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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • You know, I wish I could remember what it was, there’s something a little sad about it being the last one and me not even remembering what was on it. I think I would have burned what will likely be my last ever DVD quite a lot more recently, probably about 2018 or 2019, but CD, that’s a way’s back.





  • I didn’t hear anything before now about this issue and am not well informed at this moment. Some preliminary reading from a CNN article indicates that the Houthi leadership acknowledged the agreement praising it as a victory because it separates US support from Israel. I didn’t immediately find anything regarding further attacks since the announcement but also I see that the agreement was specifically about halting the bombing campaign in exchange for the cessation of attacks on specifically American assets in the region, which I think would be why the Houthi leadership were quick to call this a victory. Are the attacks you’re referring to on American assets?


  • I don’t know, if I’m the alien in this scenario and could plainly see they don’t have the ability to traverse interstellar distances I wouldn’t be concerned from a personal safety stand point about making first contact with the intelligent life on a distant planet even if they did show they still had problems with conflict. I’m obviously projecting my own assumptions based on living on Earth but, on Earth inter and intra species conflicts naturally occurr across the kingdoms of life (maybe even all of them?) so it’s doesn’t seem that unusual.

    Maybe if life, and intelligent life particularly, is common and perhaps intelligent civilizations commonly eventually figure out how to avoid conflict, I wouldn’t be presumptuous and judgemental because this particular one hadn’t got that far yet. It would seem that’s something they likely all have to go through and that’s just operating on the arbitrary assumption that civilizations somehow do tend to figure out a way to overcome conflict, it could just as well be that they typically don’t given how hard it seems to be, so the would be aliens here likely have or have had conflicts of their own.




  • I always thought motherfucker was a weird exclamation. At least right now, it doesn’t fit with modern concepts of humiliating put downs because things like “I fucked your mum” are commonly understood phrases of contempt and ways to embarrass or domineer someone yet it creates the uncomfortable paradox of the person calling someone a motherfucker inadvertently placing their opponent in a rhetorical position of dominance and power over at least someone whose mother they have fucked, and quite possibly even the mother of the person calling them a mother fucker if they’re happy to turn the tables and make that claim. Whether the term might once not have had those confusing connotations before common tropes around fucking of people’s mothers being a dominance thing someone might take a chauvinistic pride in; within current culture, it definitely does.

    Then you have the fact that statistically, quite a lot of normal people are going to be motherfuckers including everyone’s Dad and especially the father of the person calling someone a motherfucker, so it’s offensive impact is up against the heavily diluting effect of the sheer banality of the status of motherfucker. It’s almost like saying “oxygen breather” and expecting to offend.

    Then it gets so contextually muddied by the fact that the word has become semantically very flexible. I think I’ve even heard it used as a term of endearment before, at the very least it can sometimes be a stand in for just “people”, as in “some motherfuckers like to smoke” wherein such cases it’s fairly neutral in affect or at least only mildly negative. It’s also used just as an exclamation of surprise or anger with a situation, this is actually where I most find myself using it. It’s sometimes used with regard to objects, rather than people with which one is frustrated, a usage that I guess isn’t so far removed from the original offensive intent but still broadens the scope somewhat. This flexibility isn’t necessarily bad, after all “fuck” is extremely flexible and people will infer intent from context pretty effectively but again it does seem to me to sort of dilute it’s antagonistic and offensive qualities by becoming mundane.

    I guess the term works quite well because it’s rather graphic. It doesn’t just require the word itself to be arbitrarily considered offensive like “fuck” does, but instead produces mental imagery that’s shocking and explicit, maybe that’s how it’s managed to hang around so long despite semantic ambiguity and possible rhetorical backfiring but for me, I still think it’s a weird term. It’s so ambiguous, and so tied up with weird ideas around propriety and women that make it feel strange in contexts where someone wants to be threatening and vulgar. It feels like a strangely dandy and out of place anachronism in the sort of ‘street’ context that I think people want to evoke when they use it. Feels like something I might expect people to say right before slapping each other with gloves. Are they upset with the person’s habit of fucking mother’s because it implies they’re a philanderer? Would that be offensive to them? Or is it the mother they’re supposed to have fucked who’s improper? A “slut” for allowing the mother fucker to fuck them? If so, why is the issuer of the term directing their distaste at the mother fucker and not mother whom they fucked? Are they suggesting the person so-called, fucked their own mother? I guess that could make sense, a bit weird but certainly insulting, yet I’ve really never heard that that was the intended idea.


