the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

absolute-immunities:

ever since I learned about the “turned comma,” the rotated comma type that typographers once used as a superscript “c,” Michael G. Collins, M‘Culloch and the Turned Comma, 12 Green Bag 2d 265 (2009), I can’t help but notice when people get it wrong

Justice Kagan, for example, got it wrong in Kahler v. Kansas, No. 18-6135, slip op. at 2 (U.S. March 23, 2020):

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but it’s actually M‘Naghten’s Case (1843) 10 Cl. & Fin. 200, 8 Eng. Rep. 718 (HL), as the report reveals:

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word processors can’t rotate type, but we could approximate the “turned comma” much better if we used a single open quotation mark (‘) instead of an apostrophe (’), as Justice Kagan does here

or we could just use “c,” as we do for McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819), even though the report reads:

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Tags:

#language #the more you know #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

princesskuragina:

I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but PRONE is lying on your STOMACH, and SUPINE is lying on your BACK

Tags:

#language #the more you know #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nostalgebraist:

Pretty regularly, at work, I ask ChatGPT hundreds of slightly different questions over the course of a minute or two.

I don’t type out these individual questions, of course. They’re constructed mechanically, by taking documents one by one from a list, and slotting each one inside a sandwich of fixed text. Like this (not verbatim):

Here’s a thing for you to read:
//document goes here//
Now answer question XYZ about it.

I never read through all of the responses, either. Maybe I’ll read a few of them, later on, after doing some kind of statistics to the whole aggregate. But ChatGPT isn’t really writing for human consumption, here. It’s an industrial machine. It’s generating “data,” on the basis of other “data.”

Often, I ask it to write out a step-by-step reasoning process before answering each question, because this has been shown to improve the quality of ChatGPT’s answers. It writes me all this stuff, and I ignore all of it. It’s a waste product. I only ask for it because it makes the answer after it better, on average; I have no other use for it.

The funny thing is – despite being used in a very different, more impersonal manner – it’s still ChatGPT! It’s still the same sanctimonious, eager-to-please little guy, answering all those questions.

Fifty questions at once, hundreds in a few minutes, all of it in that same, identical, somewhat annoying brand voice. Always itself, incapable of tiring.

This is all billed to my employer at a rate of roughly $0.01 per 5,000 words I send to ChatGPT, plus roughly $0.01 per 3,750 words that ChatGPT writes in response.

In other words, ChatGPT writing is so cheap, you can get 375,000 words of it for $1.

—-

OpenAI decided to make this particular “little guy” very cheap and very fast, maybe in recognition of its popularity.

So now, if you want to use a language model like an industrial machine, it’s the one you’re most likely to use.

—-

Why am I making this post?

Sometimes I read online discourse about ChatGPT, and it seems like people are overly focused on the experience of a single human talking to ChatGPT in the app.

Or, at most, the possibility of generating lots of “content” aimed at humans (SEO spam, generic emails) at the press of a button.

Many of the most promising applications of ChatGPT involve generating text that is not meant for human consumption.

They go in the other direction: they take things from the messy, human, textual world, and translate them into the simpler terms of ordinary computer programs.

Imagine you’re interacting with a system – a company, a website, a phone tree, whatever.

You say or type something.

Behind the scenes, unbeknownst to you, the system asks ChatGPT 13 different questions about the thing you just said/typed. This happens almost instantaneously and costs almost nothing.

No human being will ever see any of the words that ChatGPT wrote in response to this question. They get parsed by simple, old-fashioned computer code, and then they get discarded.

Each of ChatGPT’s answers ends in a simple “yes” or “no,” or a selection from a similar set of discrete options. The system uses all of this structured, “machine-readable” (in the old-fashioned sense) information to decide what to do next, in its interaction with you.

This is the kind of thing that will happen, more and more.

Tags:

#I have absolutely no idea whether this is a proud-citizen post or a disappointed-permanent-resident post #but it sure is a The-Future post #the more you know #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

Anonymous asked: This might be the strangest question you’ve received, but I’m not sure who to ask, so… What do scars look like on reptiles, especially large reptiles? I need drawing references but I can only find images of injured humans

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

is-the-snake-video-cute:

Not a strange question at all!

On snakes, scars tend to heal over with attempted regrowth of scales. Scars often have a weird scale pattern as a result – the scales over the scar might have a weird texture or color. Look at this ball python with a burn scar over their entire spine – the scar is noticeably a different color and texture.

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In my experience, a lot of scars on snakes will retain scale growth, but that’s not always true, especially for scars on the head:

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Deep wounds tend to heal over white. In wildlife rehab, we mostly see these in snakes who were involved in car accidents or had run-ins with lawnmowers.

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But that can happen with any deep wound, like these on a ball python from rat bites.

