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Ducky | 26 | They/Them

[e-phemeric]

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[demilypyro]

Digital circus' biggest problem is that it was written to be a niche show aimed at weird analytical queers with actual media literacy and it accidentally blew tf up and hit the mainstream and a bunch of people who have never had a second thought about anything got into it

[rocketsaurus]

Curious what is actually normal for bed time. Go for your normal/average time, not your most extreme or what you wish it was.

what time do you go to bed? (local time)

7pm or before

8pm

9pm

10pm

11pm

12am

1am

2am or after

it's never consistent

some other time entirely

Remaining time: 4 days 40 minutes

I just don't know what grownups do for bedtime and I want to know!!!

[adz]

reddit is having a glitch where it puts the wrong captions over photos and it’s the only thing i care about right now

[dietspam16]

[wingkink]

btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here

[iamasalmon]

the thing about fiber art that nobody tells you about is that every single kind of fiber art is a gateway drug to other kinds of fiber art.

[thypandatetor]

You gain enough confidence with one fiber art, then you look over at someone doing another fiber art and go, "I bet I could do that too."

[iamasalmon]

the thing about fiber art that nobody tells you about is that every single kind of fiber art is a gateway drug to other kinds of fiber art.

[thypandatetor]

You gain enough confidence with one fiber art, then you look over at someone doing another fiber art and go, "I bet I could do that too."

[cartoonrival]

im completely addicted to Open Link in New Tab

[cartoonrival]

if Open Link in New Tab is wrong then baby i dont want to be right

[hereticpraetor]

i havent seen the strong as fuck ice mummy in a while. i hope shes doing ok

[sourcreammachine]

spring thaw. weak as fuck water mummy now

[fedoraspooky]

It's that time again

[sobcat]

old painting, deer infront of the windows xp solitaire winning animation

[takingoffmyshoes]

they told me not to get lost in the weeds, but these are lush, beautiful, and ecologically necessary native plants so it's probably fine

[quietwingsinthesky]

like the betrayal’s always going to be worse if they cared about you and it didn’t matter. someone discards you because they didn’t give a shit, then you can be angry about that, you can feel vindicated in that, you can get over it. but if they can look you in the eyes and say “I love you. I would make the same choice again.” You will never sleep peacefully again, is all.

[quietwingsinthesky]

“I thought they cared about me, but they were lying this whole time.” <- tired. boring. removes all the nuance of this relationship to make it easier to move on from.

“I thought they cared about me, and I was right, and every minute they were there for me, every time they said they were proud, every laugh we shared leaning against each other bruised and breathless, all of it was real. and they still left me behind. They could put their love aside. I couldn’t.” <- insane. will never leave you alone. reminds you that even the worst people are still people and can still care about even the ones they hurt the most and that undoes neither the harm nor the love.

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[kazuoishiguro]

✦ PROJECT HAIL MARY by andy weir —in the style of a 70s sci-fi novel.

[smol-blue-bird]

I went to a library book sale this weekend and I found a very old book called “Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers,” which was published in I think 1975? I’ve been reading it kind of like how I would read a historical document, and it’s lowkey fascinating

[smol-blue-bird]

There’s a whole paragraph that’s like “okay, find the keyboard. Don’t panic if it has more keys than a typewriter, that’s normal. Really, it’s fine. The extra keys don’t make things harder. It’s FINE”

[smol-blue-bird]

Thought this section was particularly interesting:

Can the computer create something? At first glance it seems obvious that it can. Animated computer graphics, with their fluid transitions and whiplash perspectives, look strikingly new. And if one watches the machine doing animation work, there seem to be lengthy periods when the computer is acting “on its own.”

But if one observes these processes in more detail, it becomes clear that creation is not occurring within the machine. First of all, computer graphics are not unique. Computers have yet to generate anything that cannot be done by hand—and usually already has been done. Second, the apparent ability of the computer to “act on its own” is the outcome of thousands of hours of patient human effort to refine its instructions. The computer can manipulate a shape for us if we have already informed it what a shape is, what the rules for shape manipulation are, what this specific shape is, and so forth.

You can start an automobile engine and it will run by itself, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s being creative. It’s just running.

[theriu]

Somebody in 1975 had a better understanding of why artificial intelligence is not in any way “intelligence” than the majority of today’s intellectual minds.

[glumshoe]

do not go to Dr. Kenneth Wolf for top surgery

[glumshoe]

I went to him because he was 1.) the cheapest possible option and since I needed crowdfunding that seemed best 2.) within driving distance of my friends who’d be able to host me. I didn’t have any complications and I don’t hate my results, so the fact that he stopped offering free revisions after COVID (including for people who had their surgeries before the pandemic) and ghosts everyone isn’t a huge deal personally. I do have moderate to severe dog-earring right in the middle my chest which limits what clothing I can wear and have inquired about possible revisions with other surgeons (so far no one has been willing to operate on other dr’s work and have told me I’d need to pay the price of a full secondary top surgery). Dr. Wolf famously ghosts all his patients after surgery and has strict weight limits.

HOWEVER I accompanied my friend to their top surgery at the University of Michigan last year that made Dr. Wolf’s entire process seem back alley and sketchy by comparison. My friend had extensive pre- and post-surgical monitoring and extreme sanitary precautions. Dr. Wolf just had me take off my shirt and slapped me on the operation table still wearing my street clothes and then scraped me up and sent me home the moment I regained consciousness. His bedside manner was offputting and uncomfortable. It has been impossible to contact him ever since, even to ask politely why my stitches look so different from his other results. Other people with much worse results have also been ghosted.

[glumshoe]

OH AND ALSO when I asked if he could swap my left and right nipples just for the hell of it he said “yeah sure lol” but apparently you’re not supposed to do that because there is the risk of like, manually metastasizing cancer cells. lol. I did ask for it and I think I am at very low risk for breast cancer but I do think a responsible surgeon should at least know about and warn you of that possibility before agreeing to it.

[glumshoe]

my friends and my ex were great caretakers who made the recovery process easy and kind of fun but knowing what I know now makes the whole experience retroactively a little bit traumatic

[grundoonmgnx]

Lindsay Merrill (American b. 1987), Untitled, 2026

Oil on canvas, 41 ⅞ x 55 ⅞ in