What IS a good term to explain what AIs do when they macerate human knowledge and then barf it up again? Seriously: inventing the right descriptive term for the data emitted by AIs, as opposed to actual knowledge, would be kinda a big deal for our civilisation's collective intellectual health.

#politics This was written over 400 years ago, yet it unambiguously identifies one specific individual in our society today. An impressive achievement for all concerned.

Bowser really does have the sexiest fighting style in Super Mario Smash Bros. He's so... animalistic. All that grabbing and spinning and ferocious pounding. Just imagine what he's like in the sack.

@grimmycoyote.bsky.social Are you familiar with the short stories of Saki? If not, I'd start with "Sredni Vashtar".

I just heard The Dog sigh behind me. He hasn't been in the house since yesterday. I imagine non-dog-people will never quite understand that part of your being which constantly pings the dog's presence, and starts generating weird spurious error messages if Dog Not Found.

Last walk with THE DOG before he went back to his One True Human (for whom I've been standing in as a tolerable substitute).

"Stupidest way you have injured yourself"? Cutting dandelions. With a machete. In socks.

I should have been asleep instead of sprawled in bed doomscrolling but anyway a hundredweight of dog just decided to get into bed with me and somehow that sorted out all my priorities. Goodnight world.

Trotting with a big dog across a snowy landscape under the full moon. ❤️❤️

To oversimplify things a bit: Livejournal may be about to die. If you have history on it, grab a copy. Soon.

Politics, but guardedly optimistic. Angry-making, but the right kind of angry. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I really ought to figure out something about these stress dreams. Woken up by a dream that a ten-inch centipede was crawling around under my skin.

Watched "Wake Up Dead Man" in front of the fire with my sister and loved it. Glenn fucking Close, man.

A crumbling hang-glider launch ramp in Mallorca. There is a faintly visible URL "www.aladelta.org" embedded on the concrete of the rim. MY POINT BEING: You are now so old that URLs have started to become archaeology.

My flying textbook just turned up the German word PRANDTLSCHEN, which has seven consonants in a row. As far as I can tell, it's pronounced like a wet sneeze.

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, but may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

Don't you want some puppy to love Don't you need some puppy to love Wouldn't you love some puppy to love You better find some puppy to love

Which is the best general-audience scientific magazine? I liked New Scientist… oh, twenty-odd years ago. SciAm? Or something else? I'm barely even skimming the mainline news any more. How can such chaotic, villainous people be so mind-numbingly predictable?

thanks an effing bunch

I'm not sure if this is an apology to @thependrake.bsky.social or not, but as a thought experiment I just plugged ChatGPT for furry porn writing prompts and the results were... emetic. First in their slimy weirdness, second in the way they emerge as mechanically repetitive.

I just went and dug around in Steam's data access portal, and the results are eyebrow-raising. Since 2009, I have played an average of 45.6 minutes of Steam games a day, at a fiscal cost of $0.30 per hour of play.

I'm in love with ntfy.sh. It's the comfortable, effortlessly simple pub/sub mechanism I've been wanting for years. #geek

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. But they were all of them deceived, for another reindeer was made...

Quote this with a book you read way too young that explains why you are the way you are. My granny gave me this, with a dedication saying she hoped one day I'd explain it to her, and whole chunks of my life have been shaped by the insights and interests it seeded in me.

"Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning" fascinates me. It's like @aptshadow.bsky.social's concept of people who lack a soul but hack society to their advantage by mimicking intense positive social mannerisms. MI:TFR is really, REALLY intensely film-shaped, yet somehow empty at its core.

Mmm. Definitely a certain awkward feeling in being a Brit in a flight training session otherwise exclusively populated by Germans, when the discussion gets onto the relative wing geometries of the Messerschmidt 109 and the Spitfire.

FuckfuckFUCKfuck. I was doing so well at avoiding commercial Christmas muzak for as much of December as I could, only to get whitechristmassed in a fast-food joint.

New German word learned: "truffle hunting": when a glider pilot makes a poorly controlled landing and the glider pitches nose-down against the ground. (Not me. I'm some months away from getting the opportunity.)

It's impressive to observe how stressed (mostly positively) I am by the prospect of the next session of pilot training. Last time was Human Factors, which is easy to follow. This evening we start on the physics of flight. In German. It's a while since my brain got *that* much of a workout.

I wonder if I have anything more interesting to talk about than passport applications.

16 days turnaround time for the Brits passport office to replace my UK passport, including a few days to send the old one from Germany. That's fair. But my expectations have been set by the Swiss, where my passport was slapped in my palm 92 hours after I made my initial application.

I would give my left arse cheek right now for an hour with someone who could just set me straight on English property law. Family's flailing and the bloody solicitor keeps asking for *instructions*. I ain't got instructions, I've got a miasma of confusion. I'm barely even from the bloody country!

for some reason tonight I'm as twitchy as a maned wolf in a room full of mousetraps

jesus fucking christ twelve hours of iSCSI and docker and cryptsetup and zero exercise and I'm about to fucking explode

The Cabin in the Woods (2011): a touching story of star-crossed love between a misunderstood girl and an unfortunate wolf. Plus some other stuff. But guess which scene I remember best. Go on, guess.

I suppose it is right and good that dogs know how much they are loved, but not how hard and long we mourn them when they are gone.

Huh. It's just occurred to me that as of about a year ago I've spent more of my life outside England, where I was born, than inside it.

One way to see how incredibly precise Edgar Wright's pacing and rhythm is in "Baby Driver": watch it on a TV that messes up and puts a tiny delay on the audio. You barely notice, yet suddenly the action scenes stop making sense.

A curious German practice which would be anathema in England: the recycling of graves if nobody's tending them. Checking the local authority's newsletter, a whole page lists the graves which have become unkempt and therefore candidates for clearing and reuse.

Would you like to be chased by a pack of hounds? www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

The way I’d worship idols if they looked like this… (Stole pic from Twitter)

sure sex is great but have you ever supported your artist friends during the holidays by buying their lovely work?

The PET scan is one of those sufficiently advanced technologies that still feels indistinguishable from magic. Hold still Bobby, we're gonna juice you with this nuclear sugar we made in a cyclotron and watch your internal organs light up with an antimatter glow.

Explaining to a relative, who moved to the American South and got religion, the meaning of the Alabama 3 song "Hypo Full Of Love". She looked incredulous. ("Exile on Coldharbour Lane" is a stonking album and I recommend it.)

I never cease to marvel at the creativity and dedication with which young primates seem hell-bent on their own self-destruction. (This post is prompted by a hasty foray to hospital for a H. sap. juv. which escaped its parents' vigilance, acquired a thing and, incomprehensibly, ate it.)

Seeing authors post their most engaging first sentences, remembered "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel," and now I'm halfway through Neuromancer again. And goddamn, that isn't even Gibson's best line.

Definitely on the hard-geek end of YouTube, but @huskyteer.co.uk in particular might like this deep dive into the Saab Viggen's revolutionary CK37 flight computer by an underrated YouTuber. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf6b... (maybe also @coelliptic.bsky.social)

If your plan to help someone involves you changing them, it's doomed before it begins.