#Data Offload

[the-overanalyzer]

I think microsoft should be burned to the ground for a lot of reasons, but my reason of the moment is that they won't stop harassing me to upgrade to windows 11, which I can't do without reinstalling 10 in a different format because of a decision I arbitrarily made when first setting my computer up two years before 11 was even announced

[barstoolblues]

how long are you at sea… will you be offline all that time … we will miss you…

ee i leave tomorrow for the ship which is docked in oregon so i get there tomorrow night but we sail friday morning so ill be on the ship in port for a day and a half or so and then im back september 5th. i have no idea what connection will be like, theres shipboard satellite internet for all the data and instruments and stuff but its like barely strong enough to send an email in my experience, and last time i was basically offline. but this is a newer higher-tech vessel than others ive been on so who knows!

[6ebe]

no one in my family reps my humanities degree 😞

[sophie-baybey]

I think it's also worth noting that generative AI isn't just "inspired" by content, it uses that content explicitly in the process. You could almost consider it like a very complicated photoshop job on tens of thousands of images, or like using an audio sample when making music. Generative AI isn't a conscious force that that can be inspired by things, it's a tool that is using every single piece of information that is fed into it every single time it's being used. If you generate an image of an apple in an AI generator, sure it has to reference every image that is tagged as an apple, but it also has to take into account every single image in its database that is not an apple, meaning every prompt actively uses every piece of data in some way.

so a huge list of artists that was used to train midjourney’s model got leaked and i’m on it

literally there is no reason to support AI generators, they can’t ethically exist. my art has been used to train every single major one without consent lmfao 🤪

link to the archive

[datsu-rock2763]

when CapCut came back online but you just offloaded it so you can’t redownload it

[bestbluebouquet]

Sometimes technology makes me so angry that I want to smash it all into bits like a chimpanzee and I think I should get a million dollars every time that happens

[digitalcreationsllc]

Guide to data center migration types | TechTarget

A data center migration is a way for a business to simplify its infrastructure, offload applications and save on costs. Data center migrations might be necessary for any business that relies on technology and eventually outgrows its existing IT infrastructure. This would cause the need for increased capacity or additional functionality. Data can be migrated through on-premises and cloud…

[ducktoo]

Office Antics

Yena x Reader

Note: Recently rewatched Hyemileeyechaepa and man I missed 2/3 of Jo Yuriz. If you haven't watch it yet I really recommend yall to do it!

Here's for fellow resident duck.

The office was alive with the familiar hum of keyboards and the occasional ring of phones. It was another Monday morning, and as usual, you were the first one at your desk, sipping a subpar instant coffee you’d made from the breakroom. The workday ahead promised to be a mountain of reports, client proposals, and dreaded spreadsheet formatting—tasks that demanded focus. Yet, your mind wasn’t on the work.

No, your thoughts were fixated on a certain someone who had yet to show up.

Choi Yena. Your supervisor. The office’s resident prankster. The embodiment of chaos wrapped in pastel blazers and a permanent grin. She was always the last one to arrive but somehow managed to make her presence known instantly, turning even the dullest workday into a whirlwind of noise and mischief.

You were halfway through organizing the team’s task list for the day when the elevator doors dinged.

Speak of the devil.

“Good morning!” Yena’s sing-song voice bounced off the walls as she burst through the door, holding two iced coffees in her hands. Her grin stretched wide as she plopped one down on your desk.

“Iced Americano for my favourite team member,” she chirped.

You raised an eyebrow, instantly suspicious. The last time she gave you coffee, it was spiked with salt instead of sugar. “What’s the catch, Sunbae?”

Her eyes widened in mock offense. “No catch! Can’t a supervisor just be nice to her hardworking team?”

“Not when that supervisor is Choi Yena,” you shot back, narrowing your eyes.

She gasped, clutching her chest as if wounded. “Wow. The lack of trust here is unbelievable. I’ll have you know that I’m turning over a new leaf. No pranks today, I swear.”

You weren’t buying it, but the coffee smelled too good to resist. With a cautious sip, you confirmed it was safe. No salt, no hot sauce, no glitter bombs waiting to explode. Yena watched you expectantly, her lips twitching like she was holding back laughter.

“What?” you asked, already bracing yourself for whatever she had planned.

“Nothing!” she said, a little too quickly, before skipping back to her desk.

-

Work officially started at 9:00 a.m., and the day unfolded like any other. You were in charge of preparing the weekly task overview—assigning smaller chunks of projects to each team member while flagging urgent deadlines.

The first task on your list was compiling data for the company’s quarterly performance review. You groaned inwardly, knowing the amount of cross-referencing it would require.

“Hey, sunbae, can we talk about the client feedback report for the Kim & Lee project?” you called over to her.

“Of course,” she replied, spinning her chair dramatically before walking over to your desk with her usual exaggerated flair. “Let’s tackle this head-on. Serious Yena-sunbae mode: engaged.”

You slid the draft report across the desk. “The issue is with the client’s notes on the second phase. They’re asking for an entirely new cost analysis, and we’ve got a two-day turnaround. Can we reassign some of my other tasks?”

Yena leaned over, scanning the document with a furrowed brow. For once, she was genuinely focused. “Hmm. Good point. Let’s offload some of this to Eunji and Sungho. I’ll handle the final approval.” She gave you a thumbs up. “Boom. Delegation, baby.”

-

By mid-morning, the office had settled into its usual rhythm: the quiet clatter of keyboards, the hum of printers, and the occasional buzz of phones. You were elbow-deep in Excel, trying to fix a formula that some long-forgotten coworker had created to "streamline" the quarterly financial summaries.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

“Why does this formula look like someone coded a secret message?” you muttered, leaning closer to your monitor. You had just started unravelling the mess when—

“Ya, ya, yoohoo!” Yena’s voice broke through your concentration, startling you so badly you nearly toppled out of your chair. She was suddenly looming over your desk, holding up a packet of snacks like she’d just discovered gold.

“Want some dried mango?” she asked, dangling the packet in front of your face.

You sighed, rubbing your temples. “…Sunbae, do you even work here, or are you just here to disrupt me?”

“Excuse me, I’m your supervisor. Disruption is part of my job description,” she said with a wink. “But seriously, how’s it going with that finance thingy?”

