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charles darwin is so insane. Imagine it's the 1860s and you're literally the only member of your friend group who knows that a platypus exists. The rest of them could never understand

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"XIII. Secondary Sexual Characters of Birds

XIV. Birds - continued

XV. Birds - continued

XVI. Birds - continued" -- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871

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I've developed mathematics for a non-human mind, for my comic "The book written by tiny paws"

Sapient distant descendants of rats, known as packers, living on Earth millions of years after the extinction of humans, began to develop mathematics using cognitive mechanisms never intended for such tasks. Due to an evolutionary quirk, multiplication came more naturally to them than addition, and their mathematics reflects this.

Packers write numbers as shapes, with each number having a corresponding number of corners.

And they write large numbers as nested shapes. The number inside is multiplied by the number outside.

Examples of some numbers:

Packers haven't invented 0 yet. They haven't even invented 1! In fact, they don’t need the concept of "one" much in their system. There's no need to say "I ate one fish" when they can simply say "I ate fish".

Packers can't yet write large prime numbers, like 101 or 10,501, because they would have to draw a huge shape to represent them! Even writing 17 or 19 would be quite difficult if they only used convex shapes.

So packers use non-convex shapes too!

Many years later, some packer noticed that large prime numbers look suspiciously symmetric.

So this packer improved the notation system and made it clearer.

Later, another packer simplified this system even more, deciding that there was no point in writing the same shapes twice.

This packer was the first in their culture to declare that "a dot isolated from a number" should also be considered a number. The packer called this dot "the wonderful number that's less than two".

Many years later, another packer made an important innovation: the "dot isolation" could be repeated multiple times as long as the result remained odd. When the result became even, it could undergo a "two isolation" (division by two). The final result will be a series of dots and twos.

This invention led to the creation of a binary system based on one and two, which had a significant impact on the technological advancement of packers.

The comic "the book written by tiny paws" talks about all of this in more detail. There will be mistakes, debates, the invention of rational, irrational, multivariate numbers, and some other stuff. Some stuff will be very much like human math, and some will be different. After all, math is still math, only the point of view has changed.

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It’s impossible to give directions in Boston. Nothing makes sense. There are inexplicable one way streets, there are streets that change their names as you move from one area to another. There’s a road in my area where the gps literally tells you to take TWO full right turns to “stay on” the same road which is at a right angle to the original. There’s like four different Massachusetts Avenues. Sometimes you have to be in the left lane to turn right. The gps can’t even get directions to my workplace correct; it tells me to take a left on a road where lefts are not allowed, and the only way to not have to go across the river and take 15 minutes to turn around is to remember this shit one block early and make the left THERE. Recently, they’ve restricted 1 of 2 lanes on each side of major thoroughfares to only allow bikes and buses, and the government officials seemed to genuinely believe that would somehow EASE traffic. Oh and don't try to drive on Memorial Drive on Sundays; they close it for pedestrians. Just because. And when you DO drive on Memorial, there's one exit that will make your gps lose its mind and start chanting random sequences of numbers for four minutes straight. You can't take a Uhaul on Storrow Drive because the bridges that go over it are too short, and every year some doofus college student ignores this rule and proceeds to "get Storrowed" when they shave off the top of the truck on the overpass and get stuck. I-93 turns into I-95 and makes a big circle around the city, so a lot of the time you'll be on I-95 north but driving east or west.

It’s not limited to driving either. The Arlington train station is not in Arlington, it’s in the middle of downtown. Harvard Square is not a square, it’s more like a pentagon. There are four different green line train routes, and they’re labeled B for Boston College, C for Cleveland Circle, D for… Riverside, and E for… Heath Street. The Silver line is listed on the train map but is entirely run on buses which have to be connected and disconnected from power lines every time you go through the route. The Blue line goes to (and I’m not joking) Wonderland. The two red lines are labeled for their southern points: Braintree line goes to Braintree, and the Ashmont line goes to… Mattapan. To be fair, the train itself stops in Ashmont and you continue to Mattapan on a trolley, but that doesn't make it better. South Station and North Station are 1 mile apart and the easiest way to get from one to the other is just to walk it because otherwise you have to travel through 4 or 5 train stops on two different lines. But make sure you memorize the route because there's a good chance your gps will lose signal in the Financial district because it can't get through the buildings. In Boston Commons there are two train stops within line of sight of each other, on the same street, and one of them screams. To get to the trains at Porter Square, you have to ride down escalators 105 feet below street level, or you could just take the 3 flights of stairs totaling 199 steps (presumably because the engineers had something against nice even numbers). The North End is south of East Boston. Castle Island is part of the mainland.

