asterisk-666666

[asterisk-666666]

I can’t look at the world the same way learning “robot” has specific origins as a literary term from a Czech play from the 20s, Rossum’s Universal Robots. It referred to artificial life and almost all the major “robot tropes” (being used as forced labor, rebellion, passing for human, taking over the world) came from that one source. It was very much about dehumanization and exploitation and nothing to do with computers or actual machines or technology. The use on physical machines irl came later. It was less “can machines have a soul?” and more “artificial life as a standin for the Other” ala Frankenstein.

(War With the Newts has many similar themes but with child-sized salamanders and REALLY shows how it was NOT about machines vs dehumanization)

dying inside about how AI cults are afraid of the plot of a Czech play from a century ago with barely anything to do with machines

[asterisk-666666]

Of all the amusement parks with Oktoberfest events, it’s a shame Knoebels isn’t one of them because it has the most authentically German-style rides (fast ops with higher trust in riders, weird old rides with long cycles). It’s funny and sad that a lot of tourists don’t know Munich Oktoberfest has rides. It has HUGE ones and a lot of weird rare old stuff that’s hard to compare to anything in the US but “Knoebels but larger” or “Pleasure Island from the 1940s Pinocchio”

[asterisk-666666]

i think we've done a great job expanding the view of what a child's favorite animal can be. kids these days can say they love axolotls or pangolins or coelecanths and their decision is respected. maybe their parents can even find them a stuffed animal of it if they know where to look. and i think that's beautiful

[asterisk-666666]

Perhaps one of the biggest fish tragedies of all time is that tunas, the large, fast, powerful apex predators of the open ocean that have evolved to be perfectly hydrodynamic thanks to millions of years of evolution, with fins that can be retracted into grooves in the body for maximum smoothness, which can heat up their swimming muscles and brains and eyes to become even more efficient hunters, who are in fact several species of fish, the largest of which (Atlantic bluefin) can reach four meters in length and rivals the marlins in being the largest perciform fish.....

....are just kinda known as a food item by most people. Like cod, this animal should be a symbol of raw power and speed, not fish dinner time

[asterisk-666666]

sometimes I feel like a bug that thinks it’s more invisible than it actually is. ooooo mossy log! I’m just another bit of mossy log! All the media shows is mossy logs and you must be so bored of looking at them that they become invisible ….what do you mean we’re in a sandbox and being a bit of mossy log isn’t painfully generic?

[asterisk-666666]

If you want an interesting look at a very wide variety of UK train issues and logistics, including discussion of train media and culture, Railnatter Podcast is fantastic. While nowhere near as bleak as the US, UK electrification politics are fascinating and put Hydra in a very different context (not sure if you saw Bochum or Wembley). I would kill for that podcast to cover Stex someday

look at what happened to electric trains in the US if you want a tragedy nobody talks about and very different view of Electra

WHATTTT NOOOOO

NO THATS SO SAD

WHAT ABOUT THE TRAINS??? THE TRAINS WHERE ARE THE TRAINS AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[asterisk-666666]

to summarize a very long and aggravating situation:

The US does not have a nationalized rail network like most other developed countries, outside of a few lines in the urban northeast and some transit systems it’s 99% privately owned diesel freight railroads because it’s almost impossible to turn a profit on passenger trains post-mid 20th century. The government also massively invested in car infrastructure and highways and pretty much let the private railroads fail after WWII, leading to a government takeover of passenger service (Amtrak) in the 70s that’s been strangled by underinvestment and abuse by the freight companies since. Outside the northeast and those transit systems, many major cities only have one train a day between them that’s barely faster than road tripping (and some have none at all)

The US also was once a world leader in electric trains pre-WWII, the expansive trolley network and its apocalyptic downfall is pretty well known but the mainline/“heavy” electric trains are far more obscure because few made it into museums and almost none can practically run. Now it has one of the lowest rail electrification rates of all developed countries at a whopping 1%. Just look at the wikipedia page for the topic that says “most of these lines are gone now”. There might actually be more steam locomotives running at tourist railroads and amusement parks since it’s maybe a hundred total electric engines out there. It’s genuinely hard to find much on a lot of those early electric trains because they’ve been so widely forgotten and English language media is horrible about making rail electrification interesting (if you want resources I can link though). It’s the kind of stuff that reads like a conspiracy theory but it’s just been totally memory holed, there’s tons of documentation and other countries like France even talk about that era more. They were a casualty of the forces I mentioned in the first paragraph and there was never a major electrification wave like most of the world since it’s nearly impossible for private railroads to afford and Amtrak has been strangled money-wise for decades.

It’s a messy and often overlooked topic even within the US for a lot of reasons (crowded out by romantic depictions of steam engines and luxury passenger trains, people ignoring the “why”s of history, political inconvenience since it was a massive failure of the government and capitalism, inability to practically run electric locomotives at museums, barely any beginner friendly media on thw topic). Which is why I’ve gotten so fascinated by it, it’s all so obscure but says so much about the US and its problems and why the rest of the world should avoid those pitfalls.

tl;dr Electra lives in a post apocalyptic wasteland and Greaseball is infinitely more evil than you think. He was probably even built by a subsidiary of the car company General Motors

look at what happened to electric trains in the US if you want a tragedy nobody talks about and very different view of Electra

WHATTTT NOOOOO

NO THATS SO SAD

WHAT ABOUT THE TRAINS??? THE TRAINS WHERE ARE THE TRAINS AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[asterisk-666666]

In this post, I will tell you about some common flaws in AI writing.

