Stoat rhymes with oat, I guess? That’s really all I can come up with…

Does he even count as ‘alive’ with that Yeerk piloting his brain?

A couple of things:

To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

This is God’s response to Eve eating the forbidden fruit. Old Testament God is a petty asshole who likes to spank his kids when they misbehave, but this is all about something Eve did, not something that Eve is. Nothing in the Genesis story suggests that women were made a priori to have less dignity or less value than men, and God frequently punishes men in the Old Testament as well.

As for the Timothy stuff, that all comes from Paul the apostle. You didn’t ever find Jesus saying these things about women, it’s just Paul being an incel.

Fun fact: the whole notion of Eve being made from one of Adam’s “ribs” is actually a (probably intentional) mistranslation.

In the original Hebrew, Eve is made from one of Adam’s “tsela”, which is a Hebrew word that means “half”. This same word appears dozens more times throughout the Bible, and nowhere else but this one story in Genesis is it ever translated as “rib”.

And of course, if the original author had meant ‘rib’, they could have just written that, because ancient Hebrew had a word for rib: alah.

But if Eve was really made from “half” of Adam, then that puts man and woman on equal footing, and we definitely can’t have that… so later scribes made sure to translate that feature out of the original story.

The AI is doing the code reviews and writing the unit tests now, too. It’s slop all the way down…

But Microsoft doesn’t really care that much about the Windows side of the business anymore. The real money is in cloud computing now, with Microsoft Azure being responsible for the lion’s share of their revenue. And who’s the biggest customer of Azure? Guess what, it’s the AI slop factories! So writing 30% of their code with AI and letting their OS fall to ruin as a result doesn’t really matter to their bottom line, so long as companies like OpenAI continue to pay them dump trucks full of money for their computing services. The more MS uses AI, the more hype AI generates, and the whole Ponzi scheme gets to keep on going.

I don’t know man… the “intelligence” that silicon valley has been pushing on us these last few years feels very artificial to me

Fuck… I was paraphrasing and autocorrecting!

There’s a great line in Disco Elysium that describes this phenomenon. I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of it is something like this:

The great and terrible genius of capitalism is its ability to commodify evening, including criticism of itself.

It’s never lupus

Probably sarcoidosis

deleted by creator

Don’t be pedantic. Anyone with half a brain knows that when someone brings up “climate change” they’re referring to “human-made climate change” — and it’s completely uncontroversial that the changes we’ve made since the industrial revolution have greatly outweighed the changes of the Earth’s natural climate cycles.

Are you really gonna use the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument to defend LLMS?

Let’s not forget that the first ‘L’ stands for “large”. These things do not exist without massive, power and resource hungry data centers. You can’t just say “Blame government mismanagement! Blame corporate greed!” without acknowledging that LLMs cease to exist without those things.

And even with all of those resources behind it, the technology is still only marginally useful at best. LLMs still hallucinate, they still confidently distribute misinformation, they still contribute to mental health crises in vulnerable individuals, and no one really has any idea how to stop those things from happening.

What tangible benefit is there to LLMs that justifies their absurd cost? Honestly?

AI would be fine if we just changed everything about it

lol

This is where Waze really comes in handy!

Fuck off, brand

“Google says it has calculated the energy required for its Gemini AI service: Sending a single text prompt consumes as much energy as watching television for nine seconds.”

That’s pretty staggering when you consider that it’s no longer possible to do a Google search without generating an AI summary. Google processes something like 8 billion searches per day, so if each one of those triggers a prompt equivalent to watching 9 seconds of television, every day the total power cost is equivalent to about 2200 years of TV watching. Per day. And that’s just search, for just one tech company.

I wish it were that simple, but sadly it isn’t — at least not in the US.

Shelters here were absolutely overwhelmed by COVID. People adopted pets in record numbers during the pandemic for some added company in lockdown, but many of them were not actually prepared for the realities of pet ownership, and ended up abandoning their new pet after the lockdowns lifted. Many were left at shelters, but many were not, and that later group has caused an explosion in the stay cat population in most urban centers around the country.

People living in those areas tend to be poorer and have fewer housing options, and many lower income apartments either do not allow cats at all, or put strict limits on how many you can have. So here’s the typical situation in these areas:

1. The no-kill shelters are full. If you try to bring a stay there, they’ll either refuse to take it, or forward it along to a kill shelter. People taking cats to shelters don’t typically want to see the cat harmed, so instead they’d do what’s called a TNR: trap, neuter, release. The cat is fixed and returned to its original environment — not ideal, but it at least helps to stabilize the stay cat population. Sometimes these cats will be microchipped, sometimes not.
2. Because they can’t take the cat inside (can’t afford to, the landlord won’t allow it, etc) they will set food out for the cat which remains outside. They’re still providing for the cat, just not in an ideal environment. In this situation, cat and caretaker often form a bond even if the cat is not living inside.
3. Sometimes people DO have the resources to take the cat in, but it’s already too feral to cooperate. If a cat has been outside long enough, it becomes much, much harder to smoothly tradition it to inside living. This is made more difficult if you have kids and/or other pets already.
4. The cat may have an infectious disease like FLV that could infect other inside cats, and so no one wants to take the cat inside.
5. The cat may be healthy and a good samaritan may want to bring it inside, but they’ve already adopted many other stays and have too many cats to add another — a symptom of the out-of-control stray population I mentioned at the top.

In a perfect world, no cat should have unsupervised access to the outside. It can vastly shorten the cat’s lifespan by exposing it to disease, the cat’s hunting instincts can cause major damage to the local bird populations (especially fledglings), the cat could be hit by a car, etc, etc etc…

But this isn’t a perfect world, and the sad truth is that there are currently more stray or semi-stray cats in the United States than there are resources available to care for them. If you do have the resources to bring a stray inside, please, please consider doing so. If not, please consider participating in TNR programs in your area. For many people, even this will be out of reach, and they’re just doing the best they can.

So if you feel very strongly that no good owner would ever let their cat outside? Be the change you want to see in the world and adopt one from a shelter, or take in a stray yourself. At the very least, let other people know what they can do to help with the stray cat situation, instead of talking down to well-meaning people on the Internet.

This is slightly outside the bounds of what you asked for, but I think you might appreciate Vermis.

It’s an art book/game guide for a dark fantasy action adventure game, except the game doesn’t actually exists. The whole thing is entirely fake — basically all of the world building of a video game but without the actual game. The art is fantastic and there’s really nothing else quite like it.

I think originally it was only available in paperback, but a hardcover edition is available now as well for more of that “coffee table book” vibe.

Don’t forget microservices!

Nobody is seriously looking for ‘habitable’ planets because they expect humanity will someday inhabit them — this is all about the hunt for other life out there in the universe.

To astronomers, “habitable” just means that the planet gets to correct amount of energy from its star that liquid water could potentially exist on its surface. Liquid water may not actually be a requirement for life, but since we only have a single data point to work from, it makes sense to look for the preconditions of the kind of life we’re familiar with on earth, of which liquid water is a big one. (Another is carbon chemistry, so finding lots of atmospheric carbon isn’t necessarily a bad thing when searching for other life out there.)