Laios verbalized our daily struggle with people 🫠

every autistic person watching this episode of dungeon meshi:

Knowledge is empowering

NASA Data Sonification: Black Hole Remix

In this sonification of Perseus. the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted outward from the center. (source)

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

(◡‿◡✿)

(ʘ‿ʘ✿) “what you say ‘bout me”

(ʘ‿ʘ)ノ✿ “hold my flower”

this is by far my favorite safety/warning sign btw. they really went off with this one

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

Two people have just accused me of using generative AI to write my latest work.

I need someone else's eyes on this situation, because I'm not sure what to do.

Like a lot of people, I thoroughly enjoy CRPG party banter. So I started something of an unoffical ongoing project where I take two CRPGs I like, and write what the party banter would be like if there was a crossover. A few days ago, I published my latest work in that project, featuring Dragon Age Origins and Pillars Of Eternity. It was a long work months in the making, with over 15k words total, and it took me a lot of effort.

Today I wake up to two comments.

"Sudowrite AI strikes again, sucking the life out of yet another story."

"KoboldAI could learn a thing or two about creativity. This is just lazy."

I wasn't really sure this was my best work, I'm a little less familiar with Dragon Age compared to other CRPGs, and it's been a while since I've played Pillars Of Eternity. But I put a lot of work into my writing, and I was still proud of what I'd written. Reading those comments, implying that my work lacks life and creativity, hurts. Badly. And I'm not sure what to do.

On the one hand, I empathize with concerns about AI generated content in sites like this. There's every chance these accusations were made in good faith, in which case ignoring or retaliating against them would cost me a chance for constructive discussion. I do at least have some evidence to suggest my work isn't AI generated in that my first works in my project are timestamped years before the advent of AI.

On the other hand, both of those comments came from guests, and didn't directly refer to anything I'd written, so the chance they came from trolls is also very real, in which case... I'm still not sure what to do. Most people say to simply not engage them, but I still wonder if that's the most productive approach. I'm considering enacting a policy on my work that only registered users can comment, but knowing how long it takes for a user to get registered, I'm not sure I want to deny more people the chance to engage.

I'm also concerned about the quality of my work. Of course I think it's good, but I'm obviously biased. I want my work to be the best it can be, and sometimes that means accepting criticism. If my work really lacks creativity, I want to know so I can improve.

So, if anyone has a moment, I'd appreciate them having a look at my work and the comments, or suggesting what I should do. I'm at something of a loss.

Man, i love looking at classified government documents

Writing is exactly like this

Writer's Corner

Israel has deployed auto-firing quadcopters that emit the sounds of crying babies.

https://xtwitter.com/jam_etc_art/status/1780038184828608975

There is no possible reality where this is in any way capable of being passed off as self-defense. It was never self-defense. It is, and always has been, a genocide.

Crying babies. Crying babies. This is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, meant to draw out and kill civilians while also making it far more difficult to locate and aid children who are trapped or alone.

If you have money to spare, please consider donating to some of the fundraisers on Operation Olive Branch to help people escape this genocide.

End the occupation. Free Palestine.

A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group [1] as a suspected militant [2]. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it? Lavender is Israel's system of "pre-crime" [3] - they use AI to guess who to kill in Gaza, and then bomb them when they're at home, along with their entire family. (Obscenely, they call this program "Where's Daddy"). One input to the AI is whether you're in a WhatsApp group with a suspected member of Hamas. There's a lot wrong with this - I'm in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbours, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect. But the part I want to focus on is whether they get this information from Meta. Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a "private" social network, including "end-to-end" encryption of messages. Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app. It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel's killings of "pre-crime" targets and their families, in violation of International Humanitarian Law and Meta's publicly stated commitment to human rights. No social network should be providing this sort of information about its users to countries engaging in "pre-crime".

Middle-aged magical girl.

She's been defending the Earth since the early 90s and she's very tired.

tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse

i make a lot of posts to the tune of "you're allowed to be horny btw" because it's becoming increasingly clear that adults being sexual in (clearly marked and blockable!) spaces is being stamped out and made out to be evil both legislatively and in the moral zeitgeist, especially among younger folks. not even in the "wait to be a horny adult online when you're An Adult" way, just an ingrained puritanical outrage response to *anything* that isn't chaste wholesome perfect all-ages allowed. it's unnerving and scary.

Epic lucky moment at the Pathfinder session: fighting against a Nabazu and its juju zombies produced from the bodies of the former party members. They were overwhelming us. The Nabazu targeted me, the small witch with not enough damage spells and not enough support spells. I was almost killed a couple of times, but managed to remain alive. The healer was dead (not down, dead, killed by her romantic interest, who was enchanted to attack his nearest ally, and went down immediately after that), the monk was barely alive, the paladin was struggling with the dice to land a hit. I was desperate.

So I played my only card: phantasmal killer. Two saves after spell resistance, the first was to disbelief and the second, to resist the fear. If the objective did not, it would die of fear.

The nabazu failed both.

The main enemy was down with a single strike thanks to a lucky strike.

There was still fight in us.