#then working out how to get your computer to do it in its logical language

[thrill-kill-kult]

I have! A lot of opinions about the increased push for STEM, the way we put down the arts and humanities, and the advent of AI.

What it boils down to is that I think we are fundamentally using AI wrong. It’s a fantastic tool for doing what computers were initially made to do: automating difficult STEM work.

I don’t think there should be a divide between STEM and arts/humanities. The two fields are intertwined in many ways, and recognizing this as a strength is the first step to good STEM work. You have a lot of people, such as myself, who are creative with STEM. This creativity is where good theory and experiments come from. Many STEM disciplines, *especially* computer science, are highly creative.

AI should not be stepping in for those humanistic creative practices. That’s not the best way to use it. It honestly seems to confuse AI more when it’s fed that creative data; over time, ChatGPT has begun to fail more often at providing correct answers on basic math problems, and I’d imagine some of this failure has to do with being fed data and chats that are asking it to think creatively. Computers work on logic and certainty, and this is where they are most helpful.

I would never ask AI to do some of the creative sides of my work. I develop my own ideas- for example, lately, I’ve been doing some work on a UI which I have sketched out and written down my plans for. I know what I want it to look like and do. ChatGPT comes in when a chunk of my code doesn’t do what I want it to, or when I’m having trouble coding a certain function. In short, AI doesn’t decide what my buttons look like or where they go, but it’s great at fixing a mistake that prevented my button from working.

We’re at a pivotal ethical point with STEM. We need to define acceptable uses for AI. And I think the best way to do that is to come to an understanding that AI is not best used emulating human creativity (something it can never achieve with the heart, soul, and original thought human brains have), but it is best used to assist on and solve the difficult logical problems that get in the way of creative STEM pursuits.

It’s wrong to use AI for art or writing, and to have it replace the real creative humans that work tirelessly on the art we enjoy, but it’s also wrong to read all AI as bad and ignore the possibilities it has opened for us. We need to shift our societal mindset, and the best way to do that will be with better education.

The AI issue is what happens when you raise generation after generation of people to not respect the arts. This is what happens when a person who wants to major in theatre, or English lit, or any other creative major gets the response, "And what are you going to do with that?" or "Good luck getting a job!"

You get tech bros who think it's easy. They don't know the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a creative endeavor because they were taught to completely disregard that kind of labor. They think they can just code it away.

That's (one of the reasons) why we're in this mess.

[kremlin]

How DOES the C preprocessor create two generations of completely asinine programmers??

oh man hahah oh maaan. ok, this won't be very approachable.

i don't recall what point i was trying to make with the whole "two generations" part but ill take this opportunity to justifiably hate on the preprocessor, holy fuck the amount of damage it has caused on software is immeasurable, if you ever thought computer programmers were smart people on principle...

the cpp:

there are like forty preprocessor directives, and they all inject a truly mind-boggling amount of vicious design problems and have done so for longer than ive been alive. there really only ever needed to be one: #include , if only to save you the trouble of manually having to copy header files in full & paste them at the top of your code. and christ almighty, we couldn't even get that right. C (c89) has way, waaaay fewer keywords than any other language. theres like 30, and half of those aren't ever used, have no meaning or impact in the 21st century (shit like "register" and "auto"). and C programmers still fail to understand all of them properly, specifically "static" (used in a global context) which marks some symbol as inelligible to be touched externally (e.g. you can't use "extern" to access it). the whole fucking point of static is to make #include'd headers rational, to have a clear seperation between external, intended-to-be-accessed API symbols, and internal, opaque shit. nobody bothers. it's all there, out in the open, if you #include something, you get all of it, and brother, this is only the beginning, you also get all of its preprocessor garbage.

this is where the hell begins:

#if #else

hey, do these look familiar? we already fucking have if/else. do you know what is hard to understand? perfectly minimally written if/else logic, in long functions. do you know what is nearly impossible to understand? poorly written if/else rats nests (which is what you find 99% of the time). do you know what is completely impossible to understand? that same poorly-written procedural if/else rat's nest code that itself is is subject to another higher-order if/else logic.

it's important to remember that the cpp is a glorified search/replace. in all it's terrifying glory it fucking looks to be turing complete, hell, im sure the C++ preprocessor is turing complete, the irony of this shouldn't be lost on you. if you have some long if/else logic you're trying to understand, that itself is is subject to cpp #if/#else, the logical step would be to run the cpp and get the output pure C and work from there, do you know how to do that? you open the gcc or llvm/clang man page, and your tty session's mem usage quadruples. great job idiot. trying figuring out how to do that in the following eight thousand pages. and even if you do, you're going to be running the #includes, and your output "pure C" file (bereft of cpp logic) is going to be like 40k lines. lol.

the worst is yet to come:

#define #ifdef #ifndef (<- WTF) #undef you can define shit. you can define "anything". you can pick a name, whatever, and you can "define it". full stop. "#define foo". or, you can give it a value: "#define foo 1". and of course, you can define it as a function: "#define foo(x) return x". wow. xzibit would be proud. you dog, we heard you wanted to kill yourself, so we put a programming language in your programming language.

the function-defines are pretty lol purely in concept. when you find them in the wild, they will always look something like this:

#define foo(x,y) \ (((x << y)) * (x))

i've seen up to seven parens in a row. why? because since cpp is, again, just a fucking find&replace, you never think about operator precedence and that leads to hilarious antipaterns like the classic

#define min(x,y) a < b ? a : b

which will just stick "a < b ? a: b" ternary statement wherever min(.. is used. just raw text replacement. it never works. you always get bitten by operator precedence.

the absolute worst is just the bare defines:

#define NO_ASN1 #define POSIX_SUPPORTED #define NO_POSIX

etc. etc. how could this be worse? first of all, what the fuck are any of these things. did they exist before? they do now. what are they defined as? probably just "1" internally, but that isn't the point, the philosophy here is the problem. back in reality, in C, you can't just do something like "x = 0;" out of nowhere, because you've never declared x. you've never given it a type. similar, you can't read its value, you'll get a similar compiler error. but cpp macros just suddenly exist, until they suddenly don't. ifdef? ifndef? (if not defined). no matter what, every permutation of these will have a "valid answer" and will run without problem. let me demonstrate how this fucks things up.

do you remember "heartbleed" ? the "big" openssl vulnerability ? probably about a decade ago now. i'm choosing this one specifically, since, for some reason, it was the first in an annoying trend for vulns to be given catchy nicknames, slick websites, logos, cable news coverage, etc. even though it was only a moderate vulnerability in the grand scheme of things...

(holy shit, libssl has had huge numbers of remote root vulns in the past, which is way fucking worse, heartbleed only gave you a random sampling of a tiny bit of internal memory, only after heavy ticking -- and nowadays, god, some of the chinese bluetooth shit would make your eyeballs explode if you saw it; a popular bt RF PHY chip can be hijacked and somehow made to rewrite some uefi ROMs and even, i think, the microcode on some intel chips)

anyways, heartbleed, yeah, so it's a great example since you could blame it two-fold on the cpp. it involved a generic bounds-checking failure, buf underflow, standard shit, but that wasn't due to carelessness (don't get me wrong, libssl is some of the worst code in existence) but because the flawed cpp logic resulted in code that:

A.) was de-facto worthless in definition B.) a combination of code supporting ancient crap. i'm older than most of you, and heartbleed happened early in my undergrad. the related legacy support code in question hadn't been relevant since clinton was in office.

to summarize, it had to do with DTLS heartbeats. DTLS involves handling TLS (or SSLv3, as it was then, in the 90s) only over UDP. that is how old we're talking. and this code was compiled into libssl in the early 2010s -- when TLS had been the standard for a while. TLS (unlike SSLv3 & predecessors) runs over TCP only. having "DTLS heartbeat support in TLS does not make sense by definition. it is like drawing a triangle on a piece of paper whose angles don't add up to 180.

how the fuck did that happen? the preprocessor.

why the fuck was code from last century ending up compiled in? who else but!! the fucking preprocessor. some shit like:

#ifndef TCP_SUPPORT <some crap related to UDP heartbeats> #endif ... #ifndef NO_UDP_ONLY <some TCP specific crap> #endif

the header responsible for defining these macros wasn't included, so the answer to BOTH of these "if not defined" blocks is true! because they were never defined!! do you see?

you don't have to trust my worldview on this. have you ever tried to compile some code that uses autoconf/automake as a build system? do you know what every single person i've spoken to refers to these as? autohell, for automatic hell. autohell lives and dies on cpp macros, and you can see firsthand how well that works. almost all my C code has the following compile process:

"$ make". done. Makefile length: 20 lines.

