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just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

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Fanfic tropes for your next ancient Rome AU

Enemies to co-consuls

There was only one curule chair

Shipping war - now with actual warships!

Slow burn (of the Senate house)

Accidental Baby Sacred Chicken Acquisition

No beta we die like a tribune advocating for land reform

Soulmate AU (but your mark just says "Gaius" and isn't helpful at all)

5 6 times Marius got elected consul (+1 time he exploded)

Oops we both got locked in the Senate house after dark

Oops our daggers got mixed up while we were stabbing Caesar and now I need to return this to you

Someone attempts to make pants a fashion statement and chaos ensues

Mistaken identity (due to having 15 guys with the same name in the Senate house)

Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics (but it's not omegaverse it's just Romans trying to figure out how to pronounce Greek)

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This implies that a lot of species we determined to not have self recognition might do well with a modified test.

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Did you know the best part of poultry shows is illegally bringing your chickens you just bought into a hotel room?

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Translation of Internalspeak to Externalspeak

A P2 post I made internally a month ago on October 5th about what's next for Tumblr leaked as a screenshot. This is super rare, so I'll try to translate what was said for y'all here. It was also incomplete, so here's the full thing.

We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have its revenue and usage above its previous peaks. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. (Hat tip.) It is better to have tried to summit the peak and failed than never to have tried at all. We have learned a ton on the journey, and honed skills we can use to approach other summits.

This is me saying we've worked on Tumblr for four years with ~200 people full-time, and spent well north of $100M above revenue trying to turn the site around, but it hasn't yet. That sucks, but I also want to recognized the effort of everyone who tried and gave their best.

As we talked about in the past, if it doesn’t work we’ll have a backup plan and set up the business so we don’t need to let anyone go, we’ll just need to reflect and decide where else we should concentrate our energy together. This plan is happening now: the majority of the 139 people in Bumblr will switch to other divisions. No plans for any switches in Happiness or T&S.

Bumblr is the internal team name for the product side of Tumblr, and the link was to our internal company directory which showed the ~140 people currently in that team. There are also other teams that work on Tumblr that aren't affected or changing, so this tries to say specifically who's impacted. "Happiness" is our term for customer support, and "T&S" means trust and safety, which is the team that works on fighting bots, spam, dealing with illegal stuff, etc. While Tumblr was burning cash, we managed the rest of the products and company to support and subsidize it because we thought that would turn it around.

We assume the first choice for everyone working on Tumblr is to continue working on Tumblr, but we’re going to give everyone an opportunity to have a “top three” ranked list of what other things around Automattic they would be interested in working on. To infuse some Tumblr mojo.

As we've been telling the Tumblr team for over a year, if we can't get revenue up we need to switch some portion of them to work on other things within Automattic that do generate revenue and can support their salaries. We offered a survey where people could rank stack choose what they would be interested in working on instead of Tumblr. The team has actually been performing really well in their work, which is why we aren't letting people go, they just haven't been getting results, which usually means we're working on the wrong things and we should try working on different things. We've also learned a ton working on Tumblr that I think will make our other products better.

The leak was actually incomplete, here's the rest of the post:

This survey will be posted early next week, alongside some 2-minute videos from WP.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Day One, Pocket Casts, WP VIP, .Org, Applied AI, Texts, self-serve advertising (Blaze), Newspack, Pressable, and Gravatar talking about why you should consider picking them as one of your choices. In the meantime, feel free to bounce around the products linked on Automattic.com to get a feel for them as a consumer and see what tickles your fancy. We’ll crunch through those preferences with what the opportunities for growth are in the various products and businesses, come back with a plan, get feedback on that, and then post the final plan. The switchovers will happen on December 31, so we start 2024 completely fresh. We are shifting from the mode of “surging” on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner. Pretty amazing things in the social and messaging space have been accomplished with small teams, so I’m actually quite curious to see a smaller and more focused Tumblr’s performance in 2024.

What followed were a bunch of comments that actually caused us to update the survey, other teams around Automattic posted videos pitching Tumblr folks to work on them, we did the survey, and then posted a first draft of where people could go actually just this week. (Which is maybe why the leak happened, perhaps someone didn't like the proposed changes first draft.) As a reminder, there still are no people switching, it's just planning for what will happen on December 31st, 2023.

As I mentioned this was posted on October 5th, a few weeks before we announced the acquisition of Texts on the 24th, which actually didn't leak. I do appreciate whoever shared the screenshot trimmed it down to not prematurely break the Texts news.

So now you have the full post I made, it also got 45 comments which I'm not going to share out of respect to the privacy of colleagues, but you can imagine it generated a vigorous debate internally and a lot of discussion about how to make sure we're setting up Tumblr for success in this next chapter, a lot of tech discussion about maintenance, libraries, open source, and how small teams can move faster than big teams, if they have the right environment. I'll take further questions in the Asks.

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Hannah Jensen is a New Zealand artist who hand-craves images into layers of acrylic paint, a technique she created in 2003.

art_dailydose

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Happy Halloween to all the little wyrmlings!! I’m in university now so there’s been a loooong wait for the next comic, but here it is!

Patreon | Redbubble | Webtoon

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It’s literally impossible for you to make yourself known to everyone you meet. Some people will just get the wrong impression about you and you have to let it go.

I was walking down the street with my brother on a hot day on our way into a bookstore and I said “I hate the sun. It’s too hot. Name ONE reason we need the sun. Literally I can’t think of a single reason why we can’t just figure out a way to block it”

And a guy turned and looked at me with the most dumbfounded and horrified expression Id seen since the last time someone looked at me like that (about a week before) and then turned to the girl with him and they both looked mistified in the worst way.

They really thought I don’t know what the sun’s for.

I could’ve told them I work in environmental science but I was having a conversation with my brother.

Those two people think that’s the day they overheard probably the stupidest thing any human being has ever loudly said in a bookstore.

That’s fine.

I know I know what the sun’s for.

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Source: Facebook

**** Unmute!

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Every other week I see folks complaining that this or that new web series is trying too hard to be edgy and memeable, why are we giving money to the worst effluvium of the Newgrounds generation, etc., etc., and then I actually watch whatever they're complaining about and it's literally just a mid-1990s-to-early-2000s Saturday morning cartoon with a bigger animation budget. Like, if these people think The Amazing Digital Circus is edgy tryhard bullshit, any randomly selected episode of The Tick (1994) would probably make their heads explode.

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New anti-AI tool from the team developing Glaze that looks to poison prompts and ruin data sets entirely.

The tool can go so far as to trick AI into generating things it didn't ask for. 50 "poisoned" images of dogs into a data set yield typical errors companies have been working to get rid of: weird proportions, extra limbs, etc. When they added 300 samples, it was drastic enough to make a data set that was trained to generate "dogs" into "cats" making the tool basically useless.

It's not out yet, but they're adding it to Glaze and they intend on making it open source.

Welcome to the age of the AI arms race.

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I sent a letter today - something I haven’t done for years

It’s full of plastic bread clips

It’s for Science

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I present to you Vex's Perfect Kingdom Hearts Spoiler Secrecy theorem:

Proposition: It is, practically speaking, impossible to spoil the Kingdom Hearts franchise, because any sentence that conveys meaningful information about its plot will be totally incomprehensible to someone who hasn't already played it.

Corollary: All syntactically valid English sentences have a nonzero chance of being a Kingdom Hearts spoiler.

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getting a lot of questions about my shirt that says “I WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY” that are already answered by the shirt

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