That’s an absolutely giant cat and surely must be of significant scientific interest

Movie dialogue tries to be verisimilitudinous, rather than realistic.

I’m mostly making this comment because “verisimilitudinous” is an excellent word that I love getting the opportunity to use.

I am glad you exist, and I’m sorry that existing is so hard for you right now. You don’t deserve this — no-one does. It’s not fair that you’re having to deal with so much awfulness in the world, and then an asshole like this comes along and makes it worse. Even if you know that you shouldn’t put much stock in what a random asshole online says, I know how much it hurts when something like this comes along at a time when you’re feeling especially vulnerable.

I am glad you have somewhere you can kind in that feels safer. I hope it helps.

I wish I had someone who would tell me minutiae about glassblowing

The datasets they are trained on do in fact include CSAM. These datasets are so huge that it easily slips through the cracks. It’s usually removed whenever it’s found, but I don’t know how this actually affects the AI models that have already been trained on that data — to my knowledge, it’s not possible to selectively “untrain” models, and they would need to be retrained from scratch. Plus I occasionally see it crop up in the news about how new CSAM keeps being found in the training data.

It’s one of the many, many problems with generative AI

Here is a song that relates to your comment

“Art is for Amateurs”, by Jam Mechanics (a collaboration between Narcissist Cookbook and Bughunter)

Thanks for sharing this. This bolstered my spirit.

I liked the bit where it discusses how, regardless of the effectiveness of whistles in deterring ICE, they have proven to be helpful in regular people feeling less alone.

Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them

(I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often.

Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I’d have two nickels. — which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”

I think I’m just most people’s token techy friend. Or more specifically, I’m the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)

That’s sort of like saying “I’m overheating because my apartment is 32ᵒC, let’s turn on the heating and see how we feel once it’s 45ᵒC”

As someone who is currently very low income, even $75 dollars could cause me a heckton of stress. I’m sorry that healthcare sucks so hard for y’all

Various words and phrases I have adopted ironically over the years, that have mostly lost their ironic sense:

• Yeet (this is the big one. Whenever I throw something, or see someone else throw a thing, my brain goes “Yeet!”)

• Get rekt (gaming slang)

• Aura-farming (originally from anime, I think. It sort of means being very cool

• I gotcha fam

• Mate (this is an outlier because it’s not so much new slang, but it’s new to me. Your mind may default to an Australian accent when reading this, but the vibe is more “working class shit hole in Northern England” (in other words, home <3 ))

• Vibe (despite my use of this word never being ironic, it’s probably worth mentioning too, due to how often I use it. I use it so frequently that I’m puzzled about what I did before this word entered my lexicon)

• [Noun]-maxing (originally stems from “looks-maxing”, which means putting effort into looking very good. This isn’t a term I use frequently yet, but I’m trying to use it more, in order to annoy a friend. For example, when she took 3 bathroom breaks during movie night, I said that she was “piss-maxing”. I do love knowing someone well enough that you know how to cause them psychic damage. Ahh, friendship)

I felt like there were more when I started this list, but I can’t remember any now

Archive link: https://archive.ph/oEbD7

I was recently watching the entirety of DS9 with a friend who hadn’t seen the show before. I was super keen for us to get to the point where Word showed up, because I had previously spoken about how he’s so underdeveloped in TNG compared to DS9 (though my friend hasn’t seen TNG either, so it’s not like she had much context for this. She is very patient and I love her for indulging my rants).

Scenes like this are why I was so excited for Worf to join DS9. It’s suchna funny dynamic and it makes so much sense

I love the fact that you wrote this in a science meme sub. I like getting learning alongside my memes

(I’m a biochemist, so I didn’t learn anything in this particular instance, but I frequently find my day brightened by helpful people like yourself, who take the time to explain stuff)

Pole dancing actually requires an incredible level of athleticism, and as such, is a pretty fun way to get in shape. Some people who install a stripper pole in their home will no doubt be the kind of people you describe, but that’s not the only kind of person who might install a pole at home.

I know a couple of people who do pole dancing as a sport and have a pole installed in their home. They’re both people who seem like archetypical examples of people who have their shit together. For these people, installing a pole in their home is analogous to a weightlifter purchasing a squat rack so they can lift at home — basically just a way to practice without having to travel.

I’m not trying to suggest that your caution is unwarranted — if I were the person in the OP, I would feel pretty anxious about knocking on their door about the problem, because it’d feel like a bit of a coin-flip: are they going to be the kind of person who has a full fledged liquor bar in their kitchen, or someone who engages pole-sport as a productive way to stay fit? Because one of those people would likely be much less easy to work through issues with.

I guess my goal in writing this is to convince you that there are at least some people who install a pole in their home who are nothing like the archetype you’re envisioning. I’m not suggesting that they are the majority — I have no idea what the relative prevalence of these different archetypes are. However, they do exist.

Did anything improve after that?

I feel like the target audience is “temporarily embarrassed [billionaires]”^[1]

That is, people who are not billionaires, but like to imagine themselves as having the ability to become one.

[1] the original quote that this is from uses “millionaires” but years of the upwards flow of wealth meant the quote needed some updating.

I have a friend who uses snuff tobacco, and occasionally she’ll add some cocaine to it — she calls it “spicy snuff”

The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?

Well even before AI, it wasn’t doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don’t need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.

If you haven’t read the article, I’d encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.

An extended story that I recently read (or rather, listened to) was “There is no Antiemetics Division”, by qntm. The channel J&V SCP archives have an excellent audiobook-style reading of it, if that’s your thing. It’s not especially scary (though it does have its moments), but stumbling across it really reignited my enjoyment of SCP.