*carps your diem*

I feel like having wings violently burst out of your back would just feel really good. Like itd feel awful but also itd feel really satisfying.

When a small mammal scrunches up and cleans its face and whiskers with its little hands very rapidly. I just wanted to give you that thought for a moment did u like it.

always such a struggle when you get to the sex scene part of the fic you're writing and you're not horny at all. i don't know. their things were touching. without ANY underwear. the end.

mutual just posted "ok i'm normal now". objective: survive their reverse-chronological dashboard breakdown (wave 1 of 30)

Gets abducted by aliens and put in a zoo and slowly figures out how their language works and starts writing swear words on the glass when the alien children walk by

I'm gonna be honest 'cowboys were a sort of itinerant warrior class common in meiji-era texas' always annoys me a bit because it's a funny post but also No They Weren't. They were an itinerant pastoralist class common in Meiji-era Texas. And indeed the wider western region of post-Risorgimento America

I do think the Hank Green AI thing makes it abundantly clear that if you have ADHD or any other mental illness and/or you are prone to addiction you need to avoid AI at all costs. This shit will rope you in, and if you have a mental illness that say, starves your brain of dopamine, you're gonna be extra susceptible to that. I won't use AI for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is knowing how it would fuck with my ADHD and bipolar. Like yes, it's bad for the environment and giving money to rich scumbags and runs on plagarism, but even more than all that, it's straight up not safe at all and you really shouldn't use it if for no other reason than to protect yourself from whatever the fuck it might do to you.

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

and for my favorite character: failed suicide attempt and erectile dysfunction

@demegods

genuinely sickening to think about how men pop up out of holes in the ground and you have to swing a mallet and hit them over the head to get them to stop

boardwalking is great because you overhear some of the funniest shit ever. it's like npc dialogue in fallout 4

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.