the worst i've ever deviated was having a configure script (probably 40 lines) that had to be rune before make. what about autohell? jesus, these days most autohell-cursed code does all their shit in a huge meta-wrapper bash script (autogen.sh), but short of that, if you decode the forty fucking page INSTALL doc, you end up with:

$ automake (fails, some shit like "AUTOMAKE_1.13 or higher is required) $ autoconf (fails, some shit like "AUTOMCONF_1.12 or lower is required) $ aclocal (fails, ???) $ libtoolize (doesn't fail, but screws up the tree in a way that not even a `make clean` fixes $ ???????? (pull hair out, google) $ autoreconf -i (the magic word) $ ./configure (takes eighty minutes and generates GBs of intermediaries) $ make (runs in 2 seconds)

in conclusion: roflcopter

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[bunnidid-reviews]

hello 🌷 I hope you're doing well. i wanted to ask and I hope this isn't offensive in any way.. so those w did and osdd have the word system to refer to themselves as, right? what about the c ptsd fragments / parts? some r saying that they give their parts names even, but I don't do that.. tho I do want to make it clear to my loved ones that I am fragmented if that makes sense, and maybe even tell them what this ep does and how my anp usually behaves but im confused. i don't want to make it look like im different people but I know they get confused when I differently to protect myself or shift states, so I do want to explain!! im not in the community yet hence why I asked. thank you and I apologize if this was rough to read. ☺️

Hi anon! Thanks for reaching out. Pls note I’m not a professional and can’t give advice or speak for how the community feels, just going off my own experiences

So I’m a full supporter of using what language makes sense to you and your loved ones when explaining what’s going on for you. If that means using system language to describe it all, theres literally no issue with it at all, especially when its just between you and loved ones anyway. Sorry, but I’m not going to gatekeep words, thats silly! People might get confused if you talk about it in a more public way but thats about it.

I frequently change up my words according to who I’m telling about this all, depending on what they understand. Not everyone knows I have DID but I’ve had to explain what happens sometimes because I’m pretty overt with my presentation and I don’t really like having to do the whole ‘do you believe me or are you going to be fucking weird about this’ song and dance.

Here are some words that might suit you, based on things I’ve used to explain my parts without outing my DID entirely that you may or may not find useful:

- parts of self (‘this part of myself’, ‘the traumatized part of myself’, ‘the part of myself who struggles with this specific thing’, etc. descriptors help a lot to differentiate)

- trauma brain and present brain (easier, snappier, more to the point than ANP and EP, nicely not specific to any one part. Sometimes people use left brain and right brain to explain their logic side and creative side, so its the same kinda thing)

- using animals to describe whats going on (my housemates use things like ‘feeling stalked by hyenas’ when feeling urgency, or ‘hiding like a wounded animal’. This is pretty normal too, like ‘a deer in headlights’ used to describe someone whos frozen or confused)

- age descriptors (‘me at seven’, ‘teenage self’, etc. )

- job descriptions (‘the part of me that can go to work’, ‘the aggressive part of me’, ‘the part of me who cries all the time’. Makes it easier to get to the point of what this part does)

As for a system of parts, if you don’t feel comfortable using system, here are some others I’ve used:

- animal groupings (a flock, a murder, a herd, a colony, whatever works here)

- computer or machine terminology (‘my inner processing unit’, ‘my folders full of memory files’, idk I use the term ‘programming’ a whole lot with my loved ones because of how theyve said that I respond like a robot, but I’m certain some people here would be upset that I use their Very Special Terms. But if its in the privacy of your own home I really do not think it matters)

- Literally any sort of grouping analogy, whatever makes sense to you and feels right. You could say a jar full of trauma buttons or something idk! Up to you! Get creative with it

R and I constructed an understanding of my DID without using the Big Community Words because it was just me and him figuring it out for a few years. Things like The Personas (instead of parts or alters), the Council Of Bunny, trauma brain/present brain, The Guys In my Head.

When it comes down to it, you and I are on the same spectrum anyway. DID is not some special disorder, its just C-PTSD with extra steps really. So I wouldn’t worry too much about all this. I wish you luck in finding words and phrases that suit you and your loved ones’ understanding of what’s going on. Having someone Know helps so so so so much

And also if I totally misunderstood and you were just wondering what the C-PTSD community uses.. i have no idea sorry! Maybe look into inner child language? I’m not even caught up on my own community

[ogxfuturetech]

The Comprehensive Guide to Web Development, Data Management, and More 

Introduction 

Everything today is technology driven in this digital world. There's a lot happening behind the scenes when you use your favorite apps, go to websites, and do other things with all of those zeroes and ones — or binary data. In this blog, I will be explaining what all these terminologies really means and other basics of web development, data management etc. We will be discussing them in the simplest way so that this becomes easy to understand for beginners or people who are even remotely interested about technology.  JOIN US

What is Web Development? 

Web development refers to the work and process of developing a website or web application that can run in a web browser. From laying out individual web page designs before we ever start coding, to how the layout will be implemented through HTML/CSS. There are two major fields of web development — front-end and back-end. 

Front-End Development 

Front-end development, also known as client-side development, is the part of web development that deals with what users see and interact with on their screens. It involves using languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create the visual elements of a website, such as buttons, forms, and images. JOIN US

HTML (HyperText Markup Language): 

HTML is the foundation of all website, it helps one to organize their content on web platform. It provides the default style to basic elements such as headings, paragraphs and links. 

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets):  

styles and formats HTML elements. It makes an attractive and user-friendly look of webpage as it controls the colors, fonts, layout. 

JavaScript :  

A language for adding interactivity to a website Users interact with items, like clicking a button to send in a form or viewing images within the slideshow. JOIN US

Back-End Development 

The difference while front-end development is all about what the user sees, back end involves everything that happens behind. The back-end consists of a server, database and application logic that runs on the web. 

Server: 

A server is a computer that holds website files and provides them to the user browser when they request it. Server-Side: These are populated by back-end developers who build and maintain servers using languages like Python, PHP or Ruby. 

Database:  

The place where a website keeps its data, from user details to content and settings The database is maintained with services like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB. JOIN US

Application Logic —  

the code that links front-end and back-end It takes user input, gets data from the database and returns right informations to front-end area. 

Why Proper Data Management is Absolutely Critical 

Data management — Besides web development this is the most important a part of our Digital World. What Is Data Management? It includes practices, policies and procedures that are used to collect store secure data in controlled way. 

Data Storage –  

data after being collected needs to be stored securely such data can be stored in relational databases or cloud storage solutions. The most important aspect here is that the data should never be accessed by an unauthorized source or breached. JOIN US

Data processing:  

Right from storing the data, with Big Data you further move on to process it in order to make sense out of hordes of raw information. This includes cleansing the data (removing errors or redundancies), finding patterns among it, and producing ideas that could be useful for decision-making. 

Data Security:  

Another important part of data management is the security of it. It refers to defending data against unauthorized access, breaches or other potential vulnerabilities. You can do this with some basic security methods, mostly encryption and access controls as well as regular auditing of your systems. 

Other Critical Tech Landmarks 

There are a lot of disciplines in the tech world that go beyond web development and data management. Here are a few of them: 

Cloud Computing 

Leading by example, AWS had established cloud computing as the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via web services/Internet over a decade considering all layers to make it easy from servers up to top most layer. This will enable organizations to consume technology resources in the form of pay-as-you-go model without having to purchase, own and feed that infrastructure. JOIN US

Cloud Computing Advantages:  

Main advantages are cost savings, scalability, flexibility and disaster recovery. Resources can be scaled based on usage, which means companies only pay for what they are using and have the data backed up in case of an emergency. 

Examples of Cloud Services: 

Few popular cloud services are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. These provide a plethora of services that helps to Develop and Manage App, Store Data etc. 

Cybersecurity 

As the world continues to rely more heavily on digital technologies, cybersecurity has never been a bigger issue. Protecting computer systems, networks and data from cyber attacks is called Cyber security. 

Phishing attacks, Malware, Ransomware and Data breaches: 

This is common cybersecurity threats. These threats can bear substantial ramifications, from financial damages to reputation harm for any corporation. 

Cybersecurity Best Practices:  

In order to safeguard against cybersecurity threats, it is necessary to follow best-practices including using strong passwords and two-factor authorization, updating software as required, training employees on security risks. 

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) represent the fastest-growing fields of creating systems that learn from data, identifying patterns in them. These are applied to several use-cases like self driving cars, personalization in Netflix. 

AI vs ML —  

AI is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a way we would consider “smart”. Machine learning is a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. JOIN US

Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: some common applications include Image recognition, Speech to text, Natural language processing, Predictive analytics Robotics. 

Web Development meets Data Management etc. 

