Ceropegia

“My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.”

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

And then all the other Sesame Street character accounts joined in:

And now I’m thinking maybe we’re gonna be okay… 💗

"So, boss... I may have messed up."

"What did you do, Ray?"

"Well, I made a post for Elmo saying 'Hi, how's everybody doing?'"

"I mean, that's kind of what we pay you for."

"Yeah, but.... <sigh> it turns out pretty much everyone is hanging on by a thread, badly enough that they needed to tell Elmo."

"Oh."

"God help me, boss, I think Elmo needs to be there for them."

Does anybody have the vaguest idea what these guys are? (Image shot on the bridge over the River Slaney in Baltinglass. There are a LOT more like this growing on the south side of the wall. ...Forgive me for not investigating the north side of the wall, as I had no desire to wind up in the river. Even if it's very clean, as you can tell by the herons fishing in it. And the trout, who look very happy with the environment.)

Here, you have caught the slightly more baffling message from the universe of, “Climbing Sailor, Maidenhair Spleenwort,” which is difficult to interpret as poem or prophecy, but certainly remains some kind of writing prompt.

Sometimes you just read something and then stare, with the jaw stuck in Dropped Position, while you try to make it make some kind of sense. And every subsequent sentence just makes it worse.

Inktober 12: Young Hera racing.

“Hera’s cult at Olympia was administered by a college of sixteen women chosen from the most venerable and respected matrons of the district. These women organized the Heraia, or games held to honor Hera, concurrently with the quadrennial Olympic games. While women were generally excluded from the Olympic games both as competitors and spectators, the Heraia involved a footrace for girls of three different age categories. They ran in the same stadium as the men and boys, though the track was one-sixth shorter. The winners received a portion of the meat from the cow sacrificed to Hera and a crown of olive.”

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

As this rolls out over the next few days and you explore it, we’ll keep reading your replies and reblogs, so please keep sharing your questions, concerns, and ideas.

Your creativity has always been the heart of Tumblr, whether you’re the original poster or adding something brilliant in the reblogs, and nothing about this change is meant to limit that.

It’s a bit of an in-joke, I guess. In-memoriam, maybe?

The long version is that it’s a reference to a bit in Going Postal, one of the later Discworld books. In Going Postal there’s a lot of focus on the Clacks system, a sort of pseudo-telegram system run by people up in boxes on the tops of towers who send messages from one corner of the Discworld to the other by flashing semaphore codes to the next tower in the line.

In Going Postal, a new company has bought out the Clacks and is running it at high-speed at all times, even as the operators are dying of the company’s negligence to make ends meet, and the plot of the book is basically about restarting the city’s old postal service to break the company’s monopoly on long-distance communication.

It’s a fantastic Discworld book, by the way. It was my sister’s first Discworld book and she quotes it at me constantly. If you aren’t doing a publishing order read, it’s a great book to check out.

The point is that halfway through the book, we see a scene set inside one of the Clacks towers, where one young Clacks operator sees a code go through the semaphore again. She recognizes it as a “GNU” code - a code that means that the message goes ahead to the next tower (G), is not logged (N), and is turned around at the end of the line to go through the entire semaphore system again (U), but the whole message is just GNU and a name, meaning that it’s a name that just goes up and down the line constantly.

The name is that of an inventor who tried to start a rival semaphore system and was murdered by the new Clacks company so they could keep their monopoly. And the oldest Clacks operator in the tower (he’s called Grandad — he’s twenty-six) says that so long as the name goes through the Clacks, he stays alive in the semaphore:

And every now and then someone says that they like him. (This came up on Twitter just the other day, in fact.) And I get all excitable and go HE WAS A PRESENT FOR RICK STERNBACH BECAUSE RICK’S AN OLD FRIEND AND HE TALKED ABOUT THIS YEARS BACK AND DID ILLUSTRATIONS OF CETACEAN ENTERPRISE CREWMEN, AND MIKE OKUDA MENTIONS IT IN The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual AND SO I HAD TO DO IT.

(In fact Mike told me the other day that there was actually a sign on one or another of the doors in the Enterprise sets that said CETACEAN OPS. Unfortunately he doesn’t have a picture: but it was there.)

Riddick: Furia

"Principal photography began on August 23, 2024, in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom."