A Hopeful Dreamer

Lurking then blogging since 2013; yet it almost feels like no time has passed at all

[beardedmrbean]

Periscope up

[birds-in-posts]

Green heron (Butorides virescens)

[ruttotohtori]

Amerikankyyryhaikara (Butorides virescens)

[blignick]

[catsofyore]

Warming the toebeans. 🥰 Photo from my collection, no date/info.

[everythingfox]

He is actually a deer

[aniseandspearmint]

instinctual frolicking

[elfybean]

[a-huge-nerd]

https://www.facebook.com/welcometomymemepage/ dont forget 

[luna-azzurra]

Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.

[drizzledrawings]

Run run run runrunrunrunrun

[kosmogrl]

we got august this week

[mehilaiselokuva]

Have you noticed the young people of Helsinki developping an "influencer accent"? With up talk at the end of sentences and generally a more loud way to speak.

Good question, yes I have!

I don't interact with "young" people much (very much confined to talking to my university professors and my classmates) but I love observing people's speech patterns especially on public transport. We also discuss this at university a lot.

I have noticed that especially young women do tend to copy English prosody in their speech. I've noted that, for example, when younger people speak Finnish (or the newer version of Stadin Slangi) the melody goes up when forming questions, just like it does in English. This is then also used in ordinary sentences, when one uses the "influencer accent", as you noted.

Young guys seem to be more influenced by the "tough guy" way to speak, and their way of speech seems to be more aggressive and "punchy". I think this is also due to the influence of the internet.

This is not a bad thing at all, but the Stadi way to speak has annoyed non-Helsinkians for a long time. Another feature which I find very common around here is the way people pronounce <s>, which is "sharper" than usual. There is even a book written about this, which I have read! It's called Stadin syntinen s.

I could talk endlessly about all the ways the language in the capital region is so unique and influenced by various different things, but this post would become way too long.

[vieraslaji]

the first thing I noticed in Helsinki this most recent trip (2025, as opposed to 2022) is that cashiers/baristas/etc had all started saying kitoos rather than kiitos at the end of a customer service interaction. it wasn't happening in any of the other cities I visited. would you say that's part of the same trend?

[mcrmadness]

I definitely hear "kitoos" every now and then and I don't live in Helsinki. I would say that it's a way to make the word sound more chill and less official, as we Finns love to stay informal as often as possible. "Kiitos" itself might feel too strong or harsh, and "kiitti" and other versions maybe too informal and not polite enough for a situation like a customer service job.

[homunculus-argument]

There's this one specific interaction on reddit that I wouldn't call "infamous" but I also know that everyone who knows it knows it by the punchline, so in order to not ruin it for the ones who haven't, I'm just going to talk all of you through it as I'm saying this.

The beauty of it is that you could place that exact same dialogue into any time and place in human history and it would make just as much sense, you could have it as a conversation between sailors in a 1600s ship, a group of bronze-age warriors cleaning their weapons, stone age hunters walking home from a hunt, or a bunch of 21st century redditors on the internet, and it would hit just as splendidly.

There was this conversation about if you could have sex with any specific person from any time through human history, which one would you choose? Famous legendary lovers were brought up, queens, emperors and such were popular, might as well fuck Rasputin just to see what the hype was all about, the kind of answers one would expect.

Then some guy said he would choose his own late wife. He went on to talk about how brutal it is, that you might find the love of your life, but there's no promise that this life couldn't be suddenly cut short. That his body aches for hers and how there isn't much he wouldn't do for one more opportunity to make love to her one last time.

Now, I'd like you to imagine a pause in the conversation. A solemn, contemplative moment of silence, with several of the people present nodding in agreement that this is indeed the finest answer - it wasn't a competition, but there's no doing better than that.

And then someone breaks this solemn silence and says:

"I also choose this guy's dead wife."

[onibi-onibi]

(タプタプお腹 | キュルZ さんのマンガ | ツイコミ(仮)から)

[midnightssea]

it’s amazing how women are able to navigate crowded rooms without ever touching a palm to a man’s lower back

[quendergeer]

you'd think occasionally men would need to touch other men like this to manoeuvre them out of the way but it never happens

[fishstarrz]

let’s be a cute seal with mama

[sealsandlacenet]

everyone’s always talking about how cute harp babies are but oh my golly the adults are so CUTE as well!!!