“It’s not a ‘thingy,’ it’s a nightmare,” you replied, gesturing to your screen. “This formula makes no sense. It’s like someone deliberately made it as complicated as possible.”

“Let me see,” she said, pulling up a chair beside you. She squinted at the screen, then immediately leaned back, shaking her head. “Yeah, nope. That’s a you problem. I’m more of a ‘big picture’ kind of gal.”

“Wow, so helpful,” you deadpanned.

“Hey, I didn’t say I couldn’t help in other ways!” she chirped, pulling out her phone.

“Oh no. What are you—”

“Shhh. I’m solving your problem,” she said, cutting you off as she started typing furiously. A moment later, she grinned and held up her phone. “Ta-da!”

You squinted at the screen. It was a meme about how Excel was designed to make grown adults cry.

“Very funny,” you said, but a small smile tugged at your lips.

“See? I’m boosting morale. That’s like, half my job as a supervisor,” she said, patting you on the shoulder before skipping off to her own desk.

-

Five minutes later, the printer jammed.

“YENA-SSI!” someone from the design team shouted.

She popped her head up like a prairie dog. “What? It wasn’t me!”

“It’s always you!”

“I take that personally,” she said, hopping up from her chair and making her way to the printer. “I’ll have you know, I’m a model employee. Watch and learn, folks.”

You glanced over just in time to see her dramatically roll up her sleeves, as if she were about to perform life-saving surgery. She yanked open the printer tray, dug around for a moment, and triumphantly held up the offending piece of paper, which was crumpled beyond recognition.

“Fixed it!” she declared, tossing the mangled paper into the trash.

The printer whirred back to life, and the team gave her a half-hearted round of applause.

“Thank you, thank you,” she said, bowing theatrically. Then, as she walked back to her desk, she sprinkled star-shaped confetti onto the floor behind her like she was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.

You sighed, already knowing who would be tasked with vacuuming it up later.

-

At around 10:30 a.m., Yena made her rounds through the office. She stopped by everyone’s desk, offering unsolicited advice and handing out snacks like a chaotic fairy godmother.

“Eunji, you’re overthinking that layout. Trust your instincts!”

“Sungho, great job on the client emails, but maybe use fewer emojis next time. We’re professionals, remember?”

When she reached your desk, she leaned over your shoulder and whispered, “Still fighting the Excel file?”

“Yes, and it’s winning,” you replied without looking up.

“Want me to call IT?” she offered.

“I am IT,” you said flatly, earning a laugh from her.

“Well, when you’re done, come see me. We need to prep for the Kim & Lee client pitch. You love PowerPoint, right?”

You groaned. “You’re evil.”

“Evil? No, no. I’m effective,” she said with a wink before disappearing into the break room.

-

When lunchtime rolled around at 12:00 pm, the office buzz quieted as everyone scattered to their usual spots. Some gathered in groups to eat at their desks, while others slipped out for fresh air or made a beeline to the cafeteria. You decided to head to the break room to escape the endless spreadsheets and give your eyes a break from the glaring screen.

As you stepped inside, the smell of warm food hit you immediately—ramyeon, fried rice, someone’s dubious reheated fish—and in the middle of it all sat Yena, perched on the counter with her legs swinging, humming a tune to herself.

“Ah, my loyal team member!” she greeted dramatically, raising her half-eaten kimbap like royalty. “Come to dine with your favorite supervisor?”

You rolled your eyes but smiled as you made your way to the fridge to grab your lunchbox. “Favorite by default, considering you’re the only supervisor I report to.”

She grinned. “Still counts.”

You settled at the table, peeling back the lid of your leftovers: some rice, grilled chicken, and steamed veggies. Simple, nothing like the variety of colorful side dishes Yena always seemed to have. As if on cue, she hopped off the counter and slid into the seat across from you, pushing her kimbap container into the middle of the table.

“Want some? I made it myself.”

You eyed the kimbap warily. “What’s in it?”

“Rice, seaweed, veggies, and unconditional love,” she said with a wink, holding out a piece with her chopsticks.

You raised an eyebrow. “Unconditional love, huh? Sounds suspicious coming from you. sunbae.”

She gasped dramatically. “Wow! Can’t a supervisor just share her lunch without being accused of foul play?”

“Not when that supervisor once put chili powder in my tteokbokki.”

“That was one time!” she protested, pouting.

“And what about the fake soy sauce prank? Or the time you switched the sugar with salt?”

Yena bit her lip, clearly trying not to laugh at the memories. “Okay, fine, maybe I have a history, but I swear this kimbap is safe. Scout’s honour!”

You stared at her for a moment, debating whether you should trust her. Finally, you gave in, cautiously taking a piece from the container. It looked normal enough. Taking a slow bite, you braced yourself for some hidden twist—but to your surprise, it tasted great.

“See? I told you it’s good!” Yena said triumphantly, clapping her hands together. “I’m not just a prankster. I can cook well.”

You shook your head, chewing thoughtfully. “Fine, I’ll admit it. This is actually... really good.”

Her face lit up like you’d just handed her a trophy. “Knew it! Now I feel validated as both your supervisor and a good home cook.”

“Don’t push it,” you warned, but there was no bite to your tone.

The two of you ate in relative peace for a few minutes, the easy banter filling the room. Yena kept sneaking pieces of your chicken when she thought you weren’t looking, and you retaliated by stealing some of her kimbap. It was a rare moment where she wasn’t causing chaos, and you found yourself genuinely enjoying her company.

But, of course, this was Yena. The peace was never meant to last.

“So, about that trust thing,” she started, her voice taking on an innocent lilt that immediately put you on high alert.

“What about it?” you asked, narrowing your eyes.

“Well…” She reached into her bag and pulled out a small plastic spider, dangling it in front of your face with a mischievous grin. “You’re not scared of these, are you?”

Your glare could have cut through steel. “Sunbae, I swear—”

Before you could finish, she tossed the spider onto your rice. You jolted back, startled, only to realize it wasn’t moving. Fake. Of course, it was fake.

“Relax!” she said between bouts of laughter, clutching her stomach. “Your face—oh my gosh, I wish I’d recorded it!”

You picked up the spider and tossed it back at her. “You’re unbelievable. Can’t even make it through lunch without pulling something, can you?”

