🐙🧑🏼‍💻

Online since 1996. Trans since 2004. Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science

[fadbucker]

[bucketofdeltav]

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

[star-system-generator]

Reblogging to drag this project over here, this is killing my notes on main so I'm giving it its own URL. Follow over here for updates on the star system generator and only the star system generator, and not on my Star Wars bullshit.

Will go through and tag interested parties when things calm down below 100 notes an hour.

[catchymemes]

[makahitaki]

[aquilacalvitium]

[ratbastarddotfuck]

you have to forgive the printer because it's one of the most machine-ass machines we interact with on a day to day basis. that thing says kerchunk. hardly anything says kerchunk these days. you can't get mad at her when she kerchunks up a little.

[digitalsymbiote]

Crazy that tech has gotten so bad that we're doing printer forgiveness now

[sodiumvaporss]

i do have to say that no matter how shitty any sort of media is or how shitty your own creations are. always remember

[upthewitchypunx]

I saw this wizard looking shit on a utility pole yesterday. At least I want it to be wizard shit. Turns out it's lineman shit, which, if you think about it, taming and directing electricity is pretty wizard.

Apparently this one means don't climb the pole. The osmofume tag means it was fumigated for fungus or something.

[depsidase]

[davidmalki]

Wondermark #1582; Limit Your Scream Time

[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

Voting ended on10h

[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 :(

Voting ended on10h

[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

Voting ended on10h

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

🫶

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[gallusrostromegalus]

seconding these tags by @ragsy: #if the social consciousness has decided that duckduckgo is the Only Othet Search Engine#might i suggest 'go duck yourself'

[warakami-vaporwave]

VHS Warning (wallpaper version)

[pinkcadillaccas]

Im listening to a podcast ep about AI usage and the guest is saying he completely understands why people refuse to use it out of fear because he shares the same fears, and it's just so weird to me that it's never ever acknowledged that some people don't use it not because they're afraid but because it just holds no appeal. There are things I'm sure learning models are very useful for but none of them have anything to do with me. Yes I'm a bit of a ludite but I completely failed to resist the lure of the phone, or social media, I've never used chatgpt because I have just never wanted to. I feel like the entire debate is instantly reframed once you acknowledge that it's not a necessary service that people either work to resist or avoid out of fear. For most people it's just an online tool, and for me and I know for lots of others too it's just not that important.

It's not that interesting or useful to me, it's holds no appeal, I am resisting nothing. I could already do everything I wanted I don't need a new tool. It really is that simple and I would feel this way even if it wasn't worrying and evil in various ways. We HAVE to resist this narrative that AI is everywhere because people want it, because it's necessary, because it's an improvement, because people can't live without it. AI is everywhere because tech CEOs and investors want to make something from their massive investments. It is incredibly resistable to me. Just don't have an interest in it. This needs to be part of the AI conversation if we have any hope of saving ourselves from the data mining clutches of big tech (AI specifics aside)

[jakeperalta]

not using AI genuinely feels like the rest of the world is experiencing some kind of mass amnesia. if someone says they never use it, the immediate response is that can't be true because "everyone" uses it to write their emails or answer their questions. saw a comment suggesting that not using chatgpt to write an essay is "like the 90s". girl I graduated in 2021 and we weren't doing that! how is it that everyone has suddenly forgotten that they were entirely capable of doing these things all by themselves for their entire lives up until the past few years!! am I going crazy!!!

[beardedmrbean]

One more in the W column for Japan.

[supersoftly]

Link for extension :3c

[yiffmaster]

"sharks are older than trees" is technically true, but TIL that sharks were a marginal group until the mid-Jurassic (the middle of the Dino Age, ~200-150 mya), and all modern shark orders first appear around this time.

Before then, a different group of cartilaginous fish called hybodonts were the big apex predators. How were they different than sharks? Mostly because they had "boney" dorsal spines made out of dentine and enamel. Like teeth are. Like where would that tech have gone, if they'd survived and kept evolving for 200 million more years?

[yiffmaster]

TIL that sharks went thru a mysterious extinction event 19 million years ago, when 95% of populations and 70% of species disappeared. Sediment samples go from having 1 shark fossil for every 5 fish fossils, to 1 shark per 100 fish (does that mean that the ocean used to be like 16% shark??)

And there was no big climate change then, or extinctions of other groups! This research is pretty recent and no one has even an educated guess!

Two effects of this:

All of today's big ocean sharks (Great White, Tiger, Basking, etc.) all evolved from coastal sharks that survived this event. And,

Populations haven't recovered. Sharks as a group are still decimated, a shadow of their former selves for most of the last 200 million years.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

keep thinking about how I wrote in my dissertation about how every time a new form of public/social space emerges it's immediately popular with kids and teenagers who see it as a chance at freedom and then adults colonise it and kick them out. this happened with malls in the 80s and diners in the 50s and pool halls in the 20s. my dad was doing research on this trend in like 1975. and I was like "yeah so this is going to happen to the internet" and then five years later every government suddenly decided to ban kids from everywhere online. I hate being right especially when I don't even get paid for it

[dragon-in-a-fez]

as much as I would love for y'all to read my dissertation it would obviously doxx me to post the link/title here, so I probably won't share (unless a longtime mutual messages privately about it). BUT what I can do is tell you about my academic idols - Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, and danah boyd - and tell you to go read their stuff, starting with a book they co-wrote called Participatory Culture in a Networked Era

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks