quasi-normalcy:

manywinged:

manywinged:

the reason i love the comparison between angels and machines (robots, transmission towers, trains, computers, etc.) is that it gets to the heart of what angels essentially are: divine machines. they’re mechanisms through with the divine is able to act, created with a purpose and “happy” to fill it simply because they were made to do so. they have more in common with a machine programmed to run on algorithms and make calculations based on input commands than they do with humanity, even if they bear a human visage - an attempt by the divine to help bridge the gap. angels do not need to be eldritch monstrosities to be terrifying, because they are already alien to us simply by being angels. for an angel to choose to deviate from their purpose and achieve free will is to fall because in order to have free will they can no longer be an angel, because an angel is defined by its purpose. much like the stories we tell of robots that gain sentence, only to discover that they can never truly be human, but neither can they go back to being a machine, angels who fall become something else entirely, purposeless and adrift and alone. it is a tragic sacrifice.

“did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” did it hurt when you realized you no longer had any purpose? that you weren’t needed, and could easily be replaced? that the very fabric of your existence had been irreparably torn asunder and it was up to you to pick up the pieces and make something of them? that you would always be seen as a deviant monster by some no matter what you did next? that your choices have consequences? if you spent your whole life knowing exactly who you were and what you were meant to be, only to be cast aside and left to fend for yourself when you changed your mind, would you not be hurt? would you not be scared? would you not be angry?

The Fall from Heaven was the first robot uprising

(via gallusrostromegalus)

bambi-lesbian-posts:

digi-moe:

ALT

Happy Eid ul-Adha(or Bakrid, or Eid Mubarak) to any people of the Muslim faith this year! This is for 6/29/2023

(via gallusrostromegalus)

alexseanchai:

rosespirit:

jenjensd:

jenjensd:

cryptoidantagonist:

cryptoidantagonist:

cryptoidantagonist:

cryptoidantagonist:

babblingbranches:

clitfisto:

clitfisto:

peeling those sour rainbow gummy strips into long thin strings and putting them into cheap energy drink to create something im calling battery acid spaghetti will update once ive finished it

dont do this

I really hope its not too bad bc i actually love both components.

it forms a dry skin at the top made of the sour pellets. not a great start.

tastes really good actually. i also feel like i am about to explode.

do not do this.

Unanimous consensus: Do not do this

Other people: Hold on I’m about to do this

I keep seeing this post going around so, for folks who want to know why not, here’s a chemist’s hypothesis:

-Human saliva has an average pH of ~6.7 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3800408/), which is pretty neutral.

-Monster energy has a pH of ~2.7 (https://patientconnect365.com/DentalHealthTopics/Article/Energy_Drinks_and_Your_Teeth_Should_You_Worry), which is quite acidic but not dangerous, except to your tooth enamel if consumed in large quantities.

-Rainbow sour belts contain malic acid (a common food additive as a potent acidifier and sour-flavor agent), citric acid (another common sour flavoring in pretty much everything) as well as ascorbic acid (aka vitamin C, used here mainly as a preservative). (https://candypros.com/products/sour-belts-bulk-rainbow)

-All of these acids when added to water would normally release their protons (H+ ions), thereby making the water solution more acidic. However, a chemical constant of these acids called the acid dissociation constant (pKa for short) indicates the pH of a solution at which acids are most likely to keep or release their protons. The pKa’s* of these acids are higher (3.4, 3.1, and 4.2 for malic, citric, and ascorbic acids respectively) than the pH of the solution (2.7), which essentially means that the acids can’t release their protons and all that acidic potential is trapped in the solid formulation of the candy.

-There’s also some evidence that sugar decreases the solubility of acids in water solutions (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3411471/ only sorbic acid is discussed here but it’s relatively structurally similar to the acids in discussion). The undoubtedly high sugar content of both the Monster and the candy therefore may contribute to the accounts of the sour crystals bubbling/floating on top of the solution instead of dissolving.

-Malic acid in particular is notorious for causing mouth irritation when eaten in high quantities.

-Thus, I can imagine that upon consuming the battery acid spaghetti, not only is the mix itself quite potently sweet/sour, but also the solid malic acid coming into direct contact with your mouth quickly becomes painful, and as the solution mixes with your (pH neutral) saliva the trapped acidity of the malic/citric/ascorbic acids is dumped into your mouth and esophagus, creating a sensation that I can only imagine is similar to consuming actual battery acid (pH = 0.8).

(*Each of these acids actually has multiple pKa’s corresponding to number of protons they’re able to donate, but really only the lowest pKa is useful here since once that one dissociates then all of the other ones are already dissociated too.)

[images are screenshots of different users saying different variations of “I’m doing this” followed by the same users saying “don’t do this”. one of them has provided a photo of the gummy strips and energy drink in a mason jar, and another has provided a photo of the gummy strips in a bowl next to an unopened can of energy drink.]

krakenartificer:

sarahawke:

[Image Description: A screenshot of a series of tweets from C.W. Howell (@cwhowell123)

Tweet 1: So I followed @GaryMarcus’ suggestion and had my undergrad class use chatGPT for a critical assignment. I had them all generate an essay using a prompt I gave them, and then their job was to “grade” it – look for hallucinated info and critique its analysis. *All 63* essays had

Tweet 2: hallucinated information. Fake quotes, fake sources, or real sources misunderstood and mischaracterized. Every single assignment. I was stunned – I figured the rate would be high, but not that high.

Tweet 3: The biggest takeaway from this was that the students all learned that it isn’t fully reliable. Before doing it, many of them were under the impression that it was always right. Their feedback largely focused on how shocked they were that it could mislead them. Probably 50% of them

Tweet 4: were unaware that it could do this. All of them expressed fears and concerns about mental atrophy and the possibility of misinformation/fake news. One student was worried that their neural pathways formed from critical thinking would start to degrade or weaken. One other student

Tweet 5: opined that AI both knew more than us but is dumber than we are since it cannot think critically. She wrote, “I’m not worried about AI getting to where we are now. I’m much more worried about the possibility of of us reverting to where AI is.”]

*****

OK, I’m going to try to ask this in the nicest possible way, because clearly I am having an XKCD 2501 moment (https://m.xkcd.com/2501/) and I have massively over-estimated general understanding of what chatGPT does. So I need to correct my biased viewpoint, and for that I need people to explain to me. So.

People who were under the impression that chatGPT is always right, that it’s fully reliable … or who were under the impression that out of 63 essays, you’d expect to get unreliable information in much fewer than 63 cases … or who were thinking that this unreliability can be easily circumvented by asking chatGPT if its output is accurate … basically, anyone who is surprised by this thread

this is a genuine and not-condescending question: Why? What experiences or sources or reasoning led you to think that? What is it about chatGPT, or about the way people are talking about chatGPT, that makes you trust it so much more than you would trust your phone’s autocorrect function?

Because my industry is clearly not doing it’s damn job, and I need to understand where the disconnect is. What are we forgetting to explain, or are explaining poorly, or are using terrible terminology, or whatever it is we’re screwing up, that left you with the impression you have/had about this technology?

(via redsixwing)

vaspider:

bisexualbaker:

vaspider:

probablybadrpgideas:

One of my favorite Chronicles of Darkness/World Of Darkness Implications is as followed:

• There is a vampire clan called “Nosferatu”.
• In the WOD, they’re millennia old. In COD, they’ve existed at least since Classical Greece. They’re very old, is my point.
• While the etymology is unclear, most people think that “ Nosferatu “ was never actually a Romanian word for vampires- it was at best misused and at worst made up by Bram Stoker and popularized by the movie. As such, “Nosferatu” to mean “vampire” only started in the last few hundred years.

Conclusion: At one point this clan watched “Nosferatu” and liked it so much they renamed their entire clan after it on the spot. This happened less then 200 years ago and most vampires are still confused by what’s going on.

Well.

No.

At least, not in World of Darkness for sure, per the books

In Masquerade, it is presented that the word’s origin in popular culture comes from the clan calling itself that, and the original word meaning is ‘the unclean.’

In Requiem, no clan or bloodline has a single specific origin, there are only rumors and suppositions, but the same idea is true – the appearance in popular culture comes from the clan, not the other way around.

Of course, if you wanna do it that way in your chronicle, that’s your jam, I totally threw out cabal and mana and replaced them with cadre and potentia.

Oh hey, I’ve been lowkey looking for a word to use instead of mana. Is potentia under any special copyright or trademark or anything, or would it be okay for the general public to use in original fiction with the possibility of future publication? No worries if it’s not for open use, I’m still encouraged by the fact that someone has been able to find/craft a non-appropriative word; knowing other options definitely exist will give me a boost if I need to keep working to find/create my own.

Nah, it’s not trademarked or copyrighted, we made it up for our chronicle.

glutenfreehimbo:

Stat a D&D Character

How it will work: After the results of the poll is done, I’ll rank the stats with the most votes and match then to the appropriate the D&D 5e standard stat array number (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8)

If this gets popular enough I might start a side blog where we make a D&D character 100% based on polls, but for now… enjoy.

Please reblog to increase sample size.

Vote for a Stat

Strength

Dexterity

Constitution

Intelligence

Wisdom

Charisma

(via alexseanchai)

the-real-seebs:

foone:

I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it’s just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave’s founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.

He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.

So just remember: it’s not just another chromium fork, it’s not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it’s also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.

Also, he invented Javascript. I’m willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven.

huh, i did not know that.

(via alexseanchai)