To be clear, this is a falsified version of this article from 2022 (“French officials told to abandon gaming Anglicisms”)

plantfanatic must have a top-loader.

My washing machine does not work if I keep the door open.

Prior to 2006, historian Raymond Winbush tracked down the living relatives of the Colonel Anderson, reporting that they “are still angry at Jordan for not coming back”, knowing that the plantation was in serious disrepair after the war.

Or the guts to still be angry at them for not coming back two centuries later.

That got kind of increasingly oddly specific the longer it went on.

This is probably less accurate to Lovecraft’s intent, but I like to think of “cosmic horrors” as being more literal. The universe, by and large, does not care about life - and the fact that it continues to exist at all, let alone so peacefully, is largely just chance or luck. It’s almost absurd that we go about our lives so mundanely, given how chaotic and inhospitable the universe at large largely is.

Events at scales large enough to completely destroy Earth’s biosphere happen on the regular and without reason in the universe. The Earth doesn’t “owe” us a stable and habitable environment, it just happens to have one largely by chance - one cosmic catastrophe and we’re out. One collision of sufficient size, or nearby supernova, or gamma ray burst aimed right at us, or front of vacuum decay, or solar superflare. A rogue planet could pass near our solar system at an odd angle and destabilize our orbit (or those of millions of asteroids).

Even our own actions - man-made climate change and ocean acidification could trigger a phytoplankton die-off, disrupting the global oxygen cycle, slowly suffocating most life over a span of decades. Or we could pass a tipping point and actually have Earth’s biosphere run away into a Venus-like state, no longer habitable at all (there’s on the order of 10x-50x more methane trapped in polar ice, than is in the entire atmosphere). A supervolcano could erupt today and send us into a decade-plus of freezing temperatures, famine, and overall civilization-collapsing conditions.

And in the very long term, an end of this nature is completely guaranteed. Life on Earth will one day end, because we’re entirely dependent on the sun - one of those unfathomably large and powerful cosmic entities that could, at any point, destroy us or our civilization with a single random event. We’re just a lucky ant on the cosmic dance floor that hasn’t been stepped on. Yet.

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I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone bring up Dunning-Kruger to comfort someone rather than insult them

What’s the story with the wiggly green line? Are those the 6 green pixels on the large German flag?

I managed to overwrite half of the long German flag near the bottom, plus the original/lower South African flag, the Czech flag, and the Polish flag. I also did like a third of the background to your message and changed the “in” to “on”. I didn’t join the Matrix/Discord but your message is what motivated me to do all that, so maybe you’re better at recruiting than you think 😉

While there were flags everywhere, I felt like there were a lot fewer than these things usually have, at least.

This is one of the better ones I’ve seen. It looks actually pretty 3D.

Make the image as large as you can on your screen while still having it all visible. I don’t recommend a phone - try it on a monitor. Don’t try to see the whole image at once - look at one small part. Play with the focus of your eyes until you start to see an edge forming - and when you do, lock onto the edge until you can see it without struggling. Just try to make the edge clearer without bothering with the larger shape yet. Once you do, it should be easier to hold the focus as you look around the image and actually pick out what shapes everything is making.

I recommend focusing on this part of the image as you start - there’s a pretty cool sea turtle there. Don’t use this version with the red scribble, the red scribble makes it noticeably more difficult.

Do people really use the term “brick” to refer to consoles with permanent online bans? To me they’re very different and a brick is much worse.

If the penalties are harsh for not attributing ai to an image, what’s to stop sites from just having a blanket disclaimer saying that ALL images on the page were generated by AI?

Just like what happens with companies slapping Prop. 65 warnings on products that don’t actually need them, out of caution and/or ignorance

No, mostly because I’m against laws which are literally impossible to enforce. And it’ll become exponentially harder to enforce as the years pass on.

I think a lot of people will get annoyed at this comparison, but I see a lot of similarity between the attitudes of the “AI slop” people and the “We can always tell” anti-trans people, in the sense that I’ve seen so many people from the first group accuse legitimate human works of being AI-created (and obviously we’ve all seen how often people from the second group have accused AFAB women of being trans). And just as those anti-trans people actually can’t tell for a huge number of well-passing trans people, there’s a lot of AI-created works out there that are absolutely passing for human-created works in mass, without giving off any obvious “slop” signs. Real people will get (and are getting) swept-up and hurt in this anti-AI reactionary phase.

I think AI has a lot of legitimately decent uses, and I think it has a lot of stupid-as-shit uses. And the stupid-as-shit uses may be in the lead for the moment. But mandating tagging AI-generated content would just be ineffective and reactionary. I do think it should be regulated in other, more useful ways.

June 10th, 2020

What I’d really like to know is, why are screenshots of tweets and such always so poorly cropped? Why do they all need to be 80% dead space vertically?

When they plaster that “If everyone reading this donated $x.yz right now, we’d be done within the hour” message I’ll usually donate exactly the amount it says.

The headline is of course misleading, but not really for the reasons you pointed out. Nobody is going to read that headline and think it means 93% of gynecological research is conducted on men. Some people might read it and think it means 93% of medical research overall is conducted on men, though.

Bold to assume I care about preserving my circadian rhythm

There isn’t a single hour of the day I haven’t both fallen asleep during and woken up during at least once in the last three months

It is 33% if the answer itself is randomly chosen from 25%, 50%, and 60%. Then you have:

If the answer is 25%: A 1/2 chance of guessing right

If the answer is 50%: A 1/4 chance of guessing right

If the answer is 60%: A 1/4 chance of guessing right

And 1/3*1/2 + 1/3*1/4 + 1/3*1/4 = 1/3, or 33.333…% chance

If the answer is randomly chosen from A, B, C, and D (With A or D being picked meaning D or A are also good, so 25% has a 50% chance of being the answer) then your probability of being right changes to 37.5%.

This would hold up if the question were less purposely obtuse, like asking “What would be the probability of answering the following question correctly if guessing from A, B, C and D randomly, if its answer were also chosen from A, B, C and D at random?”, with the choices being something like “A: A or D, B: B, C: C, D: A or D”

Honestly the worst thing about this equation isn’t the fact that they had poor typesetting, it was that they used decorative constants. The ε and φ values they chose just cancel out. The equation is equivalent to (xᵢ - mᵢ) / mᵢ.