i cannot believe i have to say this but it is disgusting and inappropriate to call antizionist jews kapos and it is ESPECIALLY disgusting and inappropriate to call antizionist jews kapos if youre STILL A CONVERSION STUDENT

(original post)

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

someone make this game NOW

lmaooo

We love to see it

#oh my god#all of them???

Yes! All of them! It's not a defect, it's a design flaw! They made an accelerator pedal that can accidentally wedge itself down flat!

People think being self aware cancels out mental illness. That when you realise your thoughts or behaviours are irrational you just stop having/doing them

Instead what happens if you're extremely self aware and mentally ill is that you just think in a resigned kind of way "I'm being really fucking crazy right now" while being very loudly mentally ill

Sometimes you are able to tell the people around you "oh, you can ignore me rn. I'm just being extremely mentally ill rn. It will eventually pass" and then continue your erratic behaviour. But mostly it's just privately thinking: "well this is embarrassing but I can't turn it off so just gotta deal with it I guess."

It's infuriating honestly

that is the face of a man worried he will be next

Good news, he was not next! In fact, she accepted him as her mate, he learned the crane mating dance and now every year, he artificially inseminates her with crane semen to expand the very endangered crane population. True story.

Sorry, he WHAT? Imagine being this man's boss and having to sit him down like. Listen. Brian. We need you to fuck the bird. You have to act like you're excited about it.

crane husband.....

this is the diametric opposite of all those awful swan wife stories and i love it.

(WalWaPo makes you jump through like three separate hoops before you can read the article, so I will share some of the highlights:

Legit cannot pick the funniest part of this

she has not been PROVEN to have killed her exes, but there is a PERSISTENT RUMOR (really officers she's simply DEVASTATED, she sobs, wearing a new feather boa unfortunately resembling her most recent deceased husband)

His name is Chris CROWE. (Mrs. Walnut Crane-Crowe?)

the mental images of a whole human man learning and performing the crane mating dance, and "sitting" on artificial eggs so she thinks he's performing his duties as a husband and father (and apparently OBJECTS if he does not?)

"chris, buddy, you gotta marry the possibly-murderous crane lady for the GOOD OF THE SPECIES." (alternately: "chris, my man! good news! we found you a very interested lady! She's 36, she's very spirited and independent, she holds a very important and rare status in her society! ...Is there a downside? WELL...")

chris sits any potential human partners down, like "my love, you must understand before we wed,,, i am already... Attached" (camera drifts wistfully to the above photo) "Lady Walnut and I have an,, Understanding... the relationship is open, but very committed"

just had to explain this post to my father bc he thought my stifled laughter was a signal of illness.

well done, everyone, good game. hit the showers.

Not only is he 'married' to walnut, this has apparently happened SEVERAL times, so he has MULTIPLE crane wives, none of which know about any of his other crane wives. This man is, for some unknown reason, irresistible to cranes

the “this content has been removed for violating Tumblr’s Community Guidelines” notice really adds a lot of flavor to this post and somehow makes it MORE obscene than whatever that actually was

World Heritage Post

My favorite pirate joke is “why does it take pirates so long to learn the alphabet? Because they spend years at c” not because it’s THAT funny but because it’s a relatively simple joke that nobody ive told it to has ever correctly guessed the punchline for because they all think it’s gonna be a joke about arrrr

Another classic is

“Why couldn’t the pirates play cards? Because the captain was standing on the deck!”

For more hilarious pirate jokes like these go to google and type pirate jokes into the search bar and click search

Sorry for the double reblog I just wanted to let everyone know that I told the first joke to my dad and he hung up on me.

For fans of the first joke especially, I'd like to suggest:

"What's a pirate's favourite letter?"

(someone will invariably say "arrr!")

"Ah, you may be thinking that, but me first love be the C"

*shyly* it's U cap'n

There’s some common threads I see in the anti-voting posts going around, and I feel like I need to discuss some of them. Let’s start with the biggest one:

Funnily enough, I haven’t seen a whole lot of third party promotion, just lots of this rhetoric aiming to punish. When voting, ask yourself:

Withholding your vote as a punishment isn’t really going to help. Biden doesn’t know who you are or why you are not voting for him, and there is no one with a chance of winning that will do everything you want. But you have other means. Protest, organize, donate, build up alternatives, advocate for a different system.

Vote to give yourself space and get a little bit. Do other things to keep things moving.

I saw a post on BlueSky that said that if Biden loses, the party will see that his centric policies (including international policy) have failed and will therefore move the party further to the left.

I cannot stress how much this will not happen. The party attempts to shift to the center when there is a major loss, because they want to pull in the left leaning-independents and the center leaning-Republicans. The Democratic party pays attention to the left when the left is pulling in victories. They go where the votes are. Not where the votes aren't.

You can go fucking nuts at the primaries, though. If some otherwise ignored candidate starts racking up the numbers, the Dems will pay attention and may focus on that candidate's pet issues in the general election. They'll also be watching where the donations are going.

If Biden loses because the left does not support him, here is what the Democratic party will learn. "Biden went left to try and capture the leftist vote, but it didn't work. We know that historically leftists vote less than anyone else. If even "moving leftward and doing the stuff they want to the best of our abilities" doesn't capture the leftist vote, then it is STUPID to even try. We need to move back to the right to capture the centrist vote."

What has Biden done to move leftward? He had broken strikes and didn't forgive student debt because congress wouldn't let him. But he BYPASSED CONGRESS, to fund GENOCIDE!

Hokay. This is not what actually happened.

First, as to the strike, I assume you're talking about the railroad strike? Yes, Biden did work to avert the strike in enforcing a deal that gave the rail workers some (but not all) of what they were asking for. And then he kept pressuring the rail companies for further concessions, which was one factor in why they got the rest of their terms a few months later. In other words, Biden tried (and succeeded) in working to see that the rail workers got their demands WITHOUT having a strike which would have hurt the national economy. Most of the credit goes to the rail union and workers, of course, but it's not a case of Biden breaking a strike in the classical sense. He prevented it but kept working to support them in other ways. (And at the same time he pushed through a Railway Safety Act to improve railway safety and increase the fines for rail companies doing unsafe things.)

As for his support of unions, Biden is the first President to join a picket line. Presidents have traditionally been supposed to position themselves as above the fray and not get dragged into disputes if at all possible. They're not supposed to say "no, this side is right and that side is wrong." Biden flat-out said "the union is right and the corporation is wrong." First time a President has ever been willing to do that. Sure, it's a publicity stunt. But no other President has ever been willing to do it even as a publicity stunt.

As for student debt: it wasn't Congress that stopped his initial sweeping plan, it was the Supreme Court (stacked with conservatives). Most presidents would shrug and give up. Not Biden. Biden said, "okay, we're going to do this the hard way then." And started looking for every loophole he could exploit ... and the dude is fucking good at finding loopholes. He has expanded a TON of student loan forgiveness programs and debt relief programs. His initial plan would have canceled up to $400 billion in debt for about 43 million borrowers. Through various loopholes and expanded programs, he's managed to forgive $138 billion for 3.9 million borrowers. So it's about 1/4 of his initial try ... and it's concentrated on the people in greatest financial need. It's far more than any previous President or congress has accomplished. More needs to be done, but it's amazing given the Supreme Court's ruling.

As for sending military aid to Israel, yeah, that sucks. HOWEVER. Israel is a US ally, and has been since the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. The relationship is very firmly entrenched. There is zero chance of getting a President who is not in favor of maintaining our alliance with Israel. (However, US support of Palestinians is also firmly entrenched; we spend a lot of money every year on development and humanitarian aid in Gaza and the West Bank.) And a congress supports Israel, too! Biden didn't override congress when he sent that aid, he just cut through some red tape. Congress supported it. But let's take a look at what Biden has done since the initial military aid deal. He's upped the humanitarian aid to Palestinians several times, which is kinda tepid considering he's also funding the military that makes them need humanitarian aid, but would you rather he didn't? He's started sanctions against Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians in the West Bank. He's stated publicly that he supports a two-state solution--that is, carve up the current nation of Israel and make two countries so the Palestinians have their own country. Which is a massive change in US policy. And Biden has been pressuring Israel to stop the attacks and work towards peace. (Another article on that.)

Contrast that with Trump who is a friend of Netanyahu, hates Muslims, and actively supports genocide. His response to the whole situation has been to say that he would bring back--and expand!--the Muslim ban he enacted as President.

To me this is a very simple idea, if I do not like a politician, I won't vote for him, I might elaborate later but I have things to do.

Somebody's going to get elected whether you vote or not. Whether or not you or I or anybody likes either candidate is irrelevant: one of the two of them is going to get elected. In the US political system, we very rarely get a chance to choose someone we actually like (and this is true no matter where on the political spectrum you fall, actually). The most common situation is for most people to be choosing which candidate we dislike the least.

Because one of them is going to get elected.

And if people on the left and in the center don't show up to vote because they don't like Biden enough, and Trump wins, well, we know what Trump is going to do because he's told us what he's going to do.

I could keep going but it's too depressing.

If you do not vote for Biden, you are handing Trump what he needs to win. That is the choice you are making. And I can only hope that there are few enough like you that Trump doesn't win.

Frankly, I couldn't care less whether you like Biden or hate him. I care a great deal about whether or not you are opening the door for Trump's second presidency.

The democratic party's election strategy currently mostly depends on fascists existing, on there being a threat to the nebulous idea of "US democracy". I am willing to bet the democrats (even if they get elected) will do nothing about the rising threat, not if it gets them votes.

They will not do anything against the hitlerites in Tennessee, they will ignore the proud boys and patriot front members across the nation, they might point a finger at Texas militias for political stunts, but they will not take any real action, other than maybe containment.

The bourgeois do not give a flying fuck about queers, BIPOCs, women, proles or really any other oppressed peoples. They only care about their property value and not seeing an unsightly unhoused person outside their wholefoods.

So, you obviously haven't been spending much time paying attention to actual Democrat election strategy, because it is certainly not just "vote for us to stop fascism!" It includes that, yes, but it also includes a lot of other things. (Partly because given our electoral system NOBODY can win a national election without a significant chunk of what passes for "centrist/middle" voters in the US, and a lot of them don't like Trump but also think "isn't calling him fascist a little ... extreme?" So if they were just saying "vote for us because we're not fascist" they would not be leftist enough to get the leftist vote, and also they would lose the centrist vote. The party platform is here. Politifact has a promise tracker which tracks promises Biden made in his first election campaign and whether or not he kept them. (Verdict: 27% kept, 63% stalled because he couldn't get them through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, 6% compromised, 2% broken.) Note that if left-leaning people voted more reliably, and Biden had a Democrat-controlled congress to work with, he would have gotten a shitton more done.

But let's say that you are right, and that "at least we're not fascists" is the only thing Dems have going for them.

What you're saying is that given a straight up choice between fascists and not-fascists, you're fine with the fascists winning. You are not going to lift a finger to stop fascism.

"At least they're not fascists." It's a low bar, I admit, but it's an important one! "Not fascists" means they're not going to turbocharge ICE to round up, harass, and deport as many brown people as possible. "Not fascists" means they're not going to strip rights away from anyone who isn't a rich white straight non-disabled man. "Not fascists" means there's a chance of getting reforms through in the near future. "Not fascists" means that even if they're not going to move left (and they have moved left significantly in the last several years), at least they're not going to move further right.

And you're saying, "yeah, I don't care about all the evil Trump and his cronies have boasted they are going to commit. I don't care about the people they are going to hurt. I don't care about the concentration camps they're just itching to start. I don't care about all the people who died or had their lives destroyed by Trump the first time around. The Democrats don't cater to me enough, so I'm going to step back and let the Republicans do all the evil they want to." In a straight-up choice between people who do not support those you care about strongly enough, and people who are proud about the fact they want to HURT the people you care about, you are choosing to step aside and let the bigots win.

You also seem to not get how democracy works. The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a dictatorship one person (or one party) can simply ... decree how things are going to be, even if a lot of people hate that idea. In a democracy, people have to work together to get things done. How much you can get done depends on how many people on your side get elected. The basic scope of "what can be done" depends on who votes and, most crucially, on who votes in every election.

The reason the Republican Party has so much power (despite their views being relatively unpopular) is that Racist Misogynist Queerhater McQanon votes in every single election. Even if he hates the choices before him, he and all his friends will hold their noses and vote for the candidate closest to their position. Meanwhile, most leftists vote only when they personally approve of a particular candidate. This has been the case for the last sixty years, at least, and is why Republicans have spent so much time with control of at least one branch of government. And if Republicans are constantly being pulled to the right by a large part of their base, they have no motive to compromise with the Democrats, which means that the Democrats can't do jack shit unless they control the Presidency AND both houses of congress. Because if the Republicans have a majority in either house--or the Presidency--they can and will prevent any bill from making it through.

If you want people in government who will care about the rights and lives of BIPoC, queers, women, working-class and poor people, and anybody who is marginalized ... then you and all your friends are going to have to reliably vote so that people who are closer to your ideology have a prayer of a) getting elected and b) getting re-elected once they get there. Because the only way of getting the kinds of laws passed that you and I both want is if Democrats have a majority. It's not a guarantee, but it's the only way it's even possible.

It is possible, if enough people vote reliably enough, to drag a political party in the direction you want them to go. I've been watching Racist Misogynist Queerhater McQanons do it to the Republicans since the 80s.

show your fat partner off goddamn. take them around town on dates and kiss them. hold their hands and tell them they’re the hottest person in the room. check them out when they get up and walk around, show ur friends ur hot as fuck partner, show them off goddamn. If you ain’t comfortable valuing someone fat the same way you would value someone skinny you are being brainwashed by a manipulative and hateful social norm

message to all leftists: understand that landlords are bad because they are extorting you in exchange for a basic necessity of survival, not because they are "lazy" or "don't have real jobs"

glad to see those spreading the truth

Rb to force new people from twitter to eat bees

Oh, hey, I was wondering when I’d get to use this again.

did you just fucking have this

Let us suppose that the "average" horse would have equal proportions of all these parts. The degree to which each part in this poll deviates from the "average" size (20% of total) will determine how large or small that part of our horse will be (i.e a horse with only 10% in Legs will have legs half the size of the average horse).

I will draw a picture of the horse we make!

Thank you for your patience, tumblr. I have been at work all day but now I am home and ready to build this horse you asked for.

First, let's pull up the poll results alongside an average looking horse. I have calculated the size of each part of our horse in relation to Average Size.

Next we will adjust our horse's components according to the specifications.

Finally, let us properly assemble these parts and see how it looks.

And there you have it. Great work team. No notes.

wait this is such a perfect use of my pony model

-> ponyy model with armature

-> edit and add hair

and the beautiful reveal

the second funniest thing about the whole "does mario feel pain?" thing is that the actual source they have for "nintendo's" "official statement" is that someone asked tezuka if mario feels pain and he said (paraphrasing) "what. why are you asking that. it doesn't matter if mario feels pain"

while this is true i think it’s infinitely funnier that tezuka followed it up with “it only matters if the PLAYER feels pain”

I said second funniest didn't I

ok i know i hate discourse. but.

terfs are so obsessed with the idea that “the left” doesnt care about women they’ll literally day “including trans men, a group who is literally a victim of roe v wade and has high rates of sexual assault/forced pregnancy, in our activism is so threatening to me that i’ll make up a scenario where trans men are erasing womanhood”

also i love it when cis women reduce the conversation down to mere semantics as if “making sure they’re called ‘people who get pregnant’” is the primary goal and not “making sure people with beards aren’t turned away from reproductive care at the door simply because of the way they look, remove legislation that requires sterilization in order to legally transition, making sure insurance covers reproductive care for people with an m or x on their documentation, making sure healthcare providers are educated about trans bodies and healthcare, advocating for trans people who want to get pregnant to be treated with dignity so they don’t experience high levels of medical abuse, etc etc etc”

Spinosaurus drama is cool and things, but do you know what's even cooler? Better fossils of animals that lived with Spinosaurus!

There is a new specimen of Concavotectum currently on display in Tuscon. BigSkyFossils took some photos of it and I had to doodle it! It's been a while since I did a tselfatiform and now we have finally an idea how the postcranium looked like!

So far we only had a few fragments and this pretty good skull. As some people noted though, the eye is reconstructed in the wrong corner.

Many people are not aware of the many incredible fish deep time has to offer, dinosaurs just take up so much media space!

Rhinconichthys, Dentilepisosteus

Tartuosteus, Brindabellaspis

Tselfatia, Alienacanthus

Aleosteus, Martillichthys

Polymerichthys, Foreyia

But most importantly never forget Pycnodontiforms!

Stenoprotome, Gladiopycnodus

Maraldichthys, Monocerichthys

“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays $0.36-$1/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I often heard "you're a programmer, AI is coming for your job". I never agreed with it and this article greatly presents why.

I mean - yeah, technically if you don't care about stuff like security, reliability, bugs and such, then you can use AI to generate your code. That's assuming you're coding something, that was already done a lot of times, and even then you need someone go review it... I wonder who that might be...

So AI - or to be exact: LLM solutions, as this is what this article focuses on - is not going to take my job. Under misguided management it can make my job a living hell of only code reviews and bug fixing AI generated code, but programmers will be still necessary.

And with inevitable decline in code quality of AI solutions, software development may actually take up LONGER to create if you want it done mostly by AI. Or at very least - it will become much more expansive to maintain. Because fixing and maintaining AI generated code will be harder and it will much more prone to bugs.

Google's DeepMind finding "new" materials:

Corporations are hive-minded super-predators that feed wastefully on resources - even human resources - and compete with humans.

Why are we allowing them to continue to exist?

AI is the culmination of capitalism: a machine made to trick humans, a doppelganger. It puts humans in competition with things.

Forcing creatives into jobs where all they do is find and fix machine errors is mentally destructive, and, as Doctorrow says, a reversal of roles.

Think how a spell-checker was made to correct typos and basic grammar. That helps the writer.

But make the spell-checker write the text and now the writer must correct it: that degrades the writer.

this autism month, Say No to Autism Speaks, Say Yes to Autism FREAKS

what about Autism Squeaks?

and autism wheeks?