She dodged it with ease, still giggling. “What can I say? It’s my love language.”

“Your love language is being too nice,” you sarcastically muttered, shaking your head.

Yena just winked, stealing another piece of chicken from your plate. “You’re lucky you have me to keep things fun.”

-

The office was quiet as the clock ticked closer to quitting time. Most of your co-workers had already packed up for the day, leaving you and a few others burning the proverbial midnight oil. Your focus was on the final edits for the Kim & Lee proposal, your fingers flying across the keyboard as you updated figures, corrected typos, and double-checked client specifications.

The spreadsheet in front of you was practically your baby at this point—a meticulously crafted, formula-heavy masterpiece. Losing it would be catastrophic.

As you clicked to save your progress, the screen suddenly froze. Your cursor vanished, replaced by a spinning wheel of doom. Then, without warning, the screen went blue.

You blinked, momentarily stunned.

The iconic blue screen carved deep into your tired mind; the haunting words lingered:

“CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR. ALL FILES DELETED.”

Your heart stopped.

“No, no, no, no!” you muttered, panic bubbling to the surface. You frantically clicked the keyboard, your mouse, anything to undo the apparent catastrophe. Nothing worked. The message continued to flash, taunting you:

“ALL FILES DELETED. SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT.”

Your pulse was racing. Everything—hours of work, detailed charts, carefully formatted tables—gone in an instant. You’d have to start over, and with the deadline looming, that wasn’t just inconvenient; it was impossible.

“Why now? Why me?!” you groaned, your voice echoing in the empty office. Sweat prickled the back of your neck as you opened Task Manager, desperately trying to shut down whatever program had caused this.

That’s when you heard it—a barely stifled giggle.

Slowly, you turned your head, eyes narrowing.

“Yena-sunbae” you said, your voice low and dangerous.

Behind you, Yena stood just outside your cubicle, clutching her phone and biting her lip to keep from laughing. Her shoulders shook with barely contained glee, and her face was turning red from the effort of holding it in.

“What did you do?” you demanded, your tone sharp enough to make her flinch—almost.

That was the wrong question because it sent her over the edge. She exploded into laughter, doubling over as if you’d just told the funniest joke in the world.

“Your face!” she managed to wheeze, tears forming in her eyes. “Oh my gosh, you should’ve seen your face!”

“YENA,” omitting the formality, you shouted, standing up so fast your chair rolled backward.

“It’s—it’s just a screensaver!” she choked out between fits of laughter, holding up her hands in surrender. “Relax! Your files are fine. Everything’s fine! I saved it already!”

You froze, your panic slowly giving way to disbelief—and then anger. “A screensaver? You nearly gave me a heart attack for a screensaver?”

She nodded, wiping her eyes. “I couldn’t resist! You’ve been on edge all day, and you were so focused—it was too perfect!”

You stared at her, torn between throttling her and collapsing into a puddle of relief. “Yena, I swear, if you ever—”

“I’ll never do it again, promise,” she interrupted, holding up three fingers in a Scout’s honour gesture. Then she ruined it by snorting with laughter. “Okay, maybe not never, but not anytime soon.”

Your glare could’ve melted steel. “You’re lucky I didn’t actually lose anything, or I’d be writing the longest HR report of my life right now.”

“Aw, come on, don’t be mad!” she said, stepping closer and placing her hands on your shoulders. “It was funny, admit it.”

“No, it wasn’t,” you grumbled, sitting back down and trying to calm your frazzled nerves.

“You’ll laugh about it later,” she said confidently. Then, after a beat, she added, “...Maybe.”

You huffed but couldn’t stay mad at her for long. This was Yena, after all. Chaos was her default setting, and you knew what you were signing up for when you started working under her.

“Alright,” you sighed. “But you owe me dinner. And drinks. Good drinks. None of that cheap stuff.”

“Deal!” she chirped, already bouncing on her heels. “Let’s go! My treat. No pranks this time, I promise.”

She linked her arm with yours, dragging you toward the elevator. Despite yourself, a small smile crept onto your face.

With Yena, your life might’ve been unpredictable, messy, and occasionally terrifying—but at least it was never boring.

Even though you wanted to quit halfway through because of her antics.

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Morgan gave birth to her new calf! Who is apparently doing well! And the comments on the video are … exactly what you would expect.

It honestly makes me sad that people can’t celebrate this incredible feat of veterinary and zoological achievement. Sad and depressed animals don’t breed. Sick animals don’t breed.

There’s been a lot of death and sadness lately… I think we should try to celebrate new life. Orcas don’t know they’re “born in captivity” - but they are a socio-sexual species that naturally reproduces for a long time before they hit menopause. Is it fair to take that away from them because a bunch of loud and misinformed people have decided orcas can’t thrive in human care? When we know they can do very well even if it’s not a perfect life or the life of a wild orca?

Check out the social media of Loro Parque and post some positive comments if you can.

This facility didn’t start out great and they’ve had some terrible luck with genetics in the animals that SeaWorld essentially offloaded onto them. But there’s research and data and welfare assessments being done and they have been very transparent about everything - especially compared to SeaWorld.

No facility is perfect. But I respect a facility that opens their doors to many researchers around the world. And seem to be constantly pushing to improve their practises.

Also look how cute this baby is 🥺

Sorry that it redirects to Meta but that’s where the footage is:

[lemonmoonmochi]

After the whole updating the game it wasn’t working I couldn’t log in, couldn’t load the update so I can play it, I can’t even get past the loading part to download the thing for the game and it’s making me so upset I went on Reddit page to see if anyone else is going through it and I found out that a lot of people are and this is kinda what I found out they had done to try to get it to work

1. To uninstall/reinstall

2. To clear all your data and then link your account again

3. Try to offload some of your apps or uninstall some apps

4. If all fails then try customer service

I did all of these things even restarting my phone then turning it back on and then switching between internet and then my data the thing is I’m in a tight situation with the whole internet thing that a bit personal to say but it’s a quite frustrating thing and I can’t play the game anymore to the point it just makes me want to just delete the app and just forget it but I’ve spent two years on this app to be where I am I have two myths cards that I want to level up and one for sylus that I want to upstage as well and it just feel so disheartening to look at the fact that other people are able to play the game and such and then show you their pulls and it’s just so frustrating that I feel so defeated

So please if you have any advice anything at all please let me know. At the end of the day I just think I’m just not going to do the anniversary event if this is still a problem for me and that sucks but it’s life I guess and it’s fine I have next year or something.