  • This suddenly triggered a memory of one specific art attack but I’ve been scouring YouTube and so far haven’t had much luck finding it. I haven’t seen all that’s available but I’m getting a bit sick of it despite my desire to still see it again. Maybe someone here remembers it.

    • I would have watched it in the 90s I think sometimes between 94-96. But I can’t say for sure it wasn’t a rerun from an earlier period
    • The particular art attack was a night scene of traffic on what I think was a wet road with a truck or lorry, the perspective is of the lorry heading towards the viewer, though a little bit profile, not directly head on
    • I think it was drawn on black paper
    • It may have been done with white and yellow chalk, certainly I remember the colours white and yellow being used
    • It was demonstrating ideas around being able to hint at the impression of objects at night without drawing the full object, only the outline of parts of it that would be illuminated by light sources which were headlights and smaller lights attached to the sides and corners of the lorry
    • It involved doing something kind of like how a little kid would draw a sun with a crude circle and rays but then some quite clever technique was employed to smudge those little suns and their rays in very straight lines used to trace the hint of outlines of traffic
    • It was finally finished off with some kind reflection on the road surface, don’t recall how he did it

    I’ve going through ep after ep, nowhere to be found. The wiki for art attack has only two mentions of “night” and it’s neither of the two mentioned episodes, there’s only one mention of “traffic” and it’s in regards to using traffic cones. There’s a mention of “truck” but that wasn’t it either, I checked. There’s no mention of “lorry”. Couldn’t find anything to do with “wet roads” either. Driving me nuts.







  • Why doesn’t the damaging and hot particulate matter in smoke do any harm to or otherwise clog up their spiracles like it does to the inner lining of lungs? I gather lungs are wet and also very delicate, but if they’re directly oxygenating their organs through these spiracles eventually it must get to somewhere wet and delicate for the smoke to get in and potentially harm.


  • I realise the dumbass here is the guy saying programmers are ‘cooked’, but there’s something kind of funny how the programmer talks about how people misunderstand the complexities of their job and how LLMs easily make mistakes because of an inability to understand the nuances of what he does everyday and understands deeply. They rightly point out how without their specialist oversight, AI agents would fail in ridiculous and spectacular ways, yet happily and vaguely adds as a throw away statement at the end “replacing other industries, sure.” with the exact same blitheness and lack of personal understanding with which ‘Ace’ proclaims all programmers cooked.


  • That’s got to be the key to all this, specificity, it’s great that it’s got natural language processing to simplify things but sometimes that’s what’s actually getting in the way. What they should really do is have a special version of chatGPT for programming where users can interact with it in a very special form of structured English. It’s still natural language, this is the future after all, none of that zeroes and ones crap like the stone age, but just highly specific words with carefully defined meanings particular to making repeatable and executable steps in a pattern that does the same thing every time in response to inputs to produce outputs. You could then “speak” to one of these LLM things using this carefully structured English to automate specific tasks. The real kicker would be that you could tell it to chain together a bunch of these tasks you’ve had it automate for you to build up in to something much more complex. This would really harness the power of AI because at each step it’s made it for you, with minimal input from yourself because you’re just ‘talking’ to it in a very specific way. Admittedly this approach would be a little bit less obvious for new users than a standard LLM, but if an average person kept doing this for like a year or two they’d get pretty adept at this manner of speech, it’d be kind of like learning another language and people have been doing that for as long as there’s been people, I speak in a language everyday, I’m doing it right now. We could make it easier too, we could have courses and schools to help people get better at it faster.