It's always fun to see people manage to turn niche interests into serious undertakings, particularly if you've been passingly familiar with their work for a long time. Like, I'll see a post with a username I recognise cross my dash and think "hey, that's the person who used to draw pictures of Patchouli Knowledge with a dick the size of her forearm like a decade ago – I should go see what they're up to these days", and it turns out the answer is "their solo-developed bullet hell shooter about cute android girls is trending 100% positive on Steam".

Okay, so you know how search engine results on most popular topics have become useless because the top results are cluttered with page after page of machine-generated gibberish designed to trick people into clicking in so it can harvest their ad views?

And you know how the data sets that are used to train these gibberish-generating AIs are themselves typically machine-generated, via web scrapers using keyword recognition to sort text lifted from wiki articles and blog posts into topical subsets?

Well, today I discovered – quite by accident – that the training-data-gathering robots apparently cannot tell the difference between wiki articles about pop-psych personality typologies (e.g., Myers-Briggs type indicators, etc.) and wiki articles about Homestuck classpects.

The upshot is that when a bot that's been trained on the resulting data sets is instructed to write fake mental health resource articles, sometimes it will start telling you about Homestuck.

Seeing the whole "death gives meaning to life" concept fall apart in real time in reaction to the Love Live game that was announced to be both released and killed in the same tweet, having only a couple of months of life.

Lots of people talking about it wondering what the point of such a short-lived game is and being clearly aware that they would be unable to really enjoy the game or invest any of themselves into it when it's not going to last.

And yeah, this is basically a less bad version of how it feels like you're not going to live very long. Your feelings of impending death can end up causing apathy and demoralize you out of engaging with anything.

It's so much more comfortable and freeing to play something with an indefinite lifespan rather than these ephemeral live service games.

just found the most fascinating anti-ai person who is only anti-ai because they make and sell the software that spambots USED to use to flood the internet with low quality SEO-bait garbage and chatgpt is putting them out of business. what a fascinating category of human to be. i had never even considered that someone had to be actually making the spambots and that they have feelings too.

If you ever tagged me to do one of those tag game thingies and I never did it:

1) Thank you, seriously. Those are fun and being included shows that my followers care enough to want to learn more about me.

2) Very sorry about that, it’s extremely likely that I said to myself “Cool! But I’m busy at the moment, I’ll have to do this later today or tomorrow” before proceeding to just straight-up forget, now it’s too far back in my notifications and/or your blog to find again.

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.

Getting tingly on hearing the word "Passport" makes perfect sense if someone had an early crush on Mary McDonnell in Sneakers.

People tend to throw out the phrase "extremely specific kinks" as though that inherently implies something transgressive, but in my experience, the overwhelming majority of extremely specific kinks are so innocuous that you could see them in public and not even clock them. For every person who can only get off to having their nipples electrocuted, there are a dozen who are volcanically aroused by seeing their partner wearing one specific pair of socks.

I found a different branch of the chain with a similar post.

I’ve searched high and low for the wonderful original post because this is amazing and deserves to be rebloged but I hope this is good enough. As thundercrumbs said GET OFF THAT MANS FACE!

A "warning" to the newcomers

Gotta remember to use this in the future

I want to see a work of fiction that reverses the "vampires are snobby upper class, werewolves are brutish lower class" stereotypes

Funny how that works

It is in fact very funny that a couple of dudes got so sick of waiting for Animusic 3 that they figured out how Animusic's technique of procedurally animating rigged instrument models based on MIDI input worked, wrote their own software, and started making their own original Animusic-style videos.