Radical Rad @radical-rad1986 - Tumblr Blog

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Gee Tumblr people in charge. If you'd LISTEN to your users and FIX the gawdamn website...

Rad Online

AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rad

Xitter: https://twitter.com/RadicalRad1986

Slack: Rad (fanart of black and white Eries, and a rainbow)

Pillowfort: https://www.pillowfort.social/Rad

Dreamwidth: https://rad1986.dreamwidth.org/

deviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/rad1986

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rad1986.bsky.social

Bluesky is new. Really, I'm only active here. Really crossing my fingers for Pifo.

FOR SALE: Escaflowne 25th Anniversary Merchandise

#pinned post

sztupy

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

ayeforscotland

Let’s fucking go

made-in-manetheren

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.

#yes #fuck a*

Email provider?

(Why doesn't the Tab button go to the text window???)

I'mma ditchin' Goog!e. Email provider suggestions?

I have Outlook for my crafting business. I don't like that the ad comes as an email. I'm willing to trade ads for a free service. Not as an email.

#untagged

rederiswrites

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

It's rude.

#fuck a*

ellipsus-writes

Today is the biggest day for Ellipsus since we launched in 2023... 👀

Back then, we began building Ellipsus out of a simple belief: writers deserve a place to create, collaborate, and share their work without handing over their words, their data, or their creative process to bad actors and Big Tech—a promise that matters now, more than ever.

Nearly 600k writers and counting are writing on Ellipsus because of this promise. We see everyday how writers are rejecting Big Tech's data mining model in favor of tools that respect user privacy and reflect our values.

We’re a small full-time team building, maintaining, supporting, and improving the tool every day. And to keep doing that sustainably—without compromising the promises that brought people here—we’re introducing Ellipsus Plus.

Plus is a set of optional features on top of free Ellipsus, designed to help fund the continued development of Ellipsus for everyone, free and paid; while helping us stay independent, ad-free, and working to improve the tool well into the future.

That means the Ellipsus you know is staying free: you can keep writing with unlimited documents, drafts, collaborators, and core features. Free Ellipsus will continue to receive updates, improvements, and new features too, including major work already planned (like offline syncing and native apps).

Plus features have been designed alongside community feedback, our pricing shaped by our users around what felt fair and sustainable.

Every Plus subscription leads to ultimate ownership of the tool. Not metaphorical ownership, but real ownership, including all future updates to the Plus plan. No endless subscriptions. Once you’ve paid, it’s yours. Really.

Our introductory Plus features are designed to be fun, creative, practical, and help you get the most out of the tool! We really hope you enjoy them. Here’s a quick overview:

Custom themes

Make your writing space feel like home with custom themes! Use any colors, gradients, images, or .gifs you love. Share with friends and readers. The choices are infinite.

Writing Insights

See insights into your writing process and spot patterns faster across ten AI-free metrics—like vocabulary diversity, sentence length, sentence rhythm, word frequency, and more. Writing insights are opt-in only, and run on local data, so your text never leaves the editor.

Customizable Snippets

We all love snippets! Now you can give your words an extra personal touch. Customize your snippets with media backgrounds (GIFs, images), fonts, text colors, and custom themes—you can even add byline credits for authors and characters!

Emboss

Emboss is our AI-free proof-of-work layer for human writing. Show your readers the time, labor, and love that went into your work. Instead of relying on unreliable “AI-powered” “verifiers” that judge a piece after the fact, share your writing journey, with authorship metrics that help inspire trust. You can also show how your work evolved with snapshots of your version history. Emboss is fully opt-in.

We hope you’re as excited about Plus as we are! Try Plus free for 7 days, no payment required. You can read more (and sign up!) on our Plus page.

Again, there’s tons more to come, and we can’t wait to build it for you. Free or paid, Ellipsus is going to keep getting better. Thank you for your support.

Have questions about Plus? We’re hosting an “Ask the Team” doc where we’ll be answering your burning questions. Please make comments there! Now please, go forth and explore!

