Moopsy!

[thekinglemingle]

I referred to something as a "real Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment" in conversation with someone who has never seen TNG, and let me tell you, that was a real Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment

[noirandchocolate]

Mom: Are you girls coming over for dinner on Monday for the holiday?

Me: *why is my mother making dinner for the Glorious 25th of May*

Me:

My Brain: *…memorial day*

Me: Oh!!! Yeah, cool, thanks for the invite!!

[thirdthoughtz]

OK but were there hard boiled eggs?

[birdandmoon]

Female birds with confusing names.

Sign up for my mailing list.

[pnglove]

Mate, you’ve got a chubby lizard on your dashboard

[markscherz]

Graced by Geckolepis typica from Madagascar. I love that they’re quite round creatures and then they have these dainty little toes. Also, their scales are full bone and both scale and skin come off when they get grabbed, which is…unpleasant. Consequently, catching these geckos for research without damaging them requires special techniques. 19th century researchers used bundles of cotton wool, but I imagine this wasn’t very effective, because cotton still has a lot of friction and the friction would pull the skin and scales off. In my (quite extensive) experience, the best technique is to carefully and quickly flick the geckos from their tree trunk or branch into an open dry plastic bag using a finger or stick.

[mrskayathefrog]

'scuse me, Mr @markscherz, does it harm the gecko for the scales to come off?

like, of course it harms them but... can they grow back? like how some lizards can drop their tails and eventually the tails grow back

[markscherz]

Not only do they grow back, but they come back so well that we cannot even tell where they have ripped off before. This is very weird, because when a lizard loses its tail, it is very obvious where it has been lost and regrown. Not so these chaps. They seek out a humid place to hide, and within a few weeks, skin and scales have started to regrow. The fact that they can do this so well is the reason a team has just sequenced their genome. I believe it is hoped that the skin regeneration tech they have built into their cells could eventually be harnessed for human skin grafts.

[byjove]

Me: *Removes my cat from my lap to do something else.*

My cat: Father is...evil? Father is unyielding? Father is incapable of love? I am running away. I am packing my little rucksack and going out to explore the world as a lone vagabond. I can no longer thrive in this household.

[cryoverkiltmilk]

The spiritual successor to Miette

[manicgoblinnightmarewoman]

Might I also add

[shydestinybread]

May i add the piece from artist Verbal Vomit

[unyanizedcatboys]

Glad to see we’re all in agreement that cats talk like disparaged victorian children

[explorerrowan]

I am so incredibly glad we finally moved on from "i can has". Cats are clearly smart enough for advanced sentence structure and dumb enough to draw entirely incorrect conclusions about what they're talking about.

[dualclock]

My cat, banging the cabnet door over and over and over: bang bang bang

Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.

My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang

Me: ksst!

My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she's been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!

Me: ok

My cat, after waiting about 3 minutes: bang bang bang

[notcaycepollard]

[callmebliss]

Can haz snackytreat

[ladyshinga]

(source)

[dogsrulepeopledrool]

Source

[cryoverkiltmilk]

#the ancient texts

... My reblog was only six years ago!

[brainrotroulette]

autistic monk finds god trapped in a tortoise gotta be my new fav genre of book, i think

[ellevandersneed]

good response to a lotta shit you see online can just be "what do you mean we"

[ellevandersneed]

another one for you: "i don't know i think it might be a bit more complex than that"

[sandinmybed]

also: "i don't think this is actually a real problem"

[teomodo]

src

[mapsontheweb]

Brazil compared to Pluto.

[carnival-phantasm]

thank you for come to brazil

[thirdthoughtz]

So misleading. I may be happy Pluto got "demoted" - sorry, it doesn't clear its orbit and is tiny (0.035 earths)... but this is still a "very misleading although technically close to correct" image. Here's why!

There is a trick - perspective and dimensions! Pluto is a sphere, Brazil is basically a 2D plane.

What does that mean here? Well, look at the numbers!

Surface Area of Pluto is ~17.7 million sq. km

Area of Brazil is about half that at 8.5 million sq. km.

However, because Pluto is a sphere, from this perspective you can see less than half of the surface area from directly above the sphere. So, optically, it looks smaller than Brazil, even though it has more than 2 times the surface area!

[magpiesketchins]

Sam Vimes every year:

[thirdthoughtz]

How do they rise up...

Post your lilacs if you gottem, everybody!

[datsderbunnyblog]

Apologies to my non-Discworld mutuals for this 24 hour service interruption. Normal service will resume on the 26th of May. 🙏

[datsderbunnyblog]

Of course if any of my non-Discworld mutuals are interested in becoming Discworld mutuals that would be cool too 👀

[spatheandspadix]

Me and Amorphophallus friends from grad school: A. bulbifer, A. perrieri, A. paeonifolius (w bonus Anchomanes hookeri), A. konjac

[thirdthoughtz]

Too much Konjac will definitely morph the phallus

[homosexualpigeon]

Star Trek is crazy you’ll look away for two seconds and then Kirk is suddenly shirtless in a harness and a shock collar

[unclefather]

[psych-is-the-name]

[shinekocreator]

Okay, this is actually funny

[starberry-cupcake]

garak and neelix would get along so incredibly well because garak would get so much information from this man who knows the nitty and gritty of the entire delta quadrant and neelix would be delighted to sit down with someone so interested to listen to his stories and ask questions on his experiences and whatever plans garak has for this information would go so far over neelix's head that it wouldn't bother him at all, as long as garak tells him how entertaining he finds him and how passable his food is

[dduane]

Anthropic blames dystopian sci-fi for training AI models to act “evil”

But training on "synthetic stories" that model good AI behavior can help.

Gee, maybe if they hadn't started out by STEALING all that dystopian SF to train their autocomplete machine, this wouldn't be happening... :/

[thirdthoughtz]

As Diane suggested in the tags - contaminated training data, improperly filtered, causes contamination in the results of the model.

Leaving aside IP protections, its the primary issue with the content LLMs produce, and these products haven't had nearly enough iteration to catch all the explicit and implicit biases, random issues with the data that cause hallucinations, etc.

Any researcher who uses more structured ML models knows that - and its actually a big part of what we use them to test! Want to know how the biases are structured in a body of work? Set up an ML model to pull latent variables, correlations among word pairs, etc. and how frequently those pairings occur (or how dominant the variables are in explaining variation in the data set).