imagination is nothing but belief

not the xkit guy or the xkit girl but a secret third thing

[transienturl]

I contribute to xkit rewritten and palettes for tumblr (@addons!)

they/??? not a minor

am also @fictionalurl or @gossamer-scraps occasionally

[transienturl]

"they say you gotta know where your bread is buttered. and my bread? it's buttered on the headache side." — my brain, which insists that this makes sense

[transienturl]

instinct is to post something along the lines of "I need someone to threaten to kill me if I keep doing x bad thing" but I do keep doing x bad thing so it comes out as "I need someone to kill me."

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[transienturl]

I've started reading ars technica daily, because it's a decent cross section of mildly interesting things, and like. look, with any source you should be evaluating the trustworthiness of the author and including that in what your takeaway is, and in a way having a constant reminder of this is probably a good thing for me! keeps you on your toes! but it certainly does feel a way to consistently be like "okay, so, almost everything in that paragraph is wrong,"

[transienturl]

Why is there not a no-AI index fund? I mean, not literally. Keep Nvidia and Alphabet and the flavoring company and the toilet company; every company is an AI company now. But: 1. In the next few months, SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI will all probably go public at massive valuations. 2. They will be fast-tracked into the major stock indexes, because those indexes are designed to reflect the stock market, and reflecting the stock market, in 2027, will absolutely require big allocations to those three companies. 3. A lot of people are happy about this, because they like AI, Elon Musk, rockets, etc., and are excited to finally be able to own SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI in their index funds. 4. A lot of people, however, are unhappy about this, because they do not like AI, Elon Musk, etc., and/or because they are morally offended that the big indexes are adjusting their rules to fast-track these companies, and/or because they think that the whole process is about pumping up an AI bubble and then dumping it on index investors. 5. If you’re in the happy camp, life is easy: Your index funds will buy these stocks in fairly short order (not that short, in the case of the S&P 500), and you will own them. 6. If you’re in the sad camp, there is very little you can do about it. Your retirement money is probably in index funds. You will have to write a sternly disappointed letter to, like, Vanguard, saying “I have been a loyal user of index funds for 20 years but I cannot abide SpaceX, please send me my money back.” And then invest it in stocks you pick that are not SpaceX. (Not investing advice!) This is a market failure, all those stern letters are inefficient, and someone — Vanguard and BlackRock — should offer, like, the Total Market But Not SpaceX or OpenAI or Anthropic Fund, or the S&P 500 But None of Those Guys Fund, or maybe even the S&P 500 But Under the Old Rules Where You Had to Be Profitable and Wait 12 Months to Get Into the Index Fund. I realize that there are copyright issues here but, you know. Honestly S&P should offer those indexes. – Money Stuff: Opting Out of the AI Boom

I'll quote basically this entire Money Stuff segment because

a) I have been saying this! and b) I think this is the most succinct way this has been put, and that it is an important thing for Regular People to be aware of and have a vague opinion about. (even if the opinion winds up being "well, the collective finance world is reasonably intelligent and will collectively make a somewhat reasonable decision in the end; I will make my voice heard about AI but I don't think I need to tell my relatives to research changing their retirement fund allocations over it or anything")

[transienturl]

idea: refined github feature that doesn't let you merge a PR if any other PRs in the same repo target that branch (so that you can change their targets to the branch you're about to merge into, preventing them from being instantly closed with no way to reopen them if you have PR branch autodeletion on)

...you know, that's probably something I could legitimately create. hm.

[transienturl]

apparently corgi tails are docked. I could be wrong but it generally seems obvious that you shouldn't cut pieces off of animals actually!

[transienturl]

“What the fuck are you doing?” the US president shouted at the Israeli prime minister during the phone call on Monday,

words that would hit different if the context they're actually in was. different

[transienturl]

jesus fucking christ, is the person in charge of the @tumblr blog using old new xkit with unconditional tag copying on reblog

[kaiasky]

its terrible for any number of reasons, but i think if we invent immortality there should be an extreme sport called civilizational speedrunning where teams of 20 go into the wilderness somewhere and try and be the fastest build the first internal combustion engine. i bet you could get it down to like 3 years tops

[biggestzam]

The real trick is to eat seed heavy food before the speedrun starts so your first poops are halfway to agriculture already

[kaiasky]

i want you on my team holy shit

[transienturl]

does anyone else observe that turning off media autoplay on tumblr also means your videos are muted when you click to play them

(if you respond: are you on firefox or not)

(yes I could log in to tumblr on a non firefox browser to test this myself instead of posting. but this is less work for me and for you it is enrichment or something)

[transienturl]

But not just short selling! One of the charges against Left was that he told his followers to buy Nvidia Corp. stock in November 2018. I would be retired if I had bought Nvidia stock in 2018. “We see $165 before we see $120,” he tweeted, when Nvidia was trading at $143.64. In fact Nvidia never again fell below $120, and it hit his $165 price target within two weeks. Also since then it has been Nvidia. It’s up about 6,200% since his tweet. Basically the criminal case against Andrew Left was that he tweeted honest correct opinions about stocks, but for bad reasons. - Money Stuff: Google Needs More Money

one of many things that suck about the crypto and ai booms is that they make Money Stuff (informative, but) not particularly entertaining to read a lot of the time. but fear not! funny things continue to happen in finance.

[transienturl]

How many post comments do you think I make per year?

10 or less

25

50

100

250

500

1000

2000 or more

Voting ended onJun 2

[transienturl]

I don't actually know why I made this a poll. anyway, the correct answer was around 650 post comments per year. not quite an average of two per day, but an average of two per weekday and one each day on weekends!

[transienturl]

‘Like a Klingon prison’: inside Barack Obama’s audacious, near-windowless, $850m presidential library

Towering over a low-income area of Chicago, and wrapped in a speech that’s hard to decipher, this controversial monolith feels like a menaci

An eco obscenity: Norman Foster’s steroidal new skyscraper is an affront to the New York skyline

It contains enough steel to go round the world twice – and even has a fake breeze to flutter the stars-and-stripes flag in its lobby. If thi

I feel like the mcmansion people might enjoy the works of the guardian's oliver wainwright. and by enjoy I mean, you know, not-enjoy, or enjoy not-enjoying, or whatever it is that one does.

[lanternlit]

I use like. so many things to make my dashboard look different, but now one new quirk I believe is just vanilla tumblr: gifs don't autoplay for me because I've turned off animation effects............... on Win11??? why does tumblr...... freeze gifs... because of my system's UI settings? I don't want my OS to animate crap but I want to see gifs move??????? now if I want to animate a gif I have to click at it and most of the time I cannot be bothered. it's not a huge deal but............ my gifs...

[transienturl]

it's a new tumblr system setting in https://www.tumblr.com/settings/dashboard that defaults media autoplay (both videos and gifs) to "use system setting," but you can change it to on or off!

(I kind of wish there were separate settings for videos and gifs, since I would probably turn off video autoplay but leave gif autoplay on, but oh well. also, we'll probably make the XKit AccessKit version—which is, notably, unpause-gif-on-mouse-hover rather than unpause-gif-on-click—override the tumblr setting if we can figure out how to do it, but we haven't yet.)

[transienturl]

a post I've had bouncing around in my head for like a week or more is "I want [to be the kind of person that I believe would be good to, and thus ought to have,] a girlfriend"