- the Ellipsus Team xo

#untagged #I need to delve into it #need to leave Goog!e

oddarette

Strawberry candy bulbasaur 🍓

#Pokemon #alternative Bulbasaur

oddarette

Bet you never seen a licorice bulbasaur. Fun fact, those little licorice candies are called “allsorts”

#Pokemon #alternative Bulbasaur #ok Idl 'nonnatural' Pokemons...#this is CUTE

marzipanandminutiae

help some Racist Nonsense someone came at me with has sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how common enslaved dressmakers were in the antebellum southern US, but the continued lack of understanding even among historians that Seamstress and Dressmaker were two different things in the 19th century is making it REALLY difficult

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

(like. yes, enslaved clothing-makers were AI clothes generators who had no skills of their own and had to be given very precise instructions to produce the desired output. of course. sounds legit. </s>)

marzipanandminutiae

Also just speaking of the book in question, genuinely, it is so 1930s to be like "oh yes, we make clothing ourselves now, so in the olden days before modern technology, they must've made their own clothes even harder!!!!!"

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash

(really the period when it was at all a money saving endeavor to make your own clothing at home from scratch was so small in western history, and the practice was geared at such a specific subset of the population, that it's not at all what people today imagine it was. Like for most women, making your family's own clothing at home being a thrifty or even just viable proposition was more likely to happen in the 1950s than in the 1850s. I'm not saying that nobody in the 19th century was in that position, but far fewer people than anyone imagines in the present)

achronalart

I recently read a book* on British women dressmakers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.

*The book is Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid: British Dressmaking in the 18th and 19th Centuries, by Pam Inder, Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2020.

marzipanandminutiae

Book recommendation! Thank you! And such a good breakdown too

(worth noting that slavery was in something of a legal gray area in the UK during the 18th and early-mid 19th century when it was legal in other parts of the Anglosphere; it was never technically legal in the UK itself, but of course it was legal and commonly practiced in their colonies, and many enslaved people who were brought to the UK Were treated as though they were still de facto enslaved until they were taken back home again. And of course you don't have to rely on chattel slavery to make a business off of unfair labor practices, which was extremely common even after slavery was outlawed and/or fell by the wayside)

it's interesting also that some dressmakers offered a sliding scale of services, from making up entire outfits on the high end, to cutting and fitting and basting the pieces together in the middle, to cutting and fitting but leaving the women of the household to do the physical sewing themselves as the Budget Option. I find that fascinating

#fascinating #untagged

pinkbowsandstripedsocks

edwardspoonhands

Honestly, Tvyek is pretty miraculous. It’s permeable to water vapor but not to water, it’s nearly impossible to tear, but can be easily cut. It’s cheap and made entirely without binding chemicals. In addition to being used for wristbands, it’s used to wrap construction sites to keep out water during construction, for tear-resistant envelopes at Fed-Ex, coveralls for mechanics, and my wallet, actually.

Fun tip, though it looks like paper, Tyvek is plastic, and cannot be recycled with paper.

fairypsychicarchive

andromedafalls

holy fuc

piisbetterthanpie

I didn’t even know it had a name

#whut #untagged

botanyshitposts

a couple months ago someone sent me an ask asking if I’d ever heard of Boquila trifoliolata and I was like ‘no way. this can’t be real’ and i looked it up and it was and I forgot about it until just now when my supervisor and I got sidetracked and I looked it up again to prove to her that it’s real and found out that not only does this plant vaguely mimic the leaves of whatever plant it’s vining on, it does it when it climbs on fake plants too so any theories about how it does it that include gene transfer or chemicals or touching it in any way are just out the window and those were like, the only theories the original researchers had about how it might be doing it. so anyway I am screaming and crying and whatnot

elephantbitterhead

The more you read the better this gets – from Krulwich, Nat Geo 2016:

Boquila feels more like a cuttlefish or an octopus; it can morph into at least eight basic shapes. When it glides up a bush or tree that it’s never encountered before, it can still mimic what’s near. And that’s the wildest part: It doesn’t have to touch what it copies. It only has to be nearby. Most mimicry in the animal kingdom involves physical contact. But this plant can hang—literally hang—alongside a host tree, with empty space between it and its model, and, with no eyes, nose, mouth, or brain, it can “see” its neighbor and copy what it has “seen.”

