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@tullius-rubi
idk anything about this but I love it
If any competition needed to be on Tumblr, it's this one.
Every time you think it's a given, that there's NO WAY that Red or Yellow could catch up to the other one given the lead, you are wrong. Right down to the wire.
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My favorite brand of people are musicians who hear Rush Fucking E, which isn't technically meant to be played by a human at all, and immediately picking up their instrument and going 'bet'.
praying to goodtimeswithscar to fix my artblock, take some sketches as my offering please pleasee save meeee save meeeeeeeeeee
crazy to see "I can't believe these young scholars let the homunculus do their homework" coming from wizards who I know copied all their spells from Sparikus's Commentaries on old grimoires when they were apprentices
My wards alert me that scribes keep adding annotations to my scroll saying that the homunculi are wrong sometimes. Of course they're wrong. If you don't have a use for bumbling, overeager, sycophantic, incompetent minions, how can you even call yourself a mage?
Commentaries also seem to be circulating widely-disproven ideas about the homunculi's mana consumption. Dude like half of the top artificers think the homunculi are going to try to kill us in our sleep and extract our souls for conjuring ink. We don't need to make up reasons to be distrustful of the treacherous and deceitful minions
probably for the first time in American history the biden admin explicitly pursued a policy of full employment and the reaction of everyone—from the right to the left—was “this fucking sucks.” now, for some people this was because their doordash didn’t remain perpetually cheap; for others it was because this did not fix literally every single problem in the american economy overnight. but I am willing to go on record and say actually yeah I think pursuing full employment is good, more governments should do that, this policy did in fact meaningfully reverse trends in inequality, and if we’re going to relentlessly undercut policies we nominally support because they don’t fix absolutely everything immediately, we are rapidly going to make those policies unviable. i do not in fact want to make progressive and lefty economic policy unviable!
and the trouble with economic stuff is that it’s a hive of low-trust sentiment that gets reflexively applied based on affective criteria—“full employment rules actually” becomes seen as an endorsement of Biden as a person or a politician. cynicism and bitterness become an in-group marker for online lefty politics. I get why affect and boundary maintenance are important in politics, but I care about policy, about hard nosed material reality, and if we are going to let affect and cynicism overrule policy we will never in fact make the world any different.
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how did your grandpa stepping on a lightning rune protect his kingdom
that the arrow of time is fixed in a single direction and from that flows both the sharpest grief of our condition (for having lost the moments and the places and above all the people of our greatest joy we may never recover them again) and all real hope of meaningful joy (for without effect and cause any concept of a “future” or a “past” would be lost in a meaningless swirl of chaos) is perhaps one of the most bitter and incomprehensible mysteries of life. made just a little bit more bitter by the fact that the canonical pop culture reference for this meditation is About Time (2013), which is terrible movie. just a completely dogshit film.
"Or, perhaps they are consolation; sturdy plings we cling to as the current sweeps past."
One of my favourite panels in Unsounded
If you're an atheist, why are you an atheist?
Problem of evil (or some variant on it, e.g. injustice, pain, etc.)
God's perfections are logically inconsistent
God has no explanatory role in the natural sciences
Existence of God inconsistent with plurality of being
Some other argument persuaded me
Raised without God, never thought about it
Religious trauma, rejected the whole shebang
Vibe's off, just seems wrong
Something Else
Not an atheist
i picked 3 as most important but honestly a lot of these apply
i have three main "thought processes" i use to when evaluating truth, in order of importance (though in practice they are all more interlinked than this):
what are the relevant empirical observations we can make about the world, and how do they line up with what's being asserted?
is the narrative internally consistent? are their logical contradictions or implications that don't make sense?
socially, who benefits from this story? what motivations do they have to lie or tell the truth?
and god fails all three pretty badly. no explanatory power/real observations to speak of, the story doesn't make sense (theodicy, perfections), and i just don't find religious people very trustworthy (vibes off, know lots of people with religious trauma).
the thing that abruptly shattered any real belief i had in religion as a kid was essentially the explanatory role in natural sciences thing--specifically, if i took a step outside the religion i was raised in (Catholicism, in this case) and asked myself "are the assumptions of religion actually necessary to explain any feature of the world I inhabit? if all this stuff was a post-hoc rationalization for contradictory assumptions invented early in the history of christianity, would it actually look any different?"--what would the answer be? and it seemed pretty clear the answers were "no, a completely naturalistic epistemology works fine (and indeed has a very good track record), and nothing about Catholicism would seem to be noticeably different."
and while the immediate context of that was stuff like the natural sciences, i think it was such a thoroughly effective realization because it applied equally to things like the problem of evil (only a problem if you assume the existence of deity) and philosophical contradictions in religion (much more obviously a feature of messy human theological traditions than reflective of anything about eternal metaphysical truth). and despite looking pretty hard for a sufficiently strong philosophical defense of religion that might inspire me to doubt my skepticism, i have never found one.
i am not unsympathetic to religion--i definitely have an instinctual emotional attraction to certain expressions or manifestations of religion. as a teenager i think i certainly would have liked to have believed, if i could have. but arguments for religion from an abstract philosophical position are frankly generally awful. and religion grounded in sort of a personal or experiential faith is obviously not something you can really transmit to other people. someone else saying "i personally feel the love of jesus" is not an argument for me believing, and ofc most of the people who act like it is also draw frankly insane conclusions from that (eg, "and as a result, we must impose christianity at gunpoint on the nation").
I guess "religious trauma" fits but it's really "I'm gay and decided in my teens that a belief system that doesn't involve me being Eternally Tortured after I die would be really swell", and then I stepped out of the religion I was brought up with (Islam) and found none of the alternatives compelling enough so I guess I'm a materialist now.
i think there's a lot of people who in their desire to own the libs radically exaggerate the continuity of the second trump administration with previous us governments. like it is correct to say it is not necessarily "worse" in any worldview that sees non usamericans as human beings with moral weight but i think the "well this is all just business as usual" affect is more contrarianism than serious analysis
"not necessarily worse"
Well, it's at least 150k deaths worse, to say nothing of recent events.
good to see something, at least, but the phrasing of the rollback announcement is hardly reassuring. i honestly don't care too much what they do, though, so long as they do not hide any interactions from the OP. that was the catastrophically bad element of this and if they do all the other silly bullshit without that the site will b salvageable
make sure everything 'downstream' of you still shows up in your notifs
add an 'all replies/all reblogs' view in the notes
fix all the obviously idiotic oversights like breaking blocks and reblog control
three steps that are a prerequisite for making whatever change some exec is clearly pushing for without annihilating this site's good qualities @staff @changes
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andy masley continues to hold coherent discussion of ai energy/water usage on his back like atlas
some assorted replies:
Can I be close to you?
Been drawing a lot with @fishbloc for our cute scarian hc9 rp <3
President reassures Republicans that conflict is intended to be short lived but also says ‘we haven’t won enough’
*looks at you quizzically*
Troubling how even the people who depend on a right to bodily autonomy to live at all so often lack a principled position in favor of that and just give themselves an exception on the one thing they personally need while thinking every adjacent intervention is tainted.
If someone's on here defending transition as their savior but also treating stuff like cosmetic surgery or ozempic like it's part of a malevolent medical-capitalist plot then I am not going to think they have the best defenses of transition either even aside from the fact that it sounds hypocritical.
Especially when a lot of anti-trans arguments take the exact same shape as the ones they're making. Transphobes sometimes claim that being trans was invented and promoted by Big Pharma to create "lifelong patients" and get rich off of them.
You have to actually embrace giving people the ability to own and reshape their body as they wish.
"But what if they become skinny and conventionally attractive?"
Who cares? People can do that if they want.
If you're only free to do the "right" things, you aren't actually free.
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"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.
Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.
We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.
It's because humans are primates.
Back in the Cretaceous period, flower plants burst on the scene and flourished in dozens of lineages by cooperating with animals. Pollinating insects were first, but many plant lineages discovered that producing tasty fruit with hardy seeds hidden inside could be useful to disperse, as larger animals would eat the fruits and excrete the seeds elsewhere. This is why many fruits are brightly colored, sweet-smelling, and packed full of sugars. Flying animals were especially useful seed dispersers, for obvious reasons.
Most early land vertebrates were diurnal, and could see three main colors (red, green, and blue). When dinosaurs evolved, and then birds, they made good use of this ability, and even now sight remains by far the most important sense for birds (you know how they say if you touch a chick the mother will no longer rcognize it because it smells of human? False. Birds don't recognize each other by scent; that's mammal stuff.)
Mammals, however, were driven into comparatively marginal niches during the age of dinosaurs: underground, and by night. (Well, not all: there were large, diurnal mammals in the Mesozoic, even badger-like Repenomamus that actually fed on small dinosaurs -- but our own ancestors were more the tiny burrowing variety). In such conditions, sight is less useful. Early mammals sacrificed much of their brain capacity for sight processing in favor of olfaction, and even lost the receptor for red in their retina, reducing to a two-color vision. This is why most mammals communicate with scents, and this is why they cannot see red.
As mentioned, fruit plants were especially buddy with birds, who could spread their seeds far and wide. No wonder that many fruits turn red or yellow as they ripen, to become obvious for birds. They also started filling themselves with substances that were selectively poisonous to mammals -- for example the capsaicin of chili peppers, which directly stimulates mammal pain receptors but does nothing to birds.
Then some mammals became primates. They started foraging again in daytime (as most mammals would, later on), and picked up what excellent source of food symbiotic fruit could be. So they re-evolved that lost third color receptors, becoming some of the few mammals that see in three colors, so they could recognize ripening fruit like birds do. And they (we) evolved metabolic pathways to neutralize many of the poisons fruits and leaves defend themselves with, even some that were never meant to be eaten at all. Deadly alkaloids like caffeine and nicotine, or the theobromine of chocolate, the organosulfides of garlic and onions, and the capsaicin of chili peppers too -- deadly for most mammals, but not for primates. And later, of course, ethanol, the toxic waste of fermenting fungi.
Incidentally, at some point a bad mutation broke our gene to synthesize vitamin C, but our ancestors didn't notice, because they got all vitamin C they needed from fruit anyway. Most mammals can produce it by themselves, but we monkeys (and, in a completely separate development, guinea pigs) need to get it from food, which is why scurvy was a scourge of primate sailors for centuries.
folks keep mentioning AI in the context of something called a "workflow" which I thought I knew what that meant, but honestly I am worried that I don't even understand anything.
I need concrete examples of what things people are using generative AI to do.
I was talking to my coworker and she said "I don't know how to use ChatGPT, people tell me 'its easy just type in the prompt' but I do and I look at what it gives me and i'm like 'this is ass!'" and I'm like well it's probably ass when others are using it too
This is a relatively recent development, like late-2025 recent, but LLMs have gotten a lot better at coding and are now a pretty reliable second set of eyes to edit/trim your code, or straight up make parts of code that are just gruntwork. You shouldn't use ChatGPT for it because it's garbage, you go to Claude Sonnet which is the best in the market for this specific purpose right now. The gist of the feeling I get from programmers on this is that this is great for senior developers wanting to cut down on gruntwork, but probably bad for beginners who will pick up bad habits if they do this and over-rely on LLMs. Though as I understand it, vibe coding for low stakes, programming-for-fun uses is now pretty much 100% viable and anyone who can boot up Claude Sonnet can do it. (If you don't care about becoming a programmer and just want to dick around making software for things you want to do)
oh of course if anyone who's not a developer or making software says "workflow" it probably just means they're using ChatGPT like a search engine.