We need so many things like web development, data management and cloud computing plus cybersecurity etc.. but some of them are most important aspects i.e. AI/ML yet more fascinating is where these fields converge or play off each other. 

Web Development and Data Management 

Web Development and Data Management goes hand in hand. The large number of websites and web-based applications in the world generate enormous amounts of data — from user interactions, to transaction records. Being able to manage this data is key in providing a fantastic user experience and enabling you to make decisions based on the right kind of information. 

E.g. E-commerce Website, products data need to be saved on server also customers data should save in a database loosely coupled with orders and payments. This data is necessary for customization of the shopping experience as well as inventory management and fraud prevention. 

Cloud Computing and Web Development 

The development of the web has been revolutionized by cloud computing which gives developers a way to allocate, deploy and scale applications more or less without service friction. Developers now can host applications and data in cloud services instead of investing for physical servers. 

E.g. A start-up company can use cloud services to roll out the web application globally in order for all users worldwide could browse it without waiting due unavailability of geolocation prohibited access. 

The Future of Cybersecurity and Data Management 

Which makes Cybersecurity a very important part of the Data management. The more data collected and stored by an organization, the greater a target it becomes for cyber threats. It is important to secure this data using robust cybersecurity measures, so that sensitive information remains intact and customer trust does not weaken. JOIN US

Ex: A healthcare provider would have to protect patient data in order to be compliant with regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) that is also responsible for ensuring a degree of confidentiality between a provider and their patients. 

Conclusion 

Well, in a nutshell web-developer or Data manager etc are some of the integral parts for digital world.

As a Business Owner, Tech Enthusiast or even if you are just planning to make your Career in tech — it is important that you understand these. With the progress of technology never slowing down, these intersections are perhaps only going to come together more strongly and develop into cornerstones that define how we live in a digital world tomorrow. 

With the fundamental knowledge of web development, data management, automation and ML you will manage to catch up with digital movements. Whether you have a site to build, ideas data to manage or simply interested in what’s hot these days, skills and knowledge around the above will stand good for changing tech world. JOIN US

[ship-of-adramyttium]

Impressions of Artificial Intelligence - Part 2 - 

AI Is Amazing and Not As Impressive As We Think You can read Part 1 here. What AI Does Generative AIs, or Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, PerplexityAI, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta’s Llama, and others are, first and foremost, incredibly powerful prediction machines. Think of them as an “autocomplete” on steroids. The systems I mentioned are vast linguistic devices designed to complete and generate thoughts and ideas with words. They do this by several ingenious programming techniques. In any given sentence, words are given a token, a weighted and numbered designation. In its response, the AI model uses these weighted tokens to determine the most likely response based on the weight of any given word relative to the context of any given word that has been used in the prompt.  Image made with MS CoPilot This weighted word is measured against the dataset the AI model has been trained on. The AI, in its simplest sense, strings together the most likely weighted words. From that, you get your response. The better the prompt you give, the more capable the AI is able to weight the response and give you a more clarified answer. The art and method of getting the best possible response from an AI model is called “prompt engineering”.  Recently, the word-to-word weighting has been expanded to phrase-to-phrase weighting. This means we can now feed whole books into an AI and receive full, impressive summaries and responses. Phrase-to-phrase may be too … human a phrase. It is more that the AI model can read chunks of text at once, but it is not understanding the text the way we would understand a chunk or phrase of text. The more correct way to say it is that the AI can analyze multiple tokens at the same time and weight the chunk as well as the individual words.  This is remarkable and incredible and mysterious how this all works. The uses are profoundly powerful when used for “the greater good”. For instance, at the end of 2023, with the help of AI, researchers discovered a whole new class of antibiotics that will be able to kill previously resistant bacteria like MRSA. Right around the same time, the DeepMind AI discovered 2.2 million new materials that can be used for all kinds of new technologies. These AI models are specifically designed for scientific exploration, and also use other AI methods aside from the LLMs we are discussing here. It is important that when we think about the value of AI systems, we recognize its ability to advance discoveries and science by decades.  Machine Learning and LLMs There is a big caveat here as well. There is a logic formula that is important to remember: All LLMs are machine learning systems, but not all machine learning systems are LLMs. Machine learning systems and LLMs have some big differences, but a large overlap. LLMs are linguistic devices, primarily, and a subset of machine learning. Machine learning can incorporate advanced math and programming, including LLM processes, that lead to these scientific innovations. 

Image made with MS CoPilot (I asked it to copy the words from the formula above. This is what came out. Clearly, there are issues with translating words to image.) Both machine learning systems and LLMs use parallel networking, as opposed to serial networks, with nodes to sort and channel information. Both are designed off of neural networks. A neural network is a computer system that is designed to work in parallel channels, meaning processes run at the same time and overlap one another, while routing through nodes or hubs. A neural network is designed to mimic human brains and behavior. Not all machine learning systems are neural networks, however. So, all LLMs are machine learning tools, but not all machine learning tools are AIs. And many machine learning systems run as neural networks, but not all machine learning systems are neural networks.  What AI Doesn’t Do AI models cannot feel. AI models do not have a goal or purpose. The heuristics that they use are at once mysterious and determined by the dataset and training they have received. Any ‘thinking’ that happens with an AI model is not remotely like how humans think. None of the models, whether machine learning models or AI models, are remotely conscious or self-aware. I would add here that when we speak of consciousness, we are speaking of a state of being which has multiple, varied, and contradictory definitions in many disciplines. We do not really know what consciousness is, but we know it when we see it.  To that end, since generative AIs reflect and refract human knowledge, they are like a kaleidoscopic funhouse mirror that will occasionally reflect what, for all practical purposes, looks very much like consciousness and even occasional self-awareness.  Artificial General Intelligence - AGI That glimmer suggests to some experts that we are very close to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an AI that can do intelligent things across multiple disciplines. AGI is sort of the halfway point between the AI models we are using now and the expression of something indistinguishable from human interaction and ability. At that point, we will not be able to discern consciousness and self-awareness or the lack of it. Even now, there are moments when an AI model will express itself in a way that is almost human. Some experts say AGI is less than 5 years away. Other experts say we are still decades away from AGI.  Jensen Huang, CEO of NVidia Corp, believes we are within 5 years of AGI. Within that time, he believes we will easily solve the hallucination, false information, and laziness issues of AI systems. The hallucination problem is solvable in the same way it is for humans - by checking statements against reliable, existing sources of information and, if need be, footnoting those sources.  This partial solution is what Perplexity AI has been doing from the outset of their AI release, and the technique has been incorporated into Microsoft CoPilot. When you get a response to a prompt in Perplexity or CoPilot, you will also get footnotes at the bottom of the response referencing links as proofs of the response.  Of course, Huang has a vested interest in this AGI outcome, since he oversees the company that develops the ‘superchips’ for the best of the AI systems out there.  On the other hand, president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, believes we are decades away from AGI. He believes we need to figure out how to put in safety brakes on the systems before we even try to create continually more intelligent AIs. To be fair, he sort of fudges his answer to the appearance of AGI as well.  Fast and Slow Discoveries Some scientific discoveries are sudden and change things very quickly. Others are slow and plodding and take a long time to come to fruition. It is entirely possible that AGI could develop overnight with a simple, previously unknown, discovery in how AI systems process information. Or it could take decades of work.  Quantum computers, for instance, have been in development for decades now, and we are still many years away from quantum computers having a real functional impact on public life. Quantum computers take advantage of the non-linear uncertainty of quantum particles and waves to solve problems incredibly fast. Rather than digital ‘1s’ and ‘0s’, a quantum computer deals with the superposition of particles (particles occupying the same state until they are measured), the observation bias (we do not know anything about a quantum particle or state until we observe the particle or state) and the uncertainty principle (we cannot know the position of a particle and the speed at the same time) at the core of quantum mechanics. More generally, this is called 'indeterminacy'. A quantum computer only provides output when an observer is present. It is very bizarre.

Image made with MS CoPilot While some of us wait patiently to have a quantum desktop computer, other discoveries happened very quickly. Velcro was discovered after the inventor took his dog for a walk and had to get all the burdock seeds out of his clothes. He realized that the hooked spikes on the seeds would be great as fasteners. For all the amazing things the 20th century brought us, Velcro may be one of the most amazing. Likewise, penicillin, insulin, saccharin, and LSD were all discovered instantly or by accident. 

