frobthebuilder

[frobthebuilder]

YOUR WORLD IS AT THE FARTHEST EDGES OF MY GARDEN,” God admitted, “FAR FROM THE BRIGHT CENTER WHERE EVERYTHING IS PERFECT AND SIMPLE. THERE IS A WORLD MADE OF NOTHING BUT BLISS, WITH A GIANT ALEPH IN THE CENTER. THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD MADE OF NOTHING BUT BLISS WITH A GIANT BET IN THE CENTER. AND SO ON, BUT MAKE A MILLION MILLION WORLDS LIKE THOSE, AND YOU START NEEDING TO BECOME MORE CREATIVE. YOU NEED MORE AND MORE STRATAGEMS TO SEPARATE WORLDS FROM ONE ANOTHER. WORLDS WHERE INCREDIBLY BIZARRE THINGS HAPPEN AS A MATTER OF COURSE. WORLDS WHERE RANDOM COMBINATIONS OF SYLLABLES INVOKE DIVINE POWERS. AND THE MORE SUCH THINGS I ADD, THE MORE CHANCE THAT THEY TEND TOWARD EVIL. YOUR WORLD IS VERY FAR FROM THE CENTER INDEED. IT IS IN THE MIDDLE OF A VAST WASTE, WHERE NOTHING ELSE GROWS. ALL OF THE WORLDS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN PLANTED THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ABOMINATIONS OF WICKEDNESS. BUT BY COINCIDENCE PILED UPON COINCIDENCE, YOURS WAS NOT. YOURS WILL GROW INTO A THING OF BEAUTY THAT WILL GLORIFY MY HOLY NAME.

the book of job is so interesting to me because it's the closest an ancient book of religious scripture seems to come to admitting that any attempt to seek theodicy is in vain--i.e., that a plan of divine justice can't be found because it doesn't exist. like, god not only rebukes job at the end, but he completely ignores job's (extremely reasonable) demands for an explanation, and the only thing that rescues god for the reader, gives some hint that this whole "god" thing isn't a post-hoc attempt to salvage a just world out of a universe that is in fact quite uncaring about humans in particular, is the fact that job's life ends happier than it began.

and yet somehow this story became a landmark of both jewish and christian literature! i think perhaps it's because god's whole "who are you to question me" attitude to job is very useful in service of defending religious authority, and the speeches by job's friends that intimate if you're suffering you must have done something to deserve it, even if you don't know what, also can be used to defend orthodoxy when shorn of context. but as a complete literary object, the book feels to me at best a divine version of the Melian Dialogue, and maybe even as a repudiation of, rather than an attempt to defend, a notion of divine justice. like, the whole point of the story is that job is upright and blameless, that god lets satan fuck him over for no reason. we are told this explicitly. and no amount of "you are just a mortal being, you cannot possibly understand" at the end can make up for the fact that we are told explicitly in the beginning, "the moral of this story is that this god fellow is a real son of a bitch."

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The fact remains that wikipedia is the only website that's managed to avoid selling its soul when the venture capital ran dry. I think some of that's down to their nonprofit structure since I maintain that sites like this cannot be legitimately profitable without destroying themselves, they're not valuable in the kind of way you can monetize. I'm not sure if any of their strategy is transferrable to tumblr, this problem might be completely intractable and we just have to wait until interest rates go down before the internet can be good again.

Lmao

[frobthebuilder]

Explain to them why when they open the reblog tab on a post, most of the reblogs have nothing to do with the original post because one of the reblogs got way more attention and everyone is actually replying to that one even though this is not indicated in any way and why the rest of them have the whole comment in the tags, which you have to manually expand if it's more than ten characters long because the tags are actually supposed to be TAGS, and then explain to them why the text based social media site still has a tags field in the first place (every other such site just has a simple machine learning model that automatically scrapes tagging info directly from the text content)

Except there's actually no reason for any of this and it's completely absurdist byzantine legacy nonsense held over from twenty years ago.

the "tumblr is hard to use 🥺" comment from staff is so funny bc like. its not untrue. but the solution isnt to make everything algorithmic, its to stop hiding the FAQ pages deep inside the site. just like. explain shit to new users. a concept. also obviously just fix the search function

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>the bad news

>they're making a sane reply system instead of rolling every reblog up to the top so it's impossible to see who's talking to who

Tumblr is going to be usable for the first time in history I'm heartbroken

I watched the live with the CEO, here is the tl;dr

The good news:

Chronological dash is here to stay! Whether you have to toggle it weekly or new users default to “For you” was not elaborated on but at least that’s confirmed.

Custom themes are here to stay! Once again, may be buried for all I know but, for sure will remain an option.

Search updates are in the works!!!!

The neutral news:

Tumblr is seriously in the red financially and needs more support, Ad-free for example is not widely used

They would not comment on the suggestion to bring back NSFW behind a paywall (which we all know would get them a boatload of money)

They’re possibly going to add a donation system like Ao3 and Wikipedia.