[dat-physics-gal]

A leap of faith and physics

We thought for a civilization to form, one needed liquid water, a stable planet with a hot core, and tardium crystals. Apparently, this is not so.

Because we just received a vibromessage over the tachyon network from an unknown source.

Which in itself would not be too unusual. Plenty of newly realized civilizations figure out how to configure tardium to send tachyon messages across isospace. Hoping someone will answer. We always do. It always takes some time to go from simple repeating messages to understanding one another. Most civilizations don't come up with the galactic standard modulation on their own. Nor do we know their form of communication all that well, language, culture, all of that.

First contact is always a lengthy affair, until the new species is integrated into the intergalactic community. Then follows the exchange of knowledge and culture, the setting up of historical archives and sharing of starcharts. Since light travels only at luxionic speed, the charts provide a valuable look at the past. Once the new civilization has been caught up to date, things tend to settle. Updates are fewer and far in between, and culture tends to somewhat homogenize. Not completely, of course, as everyone has different living circumstances, but with all the exchange between us, some settling is bound to happen.

But we know where tardium reserves are, have felt the reverb of our scans, we know where civilizations could potentially pop up. The message we received was unusual not because its source was unknown, but because it came from a sector without any sufficient tardium deposits.

That... shouldn't even be possible!

The signal is also a bit noisy. Strange. Usually, the bigger the tardium array, the more self-stabilization should occurr. And for interstellar communication, you tend to need quite large arrays. So then why was there so much noise?

It was clearly a signal, and according to the triangulators, it came from the outer third of a dark spiral galaxy. We call them that, since they were never really observed, at least not with any isocartography. We only know they're there due to shared star charts. No idea what's going on with them at the current isotime. We can't know, without any tardium resonance to pick up.

Anyway, of course we answered. Their signal had been prime numbers, if we demodulated it correctly, followed by things we couldn't really make sense of. It was standard practice to begin communications with mathematics, and fundamental harmonics. It's strange that they did that right away, but not unheard of. We sent back primes, and then a couple of playful harmonics. Music. What we received back was weird, because we thought it was music, but it wasn't.

It turned out to be a starchart, and not just any kind. Pulsars. We sent back a chart of their galaxy, as reconstructed from several older starcharts. Then, we waited for their answer. And waited. And waited. An entire solar cycle (of our species) later, we finally got another answer.

And it just would not stop. We recognized it was a series of images, or rather, rapid successions of images, together with harmonics on a different band as well. This was video! The footage depicted a bipedal species, with symbolics next to different features. The images cycled through different body parts, with different descryptions. We had a really hard time catching and saving all the data, a task which had to be offloaded to the communal computation grid, as our own planet simply did not have the capacity to do it alone. This should have tipped us off to what we were going to be dealing with, but it didn't.

We continued, almost business as usual, just a fair bit faster. Then objects were being shown, often together with the bipedals, and their corresponding glyphics were depicted right next to them. Also, each image was accompanied by a sound file. They really made learning their language easy for us. We learned that they called themselves Humans, and their home was Earth, a planet orbiting a yellow star. They were a surface dwelling species! Those are pretty rare, as most can not survive the exposure to open space for some reason. We then sent back images and glyphics of our own, matching them in their intent. We sent images of life forms, images of our own body parts, images of objects and always accompanied by isostandard glyphics.

Usually, once communication has come to a basic understanding, the exchange of culture would begin.

But the Humans had started out with primes and starcharts, so of course, their next communication wasn't about culture. We... honestly didn't know what exactly it was, for a while. Until some of the mathematicians from across the network found patterns. They were sharing mathematics with us!

Eager to help, we sent back entire databases full of insights. They requested more soon. So we sent more. And more. And more. We wondered how they could even store all that we sent them. We asked. They sent back something we didn't understand. We hoped the mathematicians could figure it out, but nope.

Eventually, we sent steam engine configurations, as well as the corresponding heating and shunting tardion-arrays used to power them. They sent back their own designs for steam engines. And other engines that seemed similar, but shoudn't work with steam. The machine configurations, piston layouts and such, were fairly primitive. As was to be expected from a new species. But they never sent us schematics of their heating or shunting arrays. When we asked how they kept things cool without shunting arrays, they sent back another steam engine. But, when we called it that, they corrected us. What they had shown us was a heat pump. They used the opposite effect, instead of creating movement from a temperature difference, they created a temperature difference from movement. We asked them why they wouldn't just use shunting arrays. They asked what those were.

And this is how we found out why they were in dark space. Why their signal was so noisy. And why they had never depicted heating or shunting arrays in their schematics.

They had practically no tardium. They simply did not have enough of it to make arrays, as we thought all civilizations do. The largest piece of tardium they had was the centerpiece of a gigantic machine. It was about the size of a human "nail", which is a vestigial claw originally used for superior grip on one of the native plant species of their planet.

We did not know how to respond. We could not comprehend how a civilization could form without tardium crystals. They asked us if we knew where more could be found, preferably near them. We didn't understand what they meant. Then they asked us how to locate reserves. We gave them the modulations that we use to scan for the crystals' tachyon resonance.

They thanked us, and ceased their questions. Then, communication became choppy. Only occasionally would we receive an exchange of culture. Their questions about mathematics and tardium crystals ceased.

---------------------

When we first received back an answer from the deep space tachyon dish, we were extatic. And shocked. And kind of in disbelief. Nobody had really known if it would work. Still, everyone in the control room agreed that we should make sure it was really a signal, before we dropped that bombshell to the public.

We focused a couple more dyson collectors onto the dish, and changed the signal. Instead of primes and harmonics, this time, we encoded the pulsar chart, multiple times, in every encoding we could think of, and sent them all.

Only a few hours later, we received another signal from the previous location. The encoding was our own, easily recognized. With shaky hands, i pressed the 'open image file' button.

When i was greeted by a picture of the Milky Way, everyone in the room lost their collective shit.

"Holy Fuck!" "Oh my god." Someone fainted. Multiple people cried. Nobody minded any of that.

~~~

The prime administrator creased her brow. The direct line was ringing. This better be important. "Hello? Prime administrator here." From the other end, she could hear someone suppressing tears, and whimpering: "Tachyon dish project operator here. We... we."

"Everything ok over there?", she asked. What could possibly have happened that had the scientist crying? Was there an accident with the dyson swarm or something? Did people die? No, she trusted the operator of that experiment to not call unless it mattered to the entire human race.

A wet chuckle. "Better than ok. Maam? We... We're not alone."

Not alone? What does that...? Oh. OH! oh

"Are.. you sure?" Dammit. Now even her own voice was shaking.

"We sent a pulsar chart and got a beautiful image of the Milky Way back, in the same image file type. Pretty sure at this point."

~~~

The following year was downright insane. The mere confirmation that we weren't alone in the universe spurred us all on. Artists did their best to show all sides of us, scientists got together to determine what questions we should ask, even the long obsolete military awakened from its slumber, churning out tactical analyses of possible tachyon based weaponry, and how to defend against it.

Some people were panicking, others in denial, but most relished the opportunities that might open up.

Policies were made, on how to handle aliens that would come to the solar system. Tachyon mechanics, an until now unproven theory, made leaps and bounds, scientists working as hard as they could to understand it better.

The dyson collectors were turned to multiple new research projects, powering large machines that channeled vibrations into the tiny crystals we had found to pick up on tachyon vibrations. The largest one that we had discovered while asteroid mining was still in the communication dish, but the smaller shrapnel, a couple millimeters in size at the most, were being utilized.

Eventually, after a year was up, communications resumed. The linguists sent data, and worked closely with the astronomers that had made the initial transmissions. We also received back data, and the scientific community devoured every piece of information. We learned their language as fast as we could.

But our requests for the sharing of scientific knowledge appeared to fall on deaf ears. Whenever we sent natural constants, or physical laws, we got nothing back. Well, almost. Our prodding did yield one answer: How to locate the crystals. Which were apparently common? Though our scans painted a different picture. We did have some scattered about the asteroid belt, yes. But the largest one we detected was only 3cm in diameter. A little bigger than the one in the communication dish, sure, but not that much.

We came to accept this, figuring that maybe there was some kind of prime directive that forbade the sharing of further technology. Actually, perhaps we leaned a bit too far into our Star Trek analogy. Because most of us would not get it out of our heads to try to build a warp drive. Well, not really a spacetime bending drive, but something that could go faster than light. Because, obviously, thanks to our discovery, we now knew that while the speed of light may be finite, the speed of information was not.

-----------------------------

After ten cycles of cultural exchange, the humans sent a request for isocoordinates of the nearest known civilization to their own. This request kind of drowned in the noise, we didn't really think about it much, we just transmitted our coordinates. Turns out, the nearest ones were us, in what the Humans call the Andromeda Galaxy.

Shortly after the request, they went totally vibrosilent. We tried and tried to contact them, but to no avail. This, while tragic, was a reality of civilization, though. Extinction events could always happen. Sometimes the affected civilization would realize in advance and send a couple warnings, but nobody could help them from afar, of course. So that's what we figured happened to Humanity. Maybe their sun blew up, or they got knocked away from it by a passing object, anything could have happened.

Many cycles passed. I had aged, my once young and springy exoskeleton now wobbly and soft, though my mind was still sharp enough to crew a communications array.

None of us were prepared for the schockwave resonating through our sensor grids. Multiple arrays straight up shattered. Luckily, as big as they were, there was nobody close to them, so no deaths. What the rest of them picked up though made no sense. We could determine there was a pulse, but no normal communication had that level of power, nor resonance.

Then, half a planetary rotation later, there was a new luminance in the sky. We were about to renew our arrays and update our starchart, when the light source moved. Toward the planet.

What?

And then, my assigned communications array resonated.

"This is the Human vessel Enterprise, calling anyone on the planet. Can you read us?" the crystal sang in choppy English, the language of the Humans. The ones we thought were extinct.

I scuttled to my post at the resonator, tuning it to reply:

"This is communications, we read you, but i don't understand? We are recovering from an unprecedented resonance pulse that shattered multiple arrays, sorry if the modulation is a bit off."

The answer was swift: "Sorry about that, our engines are a bit out of tune at this point. That pulse might have been us. Glad to hear you all down there, is anyone injured?"

"Your engines? And uh. No, nobody injured."

"Yes our engines, again, we apologize for that. But glad to know everyone is alright.

Requesting permission to land on the surface."

This was a momentous occasion, which i didn't realize until later on. The entire tachyon network would eventually refer to this exact communication as a reference time. This exact moment would come to be known as 0:0 PFJ

0 Cycles and 0 rotations Past First Jump.

The only thing i remember is absently giving permission, not quite understanding what exactly they were requesting here. If i had, i would have convened with the councils beforehand.

