Dvandm

Albert Sauros, Noted Spiritualist, knows his audience. They don’t have patience for a full-length holy book. As soon as he finds a print shop, he’ll be passing these out to every egg-layer he finds.

#1. You should be able to lay down on the floor (face down or back) and be able to get up without your hands. If you can't? Spend a little bit every day just doing that, laying on the floor and getting up again no hands style, then laying down again (you'd be surprised how fast it wears you out after a few times)

#2. You should be able to get up out of a chair without using your hands or grabbing on to anything. Can't? Fucking start training mother fucker! Just a few uppies every day could save your damn life when you get older!

#3. You should be able to turn your neck to the side without twisting your upper body in the same direction, you should be able to turn your head freely without moving your shoulders, chest or torso! Start looking up loosy goosy neck exercises! It makes such a HUGE difference!

#4. You should be able to motherfucking stand on one foot and keep your balance for longer then 15 seconds. Haha sounds easy right? Thats what I thought when I tried after watching that vid, i was horrified to find how hard it was! I started doing "one leggy style" standing any chance I got, when I'm in line somewhere, when I'm watching a video... just do a few rounds of 10 seconds on each leg for like 5 min every day!

You get older and you think you still have all the same limberness as you did when you were 8, but whens the last fucking time you ran around and played like an 8 year old? You loose that flexibility so subtlety and then one day when you need it? BAM ITS GONE

The "stand on one leg" thing isn't just about flexibility, either. If you start getting neuropathy (diabetes is a big cause, but not the only one) the reduced feedback will make balancing on one foot increasingly difficult. Because I DO have diabetes, I regularly make sure I can still balance on one foot, although it can be a hassle when my gout is flaring up.

Morons who Don't Vote: (Or worse, vote for third party candidates) Both Sides are the Same!

Me, a person who wasn't dropped on their head as a child: Well one side is celebrating and embracing the LGBTQ community and the other side wants us to be put in death camps

So I'm going to go ahead and say no

No they're not

WE COULD HAVE HAD EIGHT YEARS OF THIS WOMAN AS PRESIDENT

We could have had a President whose actually a fucking human being with a soul

But no, you fucking morons were too busy finding reasons to call her "problematic" so that you could instead an antisemitic homophobic, transphobic and racist fucking pedophile and serial rapist to squat his braindead ass in the white house for another four years

This is what you people fucking cost us and to every non-voter and third party voter this pride month, I just wish to say?

Yes, and? The other side is very sincere about wanting LGBTQ+ to be DEAD+. I'll take insincere support over sincere hatred any day.

Yes, both major parties support and benefit from every kind of systemic discrimination. But the Dems will at least hem and haw and drag their feet about fixing things, and don't make it a goal of theirs to make everything WORSE.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

The note count as of 3:12 PM EDT was 742.4K.

We’re almost 258,000 notes short of the Committment To The Bit Tumblr Curse goal, or what I am choosing to call:

The Bear Nessiecity

Because for organic systems - humans, other animals even - the ability to communicate in language is a super high level thing. In order to get there, with our meat brains, you have to have already gone through all the levels of cognition below, like "recognize birds" and "perform simple tasks but in multiple uncontrolled settings, reacting to changes of circumstances" and so on. In order to talk, as a human, by whatever method you talk (words, text, sign-languages, whatever) you have to do all those cognitions first, and also have probably done a solid sideline into theory of mind.

And so we assume that because "AI" can generate language, can put together sentences in order that we associate with complexity, according to common patterns, that it must be "intelligent" (or at least surely on the way to becoming so), that this ability to move words around into syntactic patterns represents the same thing for the computer as it does for us.

It just doesn't. The computer program is not working on the same physical sequence and rules as the animal (and thus human) brain. The chat program doesn't have to actually build an entire sequence of sapience and meaning and shit, built in turn on massive amounts of subconscious reactions to circumstances and so on, before it becomes possible for the computer program to move words around into ways that are deceptive to humans (because we only just keep feeding it words).

This becomes painfully obvious when you try to get these programs to actually do things. To actually react to anything outside the carefully controlled environments of the IT lab. It's why "AI" can appear to talk about existential issues, but can't actually power a robot that you can rely on to load your dishwasher.

It is NOT a question of possibility. It's a questiob of making it affordable.

And I still think it could be done. It would need to have a robotic arm and the shelves within reach. The dishwasher already has a computer, it would only need upgrading with the arms software.

The thing is

It would not make your life easier.

The robot would need maintenance. It would need repair. It would need electricity. All of these are expensive even for dishwashers.

