[superpowerpuffgirllove]

I’m watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time, and it is totally the blueprint for all the broody vampire boys of the 2000’s. Stephan Salvatore, Edward Cullen, etc.

[necromycologist]

if there was any justice at all in the world “every helen has her troy” would be an idiom (“every beautiful woman leaves a disaster in her wake”) and misogynistic renaissance authors would use it to describe hot women they didn’t like but, of course, inadvertently making her sound insanely awesome in the process. and then in modern times instead of talking about things being their hill to die on women could say “this is my troy to burn” and people on tumblr would be kind of horny about the whole thing and it would get incorporated into the whole “can yuo put that out on me” genre of posts. anyway just a glimpse into my beautiful mind tonight

[pointnclick]

"we live in an uncaring universe." sorry the special planet full of beauty and animals and food literally growing out of the ground isnt good enough for you. i guess

[klfg]

[source]

[klfg]

🚨BREAKING: OpenAI published a paper proving that ChatGPT will always make things up.

Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math.

Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level.

And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.

Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do.

The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing.

So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up.

OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product.

This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent.

Every time ChatGPT gives you an answer, ask yourself: is this real, or is it just a confident guess?

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

After ten years of dreaming, eight years of government support, six years of fundraising (we needed $50,000,000!), and five years of construction, the Paul Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence at Koidu Government Hospital finally saw its first patients on February 14th.

13 babies were born at the MCOE that day. Several were admitted to the NICU, the first in Sierra Leone's history. The MCOE is already radically transforming the kind of maternal and infant care available in eastern Sierra Leone.

Five thousand babies will be born at the MCOE this year. 5,000 more will be born there next year, and the year after that, and the year after that--hopefully for decades. The healthcare workforce of the entire nation will grow stronger because the MCOE is a teaching hospital training the next generation of Sierra Leonean nurses, midwives, and doctors.

The heroes of this story are those caregivers along with the Ministry of Health, PIH, and the hundreds of skilled laborers who worked together for years to build the hospital despite so many challenges. But if you're supporting this project directly or indirectly (by buying good store socks or soap), thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[lena-oleanderson]

also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

[paternosters]

Pluribus, intentionally or not, is the most post-2020-2023/COVID media I’ve seen since living through those years.

Something terrible starts to happen all around you, all over the world. So many people are infected so fast, and now suddenly the person you love most is infected, and she’s in distress, so you rush to get her help but not a single expert or authority figure around you has the capacity to tell you what to do. Your wife dies, right in front of you, and there are so many bodies everywhere that you’re seeing them on the street. You stay in your house because you have to hope your house is safe, but 800 million people just died and even if you don’t know that exact number just yet you can extrapolate from all the horror you’ve just witnessed in your own city.

And then, the next morning, it’s a bright sunny day and everyone (who lived) wakes up and tells you it’s over, we did it, so sorry for your loss. Yup, everything is okay, we lost a couple, but we’re good now. Would you like to go back to normal? 

Even the other ‘unaffected’ people in the world look at you like you’re insane when you bring up how bad the situation was. Well, MY family is intact and I want to be happy, so let’s make peace with the world as it is. We just want to be happy again, and, look, everyone is ready to pretend with you. 

Why are you so angry? 

[nonaferatu]

This would have had me crucified on tumblr 10 years ago but maybe we are ready for this conversation now:

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

This is a PSA to about 3/4s of the Portland Youth populace

[caesarsaladinn]

every morning i wake up and make the worst possible time management decisions anyone has ever made

[elwenyere]

-- Ted Chiang, from "Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art"

[oldshrewsburyian]

I'm so glad they got Ted Chiang -- a wonderful writer of science fiction and thinker about technology, in my opinion -- to write this essay. My favorite line was this:

Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.

[imacone]

decades

[byjove]

whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.

and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.

[lyricwritesprose]

My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.

[mutedtempest]

I think about this a lot.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.

[hyperactivehedgehog]

Diabetes is one of these illnesses that really throws medical history into perspective. It's so common, everyone knows someone who has it, people live pretty normal lives with it. And yet, a hundred years ago, it was an instant death sentence. And then we were able to treat people with insulin and yet - it was extremely disabling. The insulin was extracted from animal pancreas had severe side effects, even with how similar the hormones are, there is always an averse reaction to proteins from foreign species, especially during long-term treatment. Injections had to be given every few hours, at-home-tests were only available from the 70s onwards. Insulin pumps entered the market in the 80s. Genetically produced insulin - humanized insulin - was first available in the US in 1982, in many countries only around the year 2000.

In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.

In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.

In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class

In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.

That wasn't fate. It's not natural development that made diabetes a common chronic illness. It was hundreds of people who cared. It was the people who created the keto diet. It was the people who came up with tests. The ones who went through different species, trying to figure out the closest analogon to human insulin. It was the people who fought in court to get genetically produced insulin approved for medical use. It was people who looked at a rare, incurable disease and said "but what if it wasn't?"

[dragonmasque]

Trees evolved and lived and died and did not rot long, long before the organisms that can break down and metabolize their corpses ever came along.

And now, humans are working with fungi that can safely break down petroleum plastics, and with techniques that allow us to actually recycle these materials.

The world is full of difficulties... Medical, mechanical, environmental, so much more. But the world is also full of change, and humans are capable of working with that change purposefully, intelligently, cumulatively across time and populations. There is always a value in trying, in learning, in making an effort or building a community. Even if we don't succeed, every effort helps build the support for the thing that will, even if we can't always see how.

We owe it to those who did the best they could with what they had then, to do the best we can with what we have now, so that those who will come after us will have even better, more useful, more humane tools for the problems they will face. Who knows what we can accomplish together, for each other, when we don't give up?

[padawan-historian]

Centering Black environmental thought and indigenous medicine ways is to recognize that food deserts are not naturally occurring but designed to displace people from resources for profit. Food deserts are in fact food apartheids.

[sometimesboffosometimesnot]

Oh boy! I wonder who was president during that per—

[brightlotusmoon]

[skaldish]

I think about this a lot.

[computationalcalculator]

may I add also “butt dial” vs “booty call” vs “bottom text”

[clitorius-maximus]

Hand job vs manual labor

[ohgreatblackbunny]

Tags deserved to be seen

[sottopressione1]

Tuira Kayapó brandished her machete in the face of a government official who was trying to convince indigenous leaders to accept a mega-dam project in the Amazon, 1989

[lesbianmichelmishina]

“Electricity won’t give us food. We need the rivers to flow freely. Don’t talk to us about relieving our ‘poverty’ – we are the richest people in Brazil. We are Indians.”

part of kayapó’s speech during this event

also! she’s still alive! that sort of thing is always worth pointing out to show that we really aren’t too far removed from events like this! here’s a 2019 photo of her:

[shinytarountula]

I just checked, she passed away in August 2024 - but not before working with a filmmaker to make an hour long movie where she explains her life and her activism. If you want to hear what she has to say for herself, here’s the opportunity.

Movie is ‘Tuire Kayapó’ (First Contact) by Pınar Yolaçan, in case the link breaks

[xinakwans]

i actually don’t think this woman was “too online” when she tweeted in celebration about a man who actively wants her and everyone like her aka trans people dead. but what the hell do i know

[xinakwans]

i do not fucking care if she wasn’t writing what you wanted out of a comic book. they are going scorched earth on her entire comic, pulling issues that were put out to be sold YESTERDAY.

i have been reading comics since i could walk and talk. i have NEVER seen them go scorched earth like this on a writer before. she is a trans woman and if you think that that didn’t impact this choice you’re either ignorant or being purposefully obtuse.

[cardinalcringe]

I’m sorry, what happened?

[nielsthecat]

Gretchen Felker Martin's Red Hood series was cancelled after she made a joke about Charlie Kirk being shot on BlueSky. I believe it was meant to be a miniseries, but now issues that have already been solicited, ordered, and probably printed are being pulled. Like OP says, I've never seen a reaction like this before--even Warren Ellis, who was dropped by DC after being accused of sexual misconduct, was allowed to finish out the maxiseries he was writing at the time.

(There's some other context that makes this worse, such as the transmisogynistic hate campaign that had been levied against GFM since the book's announcement, but this is the long and short of it.)

[alleecatblues]

I think you’re downplaying the Warren Ellis situation. There are credible sources reporting that he abused and manipulated over 100 women over his career. At least 60 of them got together in 2020 and compiled a case against him.

And what happened? He made a public apology, and they let him gracefully exit the company, finishing the series he was working on at the time.

A trans woman says some stuff on her personal social media account that certain people don’t like and they shitcan her the same day and start canceling orders for any new issues of the series she wasn’t even half done with yet.

The double standard here is visible from fucking space.