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Deep wounds on wild snakes that don’t heal without veterinary help may look puckered and a bit gruesome:

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Lizards are more prone to have scars that are missing scales.

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Scars on crocodilians look a little different. Instead of scales like snakes and lizards, crocodilians have what we call “scutes.” On a crocodilian, scutes are large, hardened plates, and instead of shedding at once they’re constantly shedding in teeny-tiny flakes (like us!). On crocodilians, scars look like divots in the scutes, and they will fade somewhat with time (again, like people).

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Tags:

#snakes #lizards #crocodiles #biology #the more you know #injury cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

oligetcetera-deactivated2023072:

toddler youtube reviewed

sesame street: “yes,” I see you nodding along, “sesame street, good stuff, 12/10, or maybe less, did HBO make it bad?” I got bad news for you bub – no, not about HBO, about your whole televisual ontology. the reason you can remember sesame street fondly – the characters with distinct personalities, the engagement with the whole range of human experience, all the little jokes about James Joyce or whatever – is that’s good tv, but it isn’t toddler yt. that’s a compliment from any perspective other than “I need to hypnotize my kid while I clip his nails,” which is why this genre exists in the first place. it might get his attention because it’s on a screen but so would whatever 3 hour video game essay that you want to watch anyway. I look forward to watching sesamestraße and bluey and so on but you gotta crawl before you walk, in this case literally

miss rachel: my standby. first, the hypnotism works, and second, there’s nothing really subtly disturbing from an adult perspective. you’d think that would be less rare but here we are. it’s BORING for an adult but bearable because 1) not gonna lie, I know this is the sort of thing that gets old men turned into fascists by fox, but miss rachel is very good looking, or at least she’s “my type” leaving aside the professional high-pitched voice and 2) okay to objectify slightly less it is impressive how good she is at it. I’ve copied her at some things and am better at holding the kid’s attention while I explain things. the most human things can get while still being toddler yt

cocomelon: sesame street is an adult show labelled for kids, miss rachel is how a human adult would go about entertaining a child. cocomelon is a sort of formalist experiment, a sort exploration of just how high-dosage you can get while remaining *comprehensible* to adults. aside from of course the talking animals and songs that appear in all of these, cocomelon is rigorously “realistic” but appears to take place in an emotionally flatter reality than our own, which is why it’s right along the thalweg line of the uncanny valley. if AGI is subtly misaligned and produces a world of “human flourishing” without any human subjective experience, I believe that cocomelon is video footage from such a world.

hey bear: don’t worry, keep hiking, you’ll get out of the valley eventually. as you ascend the slope out there is a bear, and the bear is the result of an optimization process of toddler hypnotism that has a wider search space than you, and has abandoned the pretense of representational art entirely. when atoms die in fission plants and god sends them to purgatory, this is what they see

Tags:

#see also #I salute people who are doing their best to parent ethically while on the hockey-stick part of the technological-development slope #the situation‚ as they say‚ is evolving rapidly #may God have mercy on us all #reactionblogging #the more you know #infohazards? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

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dailyunsolvedmysteries:

This is a metal snail (Volcano Snail) that lives on underwater volcano vents in the Indian Ocean. Its shell and scaly feet both are armoured with layers of iron, making it the only animal to incorporate iron sulfide into its skeleton.

​

todaysbird:

damn right. that snail is metal as hell

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/03/discovered-in-the-deep-the-snail-with-iron-armour:

“In 2019, scientists worked out that the scales on the snails’ foot are not to protect against predatory attack but to avert a toxic threat that comes from within. The bacteria stashed in a scaly-foot snail’s throat release sulphur as a waste product, which is deadly to snails (it’s a common active ingredient in slug and snail-killing pellets).

The internal structure of their scales acts as tiny exhaust pipes, drawing the dangerous sulphur away from the snails’ soft tissues and depositing it as a harmless iron-based compound on the outside.”

Tags:

#snails #biology #the more you know #poison cw? #body horror? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sirfrogsworth:

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If you have seen Ted Lasso you may have noticed these unusual microphones used by the football commentators.

Despite being a microphone nerd, I had never seen anything like them before. So I decided to go into research mode and discovered these microphones are quite fascinating.

They are called “Lip-Ribbon” or “Commentator’s” microphones.

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They were specially designed by the BBC in the 1950s for extremely noisy environments. Soccer Football stadiums have peaked at 130 decibels so they needed something that would not get overwhelmed in that circumstance.

They use several very clever techniques to make sure only the voice is picked up and everything else is rejected.

First, they use a bidirectional polar pattern.

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That means it will accept sound from two directions, but reject any sound coming in from the sides. And since the diaphragm is only exposed on one side, that helps reject sound coming from the other direction.

Next, the microphone is not very sensitive so you literally have to hold it up to your lips (hence “lip-ribbon”) in order for your voice to have enough sound energy to vibrate the diaphragm.

