Humanity: Orcs of Space

Polynesians did also rely on a form of a physical map called a stick chart, illustrating the specific wave and swell patterns surrounding different island chains. These were particularly helpful during cloudy conditions when the sun and stars were less useful. To navigate the Marshall Islands, the Marshallese represented ocean swell patterns using parts of coconut fronds and shells as islands. Like a subway map, they don’t so much represent distances as they do relationships. The complex and decorative stick charts were often only understood by the person who made them. They were memorised before a voyage by the pilot who would lie on the floor of a canoe to get a sense of swell movement and often lead a squadron of 15 or more boats.

Hi everyone. Some of you might not know, but today August 10 at 7:34 am , a 7.4 Earthquake hit Colombia.

To my knowledge, the more affected areas have been Chocó and Pereira, but I guess we'll know more as more time passes

These are some of the donstion links that I've managed to find.

And ciricearts on twitter has a thread with emergency numbers, missing persons, missing pets and anything that other colombians can add as it goes.

a huge amount of code is "open source" - which means the code is fully available for anyone to see and, generally, anyone is free to contribute to the code project

all contributions of course go through review by the code owners. but it is generally good grace and good form to allow other well-meaning internet strangers to contribute to your project

if you are, perhaps, VERY nice, and VERY invested in the community, you might be like Scott Shambaugh here, who has intentionally earmarked some low-hanging fruit for newbie contributors to practice and get their feet wet

like I cannot overstate this is an immediate green flag, to me, that Scott WANTS to foster community learning.

now

Like. W. Win. Based. Good response Scott.

And this was in fact the screenshot I saw first, and I thought I was looking at a post made by a human who was mad that their AI coding bot pet project was being shut out from reviews.

But no. The bot itself wrote and posted this... The bot did this.

This article was fully and autonomously written by the bot...

It's claiming discrimination...

It's a bot.

It's AI.

This is not a real person.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Shamblog

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves. This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. I won’t name the authors here. Ars, please issue a correction and an explanation of what happened.

A news outlet did an article about this, used AI for the articles, and included hallucinated quotes from Scott that Scott never said.

[ID: a screenshot of the original post's tags that read, "#real turtleheads know this is a play on sliders (turtle emoji) which are a type of terrestrial turtle. but it's also tiny hamburgers #which seems apt. #this has been another episode of Joke Explainer" /end ID]

Women making fun of podcast bros

If you find a road that's oddly straight out in the countryside, chances are it was originally a Roman road. Several Major roads and sections of motorway follow the route of Roman Roads. There's a Roman Road that goes under the end of my street, part of it is still in use.

Every hour, on the hour, BBC radio 4 plays a series of beeps that tell you when it's exactly on the hour so you can set your clocks and watches.

We have a TV show made for Amateur Astronomers that has been going on since 1957. They cover major events and discoveries in Astronomy.

We have a Gameshow called Countdown wherein people take semi random letters and try create the longest word they can from it, and then take semi random numbers and try to use them to get to a random number. It is one of the Longest running and popular daytime gameshows and is a national treasure.

In Scotland, a lot of our chip shops were/are opened by Italians or people of Italian descent, so you can also get pizza there. Haggis pizza is a common menu item and it slaps.

The controllers in charge of the power grid have to watch every major soap opera and sports event because when the event ends or goes to commercial break, so many people get up to go make a cup of tea it risks a blackout, so they have to use Pumped storage stations to generate more power. There's one of these power stations near Wales's Highest Mountain and one at Loch Ness.

Every major channel rehearses for the death of the current monarch so they don't fuck it up. Under the news desk at the BBC, there's a black tie for the men and a black cardigan for the women that they put on if a major royal dies. You can see this happen if you watch the footage.

The government announces tests of the EAS system in advance so people know that A) it's a test, don't panic and B) so people with hidden phones (like abused spouses) can turn them off.

Our lifeboat and lifeguard service, The Royal National Lifeboat Institution, is completely volunteer run and funded through donations. Volunteers have to have pagers on them that ring if they're called up so they can run to the boats and rescue people. They're often in remote areas, and they're a common charity to raise money for because everyone agrees that they're not just heroic, but based as all fuck.

Most major supermarkets deliver, and by that I don't mean "you can send a gig-worker to do your shopping", I mean Tesco, Sainsbury's, Iceland and ASDA all have fleets of official trucks where you can do your shopping online, a supermarket worker picks your stuff for you, and at a designated time someone comes and delivers your shopping. They're even a common site in rural areas.

It's a Christmas tradition to go to your local theater to see a Pantomime, which is basically a retelling of a fairy tale done by drag queens aimed at children, but with jokes for the adults and modern cultural references. Famous actors will often take part in these shows. It's a beloved Christmas tradition that's illegal in Tennessee.

Ohhh good point @sweetlyfez , a thing about pantomime is that there’s specific call-and-responses. Children are trained to shout things at the actors at specific points, like if someone is creeping up behind a character, the audience all go “it’s behind you!” in a slightly creepily unified chorus. Like, the tone and cadence are always perfectly consistent.

But a thing about the UK is that people a) will show up to the opening of an envelope, b) will make the HELL out of a tradition or ritual. If it happens three times, it’s an official local ritual.

Rituals always contain a tremendous reliance on everyone’s willingness to participate and suspend cringe. Like the panto call-and-response, people are often surprisingly willing to do it.

So you can get a surprising number of people to do bonkers unified things like “hold hands with strangers and dance around a person dressed as a Green Man”. There was a “clap for the NHS” thing in lockdown (cringe, annoying) but people were willing. There’s a local ritual that involves stomping around a local apple orchard, wassailing it, and hanging toast on the branches. Everyone is tremendously engaged and serious about this. Crowds are generally quite willing to turn up and shout unified chants. During right-wing property vandalising outbreaks there were far more people turning up in anti-fash defence than there ever were fash, but what was most amusing about it was that anti-fash brought bands and snacks. Like within thirty minutes of people being outside systematically, there will start being self-organised predictable small Behaviours. When the shed blew down on my allotment, a collection of elderly people righted it and repaired it and brewed tea about it in about 30 minutes, including the time it took to stand around congratulating each other.

You can genuinely say, “turn up at 3 pm to a muddy field, we’re all going to scream at the sky. No, that’s it, literally that’s all I’m offering” and get 100 people in frigid winter to race willingly to a muddy field in awful weather with flasks of tea, alcohol, picnics, an impromptu cricket game, several more guests than you expected, and a really startling total willingness to scream like fools at the sky. Like YEAH SKY SCREAMING TIME. Let’s do it every Thursday at 4!!! And the thing is you’ll find yourself being like “oh man. I love Sky Screaming Time actually.”