

[decadent-trans-girl]

[decadent-trans-girl]

You lot are taught to defend Hiroshima and Nagasaki in schools; understand this: Canada is under no obligation to play nice, particularly when threatened with annexation.

[decadent-trans-girl]

This is the sort of shit I'm talking about. You are not serious people:

[donjuaninhell]

No one is that fucking stupid, that has to be a bit. Jesus Christ.

[decadent-trans-girl]

Yanks absolutely are

[decadent-trans-girl]

Yanks have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind

[severalowls]

A couple of others a friend of mine came across last week.

"Your problems [that the US government caused] are the least of our worries" really encapsulates the sort of baseline unexamined nationalism that is agonizingly common in the US.

[decadent-trans-girl]

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Worth pointing out that what the USA tried to do to Canada is (a fraction of) the same thing they've been doing to so many global south countries for over a century, it's just that Canada happens to have enough leverage over the USA's infrastructure to be able to fight back.

[shithowdy]

observations

[egberts]

companies are delusional if they think consumers don't notice shrinkflation. less food in the package, less medicine in the jar, less whatever in the wherever, it doesn't matter where and it's almost always noticeable. like i just finished one box of medicine and we opened another allegedly identical one that we just bought and lo and behold, the four middle medicine segments were gone from the package. they took out four pills from the same sized box and sold it at the same price without any indication on the box other than the small number in the corner. ridiculous

[tabbydragon]

I bought a carton of my favorite tomato soup last week and noticed that the nutrition facts looked weird. So I compared the new one to the mostly empty carton already in my fridge.

The serving size was the same, but the calories per serving had gone down by like 15. Odd. The ingredients list previously listed tomato as the first ingredient, and then water. Now water is first. They’re watering down the fucking soup and charging the same for it. I’m so fucking done.

[kawaiijohn]

This sort of thing is also really infuriating when you work in a kitchen or make bulk food for serving- in my field, everything is done by weight and calculated to the calorie (public school cafeteria) and all recipes need to be approved by a board before we can make them. They're standardized, by fucking law.

So we should know how many boxes of product it should take to make x amount of servings, right?

Tell me why for the last two years, every time we make mashed potatoes with the supposedly same dehydrated mix, we need more and more mix to reach our numbers? Supposedly, one carton should make 77 servings- it's made 77 servings for the last five years.

So why are we suddenly only getting 70 out of the box on average now? We're making it the exact same way every time. We make this recipe every other week. Why is it noticeably different.

We have to weigh everything to get accurate serving counts for governmental records and reimbursement from the government.

Why are the bags of frozen berries that say five pounds on every packags only weighing out to 4.3 pounds at best? We aren't draining them, they should weigh at least 4.9 because that's normal in the margin of error and the bags weigh nowhere near the difference to make it up. Now we won't have enough to make our target serving count bc we only ordered enough for about fifty extra servings like we always do.

Why is the chicken nugget brand we've been buying for years from the same brand suddenly way fucking smaller? The serving we use is 6 pieces bc legally we have to offer two grams of protein for a menued meal at the highschool level- so has our serving size changed without them telling us? The box doesn't say it's changed but we notice this sort of thing because we do the same menu every couple of weeks.

It's infuriating to have to make up the work because companies are trying to be fucking sneaky about this shit.

[thebiscuiteternal]

Also maddening as hell if you're on or know anyone who's on the WIC program in the US, because things like baby cereal are on vouchers specifically by weight, not price. So if that cereal you got last month was, say, 32.5 ounces, and the company decided to pull some shrinkflation bullshit and change it to 28.2 ounces for the same price or whatever without telling the WIC offices, you can't get it with the voucher this month, even though it's the same cereal with the same label and the same price. It's not the right weight anymore. Tough shit. Maybe it'll get fixed next month, only for the company to screw everyone over by changing the weight again.

[luckyladylily]

Executives that arrange for this should be personally charged with theft, just as if they had personally stolen a car. Or, more likely to match the scale of the crimes, hundreds of cars. It is morally unjustifiable.

[theoneofwhomisblue]

King shit

[famicom]

i really hope all of you know about this scp

[famicom]

this is the highest rated article on the site

[its-scippy]

I’ll read it later

[ishtaraletheia]

[Image desc: An SCP Foundation article:

[Title:] SCP-____-J

Item #: SCP-____-J)

Object Class: _________

Special Containment Procedures: In a box in my office.

Description: It’s a rock that makes you procrastinate.

Addendum: Probably memetic or something.

[in italics:] I’ll finish writing this up later.- Dr. Vang

End desc.]

[charlesoberonn]

When I was already into Roman history and the Crusades and now I find myself getting into WW2 as well...

I swear I'm not a white supremacist, they're just really fascinating eras!

If anything, the racists don't actually know or appreciate the real eras in question and their complexities, they only idolize the fake macho versions of these periods.

[diane-nguyen-watches-cartoons-d]

People whose idea of history comes from the movie 300 will hold up Sparta as a group of super-soldiers who Saved Western Civilization while genuinely having no idea that Sparta betrayed the rest of Greece and sided with Persia both during both the Peloponnesian War and Alexander's conquests.

That famous story about Alexander leaving Sparta alone when he conquered Greece? That wasn't because he was scared of them; in fact it was exactly the opposite. They were so weak, and their country so poor, that he saw no reason to conquer them and thought nothing of leaving them as a potential enemy in his rear when he marched east. He did eventually conquer Sparta after they rose against him. Or rather, one of his generals did. Their revolt wasn't important enough to warrant the personal attention of the Great Alexander.

[charlesoberonn]

I'm reminded of this iconic example of Spartan "badassary" during the reign of Alexander's father, Phillip

[copepods]

i just met an actual wizard on the train and im grieving because i know i’ll never meet anyone that cool for the rest of my life

[copepods]

artists rendition

[averyterrible]

well. in AI news, it seems like a Chinese company has managed to match OpenAI's most advanced models in efficacy and is taking it to market for 3% of what OpenAI charges.

which may be the first tolling of the bell for the ai bubble to finally pop

[averyterrible]

China’s cheap, open AI model DeepSeek thrills scientists

DeepSeek-R1 performs reasoning tasks at the same level as OpenAI’s o1 — and is open for researchers to examine.

[maxknightley]

Part of the buzz around DeepSeek is that it has succeeded in making R1 despite US export controls that limit Chinese firms’ access to the best computer chips designed for AI processing. “The fact that it comes out of China shows that being efficient with your resources matters more than compute scale alone,” says François Chollet, an AI researcher in Seattle, Washington.

lmfaoooooo

[averyterrible]

#count down in this being banned in the us under the same law that banned tiktok#putting that under a month

i should note: the actual AI model is open source. banning use of the DeepSeek service itself wouldn't be able to actually stop the economic knock-on effects, as US based actors can just take the model, train it on whatever material they have, and run it for themselves.

overall this is suggesting that advances in AI are, in reality, duplicable without massive infrastructure investment and cutting edge equipment. it's already a commodity product.