thahxa's minddump

My Steam avatar is an anime catgirl doing a little animated sway from side to side, and it's turned out to be an unintentional inkblot test of sorts. If you look closely, it's really not that overtly sexual. She's wearing a cardigan, there's no cleavage or midriff shown, she doesn't have her tongue out, and there's nothing especially suggestive about the motion or cropping. And yet, something about it—the cardigan being skin-tone, the pink background, the semiotics of the catgirl, I'm not sure—makes a lot of people read it from a distance as unimaginably horny. There's a friend I was playing with multiple times and week and even after months she still felt the need to comment on it every time I logged on. Similarly, if you look closely, it is indeed clearly a catgirl, but she has short hair and baggy clothes so in a small form factor she looks a bit androgynous. This seems to really get people in Counter-Strike specifically. Last game, one of the enemies said to me "your mom doesn't love you, she wanted a man," and one of my teammates (a stranger) responded "leave my femboy alone." There was nothing else in my profile or what I'd said from which they'd be making those assumptions. It's kind of fascinating.

kwarrtz.

just tried to reference the xkcd "today's lucky 10,000" comic but I wanted to explain xkcd first, so I was like "you probably know the one about experts in the field overestimating their audience's familiarity with the subject matter" and uh. he didn't. love me some irony

I DIDN’T LEARN ABOUT THIS IN DRIVING SCHOOL

THIS IS ALWAYS FUNNY

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

ok but if they start releasing paperclips I'm outta here

would be too funny if OpenAI Paperclips became an ironic nerd purchase like tungsten cubes such that an increasing fraction of their profit margin came from paperclip manufacturing, right about the time that they start optimising their capital investment with LLMs--

They hated Jiang Qing because she was a woman. Luckily she was also a vengeful and terrible person who did horrible things when granted power, so this hatred turned out to look pretty reasonable in hindsight

Americans encapsulate this deep ennui, stemming from a loss of spiritual exemplars, with the phrase "The Three Nos", which is short for "No Bob Hope, no Steve Jobs, and no Johnny Cash"

If you want to visualize gradient descent in neural networks, imagine minimizing a function that is a 2D surface in 3D space, and then say "billions of dimensions" to yourself.

on some level this is out to the markets right? there are markets on (ex) important geopolitical events (although low volume and maybe a bit volatile) but most of it is just degen sports gambling. supply and demand!

It is great when you are reading something that purports to be a technical policy document or the like but as you keep going you realize the author has a deeply fetishistic relationship with the material and you are actually reading their fanfic.

reading about south africas nuclear program is so funny because every other country is like "here is our factory for turning out interchangable implosion bombs" whereas the south african one was like "we have six bombs. they are all bad"

"Also they are implied to be for internal security purposes."

even funnier is that its the complete opposite! the original plan was to use them for mining and when everyone realized how dumb that was that shifted to "well if we detonate a nuke if angola is going badly surely the US and USSR will help negotiate a peace deal favorable to us"

(first time doing praise kink) you are Useful