Prank idea: Turing test, but instead of two humans and a computer, it's three humans. And they all think they're the judge.
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Carl Muckenhoupt
@CarlMuckenhoupt@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Rhombic dodecahedron disguised as a man
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Joined February 04, 2017
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Replying to
@hanakogames@mastodon.gamedev.place I get why a developer would do that but I don't get why they would brag about it. It's like putting "Made with the cheapest available ingredients!" on food packaging.
Replying to
@adamrice@c.im @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social (Tangentially, this was also a major theme of the movie The Prestige (and probably the novel it was based on, although I haven't read that). That the way to make a convincing illusion is to go to lengths that anyone else would reject as implausibnle.)
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@nickmofo
The poem is inside your head, Wallace Stevens said to me
The answer is easy if you're free with simile
I'd like to help you with your avian imagery
There must be thirteen ways to look at a blackbird
Just one moving thing, King
Three minds in a tree, Lee
It's part of the play, Jay
You know what I mean
The people are one, hon
Right after its call, Paul
A mood in the shade, Dade
Gonna get that bird seen
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@hakona@im.alstadheim.no @renardboy@mastodon.social @jalefkowit@vmst.io I remember a long time ago seeing a thread addressing the question "What is the one thing that an individual can do to help the economy the most?" and the conclusion it came to was "Contract cancer. The amount of money it gets flowing from insurace companies to hospitals to pharmaceuticals can dwarf your entire career."
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@ibk @vikxin @NanoRaptor Makes me think of Italo Calvino's "The Nonexistent Knight". There, a virtual human being was created out of nothing because the paperwork required him to exist. Today, we instead have product reviews
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@cstross@wandering.shop @Richard_Littler@mastodon.social This is why I've always liked the Woodman hypothesis. He says "OK, let's suppose Von Daniken is right about the Nazca lines: they were meant to be viewed from the sky. Does this really necessitate aliens? Or is it possible that the people of ancient Peru simply invented flight?" And then he goes and demonstrates that it is indeed possible by building a hot air balloon using only materials and tech known to have been available to the builders of the Nazca lines.
In his original design as seen in Fantastic Four #48-50, Galactus has a big G on his chest and I think that's adorable. It's like a failsafe to keep you from taking the story too seriously. Later versions mostly replace it with a featureless circle and that's a shame.
Immersive theater idea: A production of Our American Cousin, complete with assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A two-layered narrative, farce interrupted by tragedy. What effect does the knowledge of what's coming have on the experience of the first two and a half acts?
"Onset" and "offset" are not antonyms.
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@cstross @Richard_Littler And, like, it's still basically a crackpot theory with no real evidence behind it, but it's a crackpot theory that's more plausible AND less insulting than the crackpot theory it's reacting to
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@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social It's worth noting that when mycoprotein-based meat substitutes avoid being specific about their ingredients, it is sometimes because they are not made from mushrooms, but rather, from other, less appetizing forms of fungus that they want to avoid mentioning in their advertising copy.
But on looking into it a little, seems MyBacon really is made from actual oyster mushrooms. Which surprises me a little, given that they're being coy about it.
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@mcc Looking at replies, relieved/disappointed at lack of Amazing Digital Circus references
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My understanding is that LLM training data is tokenized in a way that means that the model doesn't actually have any record of how words are spelled. So it's no surprise that it comes up with answers that don't fit the enumeration, and are based on wordplay that simply doesn't work, like anagramming a word into something with completely different letters. But I'm quite surprised that this disadvantage completely vanishes when it knows the desired outcome.
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@gwynnion@mastodon.social It's kind of like bragging "With this new engine, my car can consume gasoline twice as fast!"
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@Aradayn@mastodon.social Reminds me of the fact that "())(" is palindromic and "()()" isn't
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@ColinTheMathmo I had the pleasure of attending a talk he gave once. The content of the talk was actually a little disappointing, because he wound up having to spend most of it explaining his number system, which I already knew. But I vividly remember his use of "unlesss" as an abbreviation for "unless and only unless".
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@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social Good last point. Attempting to stop the moose by getting out of your car and shooing it away is not advisable.
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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com
It's on the Yunohost
It's on the PikaPods
It's on the combination Yunohost and PikaPods
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@samir@mastodon.functional.computer This figure used to be higher. Nowadays, a lot of professional programmers are working on pointless or harmful *services* instead.
It’s not that software is intrinsically antisocial, though. It’s just that prosocial programming tends to not pay.
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@hanakogames I remember when slot machine roguelikes were new and exciting
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@paul_ipv6 It isn't even just a matter of "I'd rather read than watch video". I frequently prefer movies to the novels they're based on. But manuals aren't used like movies or novels. Movies are for watching all the way through. Manuals are mainly for looking things up.
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@cstross If the goal is to sneak increasingly rude things past the censor, you can always go Gaiman with it: "Elon Musk felches goats"
A semantic shift that does not bother me:
"literally" uses as an intensifier
A sematic shift that does bother me: "reality" used to mean subjective experience
Someone gave the DMV my address instead of their own. Now I have their driver's license, except I'm not sure it's valid because it has the wrong address on it.
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@fribbledom@mastodon.social I guess it’s true that we have no record of his term after that.
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@dr_barnowl@topspicy.social @talin@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop That was a quite confusing thing to read, knowing about the real WayForward Technologies, a video game company best known for the Shantae series. I wonder if the real company was named after the fictional one? They both seem to have had founders named Way.