Then, the cave began to shake. It wasn't coming from any of the arrays. It was coming from the surface.

~~~

They. They were here. The Humans were here. On the surface. Of. Of our planet. What? How?!

Most importantly, why?!

Then i remembered the stories about their exploration of the surface of their own planet. How they had sent people to their poles, despite their biology not being fit to survive there. And several did die! How they climed mountains. Made pressurized vessels to dive below the surface of their open ocean. We asked them why. They told us.

I realized at that moment, not how they were here. But why.

"Because we could, and no human had been there before," they had answered back then.

[psychoticallytrans]

Hey. You. Disabled person.

We're in dark times right now, and a lot of us are probably going to die. A lot of us have always died, and we tend to be the first ones offloaded when times get hard for being "more trouble than we're worth".

Those people are wrong about us. We are worth every effort needed to keep us alive, because we are people. We are worth loving and caring for. Our quality of life and our joy are important.

The people who are wrong about us are currently in power, and are being given leeway to act. We are likely going to be stripped of a good portion of our healthcare, income, and networks. The first two are most likely to happen directly, through cuts to federal programs. The latter is likely to happen as the ones who love us are burdened under their own problems, and may no longer have the time, energy, or spare income to help us. Ignoring any of that won't help us.

So, our lives are valuable, but they're not being treated that way. What next?

Do what you need to to secure your healthcare. We're going to see a boom in black market and back-alley treatment. Find doctors and pharmacists you trust who keep their mouths shut and their standards of care high. If you can, stockpile medications that are expensive or likely to see shortages with the tariffs. If you depend on weed or CBD for part of your symptom management, see if you can find a grower who's likely to keep it up even if the conservative agenda on weed gets reinstated.

Look into alternative sources of income. Yeah, old news for a lot of us, and I expect you've heard all the old advice about data entry and so on before. Monetary isn't the only kind of income that'll help here, though. If a neighbor will pay you in food for helping set up a spreadsheet, that's food you don't have to buy. If your insurance no longer covers repairs to your equipment, then a technician and you can barter services.

Don't do their work for them. If they want you dead, then they should have to fight for every single death that they want to see. If you have to die, don't die quietly. Spread exactly why you're dying as loud and far as you can- social media, local papers, anywhere you can. Name your killers clearly and often. Don't make yourself easy to bury. Take their reputations down with you.

Do, however, prepare to be dead. If you have any assets you care about, get a will together and make sure they'll be sent to the people who actually gave a shit about you even when it was work. If your parents were pieces of shit, they don't get to sell your small collection or your left-behind art like they have a right to it. Draw up what you want done with your body.

Living wills are important too, as is declaring who has your medical power of attorney. These determine how you are treated if you are alive, but unable to communicate or not considered in your right mind. Be very careful about who you give these rights to, but if you don't give them to anyone, they probably will default to whoever your next of kin is. If there's someone better than them, get it down in legal terms. If you're gay and happily married, get it down that your spouse has your medical power of attorney, in case they manage to rule against gay marriage at the federal level. An advance directive covers both a living will and who has your medical power of attorney.

Hide. Steal. Fight. Commit crimes and use the legal system. Protect yourself and preserve your own life by any means you can get your hands on.

Because every single one of us who stays alive is spit in the face of everyone who thinks it would be more convenient to have all of us comfortably dead and out of their way.

Because every single one of us who stays alive is proof to the disabled people who come after us that we are not easy to get rid of, and that they deserve to fight as well.

Because every single one of us deserves to live.

I love you. Stay the fuck alive.

[therobotmonster]

There's a nuance to the Amazon AI checkout story that gets missed.

Because AI-assisted checkouts on its own isn't a bad thing:

This was a big story in 2022, about a bread-checkout system in Japan that turned out to be applicable in checking for cancer cells in sample slides.

But that bonus anti-cancer discovery isn't the subject here, the actual bread-checkout system is. That checkout system worked, because it wasn't designed with the intent of making the checkout cashier obsolete, rather, it was there to solve a real problem: it's hard to tell pastry apart at a glance, and the customers didn't like their bread with a plastic-wrapping and they didn't like the cashiers handling the bread to count loaves.

So they trained the system intentionally, under controlled circumstances, before testing and launching the tech. The robot does what it's good at, and it doesn't need to be omniscient because it's a tool, not a replacement worker.

Amazon, however, wanted to offload its training not just on an underpaid overseas staff, but on the customers themselves. And they wanted it out NOW so they could brag to shareholders about this new tech before the tech even worked. And they wanted it to replace a person, but not just the cashier. There were dreams of a world where you can't shoplift because you'd get billed anyway dancing in the investor's heads.

Only, it's one thing to make a robot that helps cooperative humans count bread, and it's another to try and make one that can thwart the ingenuity of hungry people.

The foreign workers performing the checkouts are actually supposed to be training the models. A lot of reports gloss over this in an effort to present the efforts as an outsourcing Mechanical Turk but that's really a side-effect. These models all work on datasets, and the only place you get a dataset of "this visual/sensor input=this purchase" is if someone is cataloging a dataset correlating the two...

Which Amazon could have done by simply putting the sensor system in place and correlating the purchase data from the cashiers with the sensor tracking of the customer. Just do that for as long as you need to build the dataset and test it by having it predict and compare in the background until you reach your preferred ratio. If it fails, you have a ton of market research data as a consolation prize.

But that could take months or years and you don't get to pump your stock until it works, and you don't get to outsource your cashiers while pretending you've made Westworld work.

This way, even though Amazon takes a little bit of a PR bloody nose, they still have the benefit of any stock increase this already produced, the shareholders got their dividends.

Which I suppose is a lot of words to say:

[elwenyere]

I saw a post the other day calling criticism of generative AI a moral panic, and while I do think many proprietary AI technologies are being used in deeply unethical ways, I think there is a substantial body of reporting and research on the real-world impacts of the AI boom that would trouble the comparison to a moral panic: while there *are* older cultural fears tied to negative reactions to the perceived newness of AI, many of those warnings are Luddite with a capital L - that is, they're part of a tradition of materialist critique focused on the way the technology is being deployed in the political economy. So (1) starting with the acknowledgement that a variety of machine-learning technologies were being used by researchers before the current "AI" hype cycle, and that there's evidence for the benefit of targeted use of AI techs in settings where they can be used by trained readers - say, spotting patterns in radiology scans - and (2) setting aside the fact that current proprietary LLMs in particular are largely bullshit machines, in that they confidently generate errors, incorrect citations, and falsehoods in ways humans may be less likely to detect than conventional disinformation, and (3) setting aside as well the potential impact of frequent offloading on human cognition and of widespread AI slop on our understanding of human creativity...

What are some of the material effects of the "AI" boom?

Guzzling water and electricity

The data centers needed to support AI technologies require large quantities of water to cool the processors. A to-be-released paper from the University of California Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington finds, for example, that "ChatGPT needs to 'drink' [the equivalent of] a 500 ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers." Many of these data centers pull water from already water-stressed areas, and the processing needs of big tech companies are expanding rapidly. Microsoft alone increased its water consumption from 4,196,461 cubic meters in 2020 to 7,843,744 cubic meters in 2023. AI applications are also 100 to 1,000 times more computationally intensive than regular search functions, and as a result the electricity needs of data centers are overwhelming local power grids, and many tech giants are abandoning or delaying their plans to become carbon neutral. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions alone have increased at least 48% since 2019. And a recent analysis from The Guardian suggests the actual AI-related increase in resource use by big tech companies may be up to 662%, or 7.62 times, higher than they've officially reported.

Exploiting labor to create its datasets

Like so many other forms of "automation," generative AI technologies actually require loads of human labor to do things like tag millions of images to train computer vision for ImageNet and to filter the texts used to train LLMs to make them less racist, sexist, and homophobic. This work is deeply casualized, underpaid, and often psychologically harmful. It profits from and re-entrenches a stratified global labor market: many of the data workers used to maintain training sets are from the Global South, and one of the platforms used to buy their work is literally called the Mechanical Turk, owned by Amazon.

From an open letter written by content moderators and AI workers in Kenya to Biden: "US Big Tech companies are systemically abusing and exploiting African workers. In Kenya, these US companies are undermining the local labor laws, the country’s justice system and violating international labor standards. Our working conditions amount to modern day slavery."

Deskilling labor and demoralizing workers

The companies, hospitals, production studios, and academic institutions that have signed contracts with providers of proprietary AI have used those technologies to erode labor protections and worsen working conditions for their employees. Even when AI is not used directly to replace human workers, it is deployed as a tool for disciplining labor by deskilling the work humans perform: in other words, employers use AI tech to reduce the value of human labor (labor like grading student papers, providing customer service, consulting with patients, etc.) in order to enable the automation of previously skilled tasks. Deskilling makes it easier for companies and institutions to casualize and gigify what were previously more secure positions. It reduces pay and bargaining power for workers, forcing them into new gigs as adjuncts for its own technologies.

I can't say anything better than Tressie McMillan Cottom, so let me quote her recent piece at length: "A.I. may be a mid technology with limited use cases to justify its financial and environmental costs. But it is a stellar tool for demoralizing workers who can, in the blink of a digital eye, be categorized as waste. Whatever A.I. has the potential to become, in this political environment it is most powerful when it is aimed at demoralizing workers. This sort of mid tech would, in a perfect world, go the way of classroom TVs and MOOCs. It would find its niche, mildly reshape the way white-collar workers work and Americans would mostly forget about its promise to transform our lives. But we now live in a world where political might makes right. DOGE’s monthslong infomercial for A.I. reveals the difference that power can make to a mid technology. It does not have to be transformative to change how we live and work. In the wrong hands, mid tech is an antilabor hammer."

Enclosing knowledge production and destroying open access

OpenAI started as a non-profit, but it has now become one of the most aggressive for-profit companies in Silicon Valley. Alongside the new proprietary AIs developed by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, X, etc., OpenAI is extracting personal data and scraping copyrighted works to amass the data it needs to train their bots - even offering one-time payouts to authors to buy the rights to frack their work for AI grist - and then (or so they tell investors) they plan to sell the products back at a profit. As many critics have pointed out, proprietary AI thus works on a model of political economy similar to the 15th-19th-century capitalist project of enclosing what was formerly "the commons," or public land, to turn it into private property for the bourgeois class, who then owned the means of agricultural and industrial production. "Open"AI is built on and requires access to collective knowledge and public archives to run, but its promise to investors (the one they use to attract capital) is that it will enclose the profits generated from that knowledge for private gain.

AI companies hungry for good data to train their Large Language Models (LLMs) have also unleashed a new wave of bots that are stretching the digital infrastructure of open-access sites like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive past capacity. As Eric Hellman writes in a recent blog post, these bots "use as many connections as you have room for. If you add capacity, they just ramp up their requests." In the process of scraping the intellectual commons, they're also trampling and trashing its benefits for truly public use.

Enriching tech oligarchs and fueling military imperialism

The names of many of the people and groups who get richer by generating speculative buzz for generative AI - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison - are familiar to the public because those people are currently using their wealth to purchase political influence and to win access to public resources. And it's looking increasingly likely that this political interference is motivated by the probability that the AI hype is a bubble - that the tech can never be made profitable or useful - and that tech oligarchs are hoping to keep it afloat as a speculation scheme through an infusion of public money - a.k.a. an AIG-style bailout.

In the meantime, these companies have found a growing interest from military buyers for their tech, as AI becomes a new front for "national security" imperialist growth wars. From an email written by Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad, who interrupted Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman at a live event to call him a war profiteer: "When I moved to AI Platform, I was excited to contribute to cutting-edge AI technology and its applications for the good of humanity: accessibility products, translation services, and tools to 'empower every human and organization to achieve more.' I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government, with the purpose of spying on and murdering journalists, doctors, aid workers, and entire civilian families. If I knew my work on transcription scenarios would help spy on and transcribe phone calls to better target Palestinians, I would not have joined this organization and contributed to genocide. I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights."

So there's a brief, non-exhaustive digest of some vectors for a critique of proprietary AI's role in the political economy. tl;dr: the first questions of material analysis are "who labors?" and "who profits/to whom does the value of that labor accrue?"

For further (and longer) reading, check out Justin Joque's Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism and Karen Hao's forthcoming Empire of AI.

[quirkyfries]

Clearing drafts, have some EAPS Eclipse and Ruin headcanons I plan to use sometime, may have future installments

When Jake asked if pets were allowed, Eclipse made a roomba. It has since been named Norman the floorman. Eclipse does not call Norman by name, and if he does, he denies it. Norman’s name is spelled on its side in sticker letters, and someone keeps taping knives to it and letting it loose in the lab. There is a permanent notice on the lab whiteboard to specifically not do that.

