Humanity: Orcs of Space @space-orcs - Tumblr Blog

auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"

michaelnordeman

Eurasian red squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (9 May 2026).

zooophagous

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

qonphuceingey

I’m really starting to think you people don’t understand what university is for. You’re buying the accreditation that you can do these things. It doesn’t matter how you do them.

zooophagous

I can assure you if you're going to school to be an xray tech or a surgical assistant it does very much matter how you do the stuff your accreditation says you can do. We aren't all business majors.

qonphuceingey

Yes, but you actually can’t do an X-ray without an X-ray machine and you can’t do surgery without scalpels. We already rely on technology for everything. Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more. If you can do your job with chatgpt, but can’t without, you can still do your job. I’m sure you would find university much much harder without access to google or the internet too.

zooophagous

Do you think scalpels are magic and do a little song and dance and perform the surgery themselves like Beauty and the Beast characters and the surgeon is there to conduct the background music

darlingofdots

What do you think will happen when your employer, who hired you because they saw you have a certificate to say that you have specific skills and knowledge, starts expecting you to have and use those skills and knowledge and you can't because you think a university degree is just a piece of paper that you buy

ariaste

"Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more"

When you're in school, the cognitive tasks are there for the explicit purpose of being brain exercises. It's weightlifting. It is FOR building your mental muscles and making you a stronger thinker and planner. "Offloading the cognitive tasks", then, is just Not Doing The Weightlifting. What happens when you pay for your gym membership and just stand around messing around on your phone? Nothing. Nothing happens. Just money leaving your wallet. Nothing else.

Using AI is a short term pleasure that is going to fuck you over in the long term, and by the time you realize that you didn't build the necessary muscles you need for the cognitive tasks required of your ACTUAL JOB (or, like, adult life in general), it's going to be too late to do anything about it... except going back and doing the real work all over again to get you up to speed.

And if your response as a college student is "Ugh i'm already good at this though, i don't need the practice" -- sweetie, you have no idea how good at it you could be though. If you're good at it now but you keep working on it, you're going to ASTONISH yourself in a couple years with how good at it you can get. I was a good writer when I was in college; I am an ASTRONOMICALLY better writer now, because I put in the work. But you have to lift the weights and build your muscles to get there, even when it's tedious. There aren't any shortcuts for this. You can be content with your own mediocrity, or you can believe that you're capable of growing towards brilliance. Which one will you choose, mediocrity or brilliance? You get to pick right now.

skodasforge

I’m a Surgical Assistant and that ChatGPT stan pissed me off so I’ll use my job as an example. 90% of our job as surgical assists comes down to memorizing the names and usages of the thousands of unique instruments and equipment and sutures involved in surgery as well as having the critical thinking skills to anticipate the needs and expectations of the surgeons we work with. That’s a “cognitive load” that cannot be pawned off on a computer. If I relied on ChatGPT to tell me what instruments to have ready for a case, it would create a composite of what the most likely instruments to be used in a given surgery and assuming that it’s even accurate, it would be effectively useless if my surgeon didn’t use any of those because each doctor is different. Surgeons get pissed off if you give them the wrong diameter size suture, so why would I rely on a soulless algorithm to tell me what my surgeon wants? And if I’m not figuring out for myself what they may need based off my own learning and not machine learning then why am I even there? There’s a reason robotic surgery still requires a surgical assistant and a surgeon to operate the robot, technology is an easement not a replacement for human labor and in college learning is the labor you should be doing.

A common thread with ChatGPT simps seems to be that they truly believe all labor is as easy as their cushy middle management jobs in the tech industry. “Buying an accreditation” might work there but can you imagine someone in the medical field not actually knowing the subject they’re licensed or accredited to know? I’ll give you a hint: the word we typically use is malpractice.

shower-thoughts-last-responder

I would also like to add as somone who did a one degree about 10 years ago when academia was just startingto make the switch from fully physical to full online, it is entirely possible to do a degree without really using the Internet or Google. You turn up to lectures, you collect the reading list, you go to the library, you find the book you need on the shelf, you take it and several others back to whatever desk you're working at and the you read them and make notes (I made notes on a PC but plenty of people in my group used paper notes pads), you critically evaluate the information amd decide whether or not to include it in your assessments. No Google required, it's not that fucking hard.

selwyngrimm

Let me introduce you all to the building trades concept of "buying your book."

A "book" is (a slightly outdated beyond this specific topic) term for your union card, which states that you're a member in good standing of your local/union and ostensibly means that you have the coinciding skills that go with the title of journeyworker or apprentice or whatever. Typically, to become a journeyman, you serve an apprenticeship (usually 5 years) and then have to take a test of some sort to prove you've acquired all the necessary skills to earn the qualification. The card/book is the proof that you have a basic level of competency.

