Terry Prachett, He's not dead till his name is too

Screenshot bc annas archive urls have been unreliable lately so. This: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/d326a6a470b017eccb5c180b9e89f76b but if the link dont work, go to the Wikipedia page for annas archive to find the active urls and then search. Anyway

dont like a lot of what this guy has to say about the world & the actual practical $25ish system that ppl across the continent already use for offgrid life, diy events etc can fit on one page. But its a pretty good book for at least one person in ur friend group to have read because you can glean a lot about biological soil contamination and like just Generally not getting fuckin. Cholera n shit. Less helpful for heavy metals and whatnot.

Sweet potatoes are dope as FUCK because they propagate super easily which means you can use scary squat garden soil to grow plants to produce cuttings to grow in safe soil 👍 i have friends who do this.

Im not tryina front like a Food Expert but ive spent a lot of time around people whos entire deal is food system revolution & from those folks, perennial food sources > conventional modern gardening, nuts and fruit and whatnot, but i think it really depends on where somebody lives. Along the lines of what prev said... might be a good time for folks to get together with their friends and just like, walk as far from home as you think is reasonable/sustainable, make note of food sources available there vs how many other people are also in that area, and uh. Maybe think and talk about that some?

This article is by some of them Plant People and its very much written to be non-overwhelming

Wait im getting some new reports. Wait what. They did what? Oh no.

canon is what happens in the text. e.g. merlin tries to poison morgana

a headcanon is a fact that you have personally made up as an elaboration of canon. it is your invention. e.g. i think morgana and gwen had a teenage lesbian situationship before the events of canon. or, i think modern morgana would love evanesence.

an interpretation is how one reads the existing text. it is not an invented fact nor is it a headcanon, it is a reading. e.g. i think merlin tries to poison morgana out of misplaced self-hatred. or, i think that one line was delivered with suppressed malice and shows a nuanced relationship.

fanon is the general fandom’s accepted headcanons and interpretations that elaborate or recontextualize canon. e.g. merlin is a badass waif and morgana is a bitch.

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.

By no one demand here's NPC Ingo expressions sheet Emmet | Volo

NPC Ingo no one ask for

There are some mistakes on my part, but they also came out way bluer than expected.

Anyway, Giving these two puppies out to the first emmet/ingo cosplayers I see at Otakon.