(Artifical plant modeling & c. discussed in White & Yamashita, Plant Signaling & Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530)

that1girlarreis

Don’t like this at all! Thank you!!

alithographica

One theory from that above White & Yamashita paper is that Boquila does this using plant ocelli—a very basic type of eye! If you’re interested in a brief infodump about ocelli: Many animals have ocelli, like jellyfish and insects. Here’s a picture of a wasp head—you can see its two main eyes to the side, and those three dots in the middle are ocelli.

(Photo cred: Assafn, Wikipedia)

These ocelli don’t form sharp images, but instead probably detect light and shadow for sleep patterns, directionality, flight stability, etc.

Some reptiles and amphibians also have a light-sensitive third eye called a parietal or pineal eye! It’s similarly right on top of their heads. Again, they’re not forming complex images, but instead use general light information to regulate other things. It’s also why even tame reptiles may bolt if you reach at them from directly overhead, out of range of their normal eyes—that third eye sees an incoming shadow and goes HAWK, RUN.

So with that in mind, plant ocelli…Basically they think the upper epidermal cells have evolved to have a particular convex dome shape that focuses light. I don’t know what proportion of cells are ocelli, if it’s just some or all, but basically the leaf itself IS the “eye”.

Plant ocelli were first proposed over a century ago but they haven’t been well studied since then. Cyanobacteria (a photosynthetic bacteria) focus light. Arabidopsis thaliana has been documented to recognize other Arabidopsis plants…basically when competing for resources, if the Arabidopsis recognizes it’s competing with other Arabidopsis plants, they’ll cooperate and move leaves so that they don’t shade each other, ensuring each plant has access to nutrients. But if the competing plant isn’t Arabidopsis, screw ‘em, they’ll shade it. Crepy & Casal narrowed this down to a light-based response, not just chemical identification, so it’s possible Arabidopsis is visually identifying friend from foe. At any rate, that’s about the extent of plant ocelli research that I was able to find. So this Boquila thing is cool and weird.

What we don’t yet know is how precisely Boquila is seeing the world. Boquila is clearly getting some level of resolution in order to be able to copy shape, size, AND color. Unlike an insect’s 2-3 ocelli, it has tons, so even crude data over a lot of inputs might lead to a pretty good picture. The paper also says the mimicry gets more accurate over time, so there appears to be some learning involved. I would also love to know if it has some equivalent of depth perception! If the target plant is near vs. far, does Boquila produce the same appropriately sized mimic leaf? Does it adjust? They’re going to keep studying it so hopefully we have some answers in a few years!

Anyway here’s a picture of the variation of Boquila mimic leaves.

(Photo cred: Gianoli figure)

👁 🌱 👁

vigilantsycamore

On the one hand, this is fascinating, on the other hand “some plants can see you” is a terrifying thought, thank you for this

#fascinating #for the scienze #untagged

shattersaurus

Hello everyone!

Last year I started designing a series of Coat of Arms, themed in the spirit of Pride Month and using different mythological creatures as heraldic animals. I now aim to turn these designs into wearable pins and will be running a Kickstarter in July to fund this endeavor! I have found a very trustworthy local manufacturer, who has already shown the quality of their craftsmanship with the first batch of test pins I received, just look at the detail they were able to produce!

Since I try to support local manufacturers, which produce pins with fair wages and are more ethical than outside of Europe, the pins are more expensive to create than through the usual pipeline via Asia.

I therefore seek to crowdfund the expenses since they would be more than I can afford. If you are interested and look forward to support this little endeavor, please follow the link below to sign up for a mailing list. People who signed up on the email list and pledged during the campaign will receive an exclusive sticker set by the end of a successful launch consisting of the following designs:

Our Kickstarter Prelaunch Page:

A collection of Pride themed Coat of Arms Enamel Pins. Rally your friends, choose your crest and celebrate with PRIDE.

#these are cool!#friendly signal boost

c-rowlesdraws

after all the choice jokes in Morph Club about how much Visser 3 loves tigers (he really, really loves tigers), I had to draw a comic about him finally getting some merch of his favorite Earth animal.

#Animorphs #Animorphs ate my soul ok?!