nochg

There are only two drivers: that is Mika and me [part 1]

What happens when Grace doesn’t sleep for 48 hours.

Based on this panel from Dungeon Meshi:

Of course it is not good that people are using AI unquestioningly and accepting whatever answers it gives them.

It is also very fucking bad that people are not double checking ragebait news headlines, are lamenting "trends" that are a single deranged twitter user on a rant, or are seeing something third-hand in a post that drastically misinterpreted the source material and using that as the foundation for their reactionary viewpoints.

As somebody who is critical of AI it is crazy-making to see so many people talking about how AI kills your critical thinking abilities while citing points from a tumblr post of a screenshot of a news article that overasserted a claim made in a paper they didn't read that circulated and picked up tens of thousands of notes from people being confidently wrong about water use and power consumption (based on numbers from 2021-2022) IN ADDITION to using language that the authors of the paper explicitly begged people not to use when discussing their research (which, of course, the rebloggers never saw because they read a reblog of a screenshot of a news article that overstated a claim, not the paper that made the claim).

For instance, in the paper that everyone loves to talk about when they say that AI is making people stupider (the cognitive offloading one), nobody ever brings up the fact that the group that used their brain only for the first few instances of the task had higher overall performance than the AI-using group and the search engine using group and then had higher performance over their own previous metrics when using AI in an optional instance at the end of the study.

At no point in history did everyone read the studies. People have been skimming headlines and then telling each other about it on the bus since the invention of headlines. Ordinary ancient Romans could not fact check the Acta Diurna. "outsourcing your thinking" is normal-ass human behavior across time. It doesn't 'cause brain rot', it's not going to bring about the end of humanity.

It does make us vulnerable to misinformation and to moral panics. Witch hunts and race riots and the war on Dungeons & Dragons all relied partly on bad actors seeking to maintain their own power and partly on large numbers of people believing information without fact checking and uncritically accepting the framing in which that information was presented.

Basically the lens inside the eye absorbs blue light before the light reaches the retina at the back of the eyeball, so the squid sees everything it can except blue with that eye—except that squids are apparently colourblind, so the light would just appear brighter to them when the blue is filtered out (and for us it would appear green). This breaks the bioluminescent camouflage of creatures swimming above them by making them look brighter instead of allowing them to blend in with the dimly-lit water.

This is really cool because us optometrists use the same technique when we put yellow dye onto the surface of your eyeball and then shine a blue light at it to measure your eye pressure or to look for any irregularities on your cornea like scratches, ulcers, signs of dryness, etc. The dye is called fluorescein, and it glows green under blue light!

As for retinal composition, as far as my googling goes it seems that it's just like that of other squids, so it's really the lens that sets them apart.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears