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So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the real danger from integrating an LLM into a payment system or what have you will be from human stupidity or laziness. Makes sense.

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1970's Space Pod modular shower. Aquarius by Euromod

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They're always overly chatty too.

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What is with these 3d but cell shaded to look 2d shows over-animating their characters?

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5,500-Year-Old Sumerian Star Map“For over 150 years scientists have tried to solve the mystery of a controversial cuneiform clay tablet that indicates the so-called Köfel’s impact event was observed in ancient times. The circular stone-cast tablet was recovered from the 650 BC underground library of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, Iraq in the late 19th century. Long thought to be an Assyrian tablet, computer analysis has matched it with the sky above Mesopotamia in 3300 BC and proves it to be of much more ancient Sumerian origin. The tablet is an “Astrolabe,” the earliest known astronomical instrument. It consists of a segmented, disk-shaped star chart with marked units of angle measure inscribed upon the rim.

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Fire City (Jakub Rebelka)

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Invocation in the Forest by Gilbert Williams

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Jeffrey Catherine Jones' 1968 cover to Swords Against Wizardry, by Fritz Leiber

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Dog doodle

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“Leg in the air - Parthenon” by Edgard Alsteens, used on a postcard, 1986.

via Reddit

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That was my rant for today.

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It feels so disingenuous to give global statistics on farmed animal welfare and then only focus on what it would cost in the developed world. Most people don't live in developed countries!

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The people who can afford cruelty-free eggs and meat already are. And, I'm guessing, the biggest places torture produced meat and eggs are used will probably be pre-prepared meals, like your frozen schnitzels and your fast foods. And we know how voters react when the price of burger goes up.

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"Improving the welfare of animals raised for meat is easy and costs less than you think. You only have to increase the cost of the item by 50% and the amount of land needed by 30 to 300%."

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Because humans do have predators (besides other humans). People die trying to pet lions and tigers all the time. You could write a story about that!

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Reading Echopraxia, the sequel to Blindsight by Peter Watts. I have some issues.

For one, everyone kind of... The characters are all different enough from each other. But within the narrative voice there's this constant use of, like, future-time slang for things that I feel are not different enough from what we have in the present time and not enough time has passed to justify someone casually using radically different language to what we use today. Not every character. Some people would still use standard english to describe things.

Stories also typically try to limit how many extraordinary things there are in comparison to the real world, unless they're complete fantasies. That's the usual advice. Don't ask your reader to suspend their disbelief for too many things. This story has vampires and zombies and aliens and cyborgs. I hear the wolfman is going to make an appearance in the next chapter. It's a bit goofy for a story that is trying very hard to take itself seriously. For something that apparently is the author trying to argue very strongly for the evolutionary uselessness of consciousness.

It made sense in the first book that the most extreme kinds of personalities, people on the bleeding edge of human modification, would be sent out on a space mission to make first contact with aliens. This one feels a like normal people don't exist in the world. And I don't mean like the main character and the colonel. I mean someone at the kwik-e-mart whose biggest character trait is that he hopes he gets to see the big game tonight. The last book had more "normal" people by this point.

Also, I don't care how hardwired the predator/prey instinct is hardwired into humans. Someone would want to fuck the vampire.