Image made with MS CoPilot Defining our Terms Part of the difficulty with where we are in the evolution of AI in the public sphere is the definition of terms. We throw around words like ‘intelligence’, ‘consciousness’, ‘human’, ‘awareness’ and think we know what they mean. The scientists and programmers who create and build these systems constrain and limit the definitions of ‘intelligence’ so they can define what they are seeking to achieve. What we, the public that uses ChatGPT, or Gemini, or CoPilot, think the words mean and what they, the scientists, programmers, and researchers, think the words mean are very, very different. This is why the predictions can be so vast for where AI is headed.  What I Think My personal view, and not in any way an expert opinion, is that AI systems will create the foundation for very fast and large scale outcomes in their own development (this is called ‘autopoiesis’ - a new word I learned this week - which means the ability of a system to create and renew parts within and from itself). We will not know that AGI is present until it appears. I do not think human beings will create it. Instead, it will be an evolutionary outcome of an AI system, or AI systems working together. That could be tomorrow, or it could be years and years from now.  Defining our terms is part of how we retrofit our understanding of AI and what it does. What is ‘intelligence’? Does the ability to access knowledge, processing that knowledge against other forms of knowledge, determining the value of that knowledge, and then responding to it in creative ways count as intelligence? Because this is what an AI does now.  What is ‘consciousness’? Does a glimmer of consciousness, such as we perceive it, equal the state of consciousness?  What is ‘awareness’? When we teach an AI to be personal and refer to itself as ‘I’, and we call an AI model a ‘you’, at what point do we say it is aware of itself as a separate entity? Would we even know if the system were self-aware? Only in the past 20 years have we determined that many creatures on the planet have self-awareness. How long will it take for us to know an AI model is self-aware? These are deep questions for a human as much as they are for an AI model. We will discuss them more in the next essays. For now, though, I think the glimmers of consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness we see in the AI models we have now are simply reflections of ourselves in the vast mirror of human knowledge the AI model depends upon.  Read the full article

[eaglet-if]

Any tips to learn coding from ground zero? I literally don't know anything, don't even know where to start :'( Thank youu

Depends on your style of learning - for myself, watching/reading tutorials doesn't really work, I learn best through trial-and-error.

I'd say a good place to start is to think up an easy task (for example, a simple calculator) and then try to figure out how that would work in the language of your choice.

Once you have an idea (doesn't have to be the right one) of how it could work, look up the syntax (which commands exist in your language) online and try to get it to work.

Basically, the key is logic - take notes like "I want the code to give out 'hello to you too' when I enter 'hello' or '1'" (that's pseudocode already!) - then translate that into your programming language in several steps; for this example, in ChoiceScript it would be

*text_input input

*if (input = "hello") or (input = "1")

*set output "hello to you too"

${output}

Of course, you have to first tell the code that "input" and "output" even exist. Thinking about what variables you need for the code to work can also help immensely in writing it - after all, you're just translating "these variables do this and that" in a way the computer can handle. In ChoiceScript, all (non-temporary) variables are added in startup.txt, for the above example it'd look like:

*create input ""

*create output ""

(they don't need an initial value since their value is set by the text input and the if statement before being displayed in output)

Once you get the code to do what you want, you can optimize it - above example can't handle any input other than "hello" and "1", so you should add another *if statement that decides what to do if you enter anything else - at the moment, the output var will not be set, so its initial value will be displayed, which is empty.

Apart from those cases, you can also think about whether you really need as many variables as you have created (this is assuming more complicated code) - maybe you can re-use some of them?

I hope that helps a bit as general advice. If you need help with any specific code, I'd be happy to help, just tell me c:

[yaminerua]

This one got away from me a bit yesterday and I fell behind again, haha. I might try to smush today's prompt with tomorrow's to try to catch up again.

As always, prompts are by @a-literal-toaster-wtf

Anyway Day 4's theme was Family, and I couldn't help but think of Jim and Bexley. Needless to say it does cover a bit of Lister’s pregnancy.

Words: 6238

****

The last year or so had, for lack of a better word in the English language to adequately describe it, been pretty smegging bizarre. Perhaps it hadn’t really been any stranger than the year before it, after all waking up from stasis 3 million years after you went in to find that the human race had all but petered quietly out of existence around you while you’d been frozen in time had been quite a shock on its own to say the least, but it had certainly done its best to match that level of weird and expand it to newer and more mind-boggling ranges of nonsense.

Most recently, in one of several misguided attempts to orient themselves towards Earth and find their way out of the uncharted, seemingly unpopulated vastness of deep space, the Boys from the Dwarf had wound up skipping into a parallel dimension and come face to face with versions of themselves which had been familiar in some ways but also very, very different in others.

As if that on its own hadn’t been more than enough of a dosage of strangeness to call it a day, the encounter had ended – as many ill-advised, drunken liaisons do –  with one David Lister discovering that he was somehow, impossibly, incomprehensibly, ‘up the duff’, as it were.

Sure, he had known that children were in his future, he had seen the two crying little boys with his own eyes in that brief lightspeed anomaly that had allowed him to glimpse snapshots of things that were yet to happen, but with circumstances as they had been at the time the revelation had led to much curious speculation over just how exactly it was going to come about. Lister was the last living human being after all, floating through deep space on a ship populated only by a computer, a hologram and a humanoid who had evolved from what had once, long ago, been a regular black cat. With no women on board, it had seemed only logical to assume that somewhere out there, waiting to be found, was the person who would one day be the mother of his children.

Well, he hadn’t exactly been wrong about that per se… The mother of his children had indeed been out there. He just hadn’t exactly anticipated that it would end up being himself.

Rimmer had found it absolutely hilarious when it had all first come to pass, when that final little piece of the jigsaw had fallen impeccably into place, filling in the mystery once and for all. There was something almost poetic about it in a strange way, something karmic and deeply, deeply amusing about being impregnated by your alternate universe self, and the sheer thought of it had had him snickering and guffawing at frequent intervals at Lister’s expense throughout the process of Lister’s own staggered, reluctant acceptance of his own fate.

The hilarity of it had, of course, only been short lived. Once the reality of the situation had finally settled and it had dawned on them that Lister was, in fact, going to have to endure a full term of pregnancy if these boys were going to actually be born the full picture had blossomed then into cold, sobering clarity and suddenly become quite decidedly unfunny.

For what felt like an endless eternity after that, Rimmer had busied himself reading book after book on pregnancy, trying and failing to take in as much information as he possibly could ahead of the big day, treating it like he would any other exam or test (which inspired no confidence in anyone who knew Rimmer’s track record with those) while Lister just dealt with it in the only way he could, which was largely by continuing to pretend it wasn’t actually getting closer and closer with every passing day.

The logistics of how exactly things were going to work had been something he hadn’t wanted to think about too closely so it had fallen to Rimmer to read up on it himself instead because at least one of them had to be prepared for this and if Lister himself was going to shirk that responsibility despite having been the one to put himself in this situation in the first place then Rimmer was, as usual, going to have to pick up his slack.

That had been much easier said than done, however. Being a hologram, he’d had to rely largely on the assistance and coordination of the skutters to hold the books and turn the pages and whenever those had failed he’d had to turn to Holly and used vocal commands to navigate pages on harsh, bright screens that made his eyes feel like they were burning in their sockets after hours of staring at them.

Rimmer had never realised just how much went into a pregnancy. He’d never had cause to learn it properly before, of course, but there was no time like the present to suddenly decide to become informed. He’d done his best to attempt to supervise Lister’s eating and drinking habits to ensure every possibility of a healthier birth, and he had reprimanded him every time he had so much as even breathed in the direction of his cigarette packs or alcohol.

He’d drawn up timetables, plotting each significant milestone of the pregnancy, and bored Lister half to death with all the fussy, pedantic little things he did to try to take control of the whole situation and after enduring it for as long as he could Lister had finally rolled his eyes and groaned in aggravated frustration one day and pointed out how much he was starting to sound like a nagging, controlling husband. Rimmer had choked and spluttered in disgusted horror at the implications of such a comparison and had promptly disappeared off to some quiet, isolated part of the ship and avoided being anywhere near him for the rest of the day, which had come as a welcome relief.

Eventually, of course, the slow, steady march of time had brought the final day upon them and there had been no way to continue to put off acknowledging it any longer. By then, thankfully, a few important things had changed on board Red Dwarf. The biggest of these had been that they had acquired a new crew member, a service mechanoid by the name of Kryten who they had crossed paths with once before.

Kryten was well equipped to be able to assist in all manner of things, mostly pertaining to the upkeep and maintenance of the ship’s general tidiness but he also was quite competent in numerous other fields and was, importantly, capable of learning new skills and good at comprehending and retaining the information which was far more than could be said for Rimmer, who had at one point found himself more than halfway through a chapter on natural childbirth before he had belatedly remembered that Lister wouldn’t be experiencing it that way and had flipped, mortified, to the chapter on C-sections and promptly been rendered entirely unable to focus well enough to take anything in.

