Space Besties 🥹

what is your holy trinity of fruits

“Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.”

— Ted Chiang’s essay about ChatGPT is required reading

I am super against light pollution, and have been for decades

but I am also super annoyed by the way it's framed as "without light pollution you can see how beautiful the night sky is" way more prominently than it's framed as "hey, did you ever stop to think of how much energy/resources/money are literally wasted by having so much light shine up into the sky?"

so people get the idea that light pollution can only be remedied by eliminating all night-time light, which would make being outside at night very inconvenient, instead of by making night-time light shine only on the ground where, y'know, the people who need it are

when I see something dated 2019 I think “oh that’s not too long ago” and then I remember that 2019 was not only five years ago but those five years have somehow contained several lifetimes

the good news is that some things in life are easy peasy the bad news is that all the other things are difficult pifficult

Me

Every few seconds we have to close our eyelids for a moment to keep our eyeballs moist and on paper that's a trivial detail in the grand scheme of our complex biology but if a fake cartoon human never blinks it bothers us so all cartoonists have to add the blinking even though it takes only a frame or two. I just think that's really interesting. If there's aliens and they make cartoons do they have anything like that? Zoblop your characters aren't gloobering, how could you forget to make them gloober, no one wants to watch stiff freaky ungloobering characters, Zoblop you need to go back to space calarts

This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.

SIGOURNEY WEAVER as ELLEN RIPLEY Alien (1979) dir. Ridley Scott

I think something a lot of nerd authors need to learn is that taking a trope subversion and squishing it back into its conventional shape isn’t a clever double-reversal, it’s just playing the trope straight and being smug about it.

Kidnapped and experimented on by aliens but I was in the control group so nothing happened

Thanks for the question, Anon!

For me, I only go braless at home, even if others are there.

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i am a loser in ways you can’t even wrap your head around

when the academic article is so good it has you giggling and kicking your feet