jell-o101:

The unholy trinity of creatures that look like each other but aren’t even related

maxophone:

amelielb:

Ok, I’ve seen this sentiment before, but the amount of Kindle Unlimited ads I’ve been seeing is forcing me to repeat it-

Kindle Unlimited is offering two free months of unlimited ebooks. As a trial. Which will then become a paid subscription.

Your local library is offering unlimited ebooks all the time. Forever. No contracts, no predatory practices, no tracking of how long you spend on each particular page in the hopes that information about your habits can be sold for a profit.

Use your library. They want so badly to give you all of the things for free.

AND e-audiobooks!!! I have been devouring e-audiobooks ever since my two brain cells accidentally rubbed together and i thought to look it up on my local library’s site.

frankenmouse:

disteal:

I love how this website is so surly and disinterested in the neo-internet content experience that every feature imported from twitter/insta/whatever is met with an indignant fury like the French being told they cant smoke on a bus and setting the town hall on fire in protest

The only content I want to see is content I opted into and the only order I want to see it in is chronological.

t4tfaramir:

st. george and the dragon (1908-9) - briton rivière / the vigil (1884) - john pettie / vanitas still-life (1705) - evert collier / david garrick as richard iii (1745) - william hogarth / micro sff stories tweet

goldhornsandblackwool:

the-significant-clam:

afronerdism:

unfriendlyblackwitch:

afronerdism:

afronerdism:

ladyananas:

jess-the-werefox:

sergle:

sergle:

sergle:

I do think it’s a Leetle Annoying when ppl are like omg american food is so narsty and unhealthy.. look at this (food that is only sold at the texas state fair)

It does ALWAYS just come back around to saying americans are such Fatties and of course it is ~Bad To Be Fat~ It’s also very cool and fun because america is obviously the only place that uses sugar or butter to make their dishes. the only place. no other place does that

Also the mock confusion of “why are there so many foods that use cream/milk/cheese??” in areas of the US where there are tons of cows, and “what tf is up with these corn products??” while standing literally in the middle of an american corn field 

you’re right and you should say it (out loud)

Brits committed genocide, globally, for spices they don’t use

I will mock american food relentlessly for: 1. Frying everything 2. The tasteless sanitized garbage you dare calling cheese (gouda….. is not….. an extreme cheese…) 3. Not having a fresh vegetable in sight anywhere. I will never mock american food for : 1. Being based on cheap calories bc food poverty is a big thing 2. Not having traditional dishes bc its a very young country and the culinary equivalent of a teenager trying out recipes for the first time.

“Frying everything” happens primarily in the American south and is an extension of soul food which is a southern (black) American staple.

Not only do we consistently have and consume vegetables, we have regional and seasonal vegetable dishes and sides.

We absolutely do have traditional dishes that are specific to the regions and cultures found throughout the United States and the varying ethnic groups found therein. We are not children floundering around in the kitchen. We have entire unique regional and cultural divisions of food all over the US that have been passed down and worked on for generations.

You don’t know anything about American food or the cultures that curate them.

I thought I was done, but I’m not.

America is one of the most food diverse countries on the planet largely due to the massive variety of food profiles and cooking techniques melded together over the years.

The southern United States alone is a culinary banquet of flavors, colors, techniques, and food history. Each southern state has its own way of preparing soul food that is specific to the spices and culture of the black people living there. Louisiana is internationally known for its soul food. Tennesse is internationally known for its soul food. Kentucky is internationally known for its soul food. Texas is internationally known for its barbecue.

Did you know that Within the United States we have like 20 different types of barbecue and that, in the south (the real south not Texas), barbecue is not a verb? It’s a noun. It’s literally it’s own type of food that is incredibly regionally specific? It’s literally different all over and we all fight over who has the best (it’s SC).

Thousands of cookbooks have been made to try and cover the variations in soul food alone. Like we haven’t even begin to talk about other cultural influences in American food outside of the south.

“I know food” you don’t know anything about food and quite frankly this whole debate is low key rife with racism.

this also completely erases the huge varieties of native american food that has existed for thousands of years the USA is a young country but people have lived here for fuckin ever and they obviously eat and are a big reason Europe has more than just turnips and depression

Literally. “America is like a bunch of teenagers making food for the first time” yeah tell native Americans that. Tell the enslaved Africans who came here that. Tell the native Mexicans whose borders were crossed to expand America that. Like a bitch whose country is known for eating snails, frog legs, and eye of newt is going to tell us about food. Ok.

