I want to take this question in good faith and not kneejerk "neither", but I think the answer really is neither. I've sat for a bit weighing up A and B, foundation vs execution. The only thing I can think about is Bagel.

"Now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth" could be a thesis statement for the legendarium.

found a little buddy and brought her to a nice flower shrub, but why are her wings so mangled? :( #invertebrate

This might be one of the most insane scandals in game history When Pokemon Go players scan PokeStops, theyve been unknowingly building a detailed visual model of the world which is being sold to a military contractor to build a no-GPS positioning for the new generation of unmanned killing machines

Blanche illustrated all four of Steve Jackson’s “Sorcery” books - just amazing, weird, beautiful and strange pen and ink drawings unlike anything I’d seen before. Amazing creatures conjured up from Jackson’s text descriptions. Magic.

I left twitter when a woman posted her phd and thousands of men told her to have white babies. that was before they started making porn of any woman who posted a picture of herself

IF AI DID IT (HarperCollins, 2027)

magnificent www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/arti...

Trying to explain St Augustine to the pope, the former head of the Augustinian order, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine, on his way back from celebrating mass at the Basilica of St Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, overlooking the site where Augustine lived is peak Adult Catholic Convert.

Like people are literally dying and suffering for the emotional benefit of one horrible conceited dude and the job security of a bunch of toadies forced to wear too big shoes and everyone in media is pretending it’s foreign policy based on geopolitics.

Dozens are killed, 100s injured. Bad luck, they were within 400 yards of the Coast Guard recruiting office at Eastern Market. A legitimate target, hit with precision by several Mk 84 bombs from an IAF F-16I "Sufa." The dead civilians are unfortunate collateral damage, but this is a war.

That seems really relevant right now specifically because renewables may very well make energy unbelievably cheap in ways that are downright society-changing in the relatively near future. But the only thing that can make that actually translate to benefit for people is redistribution.

Steam community: “Can we play as a male character?” Me (indie dev in this economy): “Best I can do is sentient tofu.”

Four years ago I woke up at 5 am from distant explosions. I asked my boyfriend if he heard them too, he said he didn’t and I should go back to sleep. I tried to calm myself down, went on the internet, it was silent, no news or explanations.

This is the most incredible footage of blue whales I’ve ever seen

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right. Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement. This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

I wonder where it's all coming from?

Couple more Addams bangers, all with a genuinely eerie quality to them.

My last two shots before my world went dark.

The Book of Contemplation is basically Usama ibn Munqidh rambling about things that happened to him or that he heard about, and he falls downs some really funny rabbit holes, like these:

James Ransone had a remarkable talent for playing unquiet souls, inviting empathy where there might otherwise only have been aversion. Today I find myself rewatching him on stage in the "How do you slow this thing down?" segment of This American Life's 2014 one-day anthology. youtu.be/6WZB5m17XzY

Anyway. This is the gaming industry's consumer base's view on a technology that a bunch of people in the industry insist relentlessly is "here to stay" and we "have to accept"

1/3

Fascinating video that very clearly shows how these ancient Roman glass vessels were made, including these two - a glass wine flask in the shape of a cluster of grapes (1-300 CE, #GettyVilla), and a glass cup signed by Ennion (1st half of 1st c. CE, #MetMuseum). 🏺 1/ 📸 me

Exactly. The new U.S. National Security Strategy is much worse for Europe than most people had imagined. Europe is described as a bigger threat than both China and Russia, and they outline the need for regime change in Western European countries as part of a civilizational struggle.

We can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

This is why being "nuanced" about OpenAI and LLMs is useless. They are engaged in a propaganda campaign to muddy the waters and disinform people. They want you to think "oh, maybe in this special case, oh maybe under these circumstances".

Passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seat when Batman was present (67.21% vs. 37.66%, OR = 3.393, p < 0.001).

Once you start thinking of AI as a war on humanity, on human thought, on human inquiry, on human labor, on nuance and critical thinking, it slots in pretty seamlessly with the right wing ideological project, oligarchical political projects, big tech's political projects, etc

"Being told a video game was made with only “0.3%” LLM use is like being handed a glass of water that “only has” a single drop of urine in it. No matter how diluted it is [...] I won’t feel comfortable drinking it—let alone trust you on the actual piss-to-water ratio."

I keep forgetting to post the secret history of our The Weird antho, which I can safely do now we don't edit anthos anymore.

The Pennsylvania Conceptual Zone Kodak XX Nikon N90 #filmphotography

I don’t know if there’s a more perfect illustration of the utter fucking nonsense that creative pollution by AI will produce than this choice to illustrate the power of Paramount’s new “localization” and “customization” technology by face-swapping Brad Pitt into the lead role of GET OUT

Do not ask what this is, or how it works, or why I would want to do this. Because I do not know, and I do not know, and I do not know.

I haven't had the capacity to keep up with moderation lists for a bit, but this one is really obvious, so I'm stealing some energy from Future Me: a list for the extremely obvious wave of inauthentic accounts following today's newly-created US gov accounts bsky.app/profile/did:...

Learned that an anonymous outside expert on submersibles did an interview with the OceanGate Titan investigation, and they released a transcript, with all the names redacted. The first line of his first answer? "I'm sure you're familiar with my film Titanic."

Wealth inequality in Europe keeps rising. A main reason is that income from wealth is taxed much lighter than wages, creating a tax system that is highly regressive at the top. This means that billionaires across Europe have lower taxes rates than normal working people.

The man truly was ahead of his time.

I don't think we'll ever get another sentence which sums up everything the New York Times embodies quite like "Some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily kill civilians".

I decided it was finally time to write about an all-timer, JACKIE BROWN. Boo yaa!

if it wasn’t clear from when they changed their terms of service to allow open bigotry on their platforms, both zuck and meta are making a hard right turn. we must reward them appropriately.

Cheers to 10 years of making videos 🥂

One of the greatest errors in K-12 education, in my opinion, is prioritizing trigonometry and calculus over statistics. Yes, trig and calc are important for many professions. Statistics are important for literacy.

beautiful

Hello

Jucika Receives Love Letters