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so like I said, I work in the tech industry, and it's been kind of fascinating watching whole new taboos develop at work around this genAI stuff. All we do is talk about genAI, everything is genAI now, "we have to win the AI race," blah blah blah, but nobody asks - you can't ask -

What's it for?

What's it for?

Why would anyone want this?

I sit in so many meetings and listen to genuinely very intelligent people talk until steam is rising off their skulls about genAI, and wonder how fast I'd get fired if I asked: do real people actually want this product, or are the only people excited about this technology the shareholders who want to see lines go up?

like you realize this is a bubble, right, guys? because nobody actually needs this? because it's not actually very good? normal people are excited by the novelty of it, and finance bro capitalists are wetting their shorts about it because they want to get rich quick off of the Next Big Thing In Tech, but the novelty will wear off and the bros will move on to something else and we'll just be left with billions and billions of dollars invested in technology that nobody wants.

and I don't say it, because I need my job. And I wonder how many other people sitting at the same table, in the same meeting, are also not saying it, because they need their jobs.

idk man it's just become a really weird environment.

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I drew the gummy rats from Neopets :}

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linus takes a trip to the nether. birthday gift to my sister

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Scolopendra Miku

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day 1779

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Beaniatures I made last year! The term is a combination of "Beanie" (my cat's name) and "miniature". This was my first venture into figurines. They are plastic casts, each uniquely hand painted. All of them have been adopted to loving homes now! I'm hoping to make more later this year.

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Drop the gender marker for government IDs.

Instead include fursona species.

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Today I learned that the European Pine Marten is one of the national symbols of Croatia, and appears on their 1-euro coins.

How many other counties put mustelids on their currency? NOT ENOUGH, THAT'S THE TRUTH!

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Sword and sorcery tabletop RPG which includes a long, rambling list of magic spells with weirdly specific affects and annoyingly particular casting requirements, kind of like if Dungeons & Dragons decided to be about 40% more precious about its magic system, except it's a group worldbuilding game, and one of the first steps is for the group to collectively choose exactly seven of those spells to be the only ones anyone still knows how to cast. All of the spells that didn't get picked might be spoken of in legend, but the knowledge of them has been lost over time. The remainder of the group worldbuilding phase consists principally of brainstorming what a society built around these seven annoyingly specific spells would look like; for example, perhaps the knowledge of their working is jealously guarded, with each of the setting's great nations constructing their entire cultural identity around Their Spell, or perhaps the setting's industrial base is dependent on combining these spells in increasingly unintended ways to form a sort of sorcerous Rube Goldberg machine of production.

(One of the default campaign premises for this hypothetical game would, of course, cast the player characters as a gang of mercenary scholars on a quest to rediscover an eighth spell. Depending on what sort of setting the group initially brainstormed, keeping their intentions under wraps may be strongly advisable.)

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the worst part about being a flesh human on the earth world is that you cannot speak by having text quickly appear in a box with your portrait on it, with a little sound played repeatedly to imitate your voice. i need a talksound and a theme song and everyone should be subjected to it

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my hottest english spelling reform take is that I think it would be a good idea to replace wh with qh. it would be really elegant to have ph th ch qh as a set analogous to p t c q(u)

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When you think about the modern computer mouse is such a bizarre hodgepodge of inputs.

an x/y optical sensor

a linear wheel

two big buttons

a third secret button when you click the aforementioned wheel

and, if you're lucky:

two small buttons used almost exclusively for navigating forward and backward in webpages

a left/right tilt switch for the wheel

There's a lot of history behind the addition of these "canonical" features, but none of them really have anything to do with each other. It's like a pure, distilled monument to the past fifty years of human interface design. Every element is a reaction or a response to the others, or to sea changes in the broader tech sphere.

I dunno what else to really say, I just find this all very interesting.

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hands you some creatures

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volcano snail

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I am so, so sure that my cousin meant to type something else, but I'm going to cry. Welcome to my bathroom themed bathroom... Pictures of other people's bathrooms on the walls... Little bathtub figurines on the sink... Soap dispenser shaped like a toilet... Life could be a dream... in my bathroom themed bathroom...