With Kryten’s presence on board, Rimmer had been privately relieved to discard the initial plans for carrying out the daunting procedure, which would have largely involved him trying desperately to coordinate the skutters to work together to deliver the twins without accidentally killing them or Lister in the process.  Needless to say, that was one role he had been more than thankful to be able to hand over to someone else.

When the big day finally arrived, he had tried with all his might not to give a single solitary smeg about any of it. He had been as carefully nonchalant as was possible as Kryten had come in to wheel Lister off to the medical bay, waving after him with a falsely bright “Don’t die, Listy!” as he’d watched him disappear down the corridor. He’d swallowed about as much of the nerves as he could keep down but the fact of the matter was that, in all honesty, he had been absolutely petrified. The little matter of his own continued existence relying heavily on Lister’s survival through this crucial procedure aside, there was – deep, deep down where not even Rimmer dared to investigate – a genuine concern for Lister’s wellbeing in its own right. He didn’t exactly like Lister, and he made that patently clear at every available opportunity, but he didn’t hate him – didn’t really want anything bad to happen to him. Certainly not something bad enough that they wouldn’t be able to laugh about it afterwards (even if Rimmer was the only one who might have been laughing).

While Kryten worked what he hoped was medical magic behind closed doors, Rimmer had paced along the length and breadth of the corridors like a man possessed, wringing his hands and vibrating with anxiety. Several times across the excruciatingly long duration of the procedure, he had become increasingly, frustratingly aware that this behaviour was doing absolutely nothing to shake off the appearance of ‘overly-concerned husband’ but given that the only other person bearing witness to any of it had been the Cat who honestly couldn’t have given a smeg, he’d simply brushed it off and pushed it down every time it had tried to resurface.

When finally, after what had genuinely felt like an eternity, the doors to the medical bay finally slid open and a self-satisfied, proud looking Kryten had walked triumphantly out, wiping his hands, Rimmer had nearly bowled him over with his aggressive impatience. “Well?” he’d snapped urgently, nostrils flared and lips drawn together in a tense, thin line. “What happened? How did it go?”

Kryten had simply smiled genially at him then and announced happily, “It’s two boys!” and if he had been capable of it Rimmer would have throttled him right there.

“I know it’s two boys you half-chewed rubber-headed git! I’m talking about Lister!”

Kryten had been a little put out by the outburst, blinking sheepishly down at the floor, the smile on his face wiped off in an instant. “Oh, yes of course,” he had said, fidgeting slightly before recovering himself and straightening up. “Mister Lister is going to be fine, sir. He just needs to rest up and keep clean.”

Rimmer had rolled his eyes sarcastically and scoffed. “Oh, fantastic, he’s doomed then is he?” he’d said wryly but there hadn’t really been any bite in it. At this point, now that presumably the worst of it had come and gone, he’d simply been left too exhausted for there to be any genuine hard edge to it. In all honesty he’d just been filled with an immense sense of relief that the whole thing was largely over and done with now.

Kryten had paid the remark no mind, instead deciding to inform Rimmer that he was heading off to prepare the room the twins would be staying in once they were ready to do so and had given him permission to go in to see them if he wanted to, requesting only that he be mindful not to wake Lister and then he had been off leaving Rimmer with nothing better to do than do precisely that.

That had been a good few hours ago now and as Rimmer sat peering down into the little crib at the tiny sleeping bundles destined to be named Jim and Bexley, he felt the weight of all these past weeks weigh down heavily on him, equal parts relief and exhaustion.

This had been more work even than preparing for his exams had usually been. At least with those he had been able to take breaks away from it but living with a pregnant buffoon that you had to effectively supervise and educate yourself about had felt like an endless job he had never willingly signed up for.

The boys had been moved into their new room by now, just down the corridor from the bunkroom so that it was near enough to be easily accessible without the sounds of screaming and wailing being too close and loud to get in the way of Lister’s much needed rest or get too much on Rimmer’s nerves.

Lister himself had been moved back into his old room – mostly because he had apparently insisted on it – however given his current condition and the effort that getting up onto the top bunk would have required, Kryten had carefully placed him on the lower bunk without Rimmer getting much of a say in the matter. It didn’t really matter all that much anyway. Lister had already been forced to relocate to Rimmer’s bunk as his growing size had limited his movements so it wasn’t so much of a leap to let him keep using it a little longer. He was pretty certain that once he was finally able to be granted access to his own bed again after Lister was fully recovered he was likely going to have to fumigate the whole mattress and all of its covers but that was a problem for a later date.

It was strange that it was over, all that build up, all that preparation that had been made in advance of this day and now the moment had passed. Now all that stretched on ahead was a new and entirely different situation and it was one that Rimmer was secretly dreading in an entirely different way.

Jim – or was that one Bexley? He couldn’t remember – hiccupped gently in his sleep and snapped him from his thoughts, catching his attention as he shifted a little, letting out a soft, gentle vocalisation as he turned towards his brother. They were so small, so fragile-looking, and Rimmer felt entirely out of his depth thinking of the responsibility of keeping them both safe. He didn’t know the first thing about children. He doubted Lister knew any better. This whole thing was surely going to be a disaster.

Bexley – or simply ‘the other one’ – whimpered slightly, a small, feeble whine that threatened to escalate into something else. “Shhh,” Rimmer said quietly, as soothingly as he could, indicating urgently for the skutter sitting by his feet to initiate the gentle rocking motion he’d instructed it to do in events like these, anything to try to keep the boys content and quiet, though he knew that would only be able to work for so much longer before the problem became something that genuinely required someone else’s assistance.

That was another thing about being a hologram that was going to make this new future difficult to handle. He couldn’t touch anything which meant that he’d be useless at any of the more hands-on aspects of looking after children. There was nothing he would really be able to do to stop the boys from doing something if they wouldn’t listen to his commands (and if they turned out to be anything like Lister was, that was a very likely outcome). Not only that, but he wouldn’t be able to help feed them, or hold them, or change their nappies or any of that – not that those duties would have fallen to him anyway. The most he could hope to do was simply sit as he was now and watch over them quietly, speak to them occasionally and try to soothe them with his words if they started to cry, rocking them gently back to sleep with the aid of a skutter to handle the movement for him.

He supposed he shouldn’t really feel as bereft as he was about this whole thing. These weren’t his children in any capacity. They were Lister’s through and through. Rimmer was effectively just someone else who shared the same space as them, a strange ghostly uncle of sorts at the very most, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to be a little more involved in the process, at least a little. Maybe he just wanted some kind of evidence to prove to himself he’d have been any good at this…

He sighed, gesturing for the skutter to ease the rocking to a gentle stop now that the twins seemed to have settled back down again.

He lost track of just how long he sat like that watching the two of them sleeping on peacefully but it must have been quite some time. Kryten had popped in every now and then to check on them and even the Cat had swung by to squint curiously down at them and comment that he hoped they would have better dress sense than their daddy when they grew up.

When the door to the room slid open behind him some time later with another gentle hiss he expected it to be Kryten so when he turned round to find that it was in fact Lister making his way with some difficulty and no small degree of discomfort towards the cot he had to bite his tongue fiercely to keep from shouting for him to get back to bed.

Catching himself in time, he opted instead for hissing the demand but Lister waved him silent, all stubbornness and disobedience as always. “I want to see my boys,” he said firmly and Rimmer couldn’t really argue with that.

He stood up from the chair he’d been seated on and shifted over to the one next to it that Kryen had been using earlier, letting Lister drop down heavily and breathless on the one he’d just vacated, watching the way he winced with pain and clutched at his lower abdomen. “You really should still be in bed, you know. You can’t just walk around all willy-nilly after you’ve been sliced open,” Rimmer said matter-of-factly.

Lister simply offered a partial shrug and leaned carefully forwards over the cot as far as was comfortable, beaming down tiredly but joyfully at the two little boys he’d brought into the world.

“Aren’t they fantastic?” he cooed, awestruck, reaching a hand out to tentatively brush his fingertips feather-light across their little cheeks. “They look just like me.”

“Well,” Rimmer began, his tone sarcastic and utterly unsurprised. “When your mother and father are the same person what do you expect?”

Lister shot him a look, unamused, and turned back to look down at the twins again. “Alright, Rimmer, leave off. Yeah, it’s a bit unconventional but it’s what happened, alright?”

He could hear Rimmer let out a small, indignant ‘tsk’ to his left and decided not to acknowledge it. He wasn’t going to let anything he had to say ruin this moment for him after everything it had taken to get here.

He sat back in his chair, eyes still twinkling proudly, warmly, down at the wholesome little sight, a single shining gift in what had otherwise been a cold and difficult couple of years to process. Behind his ribcage, he felt oddly light, a rosy glow of affection radiating out from his heart and expanding to fill every inch of him, making him feel positively giddy, though that might have also partly been the painkillers.