Also like,,, saying you’re aware of the way poverty affects the food you can make and then mocking poor folks for not having fresh veggies really screams “i have never heard of a food desert before.”

^^^^

saucetoe:

pitbull

eflor:

winslowsfaust:

winslowsfaust:

im on my hands and knees begging and pleading for this whole “narcissistic abuse” thing to be put to a fucking end. just call it emotional abuse thats what you’re describing narcissistic abuse isnt a thing. even the “support” people give for people with NPD is so transparent and backhanded and all boils down to ‘it’s okay, it’s not your FAULT that you and everyone like you is a horrible abuser!’

yesterday scrolling on tiktok i saw someone with NEITHER disorder make some bizarre skit about a narcissist and a borderline in a relationship and they framed it as if it was somehow the most toxic relationship that could ever happen. i am literally a narcissist in a relationship with a borderline and, shocker, we are perfectly healthy going on 2 years and neither of us are abusing each other. it’s almost like people with personality disorders are fucking PEOPLE outside of the harmful stereotypes you blanket over us

aiweirdness:

New AI Paint Colors

One of my first experiments with neural network text generation was to generate and name paint colors.

I trained a neural net from scratch on lists of colors I could find online, and with no prior training on English or any language (and therefore no idea what paint colors were) it managed to reproduce some of the letter combinations in the originals. But it lacked the context to know not to generate colors like these:

In the nearly five years since, a lot has changed in AI. Now we have giant internet-trained neural networks. And these neural networks have not only seen English before, they have also read all the popular paint color sites. Give them a list of existing paint colors and ask them for more, and they’ll respond with more paint colors lifted straight from online, or altered only slightly.

As the January 2022 Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian AIB, I’ve spent the month thinking about how much difference our starting points make, how we have to take care what foundations we build on when working with AI. I realized that to get a modern AI to generate entertaining paint colors, I would have to take inspiration from the AIs of five years ago. So as my starting point I used that original neural net’s garbled paint colors. And I got these:

What I find interesting here is that to generate a color, the AI not only had to come up with a name, it also had to specify the color in Red, Green, and Blue coordinates. A computer screen generates its colors by illuminating tiny red, green, and blue dots that blend together when you view them from a distance. By telling the computer how much red, green, and blue to use (on a scale from 0 to 255), you can specify any color. I didn’t tell the AI that it had to follow each color name with a list of three whole numbers. But it had seen enough Red, Green, Blue color listings that it was able to follow the format from just a couple of examples. Mostly. At least, the largest AI could.

To make these paint colors I used GPT-3, which comes in models of different sizes. DaVinci, the model that generated the Hog Wash list above, is currently the largest. Ada is the name of the smallest model, and it was not so great at sticking to the format.

This color Ada specified is slightly more green than a computer can display. Its green coordinate is supposed to max out at 255; this one goes to 311.

You Must Be Above This 216 311 273

And then there’s Blobsday, which is almost twice as red as is supposed to be possible:

Blobsday 504 105 121

Painted Batman is an impressive 8.5 times redder than a computer is supposed to be able to display.

Painted Batman 2179 231 207

What does this mean? Can the color Painted Batman only be properly appreciated when viewing the computer screen illuminated by several single-frequency red lasers, after having spent an hour staring at a green wall?

Then there’s Starbat, which has FOUR color coordinates.

Starbat 69 25 192 252

Some of our other color scales have four coordinates (like the ones designed for print), but the common ones don’t go up to 255. I like to think that Starbat is a color meant for birds to see, and the 1st color is actually meant for their ultraviolet vision.

Here are some of my favorite of Ada’s colors, at least the ones that CAN be displayed on standard screens.

Also, Ada has renamed the color black “Jolly Rumpus”. Madison Avenue, take note.

I have an exhibit at the Smithsonian AIB Futures! It’ll be there till mid February 2022.

Bonus for AI Weirdness supporters: generated paint colors from two more GPT-3 models, Curie and Babbage!

elodieunderglass:

nerdgal-dorkski:

smarter-than-the-republicans:

i-sold-my-soul-to-thefandom:

just-pansexual-things:

teaboot:

the-prolefeed:

anarcho-kaibaism:

the-prolefeed:

agentscarters:

anyway jeff bezos could eradicate homelessness. he could literally give each homeless person 100k and it would only take less than .5% of his entire wealth. what the actual god giving fuck

Why do you think they deserve it

Well shelter is a basic need, and would at the very least allow them a place where they can get back on their feet. Food water and shelter are necessary for a healthy body and psychology. There’s also the fact that they’re people too, and a little help goes a long way in making a decent community. There’s plenty of reasons

Yeah they need stuff, but why does every homeless person deserve 0.5% of someone’s income

You have five hundred apples, and just one day to eat them all. 

You pass by a small crowd of hungry children, and decide you’d rather 455 apples go rotten than give them to some snotty brat who isn’t your problem.

It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked for your 500 apples, or that you aren’t the parent of any of those kids. in the moment you decide to walk away, it doesn’t matter why they’re hungry, or who owes who what.

You had the opportunity to help people, you had the ability to help people, you had the resources to help people. You had everything you needed to make a small, tiny little difference in someone’s life, and you decided not to.

What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity?

What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity

Reblogging for the very, very important lesson

Sometimes I wish there were a Hell if only for the visuals of a bunch of rich shit heads wandering around on fire asking “Where’s my money?!”

I like the town I live in, but our biggest household daydream is patching everything that would be better with money.

We want to live in a town with a pretty street to wander down and nice bookshops. Only one bookshop is surviving. We could rent an empty storefront, pay off the rent for several years, install a handful of nice part-time workers with their wages paid for several years, give them running money and tell them: set up a collective to make this shop go. Make a good shop we can visit. It wouldn’t take much to fill a high street with the kind of places you’d want to go into. The local social media is begging for venues, listing what we need: a kid friendly cafe, less sketchy nightlife, more after-hours and weekend activities, attractions. Each one gets hundreds of comments agreeing; nobody has the money to do anything because of the rent. Shops stand empty while hundreds of people ask for amenities, all because of rent. If you were rich there would be no obstacle.

This nation allows communities to take in refugees if a home is provided for two years rent free. We could buy homes and give them to refugee families and then lives could be materially saved and our communities would be richer.

We want to send our kids to nice schools. Money would fix that. Raise teacher wages, provide splendid trips and activities.

When our kids are teens, they’ll rely on peers and listen more to peers than to us. There are a lot of deeply shitty teens around here and some entrenched nasty habits. Honestly, they mostly need stuff to do. Money could fix that.

If you got every shop in town to agree to a voucher scheme, you could give every household in town £500 in vouchers to spend in local shops and for a few hundred thousand pounds you would change an entire year for a town. Every household would have a smoothing of worry: scooping up school shoes and groceries and haircuts and fancy coffees and birthday presents. And the money would be spent twice on the town - once to the people, and once to the shops that need it so badly. Shops could stay open if they were doing this business. Isn’t that clever? The money would be spent twice! Maybe even more!

Despite the grimly well-intentioned environmental communities, the locals would currently be resistant to becoming a Transition Town because of the impression that it’s for snotty wealthy towns. I don’t really know how I could fix that. I could pay someone cleverer than me £30k a year to fix that and get started.

Instead of moving to a fancier prettier town with rich-people shops or sending our children away to expensive private schools, we could have a great place to live right here. Why would anyone want to live anywhere else? What else would you do with the money? Why would you move? What else could possibly be more stimulating and enriching than using money to perform endless, self-sustaining, material-world-changing magic?

thepatientandtheparader:

When you try to type an exclamation point but you miss the shift key

roswell-newton-vargas:

roswell-newton-vargas:

Realistically, the only thing y'all know about my gender is my pronouns. Could be all sorts of fucked up in here and you’d be none the wiser… Watch your back.

People are tagging this, like, “YES!!! My gender is vaguely threatening,” and that’s totally fine and definitely on me for wording this as a little jokey joke for my friends, but I mean this with my whole chest:

Anyone can use he/him pronouns for any reason, and it doesn’t have to mean anything other than that those are their pronouns. Anyone can use ANY pronouns, and it doesn’t mean anything except for that those are their pronouns. Sometimes a word just feels right, and it doesn’t have to feel right to anybody but you!