[brenshor]

Hey maybe you guys should stop writing for the Addams family cause you don't get them at all.

Imagine my girl Morticia saying that shit in any other portrayal? NO? Because she wouldn't.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

I really love Jenna Ortega as Wednesday

And when she's given good material to work with I love Catherine Zeta Jones as Morticia

but this show really does not seem to get the dynamic of the Addams Family as a whole like it just does not seem to grasp what their deal is as a family

[xzombiexkittenx]

The problem with Netflix's Wednesday is that one of the main things about the Addams Family is that they are counter cultural. Specifically counter to cishet, white, American, suburban norms.

Part of that is being the opposite of the shitty sitcom family where the wife is a nag, the husband is an idiot, the mother-in-law sucks, and no one seems to like each other very much. The Addamses actually love each other. There's no 'take my wife' bs. If Gomez calls Morticia a battle-axe or the ol' ball and chain he means it to be highly complimentary. There's none of the nonsense like in the pics OP posted. Gomez or Morticia lives with their mother in law (it depends on which version whose mother she is) who is literally a witch (geddit, 'my mother-in-law is such a witch...') and get on great. They genuinely and openly support, love, and care for each other through thick and thin.

But the biggest problem that Netflix's Wednesday has is that to make a really good Addams show rn would mean scrapping the Sabrina the Darksided Witch/boarding school Monster High concept, going back to basics, and having them live next to an upper-middle class, conservative values, MAGA family and letting their differences fuel the plot.

A really good Addams Family show would have Morticia fighting against book bans at the school and having hilarious misunderstandings about what her neighbour means about "Liberal witch hunts." It would celebrate queerness, and gender (and species) non-conformity because the Addamses are queer and gender non-conforming, and not always definitely human (Cousin Itt, for example). You know Fester's gender identity is probably something like 'an abomination.' If one of them gets asked, "What are you?" the answer is a prompt, "An Addams."

They would be fighting for co-ed sports so Wednesday can trounce a boy at fencing, and would find out her chromosomes are just 'spooky' or something.

There'd be an episode about immigration and being targeted by ICE. OFC several Addamses come from somewhere weird and arrived in the USA via broomstick, or tunneling from some underground community of cryptids, or other hilarious misadventure. Gomez would desperately want to be blackbagged and treated like a dangerous animal (cue a major flirting moment between him and Morticia). They would permanently scare ICE out of the town.

Wednesday would fiercely support Landback. Pugsley would get redpilled and learn a lesson real quick. Gomez would get into (and out of) Crypto, and Morticia would have run-ins with MLM 'huns.' They would advocate for freedom of religion. Granny would rally alongside Evangelicals to have religion in school, only to reveal she meant witchcraft. They would support UBI, and be anti-landlord. Easy episode idea: Gomez is a landlord and goes on a spiral about it ("But, Gomez, you love leeches and scum" "Not this kind! Morticia, they've painted everything white, in my name!!!" "No!") and they wind up in a battle with the town because he wants to unburden himself of this shame and the town wants to stop free community-owned housing.

The point is that Netflix isn't going to touch any of that with a ten foot pole. They don't want to; that's way too political for them. Instead, they made this wildly unrelated supernatural teen drama that has nothing to do with the original concept or world that the Addams Family exists in (they're outsiders in the real world, that's the point).

And, worse, Netflix's Wednesday actively goes against the original themes by being vaguely conservative in its values.

Netflix's Wednesday fails the assignment so bad I'd laugh, if it wasn't so disappointing and enraging. Just take a look at what the Mary Sue had to say about the whole "werewolf conversion camp" debacle for a microcosm of the many things wrong with this show.

"It wants to use hot-button topics like conversion therapy and colonization but it doesn’t understand how to work them into the metaphor. In fact, it barely knows how to work with the basic metaphor of “monsters” and how they function in the horror genre in general. In storytelling, the monster or the freak has always been the stand-in for the societal outcast. For the person who can’t be controlled by the dictates of polite society. They are the subtext for the outcast. But Wednesday makes the subtext text by literally splitting the characters into “outcasts” and “normies.” And yet the outcasts, the monsters and freaks who live on the fringe, are also the privileged and elite."

In my opinion, Netflix's Wednesday is wholly unworthy of the Addams name and is an outright blight on the franchise.

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

…I want a world where this is the version of the show we got. Because that all sounds awesome and like it would make all the right people mad.