[chernozemm]

I think there's a great chance the existence of mirrors/reflective surfaces silently fucks Rocky up.

Like, Grace is in the bathroom, shaving, the curtain pulled to the side and suddenly he stops and says "stop touching my stuff". Rocky, frozen, somewhere behind him, can't fathom how Grace sensed that. He was so quiet. The razor is so loud. Grace's still facing away from him. What the fuck.

Grace repairing some panel or other and asks for a tool. Without even turning around, he says "no, not that one, the one to its left". Rocky's like are you shitting me. I know for a fact your hearing is ass. You can only see in one direction and I'm not in it!! What?!

[somie]

Aborted weird route krusie thoughts (comic)

[elbiotipo]

It's very interesting how big of a revolution will LLMs cause (and are already causing) in genetics and bioengineering since DNA and proteins are, for all intent and purposes, really really long words

[elbiotipo]

You can, very literally, fit the entire human genome in a .txt file. It's not the most efficient way to study it but you can

[elbiotipo]

It's so funny that people have such strong opinions on AI but every geneticist I meet is like "oh god finally. This thing does all the work for me. We will find the catgirl gene soon"

[elbiotipo]

And no this isn't just the specialized models like alphafold. You can ask Claude or Deepseek to make pipelines and bioinformatics stuff for you and they work.

[elbiotipo]

A good chunk of AI and LLM research actually comes directly from bioinformatics research. To find the catgirl gene.

[odmnd]

No technology is by default, evil.

The transformer architecture, and LLM’s have very valid and very benefical advantages for humanity. At the same time, however, the raging psychopats who control these companies have indeed completely abandoned their humanity, and removed themselves from the human condition completely.

To let these people decide the fate of the world and its future is utter and sheer madness and self destruction for mankind.

[elbiotipo]

I don't think they're raging pyschopaths or that they are deciding the fate of the world, let alone the destruction of humankind. I just think they want a lot of money and this stupid unequal (read, capitalist oligarch) economy is letting them get away with stupid things. LLMs are a great technology for research and yes, even entertainment. I just don't need them in every single thing I use and I don't need them to replace jobs that need a human touch.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

They were using this tech to generate potential cancer-fighting proteins when I was in uni about a decade ago. I assume they can do it better now with modern models but I've been out of the field for a while. They'd use what we now call "generative AI" to come up with potential proteins, they'd be screened for the most viable (and actually makeable/refinable) candidates, and they'd be tested on cell culture assays to investigate their effect on cell growth.

[bulletsandbracelets]

Professional quibble, though I still agree with some of the sentiment. They were not using large language models to come up with potential proteins. AI is a massive field made up of a ton of different algorithms, training and mutation methods, iterative improvement methodologies, etc.

And part of the problem of the current LLM corporate led push is that it has driven research, and funding, away from alternatives to LLMs. The current generative AI that almost all of our resources are being pumped into is inefficient, generalized, and not as accurate as specialized models. It has a few things it is good at, but a lot of things it isnt, and there are far more efficient and far more effective models out there (or probably yet to be discovered) that could do even more good. But because those tools are specifically trained and specifically efficient, they aren’t widely marketable.

PairFormer Module | kyegomez/AlphaFold3 | DeepWiki

This document provides a comprehensive technical overview of the PairFormer module within the AlphaFold3 architecture. The PairFormer serves

^ the basis protein model, then refined by diffusion. Diffusion models are most useful for refining data down, not for generating new data altogether.

New data generation just isn’t scalable, but because these people think that all they need to do to create “artificial general intelligence” is pump in all the knowledge in existence, suddenly every research resource is being turned towards scaling up data collection and data storage as much as possible. Regardless of if they are right, and regardless of how useful it is.

[sermna]

Alecto was angry, and raised her up, and kissed her. The child did not cry out, though blood fell from her lips and tongue, and she was wounded sore. For Alecto knew not how to kiss, except such as it involved the mouth and teeth. And Alecto said to her, Why are you not appeased? That is how meat loves meat.

I love u Alecto 💛