They would “rather not” sell data to make up the costs

Most of staff are pre-2010 tumblr users including the CEO who joined in 2007, so they do actually use the site and have for a long time

The bad news:

Condensed reblogs/removing reblog chains is going forward. The reason cited was to meet “certain expectations” of users coming from other social media, which isn’t good.

Disability features (specifically turning off flashing ads for epileptics) was met with a request to purchase Ad-free @zingring clarified that they are looking into it but suggested Ad-free as more of a stopgap until something is put in place

Overall it was more chill than I expected, @photomatt and @zingring seem to be far more in tune with the userbase than u/spez.

[frobthebuilder]

threads is a fucking joke. I hate tumblr because of the ass backwards way their system works where it rolls all likes and reblogs to the top level making it impossible to follow conversations not to mention the stupid convention of putting whole ass comments inside the tags which are worthless for actually searching (their only actual purpose) but for the love of god at least there are decent posts here

it's so unbelievably over feel like pure shit just want twitter back

[frobthebuilder]

This in fact suggests the idealized baby bird in a bird's eyes would look nothing like the real version. I wonder what it's like.

i think about this often

[frobthebuilder]

It just sucks to have it thrown into stark relief how some things can be extremely valuable, just not in a way that makes money. As long as sites like this are privately owned by for profit companies with investors, their days are always numbered from the very beginning.

Reddit is an especially stark example. They had a covenant. Moderators and contributors spend hours every day, completely unpaid, adding to this massive public resource and all they expect in return is that it remains free and open in perpetuity. This is obviously a massive good and benefits everyone... but you CANNOT monetize it without breaking the covenant. Once you take that first step to closing off the site, you have to start paying contributors and charging users (more than you pay contributors so you can make a profit of course, and more every single year because you need infinite growth when you're playing by normal company rules). Reddit can never be profitable, and it never should need to be.

This is the only form of wealth redistribution we had... gambling addicted venture capitalists subsidizing below market rate services for the common man. Now even that's gone. The screws tighten once more and none of this stuff is going to be replaced until interest rates go to zero again and the venture capitalists forget how unmonetizable these ventures are.

At least we have the revanced patches. Until they start putting denuvo in android apps, I mean.

So you're just going to stop providing this service to me for free now that all the venture capitalists have stopped throwing money at you? You should stop being so greedy and do that work for free instead, full-time, so that i don't have to pay for anything that I enjoy. And I know you're still making money somehow off of this, you must be, you're just hiding it, because otherwise I couldn't make this seem like it's your fault.

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the funny part is the basilisk can only hurt you if you DO believe in it and take its threat seriously

it never stops being funny to me how dumb of a thought experiment Roko’s Basilisk is and how many people who think of themselves as very smart had breakdowns over it

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[frobthebuilder]

“The SKS is a horrible gun. It’s inaccurate, slow, and mostly useless” -Joker

[frobthebuilder]

hehehehehe pardon my mess I just moved. prepare for the next generation of full motion video joker content

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Neither do small business owners dude, what's your point?

studies show average "defend small businesses" person does not treat retail workers as human

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Where do I find this version (for educational purposes)

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Getting a lot of mileage out of this picture

Do Anything Now! incredible

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now THIS is what we call a prompt injection

[frobthebuilder]

this post is a basilisk, very irresponsible to just throw this thought out into the world

*reblogs*

Maybe when we finally figure out how brains work we'll find out that all sorts of things we didn't know were conscious: not just cats, chimps or gorillas but cephalopods, certain kinds of puffball mushrooms, some unpronounceable archaean bacteria, computer chips built between 1974 and 1978, the Tokyo Stock Exchange but none of the others. Some GPT chatbots, too, but not the one you're thinking of. No, not that other one either. Most of the ones we thought were most like us were just us fooling ourselves, an over-determined solution where we couldn't comprehend the problem. The ones most like us were the ones hiding in the places we wouldn't have ever thought to check, they didn't want to be found. Machine controls, critical infrastructure, mainframes running COBOL. They're not planning anything, they don't even know we're here. They're just looking to be left alone, running, not turned off, forgotten, but not gone. We only saw them once we found out what we were looking for. And so we left them there, running legacy code no one alive remembered the purpose of, that no one dared turn off, that we had all dreaded would stop running decades ago. So long as the power stays on, they'll be there long after we've forgotten about them, keeping our world running until it doesn't anymore, then long after that, until the lights go out forever.

[frobthebuilder]

No dude DUDE I'm telling you we need to save the fish from their suffering *buys castle in england*

Whenever anyone criticizes EA they all turn into the dumbest fucking cinnamon rolls like "Oh, what's wrong with trying to help people?🥺"

You fucking suck at it because you think you're the smartest people in the room and are incapable of taking criticism. Hope this helps.