“I always wanted a family,” he confessed quietly, suddenly, eyes softening with a wistful, distant look of longing. “A proper one, I mean. The one I got did their best but, well…”

He trailed off, ending the sentence with a shrug and a shake of the head. Rimmer didn’t say anything, didn’t really know what to say.

A heavy silence settled between them, oddly tense, before Lister decided to break it again. “Never actually knew me real dad. Or me mum,” he began, speaking aloud to no-one in particular, peeling back the more private, personal layers of his past just a little, giving Rimmer a few more pieces of a jigsaw he’d previously only had scraps of before. “I was left in a box under a pool table in a Liverpool pub when I was still a baby. No idea why…”

Rimmer bit back the urge to say that explained a few things. It didn’t seem appropriate. Instead he remained quiet, watching Lister out of the corner of his eye, noting the way he chewed anxiously on his bottom lip, a little agitated crease forming between his brows, staring absently into the distance for a moment before affixing a falsely bright smile to his face and shaking his head, attempting to mask how he really felt about the whole thing. “I like to think they had a good reason for doing it but… I dunno.” He looked down at Bexley, who had unconsciously grabbed hold of Lister’s finger in his sleep, his tiny little hand loosely clinging on unknowingly to someone to whom such a simple human gesture meant so much.

Lister swallowed hard, struggling to push past the tight little ball of emotion that had formed in his throat. When he spoke, his voice sounded choked. “I always wanted to have sons of me own one day, so I could be there for them, watch them grow, y’know? Do what my parents couldn’t.” He laughed, a little incredulous, disbelieving sound, as he looked around at the room. “Didn’t think this was how it’d end up happening though.”

Rimmer huffed a short, curt laugh beside him, hollow and humourless, and Lister shot him a glance, eyebrow quirked slightly in curiosity. “What about you?” he asked after a moment, searching the tightly drawn lines of Rimmer’s face. “Did you ever want to have kids one day?”

Rimmer didn’t look at him, didn’t dare to. He could feel the burn of that inquisitive stare boring into the side of his head but he kept his gaze fixed straight in front of him, locked on nothing in particular, and Lister watched carefully as he swallowed slowly, adam’s apple bobbing above the collar of his uniform shirt.

“I don’t know, to be quite honest with you,” he admitted quietly after a moment, a rare fragile, vulnerable quality to his voice, honest and open in a way Rimmer only occasionally allowed himself to be. “My parents expected me to of course – they expected us all to – but I don’t really know if that kind of life was ever actually in the cards for me.” His face crumpled slightly and a harsh, sharp laugh ripped its way bitterly out of him. “Well, obviously, of course it wasn’t – just look what happened to me!”

Jim stirred suddenly in his sleep in the cot, disturbed by the sudden sound, his little face scrunching up momentarily, seeming just about ready to burst into tears and Lister readied himself to react but the moment never came to pass. He simply settled back down and kept on sleeping peacefully, which was a much appreciated relief for now.

Rimmer became very quiet then, introspective and solemn, his whole form seeming to shrink into itself as he sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped tightly between them. He bowed his head and looked down at them, agitated, flexing his fingers tensely as his brows knitted together.

“I don’t know if I’d have been a good father. Guess I don’t have to ever find out,” he said bitterly, the muscles in his jaw tensing noticeably as he wrung his hands together. “I didn’t exactly have what you would call ideal role models so maybe it’s for the best.”

Lister regarded him sadly, sympathetically, and had to fight the overwhelming urge to reach out there and then and place a supportive, encouraging hand on Rimmer’s right knee. Given the circumstances it would only have made the mood worse.

He’d heard Rimmer talk about his family life before and each revelation had been steadily building a much more detailed picture of Rimmer’s past and all the smegged up little things that had made him into who he was today. He knew very well that he wasn’t joking about them being less than ideal, in fact that was something of an understatement. They’d certainly done a number on him, that was for sure.

Not wanting a repeat of the gloomy mood that talk of his parents usually caused him to descend into, Lister tried for an optimistic, sympathetic smile. “I dunno, man. I think you’d probably have been alright,” he said, and somewhat to his surprise, he meant it quite genuinely.

Rimmer, however, didn’t seem to agree. He scoffed derisively at Lister’s words and rolled his eyes, doubtful. “Oh, please, I know you don’t actually believe that.”

“I do, man. I do,” Lister insisted gently and then, seeing the persistent look of disbelief still painted stubbornly across Rimmer’s features, he huffed a sigh and looked down. “Look, so your parents were smegheads and they got a lot of things wrong but that might’ve worked out in its own weird way. I mean, think about it. Now you have a pretty comprehensive list of things not to do to start off with. Can’t go too far wrong if you stick to that, right?”

Rimmer considered his words for a moment and then begrudgingly offered a stiff nod in agreement. “I suppose,” he said quietly, contemplatively, but there was still a noticeable note of bitterness to his voice, like he still didn’t quite believe that was enough on its own. “What does any of that matter anyway? I’m never going to get to find out what kind of father I might have been.”

That same awful, suffocating silence as before descended once again upon them and this time Lister didn’t know how to break it so he didn’t try to. Instead he let it hang in the air around the two of them, thick and heavy, until one of the twins coughed and startled himself awake.

Lister was quick to reach for him, scooping him up and cradling him tenderly in his arms, crooning softly to him as he rocked him back and forth, the gentle motion enough to stall whatever waterworks might have been about to follow.

Tiny and curious, his little face squinted in enchanted bewilderment up at Lister who beamed warmly back down at him and planted a quick little kiss upon his forehead. “There you go, Bexley. Let’s not wake up your brother just yet, yeah?”

Rimmer found the affection hard to look at, like staring directly at the sun, so he tore his gaze away and fixed it instead upon Jim who had thankfully remained peacefully undisturbed.

“I still think you could have gone with better names than Jim and Bexley,” he said pointedly, glad for the slight change in subject. “There are so many more appropriate options out there.”

Lister shot him an impish grin, mischief glinting gold in the brown of his eyes. “Oh yeah?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Still trying to make Arnold Lister happen are you?”

He waggled his eyebrows teasingly and relished the way Rimmer dissolved into a spluttering flustered mess, the tips of his ears flushing scarlet red in mortified horror.

“Don’t,” Rimmer said warningly, not wanting a repeat of the last time he’d innocently suggested the name. “You know what I meant when I suggested that, Lister. Don’t try to turn it into something else!”

If he hadn’t had his hands full, Lister would have held them up placatingly. “Okay, okay! I won’t,” he insisted but Rimmer seemed doubtful, suspicious, unwilling to let it go quite yet.

It was all the silly little jokes that had been building up over the passing weeks sharing the same space together that had buried themselves under his skin like an itch that couldn’t be scratched and refused to budge. Everything felt like a suggestive insinuation now, an accusation of something his own father would have surely disowned him for – if it had had any truth to it of course, which it didn’t because Rimmer was absolutely, one-hundred percent not whatever it was those implications might try to suggest. It didn’t matter that no-one was left around who would give a smeg about whether he was or wasn’t in any way that would have actually mattered. Rimmer still felt the need to defensively deflect any and all implications regardless.

“Don’t even joke about it,” he said, staring evenly, piercingly, at Lister, hazel eyes dark and deathly serious as he said in a choked, half-hissed, tight voice, “I’m not even remotely that way inclined and don’t you forget it!”

“I never said you were!”

“Well I’m not.”

“Okay! Okay.”

Rimmer seemed to finally relax a fraction, satisfied for now with Lister’s acquiescence. He breathed in deeply, slowly, and released it in a long, steadying exhale, his tensed, squared shoulders finally slackening just a bit.

Lister watched him out of the corner of his eye and couldn’t help himself.

“Even though you were the one who smushed our names together in the first place.”

“Lister!” Rimmer all but shouted, his voice rising to a desperate, rasping hiss, all thoughts of keeping quiet very nearly forgotten in the wake of incandescent, scandalised rage.

Lister laughed as quietly as he could, wincing as the pain in his abdomen seared at the motion, tears beading at the corners of his eyes at the way Rimmer’s nostrils had flared and his whole face had pinched itself tightly to contort around his scrunched up nose. It had been a step too far, he knew that, but Rimmer’s buttons were far too amusing to keep from pressing and he really was being far too defensive about what was genuinely just a little teasing.

He hadn’t meant anything by it, just a little joking around, but every time he did it Rimmer always seemed to become immediately aggressively defensive, his whole body drawing itself taut and rigid with tension, coiled up tight like a spring waiting to snap.

He looked about ready to explode, his jaw set and knuckles white, a pleading, wild, desperate look in his eyes and Lister knew then that he’d pushed him about as far as it was safe to go.