Sometimes though certain locals, usually in the South or other places where right-to-work or similar attitudes are stronger, will "sell books," which is to say they will allow people who either haven't served an apprenticeship or passed a skills test to buy their card so that they may work on union jobs.

There's a myriad of reasons and reasonings on why a local might do this, but on the ground, it means that if I'm on a big job, anyone from areas or locals that have a reputation for selling books is automatically assumed to be under-qualified. This sucks, because I've known plenty of badass hands from Southern Locals, but because they come from book-selling locals, they had to overcome that stigma. To an extent, this whole thing is self-regulating because if you bought a book and can't hack it, you only come to a travel job once before they will never invite you back, but it is a constant source of sand in the gears for the whole labour management process.

Anyway, learning is important and faking learning WILL bite you in the ass if you have any desire to exist in the world in a meaningful way.

hollowedskin

Also, just so you know, real life professional shit isn't like school. You don't get endless chances to get it right when you fuck it up . If you are found to have fraudulently acquired a qualification that you have no idea how to use, you not only get fired, but you get blacklisted in your inustry if not legally charged with fraud.

That will follow you for the rest of your life. That will completely lock you out of your chosen field and all it's related feilds forever.

What are you going to do when you're still paying off a degree that you can't use because you've been flagged in the system? What are you going to do when your future employers run a police check and find that you've been charged with occupational fraud? Do you think they're going to hire you anywhere when that comes up? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a job with an unrelated criminal charge, let alone one directly tied to your job?

Come on guys. You don't get do-overs with this shit. Don't fuck your life up because you didn't want to pay attention at uni. There are real world consequences for this shit.

mockva

Man notices an Eagle eyeing the fish he just caught

mexicain-sans-frontiers-v2

the-davest-of-uncles

*gets back to the nest* baby you are NEVER gonna believe how i got this fish

virtualgirladvance

this has to be some eldritch horror shit for the fish

fromthemouthofkings

A group of far-future linguists and archeologists suddenly *poof* into existence in front of me. One is holding a tablet. "What is the difference between 'red sauce' and 'tomato sauce?'" they ask me. "The distinction is not clear in extant texts from this time and place."

"Uh, they're the same thing," I tell them. "Who are you?"

"Yes!" the being with the tablet exclaims.

One of the other researchers groans. "No! My thesis...months of writing wasted..." One of the others comforts them.

"Now, what is this object for?" The first researcher holds up a discolored, dinged-up plastic object. It's clearly been buried in the ground for quite some time, but the two holes and the scuffed plastic window are distinctive.

"That's a cassette tape. You record music with it."

"Interesting, interesting." The being enters something on the tablet.

"How are you speaking English?"

"Sophisticated translation technology," one of the researchers confides. "We are students of your society. From the future."

"What does this pictogram represent?" The researcher with the tablet turns it around so that the screen faces me.

It's the eggplant emoji.

"Sex," I say. "Why do you need to ask me this if you can time travel or whatever? Can't you just go wherever you want to go and look around and see how these things are being used?"

The beings shift guiltily and look at each other. "Technically, travel to times and places prior the advent of time travel is strictly prohibited. Paradoxes, you know."

"Oh."

"We must be get back before our advisor returns to the lab. Just don't tell anyone you saw us, alright? The space-time continuity depends on it. Can you do that?"

"Uh, sure, I guess?"

One of them pats me on the head. "And don't go to Mars."

"Okay. Wait, why? Is it dangerous?"

"No. Just not worth it."

The group disappears in a shimmering light.

The cassette clatters to the sidewalk behind them.

Out of befuddlement, mainly, I pick it up. It's clearly old, discolored and scuffed, but it still has tape in it.

I carry the tape around in my pocket for a while. The curiosity builds. I want to know what's on that tape. I don't have a cassette player anymore, so I go to Goodwill and pick up the first one I can find, praying that it still works. I plug it in. It turns on.

I slide the tape inside. It's dirty, but it still seems to be in decent shape. I snap the player closed and hit play. The wheels begin to turn. I hold my breath.

A familiar tune starts up. A wobbly voice comes out of the machine.

We're no strangers to love

heavensenthousepet

you learn something new everyday. unless you're a historian. then you learn something old

melonisopod

estro-boi

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

estro-boi

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

macleod

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.

brawltogethernow

tealeafed

One thing I love about studying math is that when you ask any fellow student or prof why they went into math we all say it’s because we find it beautiful. It’s so diametrically opposed to the opinion that everyone else has about math that it feels like some kind of virus that infects you and makes you unable to study anything else

mindwires

I study math because there is some sort of gremlin in my brain addicted to the clacking sound two Numbers make when they smack against each other

pico42

Reminds me of this:

thalassarche

Common Raven (Corvus corax) teasing a gull (Larus spp) - series by Sandra Gilchrist

According to the photographer, the raven eventually left and the gull seemed no worse for wear after the interaction.

keatxu

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

omikronsoul

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

justletmeremember

op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.

macleod

When I worked for the government a few years ago, one of the offices I was in charge of managing for their network, security, and IT systems was the nuclear task response office, this is the office that is in charge of toxic cleanups, nuclear fallout (if such a thing ever happened), and more.

They required having tech from the past sixty years ready at a moments notice (if X fails, try Y, then Z, etc). A lot of the older digital methods are all abandonware, sitting on computers developed in 1991 because they couldn't figure out how to safely transfer or migrate them to newer hardware (or even knew they had! found a server from '95 at the back of a closet somehow still running! connected to a powerstrip from '89! I kept the powerstrip, it's so chunky.)

One of my favorite jobs was figuring out how to get this software that had virtually no documentation remaining (likely buried in the office, but I never found it), or instructions, or really anything to a modern, more resilient, system. The company went out of business in '93, and the only known developer I could track down was in a retirement home.

I did eventually shift it over to run in a container/emulator for DOS, but it was a nightmare (one I loved) that took me months of hacking things together to figure out how it all went together.

Abandonware, the source code, the documentation, the IP, all of it, should be legally required to be disclosed, released, and submitted to public and government archives after either 12 years after first release, and/or upon dissolution. Until that happens, this entire era is likely going to be referred to as the digital dark age. Where everything was once online and available, but where nearly all of it was lost.

odyver

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?

under 18, AI is a net positive

under 18, AI is a net negative

18-29, AI is a net positive

18-29, AI is a net negative

30-45, AI is a net positive

30-45, AI is a net negative

46-60, AI is a net positive

46-60, AI is a net negative

over 60, AI is a net postive

over 60, AI is a net negative

Remaining time: 2 days 13 hours

odyver

Question 2/3

How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?

Frequently (multiple times per month)

Often (multiple times per year)

Occasionally (a couple times per year)

Rarely (once every couple of years)

Never :(

Remaining time: 2 days 14 hours

odyver

Question 3/3

If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?

under 18, more inclined

under 18, less inclined

18-29, more inclined

18-29, less inclined

30-45, more inclined

30-45, less inclined

46-60, more inclined

46-60, less inclined

over 60, more inclined

over 60, less inclined

Remaining time: 2 days 14 hours

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

🫶

blondebrainpowered

This is an ancient Egyptian gold ring with a carved jasper frog, dating from 600–30 BC.

hungwy

Another reason why trains would be good is that most people are not good at driving

dreamlogic

im in the bathroom listening to the following conversation between my roommate and my cat in the hallway outside trying to stifle my laughter.

roommate: is there a problem?

cat: RAH!

roommate: oh no, is the door shut? did charlie lock you out of the bathroom?

cat: mweh...

roommate: well you see, i could fix that problem for you—

cat: MYEH!

roommate: —but due to social rules that you probably couldn't understand even if i explained them,

cat: gWAAH... mow..

roommate: yeah, dude, i hear you, but it's not gonna happen.

cat: MRRRR..!

roommate: i know i have opposable thumbs, but my hands are tied, thumbs and all. i'm sorry, i wish it didn't have to be this way.

[sound of roommate's door closing, followed by desperate scrabbling claws on the bathroom door]

kineticpenguin

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

kineticpenguin

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

yourunderwaterskies

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

aloeverawrites

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

yourreddancer

The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.

The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.

Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.

Given that no company walks away from European consumers voluntarily the phones are going to change and once they change for Europe the rest of the world will ask why theirs still do not.

viciousgangsofkeepleftsigns

New sustainability rules come into force in the European Union from 2027, and here's what you need to know.

Article with more info.

I think that people forget - or simply weren’t there for it - that cell phone batteries, even smartphone batteries, used to just come out of the back of the phone. I remember my BlackBerry Bold 9000 was SUCH a power-hungry machine that I literally always carried a fully charged backup battery in my bag (in a special carrying case to protect it) so that I could swap them out on the fly at 2 pm if I didn’t have access to an AC charger. I remember getting my first iPhone and being confused that the battery didn’t just…pop out. I had also assumed it was partially a safety feature - if the battery starts to die or get too hot, you could pull it and salvage the rest of the phone. Sure it might lose whatever you were working on, but at least you didn’t have to worry about not having a phone anymore.

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