So instead of upgrading the dishwasher, jusz upgrade your life surrounding the dishwasher.

For example: there's lndustrial dishwashers which take about three minutes for a program. You have one tray where you put things on. If you add cabinets which hold trays instead of china, you can take a tray out the washer and store it in the cabinet.

The entire place is hyper-designed to make absolutely sure that nothing upsets, confuses or disrupts the programmed patterns of movement and action that the robots then use to make the car, and no new element of confusion is added to the whole process. The humans overseeing things are there for essentially that purpose: so that the process is maintained, the environment controlled, and if something does go askew the whole thing is stopped and that thing is fixed before it causes a breakdown all the way through the chain.

The human overseers are kept for that purpose . . . .because that's something human cognition can do!

So like yes: you could design your entire life around allowing a mechanism to cause dishes to be done. But that's not really what people mean when they say "I want a robot to do my dishes."

They want a robot to go around their home as it exists - their home full of the messy chaos of a human living in it, leaving dishes on desks and bedsides and tables, with a cat and the cat's box and that pile of unfolded clothing - and washes their own dishes, that they already have, without breaking them or the machine or causing property damage. And without washing anything they have out on surfaces that are available to the robot that looks like a dish, but is actually a decoration. And also without leaving behind things that turn out to be dishes (or dish related mess) but are not recognized as dishes. Presumably most people want this without super-invasive "smart" tagging on everything they own (designed to tell the robot what is and isn't a dish that should be washed).

So like yes: you can set up an environment that allows an automated process, even a very complicated automated process, when you've optimized that environment, and then leave that process to run with only minimal human supervision (which still amounts to "someone sitting in the oversight booth more or less all day" and still involves a loooot of fiddling, and code-fixing, and repair to the system, and redirecting of the system).

Yes that's correct. The physical dexterity it takes to manipulate a variety of unknown 3D objects of highly variable weight and friction, from a constantly changing environment full of other objects they're not supposed to touch, and getting them all into the right area without breaking them or anything else, is a phenomenally complicated task. Much, much more difficult on every level than Spicy Autocomplete. A writing algorithm doesn't even need to be able to move! It's got no arms!

Brought to you by Zach hasn't studied physics in years and is trying to read through the famous Mike and Ike quantum computing textbook.

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Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

"I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY

.....

Whose real name is literally Mikron O'Jeneus

And Eggman's just sitting here thinking "Alright Robotnik, this isn't going to be like Dr. Wiley, this time shall be different!"

<Later>

One thing Teen Titans (both Go and the seasons before Go) tended to do was de-age characters so everyone was a teenager (except Mad Mod, who absorbed all of those lost years). Gizmo was basically a riff on the tinker gnome/dwarf (I dunno if he was inspired at all by the Squadron Supreme's Tom Thumb, who in turn was a very slantwise riff on the Atom but made a gadgeteer).

However, more recent comics appearances have gone with the cartoon version's baldness, which does make it a little harder to tell if he's supposed to be middle-aged or not now.

I cannot, sadly, teleport to Idaho this week. But if you’re in Idaho and have Thursdays or Fridays off, please go see this fluffball on my behalf.

So many people showed up they had to split the session into 2 groups so we didn't overwhelm the birb

This lil guy is Nox! They aren't 100% sure what sex it is, but they're pretty sure he's male.

He's a brancher, so he can't fly yet but is real good at jumping. In the wild he'd be jumping from branch to branch to build up his flight muscles, but he'll be flying soon

Nox is 5 weeks old, weighs 190g, and has reached his adult size, but his flight and tail feathers haven't grown in yet. He'll be a full adult next week!

The Northern White Faced Owl is from Africa, usually between the Sahara and the equator (according to Wikipedia, staff just said Africa). It used to be believed that this and another species, the southern white faced owl, were the same species but are now recognized as separate birds

His lil whiskers are called bristles, and they function like cat whiskers! He's just learned to tear meat, the trainer had big tweezers to give him lil bits of rabbit (some were placed on her glove and some were put right in front of his beak!)

He kept bobbing his head around, which is called triangulating and helps him figure out how far away things are.

*checks notes* these are also known as transformer owls! Like screech owls, they can stretch themselves real tall and thin to try and camouflage itself as a branch (search for transformer owl and you'll see what I mean)

After today he'll spend time with a foster parent to teach him how to Bird, then he'll join the legion of ambassador birds they have out here!

(PS his feathers are so fluffy my phone had a hard time taking clear pictures of them)

If you're near Boise this is absolutely worth a trip, they have so many other birds to see, and there's a walking trail just outside as well as a huge ampitheatre they use when it's not too hot out