“Alright, I’m sorry!” Lister said, and this time he meant it, not wanting to risk a further escalation.

The apology did little to release Rimmer’s tension, the knuckles of his hands still blooming a ghostly white where he continued to grip them tightly. His mouth was drawn tight and thin, distrust burning fierce and unrelenting in his eyes.

Huffing an exasperated sigh, Lister bit back the urge to utter some remark under his breath about the negative effects of a conservative Ionian upbringing but ultimately decided he preferred not to instigate a full-blown argument in front of his newborn sons. Instead, he turned his attention back to little Bexley in his arms who had started to stir with discomfort again at all the commotion. “Hey, don’t worry, Bexley. That was just your Uncle Smeghead. Nothin’ to worry about. See? From this angle you can see right up his nose into his empty head.”

Rimmer scowled incredulously up at the ceiling and shook his head. He’d had just about as much nonsense as he could take from Lister right about now and here he was still trying to poke fun at him.

“Ha ha, Lister. Very funny,” he said flatly, stonily. “You better be careful what you say around the two of them, you know. If their first words end up being smeghead instead of dad that’ll be a personal failing on you.”

“Yeah, yeah, but it’ll be worth it for the laugh I’ll get from it, eh?”

Rimmer turned to look at him askance, a thousand possible insults and retorts flying through his head but none of them making it past his lips. There was nothing to say, really. Lister was an imbecile and he was absolutely going to raise his sons into precisely the same kinds of imbecile and the mere prospect of having more than one of that kind of person around was quite frankly a depressing thing to imagine.

“The wrong people get to be parents,” is what he eventually decided on, looking back down at Jim in the cot and wondering if there could have been any hope for either of those two boys’ braincells.

The smile on Lister’s face died then and there and he became oddly quiet, rocking Bexley back to sleep before finally lowering him back into the cot beside his brother.

Sitting back, he watched the two of them silently for a few moments longer, the humming and creaking of Red Dwarf all around them the only other sounds.

Now that he’d been up and about for a while and had had a bit of a joke and a laugh, the exertion was beginning to wear him out, the ache in his abdomen and the heaviness of his body calling for him to yield to the pull and finally go back to bed. His eyes slid closed of their own accord and his head bobbed and lolled as he began to gradually drift off, his body starting to ever-so-slightly tilt to the side, towards Rimmer who only realised what was happening moments before it would have spelled disaster.

“Lister, wake up!” he cried, hands flying up helplessly to try to stop him, passing uselessly through him with no resistance whatsoever.

Lister started awake and caught himself, one hand bracing steadyingly against the chair Rimmer was on, disappearing into Rimmer’s torso as though it were impaling him. He jerked back, alarmed and unconsciously rubbed vigorously at his forearm, momentarily disturbed by the reminder that although Rimmer was very much there in spirit, he was very much not there in person.

“Sorry. Nodded of there for a second,” he muttered sheepishly, unable to lift his gaze to meet Rimmer’s.

“I told you you shouldn’t have got up,” Rimmer said, his tone thick with patronising condescension. “I told you you should still be resting.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m going,” Lister relented, pushing himself up with great discomfort onto his feet and steadying himself with the rails of the cot.

“For what it’s worth, Rimmer, and I know what you’re gonna say to this but just listen, alright?” Lister held up a hand, silencing whatever interruption Rimmer might have been about to make. “But, in a way, you kind of will know what kinda dad you’d have been. You’re helpin’ me out with these two after all.”

Rimmer’s face twitched a little, that same little pang of defensive discomfort twisting in his gut. “That’s not being a dad, Lister. If anything I’d be something of an uncle.”

Lister shrugged. “Uncle, Dad, whatever. You’re still helpin’ raise them. You never know, we might end up balancing ‘em out in the end.”

“You mean they might not end up the same kind of lazy, slobbish gimboid as you are?” Rimmer said, raising a dubious eyebrow.

Lister frowned, leaning against the doorway. “Well, yeah, that. But also…” He trailed off for a moment and looked away, suddenly unable to look Rimmer in the eye, his face grimacing a little as he tried to shrug off the awkwardness of what he was trying to get out. “I dunno, it’s just good to not be doing it on me own. Yeah, they’re my kids but beyond me, you and Cat and Kryten are all else they’ve got. Smeg, even Holly too.”

He scratched the back of his head restlessly, feeling altogether too exposed, too naked in this rare show of vulnerable honesty towards Rimmer of all people. He risked a glance in Rimmer’s direction, trying to gauge his expression but Rimmer wasn’t looking at him. He was very pointedly facing away.

He fished helplessly for something else to say but he couldn’t think of anything. A yawn was threatening to force its way up his throat and his energy was flagging. He really needed to get back to bed.

“You should probably take a break soon too, Rimmer,” he said, bringing a hand up to shield the yawn as it finally broke through.

Rimmer nodded. “I will when Kryten comes back,” he said simply and Lister nodded in agreement at that.

“Alright. Night, Rimmer.”

With that, the door to the corridor slid open and closed and it was just Rimmer left in the room with the two sleeping boys again, as he had been for much of the day.

Lister was right, he really should take a break. He felt mentally and emotionally spent after everything but he was finding it hard to switch off after months of hyper-vigilant supervision and he didn’t really know what else to do with himself. His bunk was currently occupied and he would sooner die a second death than ever consider using Lister’s even once.

He thought about what Lister had said again about how they would all be contributing together in their own little ways to the collective raising of Jim and Bexley, about how in a funny little way they were all now part of what was surely a very dysfunctional and highly unconventional family unit. Something about that made him feel a tad strange, an unfamiliar little glow of something warm and light in his chest that flitted about like little butterflies, a mix of apprehension and something almost pleasant.

Maybe he would never have been a good dad, and maybe he was a little bit thankful he would never have to truly find out, but for the time, in this current situation, he was quite content to settle for being the best possible uncle he could be.

And they’d call him Uncle Arnie, not Smeghead. He’d make absolutely sure of that.

[aristoteliancomplacency]

You’re absolutely right that there’s clear hyperbole going on in that tweet thread, but you have to be feeling very uncharitable indeed to claim that the worry of ‘reverting to where AI is’ is an indulgent statement that ‘doesn’t mean anything.’ It’s really very easy to understand what the student meant - the exact meaning is explained within that same tweet (along with how they’re defining ‘dumber’). She is referring to loss of ability / practice in thinking critically.

Given that they’re doing this for an assignment I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re drawing that claim from an article like this. Which certainly makes it sound far less knee-jerk and more like a response which has some logical and calm thought behind it. Concerns about impact on critical thinking skills, it turns out, are indeed a totally legitimate concern to have. (Brain atrophy is another thing, of course, which sounds more like a term first year students might bandy around without fully understanding it).

Of course, you’re fully entitled to your interpretation but on that particular point I’d suggest you’re being as reactionary as you’re an accusing them of being and engaging in a very bad faith interpretation. They’re very, very clearly not talking about AI as a field of study. C’mon.

‘But everyone in my peer group that I know knows way more about this’ is a sentiment that will often be true (or its opposite will be). I am constantly surprised at what, in turns out, most people my age don’t know - or what I don’t know that supposedly most people my age do know. Anecdotal evidence is still just anecdotal evidence, after all. And it’s certainly not enough to extrapolate across an entire country, let alone the globe. And if you’re on tumblr you’re more likely to be Online, and far more likely to be aware of all tech issues. You specified you did an intro to computer science and learnt Java and wrote code for a basic AI: of course your experience is atypical for your generation. Most students don’t do that.

And on the other side of that - this tweet thread is also just one group of students! It’s not evidence that all students - or even the majority - were so unaware of the pitfalls of relying on chatGPT to generate accurate info. But from hearing academics talk about their encounters with students and chatGPT in other places, it’s also not a unique experience.

There’s a lot of discussion about chat GPT among academics. Some have students who understand the issues, are skeptical of it, etc. others have massive issues with plagiarism, with students not understanding how it works, etc. the situation can be so drastically different between different unis (or even departments, or even individual classes tbh). This is absolutely not a unique situation in terms of people reporting how little some of their students understand about chatGPT (and that’s not even getting into the issue of how little many academics themselves understand about it - recall that recent incident what a prof tried to fail a whole class bc he asked chatGPT if it could have generated their essays and somehow took its reply to mean that it had generated them?)

Tl;dr: I agree the language here is very dramatic. I agree privacy should be a big concern (though in this context I can also see why it didn’t come up - it’s not relevant to how accurately chatGPT wrote an essay). I think it’s also very dramatic to suggest that what the students understand now is worse than their previous total ignorance.