It is important to be aware of signs of AI writing. Signs of AI writing can be a problem for many people. Many people don’t know how to tell some common signs of AI writing. In this article I will inform you of some important AI writing facts. Some signs of AI writing are:

1. Repetition of key phrases

2. Pointless restatement of facts

3. Incorrect facts

4. Information that is not right

5. Flow that is awkward

6. Lists

7. “In this article I will …”

8. Not much creative language or metaphor.

9. The voice is not unique.

It is true that sometimes people will think that an article was a communication by a knowledgeable source, when the signs of AI writing show that it is a group of words generated by a computer, and sometimes people think it is from a knowledgeable source. It is important to know these signs of AI writing, so that we can know if we can trust it as a source of information. Sometimes you will see lists as one of the signs of AI writing. Now that you know these signs of AI writing, you will find it easier to search for reliable information. Good luck!

[asterisk-666666]

god help me I’m unironically enjoying how verbose and agonizingly detailed Moby Dick is. It can be hard to follow the plot but individual descriptions in it are amazing

[asterisk-666666]

I love the contrast between magnetic boots mainly being a thing in space sci fi and then irl I hear a guy saying they’d be a great safety feature for cleaning the tops of trains in resource-poor environments because you have to physically crawl/walk around up there without fall protection

[asterisk-666666]

I love how claviolines are associated with Telstar, the Tornadoes, or Beatles in the west…. and apparently snake charmer music in India because of a notorious even earlier use of the instrument in Bollywood

[asterisk-666666]

it’s terrible but funny seeing how many problems have been caused by nerds trying to gatekeep “nerdy” topics and extrapolating to terrible and bizarre political extremes (see Yarvin and Thiel).

meanwhile electric trains are anything but gatekept and still remain incurably nerdy in the Anglophone world. Just not something the algorithm pushes or that there’s much glamorized media for general public about. But then they’re so well documented and sources that do exist are all written by people who are electrical engineers, have worked with them for 30+ years, or have a PhD or close alignment with elite universities. Media that seriously discusses them is so slop-free it’s weirdly impressive, because they are the perfect mix of alien and unknowable to most but also 100+ year old tech that isn’t as “cool” anymore

[asterisk-666666]

the more I learn about electric train history the more I get weirdly disappointed that like, trolleypunk isn’t a thing. There were so many janky/clever solutions to things before cars and power electronics and early 20th century tech limits still have huge impacts on rail today because it’s so hard to replace old infrastructure

[asterisk-666666]

One of the common mistakes I see for people relying on "AI" (LLMs and image generators) is that they think the AI they're interacting with is capable of thought and reason. It's not. This is why using AI to write essays or answer questions is a really bad idea because it's not doing so in any meaningful or thoughtful way. All it's doing is producing the statistically most likely expected output to the input.

This is why you can ask ChatGPT "is mayonnaise a palindrome?" and it will respond "No it's not." but then you ask "Are you sure? I think it is" and it will respond "Actually it is! Mayonnaise is spelled the same backward as it is forward"

All it's doing is trying to sound like it's providing a correct answer. It doesn't actually know what a palindrome is even if it has a function capable of checking for palindromes (it doesn't). It's not "Artificial Intelligence" by any meaning of the term, it's just called AI because that's a discipline of programming. It doesn't inherently mean it has intelligence.

So if you use an AI and expect it to make something that's been made with careful thought or consideration, you're gonna get fucked over. It's not even a quality issue. It just can't consistently produce things of value because there's no understanding there. It doesn't "know" because it can't "know".

[asterisk-666666]

Other posts go into more detail on this, but if you ever find a meme-like claim that a certain taxon has "never evolved" since so and so millions of years, it's most likely that, just a meme.

Crocodiles? Land crocodiles were, at many points of history, as common as amphibious crocodiles. In South America when it was a island-continent, they were among the main predators.

Horseshoe crabs? They have a rather well documented evolutionary history.

Sharks? Buddy you aren't even ready to know how fucking weird prehistoric sharks were:

(in order: Helicoprion (ONE reconstruction, we still don't have any idea how it worked), Stethacanthus, Aquilolamna)

Yes, for sure, some life forms have been very successful, I won't pretend the amphibious crocodile body plan hasn't been very succesful and conservative since the mesozoic. Plants are also remarkably conservative (not as much as you'd think, though). But every time you see the "X hasn't changed at all for millions of years, it's the perfect creature!" it's just a meme that obscures real life evolution and diversity.

[asterisk-666666]

i love seeing posts made by arachnophobes that are like this bc it's just. there are literally 0 downsides to this situation. i get to live in my dream house AND have a big fluffy beast as a pet. this is fucking awesome.

[asterisk-666666]