no white flags

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

Cambrian (14.7%): Undisputed winner, of course: the time in which the major phyla of the animal kingdom took shape, the time of Anomalocaris, Opabinia, and all other weird arthropods and quasi-arthropods roamed the shallow seas. The crucible of animal life, seminal for all that came later.

Cretaceous (11.9%): The absolute peak of megafauna in Earth's history, the time when animals twice as heavy as a fully-grown elephant still felt the need of an armor so thick it covered their eyelids. The time when life on Earth was at its most Most, and ending with the worst single day in its history too. (And also the time when flower plants, spiny-finned fish, and social insects filled the world, but seriously, who has the heart to ignore the giant dinosaurs?)

Ordovician (9.6%): Even though this was my vote, I was surprised to see it rank so high! (The first day, it was enck-to-neck with the Cretaceous!) Most summaries of the history of life don't even mention it by name. This is the Cambrian's younger, less cool but harder-working sibling, the time when animal life detached from the seafloor and filled the waters. Giant nautiloids, swimming trilobites, and the first (jawless) fish.

Jurassic (9.6%): Most of what I said of the Cretaceous also apply here. If you like giant sauropods and stegosaurs more than hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, or think that Tyrannosaurus is too mainstream and Allosaurus deserves more love, the Jurassic -- time of dinosaurs par excellence -- is right there.

Quaternary (9.6%): The Cenozoic in general ranks pretty low -- too normal-looking I guess, we have birds and mammals already -- but the Quaternary stands far above the other two. I suppose Ice Age megafauna still retains its charm!

Devonian (8.8%): Ah, the golden age of fish diversity, the time when the land turned green and our ancestors left the ocean behind. Also the last jawless fish and trilobites had a really good time (the Permian extinction would only mop up the survivors). And the only period placoderms, taken out so soon, were given to shine.

Silurian (7.9%): The time of the very first land ecosystems... if they weren't already around in the Ordovician. Kind of a filler period, by comparison with the Ordovician and the Devonian. Heterostracan fish and sea scorpions are so cool, though.

Carboniferous (6.8%): The great swampy coal forests and their fauna of man-sized quasi-millipedes, raven-sized quasi-dragonflies, and giant armored amphibians is not quite as popular, however. I can't blame people for not caring much for coal anymore, I guess.

Paleogene (6.6%): The quiet time of respite after the downfall of dinosaurs, tropical jungles almost reaching the poles, and the first spread of primates while continents finally took their familiar arrangement. The Cenozoic is not so hot in general, it seems. (Will anyone appreciate the volcanic lake occasionally killing everything in its surroundings and creating one of the best fossil sites on Earth?)

Triassic (6.5%): Triassic fauna is really underappreciated, if you ask me. Long-necked Tanystropheus and flat-toothed placodonts and chameleon-like drepanosaurs, and a profusion of quasi-crocodiles, and the dawn of mammals and dinosaurs, compressed in a brief respite between two mass extinctions.

Permian (5.4%): Poor Permian. No love for the kingdom of synapsids -- sail-backed pelycosaurs and dagger-toothed gorgonopsian -- dethroned by two mass extinctions, and who would have to live in the shade of dinosaurs before resurging in the form of mammals? For Pangea stretching its burning desert heart from pole to pole? For Earth's most terrible mass extinction, that almost took out insects? Someone has to be near the bottom, I guess.

Neogene (2.6%): And there is the actual bottom. Dear Miocene, the golden age of apes and elephants, the time when a world of jungles became the world of woodlands and grasslands that we know today, too familiar to be popular and without the appeal of the Ice Age, someone had to be here.

Here are some basic primers. If someone is wearing what look like Meta glasses, they usually have a small circular camera in the outer corners of the lenses, like the one on your phone.

I would also regularly check their own product pages so you're on top of what the models look like. They tend to have larger frames, but come in a variety of shapes and colors.

A new hobbyist developed app warns if people nearby may be wearing smart glasses, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, which stalkers and harassers have repeatedly used to film people without their knowledge or consent. The app scans for smart glasses’ distinctive Bluetooth signatures and sends a push alert if it detects a potential pair of glasses in the local area.

The American Foundation for the Blind has said that "The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are an accessibility tool only by coincidence. That makes them more affordable and, in many ways, unaware of the needs of users with reduced vision" although they do have seemingly positive views on Meta Glasses as a whole. (source 10). It also seems like their marketing push as accessibility devices began last year (source 11).

But to add even more into the nonsense, Meta is now toying around with adding a "limit" to the functionality of their glasses unless their users pay for more access (source 12). AND, as stated above, Meta has officially added facial recognition code in their glasses and only admitted it after being called out, which is basically the death of privacy as we know it (source 13, source 14, source 15). And oh look another lawsuit because of it (source 16) THAT THEY LOST (source 17)!

Long story short: I don't begrudge someone using them as a disability aid overall, but ultimately both their privacy and other people's privacy are being disregarded by Meta and that is not and should not be acceptable by any means.

I understand there is no ethical consumption under capitalism but there is a level of personal responsibility someone has to take when using them if they truly truly need them, such as opting out of sharing information, not filming strangers without permission, not posting footage of strangers online, opting out of facial recognition if possible, etc.

It had grown so silent in the hall that she could hear the bells in Khal Drogo's hair, chiming softly with each step he took. His bloodriders followed him, like three copper shadows. Daenerys had gone cold all over. "He says you shall have a splendid golden crown that men shall tremble to behold." [...] "That was all I wanted," he said. "What was promised."