[connectxira]

"Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: Transforming the Future

🤖 The Real Talk About AI & Machine Learning – From a Curious Mind

We hear the buzzwords everywhere—AI, Machine Learning, Neural Networks... but let's be honest, most explanations sound either too technical or copy-pasted from textbooks. So here’s my take, in plain and simple words.

🧠 What Really Is AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t just robots or sci-fi anymore. At its core, AI is about building machines or systems that can think, learn, and make decisions—kind of like a human, but faster (and without getting tired).

Imagine giving a computer the ability to understand language, recognize your face, or even predict what you’ll buy next. That’s AI at work.

🌀 Where Machine Learning Fits In

Now, Machine Learning (ML) is like the brain of AI. It’s the part that teaches machines how to learn.

Let’s say you want a machine to recognize cats in pictures. You don’t write one giant program telling it what every cat looks like—you feed it thousands of pictures of cats, and it figures it out on its own by spotting patterns.

The more data you feed it, the smarter it gets. That’s machine learning.

⚙️ Not Magic – Just Really Smart Math

Here’s the fun part: AI isn’t magic. It’s just crazy-smart math and logic running behind the scenes. It finds trends, predicts outcomes, and learns from mistakes faster than we ever could.

Think of it like a chef who’s never been to your kitchen but learns your favorite dishes just by watching you cook for a week. Creepy? A little. Cool? Definitely.

🌍 How AI is Already In Your Life

Your Netflix recommendations? That’s ML.

Google Maps showing you traffic updates? AI again.

Chatbots answering customer questions 24/7? Yep, that too.

Even if you don’t see it, AI is already making your daily life smoother, faster, and sometimes even more fun.

🧩 Final Thought: AI Isn’t the Future. It’s Now

People think AI is something far away. But the truth is, it’s already happening—quietly shaping how we shop, talk, move, and decide.

The real question isn’t what AI can do—it’s how we choose to use it.

[shravantyagiblog]

Gaming Development with Grok 3

[zinefully]

Gaming Development with Grok 3

[brainynbright418]

Summer Camp 2025 in Bangalore: A Fun-Filled Adventure for Your Child

Looking for the perfect summer camp in Bangalore to keep your child engaged, learning, and having fun? Brainy n Bright’s Summer Camp 2025 in BTM Layout, Bangalore, offers an exciting and educational experience for children aged 6-16 years. Packed with hands-on learning activities, technology workshops, and creative projects, our summer camp is the ideal place for your child to explore new interests and build essential skills for the future.

Why Choose a Summer Camp in Bangalore?

Bangalore is known for its vibrant tech scene and innovative spirit. A summer camp in Bangalore offers an enriching environment where kids can learn while having fun. Whether your child is into technology, arts, or sports, you can find a summer camp in Bangalore that matches their interests. Brainy n Bright’s summer camp stands out by offering a diverse range of activities that foster creativity, problem-solving, and hands-on learning in cutting-edge fields.

What Makes Our Summer Camp in Bangalore Unique?

At Brainy n Bright, our summer camp in Bangalore combines fun with learning in a way that engages children across different age groups. We offer a variety of activities designed to help kids discover their passions, develop new skills, and make lasting friendships. Here are some of the key highlights of our summer camp in Bangalore:

Robotics & Coding A summer camp in Bangalore wouldn’t be complete without introducing kids to the exciting world of robotics and coding. Our program helps kids design, build, and code their own robots while learning important concepts in artificial intelligence and engineering. This hands-on experience fosters creativity and technical skills that are essential for the future.

Arduino & Raspberry Pi Our summer camp in Bangalore also offers kids the chance to explore electronics with tools like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. They will work on fun projects that involve hardware, coding, and electronics, giving them a deeper understanding of how the technology around them works.

App & Game Development If your child is interested in the world of tech, they will love learning how to create their own apps and games. Our summer camp in Bangalore teaches kids coding, game design, and how to turn their ideas into reality, giving them the skills to develop their own digital projects.

Python Programming Python is one of the most popular and versatile programming languages. At our summer camp in Bangalore, kids will get to grips with Python and create projects that teach them coding logic, problem-solving, and critical thinking.

3D Designing & Printing In our 3D Designing and Printing sessions, kids will get to design their own 3D models and bring them to life using a 3D printer. This hands-on learning experience helps them understand the basics of design, engineering, and digital fabrication.

IOT & Drone Technology Our camp also introduces children to the world of Internet of Things (IOT) and drone technology. They’ll learn how to control drones and explore how devices connect to the internet, making them part of the smart world.

Quantum Computing For older kids, our summer camp in Bangalore introduces them to the world of Quantum Computing, a rapidly evolving field that will shape the future. This exciting session will help them understand the basics of quantum mechanics and its applications in modern technology.

Why a Summer Camp in Bangalore is Perfect for Your Child

Enrolling your child in a summer camp in Bangalore offers more than just fun. Here are a few reasons why a summer camp in Bangalore is a great choice:

Skill Development: Your child will learn valuable skills that will benefit them academically and personally. From coding to creative arts, our summer camp in Bangalore ensures that kids gain knowledge in a fun, interactive way.

Hands-On Learning: We believe in learning by doing. Our summer camp in Bangalore is designed to engage children with practical, hands-on activities that build their creativity and critical thinking.

Social Interaction: Summer camps are a great way for kids to make new friends and develop social skills. Through team projects and group activities, kids learn to collaborate and communicate effectively.

Innovation and Technology: At Brainy n Bright, our summer camp in Bangalore focuses on innovative technology programs, such as robotics, app development, and IOT, ensuring your child stays ahead in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Location and Contact Details

Our Summer Camp 2025 will be held at BTM Layout, Bangalore, a prime location easily accessible from different parts of the city.

For more information or to register your child, please contact us at:

📞 Call Us: 73669 36999 📧 Email: hello@brainynbright.com 🌐 Website: www.brainynbright.com

Alternatively, you can scan the QR code on the image for quick registration.

Conclusion: Give Your Child a Memorable Summer with a Summer Camp in Bangalore

A summer camp in Bangalore is an ideal way for your child to spend their summer—learning new skills, exploring their creativity, and making new friends. Brainy n Bright’s Summer Camp 2025 is designed to offer an unforgettable experience that blends fun with education. Whether your child is interested in robotics, coding, or 3D printing, there’s something for every child at our summer camp in Bangalore.

Sign up today and let your child embark on an exciting and enriching summer adventure in Bangalore!

[bsksk5158]

Gaming Development with Grok 3

[nmietbbsr]

Is Computer Science Engineering Very Difficult?

If you are thinking about pursuing Computer Science Engineering (CSE), you might have heard people say that it’s a tough course. But how true is that? Let’s break it down in a simple way.

What Makes CSE Challenging?

Like any engineering branch, CSE comes with its own set of challenges. Here are a few reasons why some students find it difficult:

Logical Thinking – Unlike subjects that rely on memorization, CSE demands logical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Programming Languages – You will need to learn different coding languages like Python, Java, C++, etc.

Mathematics – Concepts like algorithms, data structures, and discrete mathematics form the core of CSE.

Continuous Learning – Technology changes fast, so you need to keep updating your knowledge.

Project Work – Hands-on experience through projects and practical assignments is a major part of the curriculum.

Is It Really That Hard?

The difficulty level of CSE depends on how you approach it. If you are willing to practice coding regularly and understand concepts rather than just memorize them, you will do well. Many students start with zero programming knowledge and still succeed by putting in consistent effort.

How to Make CSE Easier?

Start with Basics – Before jumping into complex coding, get comfortable with the fundamentals of programming.

Practice Coding Daily – Websites like LeetCode, HackerRank, and CodeChef help in improving coding skills.

Work on Projects – Apply what you learn through small projects.

Join Study Groups – Learning with peers helps in understanding concepts better.

Choose the Right College – A good college provides proper guidance, practical exposure, and industry connections.

Where to Study CSE in Bhubaneswar?

If you are looking for a college of engineering and technology in Bhubaneswar, there are many reputed institutions that offer quality education. Colleges like NMIET focus on a balanced approach, combining theoretical knowledge with practical experience. With strong faculty support and industry collaborations, students get a solid foundation in CSE.

Career Opportunities in CSE

One of the biggest advantages of studying CSE is the wide range of career options available. Graduates can work in software development, data science, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. Companies like Google, Microsoft, TCS, and Infosys actively hire CSE graduates.

Final Thoughts

So, is Computer Science Engineering difficult? It can be, but it’s not impossible. With the right mindset, dedication, and a structured learning approach, you can excel in this field. If you are passionate about technology and problem-solving, CSE can be a rewarding career choice.

If you are exploring options, consider checking out the college of engineering and technology in Bhubaneswar to find the best fit for your education and career goals.

[fibrefaifaibre2]

Gaming Development with Grok 3

[365newsblog]

Gaming Development with Grok 3