In my eclipse design the safety vest is a spite thing. Lefty would get on to Eclipse about workplace safety. Eclipse figured out that, because of fazbear’s crappy rules, as long as he was complying with one (1) rule then he was fine. Lefty has since conceded but Eclipse doesn’t believe the matter is settled and still wears it regardless. He only takes it off when it’d benefit him to not be seen immediately.

Also in my design, the bracelet is one of those rubber bands in the shape of animals. The one Eclipse has is a cat. On the same note, the bead necklaces (think Mardi Gras necklaces) were given to him by Jake/Andrew when kids were gifting them to their favorite staff. He still doesn’t know how they got ahold of them. (The smiley pin was a gift from Earth.)

Ruin enjoys using hand puppets to entertain small children who won’t understand theatrical references. This is totally not inspired by that guy with the raccoon puppet on tiktok

Ruin doesn’t have a space to himself (or if he does I haven’t picked up on it? In his nightmare episode he wakes up in a party room,) but he’s okay with it because he has a lot more friends and he doesn’t shut all the way off if he does sleep (for fear of nightmares.) I like to think Ballora has invited him to at least one sleepover that ended in late night tea-time conversations. Not “sleeping” properly is causing Ruin a battery issue, but he doesn’t entirely have the means to fix it right now. Instead, he takes steps to manage it.

Ruin has exceeded the expected lifespan of a daycare animatronic, and his memory storage has to be managed in order for new information to store. As much as he’d like to forget the sins of his past, he won’t let himself be free of it, both because he feels he doesn’t deserve that and because they were valuable lessons to him. I have yet to decide exactly how he does this but it involves something akin to Apple's feature of offloading data from apps but not deleting them--for Ruin, this is forgetting exactly how events played out but still knowing they happened. He would remember he was happy when a child gave him a drawing, but he wouldn't remember what the conversation was about before and after was because that's not the part he thought was most important to keep. This would show a level of sentimentality in him.

Ruin’s tendency to be distracted by new surroundings (shown in several episodes) is both a hypervigilance issue and a Sun “constant stimulation” trait working in tandem. Ruin’s most prominent Moon trait is his intelligence and independence, both of which became more prominent out of necessity due to events following the AI merging.

(CW talking about implied child death for the rest of the post)

Out of everyone, Ruin would freak out the most if there were an intruder in the daycare—yes, even if he’s not a daycare attendant anymore, and yes, even more than Sunpea. They just show it in different ways. Ruin’s first concern is the children’s safety, dealing the threat second, and he’d seem calm the whole time (he is not, but you won’t know it.) Sunpea’s first concern is the children’s safety, his own safety second, and he’d be visibly upset the whole time. (Whether or not Moonpea has any input is debatable but not the point.) The difference is their levels of self preservation. You can read between the lines in this one, only one of the two had truly failed to protect their children before

One facet of Ruin's past that I think wasn't expanded on enough in canon is the horror of situation vs. purpose. Ruin mentions that he was very good with children, both AIs that are him were daycare attendants and he continued that job for a time. We also know that Ruin had to kill children, or at the very least stand by with the knowledge it was happening. Ruin's job was to look after children, to protect them, and then he was made to do the opposite. When his Creator confronted him, he could have refused, let his Creator kill him, and those children would've died by another's hand. Instead he agreed and likely did it himself. I like to think he had some amount of mercy, as much as he could safely get away with under the watch of infected peers and his Creator. I also think that's why as mentioned in the hc above, he would put himself in danger to protect children in the dimension he promised to help steer in the right direction. He won't fail them this time.

[empty-vessel-of-a-person]

Similarities and Difference I feel between Zayne and Sylus.

Note: Just my opinion. It's okay if you do not agree. We all have different take on Sylus appearance in the game and the whole update. MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS... YOU ARE WARNED.

The Game

The game fixes so many bugs. I'm so glad that I don't have to buy a new phone. Imagine downloading 2.3 GB for the new version then another 7+ GB for data and then it offloads all data of all of your memories. So the update is both has its good side and bad side.

When Infold says Sylus is coming, he is indeed coming!!! I mean the whole update is about him and the N109 zone. But setting aside the Sylus thing, the whole N109 zone is both scary and wonderful. The details and depth they put in the update are very gone. It's like watching a movie. If ever you watch Final Fantasy VII Advent Children or Spirits Within. It's giving me that vibe.

The transition from a light theme to a dark theme in the fighting scenes is good. We get to see the game evolve to a more serious side.

All in all, the update is so good and I really enjoyed it.

Sylus and Zayne

I can't help but think they are both ends of a ruler, it's like they are Morning and Nighttime. While they are both sharp tongues, Zayne will tone down and spoil M/C while Sylus leaves things as it is.

They may seem cold but they protect M/C at all costs. Just like what Grandma Josephine says, "By helping her(M/C) you are helping yourself"

That being said, Zayne and Sylus are always there to teach M/C what she needs to know and survive. While Sylus is more brute in handling things, Zayne is more of sarcastic but kind.

Sylus

I don't think he is in love with M/C.... Yet! He needs her, yes. But that does not necessarily mean being in love.

In Abyssal Chaos, M/C finds him a nuisance then when M/C asks if he is worried about her, he answers maybe leaving us on the edge.

To say I'm shocked on Sylus Relax Time: Palm, is an understatement. The first part is cute, but my head explodes when he bites our hand!!!! I'm so not ready for that. I waited so long to upgrade Zayne's affinity to get the Relax Time: Hands, just to be slapped by Sylus' first relax time. But then again, as a consumer, Infold purposely intends Sylus to be that way to get more girlies to the game. I can't complain about that.

I don't like his voice. You read that right. I don't like his voice (English Version). My sister doesn't know I'm playing while he is speaking. She says it's like a grandpa's voice. Infold should have chosen a younger-sounding sexy voice. A little bit like Zayne's but deeper. Again this is just my opinion. If you like it, you like it.

Now I know why Zayne never gets casual clothing like a t-shirt or sweats because they are reserving them for Sylus so Zayne and him will have a striking contrast with style and personality.

He is also a mixture of everyone (Xavier, Rafayel, and Zayne) Xavier on being oblivious. Oblivious because this guy doesn't seem to know how dangerously sexy he is. Rafayel on being witty. Yes, No, Maybe so? And Zayne for having the air of authority and control.

Final Thoughts

Sylus is sexy! Yes I said it... He is sexy. And women like dangerous and sexy. It adds to the excitement. It doesn't help that he bites our hands. Who wouldn't fall for that... Infold's Sylus team did a great job in shading the other guys in one swoop..

Thank you Infold for giving us more ways to earn Diamonds. I hope you also increase the weekly limit in earning chocolates.

The love interest page still flags 'Coming Soon'. I am still hoping Infold brings Caleb back. Yes, I love Caleb as much as Zayne! He is the only guy I'm interested in aside from Zayne. Don't you think it's a good and fair love triangle? Sylus has always been on a different level. Something Zayne and the other boys can never be and never compete with.

What's next? Since Glint studio is so addicting, I am hoping the next version comes with video shooting. I mean we are making a video shoot with the boys not just still photos.

Good job Infold!!!! You really hook me and my wallet!!!!