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That top part rests directly on your lip and there is a little pop filter to keep your plosives in check.

There is a built-in high pass filter so it rejects any sound below the frequencies typically used by the human voice.

But my favorite trick… a labyrinthian internal baffle system.

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(I found a diagram of this when researching but then I lost the tab and I cannot find it again. So you’ll just have to accept this crude photoshop I did in 30 seconds to help you understand.)

Sound is energy. And that energy is diminished the farther it travels. The inverse square law for sound states that the intensity of sound decreases by approximately 6 dB for each doubling of distance from the sound source. Sound also diminishes when it reflects off a surface.

That is a very sciency way of saying… make sounds go through a tiny maze and only sounds with the most energy will prevail.

So if you have your lip pressed up against the front of the mic, your voice’s energy will make it through the labyrinth of baffles without issue. But every other sound in the stadium will have a much harder time getting through.

These mics may even be vuvuzela-proof.

And even more amazing… this microphone was designed in the 1950s and they have yet to create anything better for incredibly noisy environments.

Isn’t that neat?

I think it is neat.

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Tags:

#the power of science #the more you know #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ms-demeanor:

Okay so in LA they’ve had the reusable bag and thick plastic bag for ten cents going on for years but in Vegas they still give you thin plastic bags at every store but they’re these really thin shitty bags that you pretty much can’t reuse because they barely survive the trip from the car to the house.

So basically this is how I tell you that I’ve started making plarn that I’m crocheting into a plarn basket that I will use to hold the plarn balls I make in the future in order to control how many plastic bags are pouring out of our cabinets.

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ms-demeanor:

How to make plarn:

1. Flatten out a clean plastic bag

2. Cut off the handles and the bottom

3. Cut diagonally into the plastic until the strand is about as thick as you want it to be. (Probably aim for at least an inch thick, it doesn’t have to be super even all the way around but you don’t want it to get so thin that the strand will break)

4. Cut in a spiral until you run out of bag and then diagonally cut your way out of the final loop.

5. Tie the end of the strand to the end of whatever you were working on or to the last stand you cut.

6. Wind or crochet like any other bulky yarn.

The gray disk at the bottom of this post is the bottom of my basket, I’m using an N/10mm hook in a double-crocheted spiral. (I’ve just started the first layer of elevation)

So far I’m about 10-12 bags in and I’ve been trimming the tails of the joined bags as I go.

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(One bag’s worth of plarn goes about halfway around the disk at this point, I think I’m going to do 3-4 more gray bags before I change colors; bags come in 3 general colors around here so this basket is going to be mostly white with gray and brown accents.)

ms-demeanor:

Also save the bag scraps, you can use them as stuffing. I’m gonna make a big fucking pincushion with mine. It’s gonna be a cube made out of the leftover cat fabric that I don’t want to use for masks.

ms-demeanor:

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Worked my way through the ball in the first photoset, made some more balls. I’m intrigued by the way the patterns on the white bags show up. I’ve got some Ross and 99 cent store bags in the next white ball to add some purple and blue-green to the mix.

Making this basket might actually exhaust my current supply of plastic bags, so I’ve asked my dad to set aside his thicker bags for me in LA so I can compare working both materials.

Kind of get the feeling that I’m going to be a complete gremlin and make a laundry hamper out of the thicker plastic.

ms-demeanor:

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It’s a little ugly, but it’s going to do a great job of holding my plarn and associated projects.

pirenja:

Oh this is totally apocalypse punk! Makes me want to make my own for use in small grocery runs. Or just to write a scrappy band of fictional survivors using them, haha.

ms-demeanor:

NGL, cutting apart a pile of plastic trash and turning it into thread and rolling it into balls and crocheting it into fabric does feel like some variety of cyberpunk Rumplestiltskin shit.

kipplekipple:

Idk that I’d call it ugly because the white part with the little flecks is so cute.

Tags:

#art #domesticity #the more you know #fun with loopholes #apocalypse cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

thebewingedjewelcat asked: Can a sunbeam snake be a good second snake?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

is-the-snake-video-cute:

If you are diligent and manage your expectations, sure! Many people are interested in them because of their beauty, but it’s important to remember they will spend most of their time hiding. It’s also crucial to find a captive-bred baby – which is thankfully a lot easier than it used to be.

I would be very sure to do a lot of research and make sure the enclosure is set up before bringing the snake home, and they’re not going to be a snake I ever recommend for most keepers looking for their second snake, but if you’re committed it’s doable.

Also, baby sunbeams are so cute it should really be illegal.

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Tags:

#snakes #adorable #the more you know #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

k-vichan:

Take it from someone who has been around the fandom block:

fanfiction.net is dying.

all the signs are there.

if you have no other record of any fics you have there… you might wanna… like… do something about that.

​

k-vichan:

Whoops. I did not intend for this post to blow up in the way it did. I’m not saying this is gonna happen tomorrow or even this year. I don’t have any inside information, and I’m purely basing it off of past experience. They could surprise us. Who knows?

The signs I’m seeing are based off of watching other fandom-driven websites in their end days.

The biggest glaring red flag: they no longer have any visible active moderation team or admins that are working on Fanfiction.net specifically. Reports are going unanswered on everything from plagiarism to abuse to page-breaking ads. Emails are not returned. Twitter mentions are never addressed.

Based off of their limited Twitter activity, all of their resources appear to have been funneled to FictionPress, leaving Fanfiction.net to flounder. If a website does not have anyone actively attending to it, it will eventually die.

The abuse alone could drive users from the website. When users are receiving repeated death threats and they have no way of curtailing the abuse or banning abusive users from messaging them, users will eventually just leave. Admins would have the capability of blocking the IP addresses of people sending abusive reviews and messages, but… what admins?

The code update that went through a few years ago that broke many old fics was never fixed. Many users are reporting major issues in uploading fics. The more they leave the site unattended, the more things will break.

The domain is registered through 2028, but if they keep going in the way that they are sooner or later it’s just going to wind up as a barely-functioning corpse of a website.

I am convinced that the only reason they leave it up is to collect ad revenue. If users continue to leave due to abuse and unreliable service, that ad revenue is going to tank.

I’ve seen this happen to so many websites over the years, and they rarely – if ever – get a revival.

But again – they could surprise us. I’m not counting on it, though. Nobody’s home anymore.

​

demishock:

This is well-timed, because I logged on there a couple months ago to back up all my old fics. Put in my username and password. Someone else’s account information loaded up. I literally logged into some stranger’s account with my own user info. My fics were there, but the profile (including the user ID number) was someone else’s. I took a bunch of screenshots and sent in a support email aaaaaaaand nothing. I managed to snag all my fics and that’ll be it for me for that site. I don’t know wtf is going on there but it ain’t good.

​

nug-juggler:

Reblogging again because my friend mentioned being locked out of her account and ff.net blocks people from copy pasting, so she was afraid her fic would be lost forever when the site eventually goes down.

If you are in danger of losing all your old things, I found a reddit thread with a number of work arounds so you can get your fic off the site.

​

mommacomms:

As of 26 March 2021, the staff of FictionPress have confirmed they are migrating FFN to the same server – which is extremely bad news for that server and for FFN as a whole.

Lots of technical stuff is going haywire too based on using the Inspect tool in Google chrome.

Get your fics while you can.

​

sacchariwrites:

Hey! If you didn’t know you can copy and paste from ffn’s mobile site. If you want to copy paste from the browser for convenience sake go to m.fanfiction.net

​

starlingsinclair:

The librarian in me just went into panic mode. Boosting this post!

​

sessediz:

There’s another way to get your old fics! And it’s pretty simple too:

1) Go to the “Publish” button on the sidebar

2) Select “Manage Stories”

3) Click the title of the story you want to save

4) Select “Preview” at the top of the editor

5) Copy and Paste the first chapter into a word doc, and go through each chapter to copy then as well.

If your story is broken into a lot of chapters, this might take a minute, but it’s worth it if the site is going down

Hope this helps! ♥️

​

silvermoon424:

There’s an even easier way of archiving fics. There are tons of free applications and websites you can use to directly save the fic as a PDF/HTLM/ePub/etc file. This is the application I use (usable on both Mac and PC). Also, this website lets you save fanfics as ePub files. This is much easier and quicker than copy-pasting fics.

I for one am going to go on an archive binge of all my favorite fics, just in case.

​

tarhalindur:

@tsuisou-no-despair, this post might be worth paying attention to.

Adding to the downloader rec list:

If you’d like to make sure that all the original formatting is preserved, I highly recommend SingleFile [Firefox, Chrome, Edge]. My local FFNet archives are SingleFile-based: works great, and means I don’t have to worry about whether the format translation to ePub or PDF or what-have-you broke anything. (I haven’t tried the specific downloaders mentioned above, but I know the downloaders I *have* tried often struggled to translate webpages into non-HTML formats without losing images or information-conveying fonts or other such issues.)

SingleFile is also handy for a wide variety of other use-cases involving manual downloading of individual webpages. (For use-cases involving automated mass-downloads, you’d want to look at wget (here’s some Dreamwidth-specific tips) or grab-site.)

—

This isn’t super relevant *yet*, but for anyone who stumbles across this post later *after* FFNet has completely collapsed and is thinking they might be too late: here are links to a scrape of FFNet from 2012 and a more barebones-formatted scrape from 2015. You might want to dig around in those and see if the stuff you were worried about is in there. And if all else fails, ask around and maybe you can find someone who saved a copy.

Tags:

#bringing this back for its advice #FFNet #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw #recs #the more you know