drethelin

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“Thats why you always identify the subtext of a blowjob before you accept it.”

— Madame D’Arouet

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some terra ignota redraws

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noticing the correspondences between herschel schoen and jedd mason

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the thing wrt JEDD Mason and the like Hive Leader’s conspiracy whatever as of beginning of seven surrenders is incredibly funny bc it’s like, okay the world leaders who would normally hate each other but are brought together by their shared a) assassination conspiracy b) toxic 1700s larp polycule and c) mutual blorbo JEDD, their beautiful son who is too pure for this ruthless world. leading to a dynamic that’s like. what if data from star trek tng but in the mirror universe where all the characters are evil, except for data. but all data’s evil mirrorverse peers still like him as much as they do in canon.

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jedd mason was 21 he should have been at the club

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more terra ignota doodles bc I just finished twtb. madame, carlyle in her existential despair era, jedd, & dominic in his no skin on his face era

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Portrait of a young woman with her hair pulled back, wearing suit coat, vest and turned down collar with small bow tie. Printed on photo back: "Revenaugh & Co. successor to Geo. C. Gillett, photographic & art studio, Kelley's Block, East Huron St., Ann Arbor, Mich., negatives preserved, old pictures enlarged to any size desired, and finished in ink, oil or watercolors in a superior manner."

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

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exclusive

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View from the Neuschwanstein Castle

Bavaria, Germany, IX 2022

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There was a recent study about how LLM usage decays brain function in some way, and while there are methodological flaws and small sample size, it's one of those studies where I think to myself "well, that seems obviously true".

That is to say, the brain is a muscle, and you need to use it in order to keep it honed. Or rather, the brain is neural net, and it's going to get better at the things that you train it to do, and connections will naturally atrophy for things that you're not training it on.

You can imagine someone who does a crossword every day, and someone who stops doing crosswords and instead goes to look up all the answers and fill in the crossword that way, and ... yes, obviously the person who is actually doing the crosswords is going to have better skills after a month? Obviously the person filling in the answers is going to get good at searching for the answers and filling them in?

And if you don't actually care about being good at crosswords, if you just want to fill in the crossword as quickly as possible, then maybe you don't actually give a shit about whether this skill is being honed or is degrading.

But you should think about whether you care about the skill, about what's happening to the brain.

I also tend to think of a lot of things in terms of skills, to think of the brain as this training system that needs deliberate care and attention if it's to be kept on track. So I do try to practice what I preach, and be very careful what it is I'm using the LLMs for, if anything: if the use case is an area where I'm genuinely okay with losing a skillset in exchange for having work done faster and worse.

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i love poison omelette

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They say science fiction never really predicts the future, and yet Captain Picard says “tea, earl grey, hot” in that meticulous way observed only in someone with a slightly unusual accent who’s finally figured out the exact cadence and phrasing their voice activated smart-whatever actually understands and suspects if they allow their tone to vary even one iota it’s going to interpret their drink order as a request for a live ocelot.

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grizzly man (2005) dir. werner herzog

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I work in a rural nature center that is extremely beautifully built & well-maintained but it's a little off the beaten path and none of the land managers ever check in on my colleague or me so it's just the two of us in the office occasionally descending into madness so despite it being a totally modern recently-built facility, working here still has the energy of being relegated to mulder's basement office and as it happens my colleague somehow tripped and fell into the role of our region's de facto bigfoot expert so people come in to ask him about bigfoot and they'll all talk and talk about bigfoot and then every time one of the visitors will finally turn to me and ask something like "so what about you? what do you think?" and I'm making this face

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DS9 | 6.16

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☕️