Okay, let's do this one last time

Dick and Damian Week 2026: Day 1 - Adoption! my excuse to draw them domestic lol @dickanddamianweek

bottom left was inspired by this bit from Batman 80-Page Giant (2010)

Then they’re just crimes.

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.

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

Continually updating the date on their work so it gets pushed to the top of the tag, without actually making updates. Not against the TOS, just HORRIBLE behaviour, absolutely rude as fuck, I will mute people who do this with zero hesitation. Everyone gets their turn at the top of the page, you aren't special. (Caveat: people whose work was in an unrevealed/anon collection, like for an exchange or event, get one free redate in my opinion, once their name is attached or the work is revealed. Otherwise stop redating your work to try and get more people to see it.)

Tagging "for reach" rather than based on the content of the work. Stop grabbing every single fandom that might be vaguely related (e.g. if you're writing Dracula fic, don't tag every single fandom with vampires in it). Don't tag your RPF as the FPF fandom too, "so more people will see it." (We will see it, and we'll mute you.) Stop tagging in the main character/relationship fields for characters who appear in one paragraph and never speak, or for relationships that are just implied in the background (use the Additional tags field for those if you want.) Tagging actively wrong fandoms is against the TOS and reportable, tagging inaccurate rels, characters, or additional tags is not against the TOS but just asshole behaviour.

Creating placeholder posts. "Story coming soon!" - go away, I'm muting you, I will never see your story. Against the TOS, reportable.

Treating the Archive like a personal journal, making updates just to complain about how mean people are being to you, or how you can't update this week because you're sick, or just repeating your fave ship name 1000 times or whatever. Put it on tiktok , tumblr, bluesky, whatever. Put a link to your social media in your profile or author's note. Non-fanworks are against the TOS.

Acting like it's weird to comment on older works. It's an archive. It's there to preserve fanworks for as long as possible. Those works are there for you to read. You can comment on them even if they're 10, 15, 50 years old. It's fine. If the author didn't want comments, they can disable comments. If they have comments turned on, assume they want you to comment.

Complaining that they want AO3 to recommend similar works to them based on their reading habits/preferences. No, you don't want this. You do not want AO3 to track your reading and push works it thinks might be similar to you, not least because good lord what a terrible idea. AO3 also doesn't want this, because it doesn't want to collect that information about you, because information it doesn't collect is information that can never be leaked or stolen. Learn how to search or perish.

Asking for a downvote button. Again, it's not social media, this isn't reddit, you don't need to downvote a fic you don't like, you can just backbutton away. There's no algorithm so you would just be using it to be a dick to the person who posted that work.

This kind of response always fascinates me, so while I've got you here, can I just ask: legal by what standards? Do you mean real world standards, where laws vary from country to country, and in the case of the US, state to state? Or do you mean the fictitious laws set in place in the fictional setting of the ship? What standard exactly should we use to tell people "you're not allowed to enjoy this fictional thing?"

Y'all only EVER. Say it about sexual stuff. "Oh wow well if it's LEGAL-!" bitch my ass is out here playing DnD. I roleplay a devil-them who KILLS PEOPLE FOR A LIVING and yet I don't see y'all rushing to tell me that those thoughts are illegal and bad and noooo you can't do THAT, murder is ILLEGAL.

According to the CDC, in 10 percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch the child do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning—Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene magazine, described the Instinctive Drowning Response like this:

“Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs.

Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.

Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.

Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.

From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.”

This doesn’t mean that a person that is yelling for help and thrashing isn’t in real trouble—they are experiencing aquatic distress. Not always present before the Instinctive Drowning Response, aquatic distress doesn’t last long—but unlike true drowning, these victims can still assist in their own rescue. They can grab lifelines, throw rings, etc.

Look for these other signs of drowning when persons are in the water:

Head low in the water, mouth at water level

Head tilted back with mouth open

Eyes glassy and empty, unable to focus

Eyes closed

Hair over forehead or eyes

Not using legs—vertical

Hyperventilating or gasping

Trying to swim in a particular direction but not making headway

Trying to roll over on the back

Appear to be climbing an invisible ladder

So if a crew member falls overboard and everything looks OK—don’t be too sure. Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you all right?” If they can answer at all—they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents—children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

Source/article: [x]

I’ve been a lifeguard for 6 years now and of all the saves I’ve done, maybe two or three had people drowning in the stereotypical thrashing style. And even those, like the save I made last weekend, it was exactly like OP describes where the person’s head is going in and out of the water but it isn’t long enough to get any air. Mostly you recognize drowning by the look on someone’s face. If someone looks wide eyed and terrified or confused, chances are they’re drowning. That look of “oh shit” is pretty easily recognizable. And even if you can’t tell for sure: GO AFTER THEM ANYWAY. I’ve done “saves” where a kid was pretending to drown and I mistook it for real drowning, but that’s preferable to a kid ACTUALLY drowning.

Also please remember that even strong swimmers can drown if they have a medical emergency, get cramps, or get too tired. If your friend knows how to swim but they’re acting funny get them to land. And even if someone can respond when you ask them if they need help, if they say they do need help? GO HELP THEM.

However . If the victim is a stranger, I can’t recommend trying to get them. Lifeguards literally train to escape “attacks,” because people who are drowning can freak the fuck out and grab you and make YOU drown as well. If you do go in after someone, take hold of them from the back and talk to them the whole time. IF YOU ARE GRABBED: duck down into the water as low as you can get. The person is panicking and won’t want to go under water and should release you. Shove up at their hands and push them away from you as you duck under. Don’t die trying to save someone else.

When the lifeguard got us both out, a woman came running down and accused me of harming him and said he had been completely fine in the water. That there was no reason to drag him out of there. The lifeguard had to explain to her that her son had been drowning, to which her response was to say that she didn’t hear him call for help.

Also, previous tag:

fun fact this is a big issue that museums/archives/preservation professionals run into

This is something I bring up a lot. Digital preservation is not a thing to rely on. Anything digital is inherently ephemeral, fleeting.

All current and former digital storage will eventually fail. Paper tapes and punch cards cards wear and rot. Magnetic tape and disks grow mold and shed their magnetic coating. Hard drives seize and crash, their controllers fail. Optical media scratches, rots, or simply fades. Solid state media loses its charge over time. Cloud services shut down with no warning.

Long-term digital storage is a never-ending process of copying to new media.

And then there's the problem of format.

It took less than 30 years for digital works by Andy Worhol — one of the most popular artists of the 20th century — to be lost to obsolete technology.

We had the disks, we had the computers, we had modern emulators for the computers. But reading the images (PDF Archive) required very specific combinations of operating system and software versions, and in some cases required reverse-engineering image formats for which the correct combination of software could not be found.

This wasn't some obscure machine. Millions of Amiga computers were sold, and Amiga users are among the most dedicated to keeping the platform going long after its discontinuation.

And still the image format had to be reverse-engineered to recover Worhol's images.

How much of our culture from the past 30 years has been entirely digital?