No matter where you're going or how you're getting there, it takes 45 minutes (no wrong turns) or an hour and a half (one wrong turn). It doesn't matter if you're going one stop on a train; it will take 45 minutes. If it's summer, there's a better than 50% chance you'll be in the train car that lost it's AC; if it's winter, you're guaranteed to be in the car where the heat has it up to 80 degrees and the inside of your winter coat will be a sauna. Check the Red Sox schedule before you go south of the river, or you'll be trapped in the waves of baseball fans flooding the streets and days will go by before you're found again. And just... don't go outside on September 1.

If you're thinking that this sounds eldritch as shit, you're right. The entire city is an arcane lock keeping the ghoulies and ghosties from haunting the rest of the nation. We charge it with every "fuck" we utter while we travel our labyrinthine paths and drink our Dunks. You're welcome.

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if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do... research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?

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lots of people seem to fundamentally be unable to acquire any notion that politics is anti-inductive and will just burn them hotter than they burn it, yes no matter how much fire they light

and unlike playing the stock market, being Politically Active is considered a virtue in our culture, for various reasons including our Sense of Justice being exploitable by the social media machine, our Founding Fathers having been greco-romeaboos, etc.

so it's much harder to have a shared cultural understanding that being too involved in politics should make you lose status, like betting too much in the stock market

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I need people to realise that, if everyone is a legal adult, age gaps in a vacuum are literally fine, and that predatory behaviour is defined by a situational power dynamic in how two people interact rather than being something you can diagnose from two numbers.

I'm tired of people who have only had a couple of sexual partners in their life and still live with a high school mentality where everyone exists in their own discrete social bubble where everyone outside of like a 2-3 year age difference is in a completely alien and incompatible peer group to stop yelling at people who realise that sex doesn't have to be a big deal, actually, and are totally unaware of (or implicitly condemn) contexts that allow adults of all ages to interact as sexual peers.

If you go to fetish events and sex parties there will be 18-24 year olds and 50-65 year olds naked in the same room. This is inevitable because it would be extremely bizarre to have any age criteria for such events other than "is a legal adult who can consent to sex", or to start excluding people from existing too far from some nebulous age norm.

These two groups of people will intermix. They will have no idea how old each other are. They will interact mutually as peers. Sometimes a 30 year old will cuff a 20 year old to a cross, or a 45 year old guy will suck off a 22 year old in a cruising club dark room and they won't even know what the person looks like let alone what "life stage" they are in, and then everyone will go home and it will be fine because everyone consented and got what the wanted out of the interaction and nobody was exploited.

Like this stuff happens! I feel like there are some people here who have a very fearful and inexperienced outlook on the adult sexual landscape and are quick to project that into pretty dangerous and damning blanket statements that speak more to their own perspective and neuroses than anything else. And it kind of sucks!

This is not to say that a full romantic relationship with an expectation of mutual support between people in different life stages is a good idea and yes that can be predatory and/or exploitative but like. Come on! I need people to have more nuance than this!

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awayfromdatascience.com is taken, I've been checking since 2022.

Due to recent experiences, I am feeling an urge to make an anti-drug-style PSA except it's warning impressionable machine-learning-curious teens to never, ever try a thing called "Huggingface transformers Trainer"

Not. Even. Once.

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Young human children, at the very least, are important moral patients because they are sentient, without being sapient. AFAIK this was first clearly described by Jean Piaget, although he didn't use those words [or their French cognates, AFAIK].

i am on my knees tears running down my face knuckles raw and bleeding and BEGGING people to learn the difference between sentient and sapient

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You've never heard of a celebrity being forgiving to somebody who had a parasocial relationship with them, who came up to them and said something kind of weird and presumptuous and offensive/annoying?

Richard Siken… Richard Fucking Siken. You asked RICHARD SIKEN if his poems were inspired by BUDDIE. Gay men do not exist in people’s heads except as props huh?

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im fresh outta advil, Jesus grab the wheel

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Dracula to some extent is real, but people disagree so much on what he's like that he's an incredibly leaky abstraction. The Christian God, too.

The Onceler, on the other hand,

vampirebicth said: gods are real. all of them. they have an impact on the world around them - they change laws, inspire cruelty and charity, comfort people and cast them out. real communities are built around them, some of the last still sticking around. people devote their whole lives to them, make art for them, pray to them before they do anything else to fix things. just because we made them doesn’t mean that they’re not real.

yes and Marvel characters are also this real, although hopefully have inspired fewer murders (so far).

obviously fictional characters, literary devices, and even mathematical abstractions are “real” in the sense that they are instantiated in the minds of human beings and encoded in speech acts and books and movies without being real in the sense of being agents that actually exist and act in the world outside of people thinking about them.

the mosquito that sucks my blood exists and does things even when I’m not observing it, but Dracula only exists in our thoughts and words.

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> individual humans do very much exist in the world and "humans" are an abstract category over those real things, and that abstract category is instantiated in our minds (and our books and other communications etc.)

s/humans/dollars

dollars exist in this same way!

vampirebicth said: gods are real. all of them. they have an impact on the world around them - they change laws, inspire cruelty and charity, comfort people and cast them out. real communities are built around them, some of the last still sticking around. people devote their whole lives to them, make art for them, pray to them before they do anything else to fix things. just because we made them doesn’t mean that they’re not real.

yes and Marvel characters are also this real, although hopefully have inspired fewer murders (so far).

obviously fictional characters, literary devices, and even mathematical abstractions are “real” in the sense that they are instantiated in the minds of human beings and encoded in speech acts and books and movies without being real in the sense of being agents that actually exist and act in the world outside of people thinking about them.

the mosquito that sucks my blood exists and does things even when I’m not observing it, but Dracula only exists in our thoughts and words.

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I think the indoor vs outdoor CO₂ difference is a big deal, to me at least. Probably not everyone is as sensitive to it. But for me, something about outdoor air, I think low CO₂, is important to emotional equilibrium. It got cold enough that I have to close my windows, uh-oh

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No offense but I think some of you would be a lot happier writing a fictional atlas or encyclopedia instead of a narrative story

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hi, i’m your local laid off discord employee, here to talk about exactly how safe it may or may not be to talk about Political Activism on discord. my credentials here are that i was a senior member of discord’s trust & safety team, which is the team that handles bans, legal investigations, and legal compliance. (my speciality was in child safety, anti-grooming, and taking down CSAM, but i also worked occasionally in low level terrorism issues and assisted that team in investigations.) i also know most of the people still working there in these capacities.

the tldr and most important thing to know is: i do not recommend you plan, discuss plans, or use any kind of hyperbolic (or not) language about violence to government officials or anyone in that vicinity on discord. please use signal instead.

a discord trust & safety employee is technically able to see any message you’ve sent under your account, going all the way back to the beginning of your account. unless you have manually deleted a message, it is viewable to a tns employee. now: it is a tremendous part of being on a tns team that we did NOT invade user privacy without cause. cause was usually: another user reported something you said, and we thought the reported message indicated you might be doing something elsewhere that was illegal (for example: a user says “i’m talking to this girl but she’s in high school lol.” i would then try to find evidence as to whether or not there was a child safety issue there. in this example, we’d require clear admission of age from both the user and the alleged high school girl, and then clear evidence of sexual talk between them, and go from there.) finding evidence required looking though all of that user’s messages.

most of the tns team, as i know them, are pretty resolute about not going further in looking than would be needed for action. most of the tns team that i still speak to is very much on the side of blue. your general conversations are probably perfectly safe, and we were very good at figuring out quickly if someone has reported you maliciously. i don’t believe you need to worry too much about your porn and fanfic and all that.

HOWEVER: reported content must be investigated, and discord can, and has been, legally subpoenaed to turn over user information. again, this has nominally been in Very Evil cases (CSAM and grooming, school shooting threats, murder admissions, etc.) but that could change, either at the federal level, or at the discord policy level. discord, like any social media company, could easily be pressured or forced into taking on different internal policies that could get you in serious trouble if you are organizing violent or “illegal” resistance. if that happens, there is a scenario where this incoming administration is given access to your messages.

again: please do not organize your political or social resistance on discord from now on. please use signal to ensure your maximum safety. do not panic if you have already talks about things on discord: you can easily delete your messages, and that WILL remove from an employee’s view. do that and use signal from now on.

stay safe. i love you. 💕

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What about the truth value of the statement "I am driving a car"? Physics makes no distinction between car-ness and non-car-ness; if all humans suddenly vanished from Earth tomorrow, physics would not particularly continue to notice the presence of cars, as distinct from trucks, tractors, and the rest of matter following the universal, uniform laws of how quanta, forces, time, and space interact. Without any observers, cars would not particularly continue to be real.

Are they real now?

vampirebicth said: gods are real. all of them. they have an impact on the world around them - they change laws, inspire cruelty and charity, comfort people and cast them out. real communities are built around them, some of the last still sticking around. people devote their whole lives to them, make art for them, pray to them before they do anything else to fix things. just because we made them doesn’t mean that they’re not real.

yes and Marvel characters are also this real, although hopefully have inspired fewer murders (so far).

obviously fictional characters, literary devices, and even mathematical abstractions are “real” in the sense that they are instantiated in the minds of human beings and encoded in speech acts and books and movies without being real in the sense of being agents that actually exist and act in the world outside of people thinking about them.

the mosquito that sucks my blood exists and does things even when I’m not observing it, but Dracula only exists in our thoughts and words.