#BUT STILL

[ibreathebooks-42]

This reminds me how everyone is always bemused by the fact I take notes during HOA meetings

(when we manage to wrangle the cats they are enough to have one, but that is a different matter)

"But Steve is the secretary, he's taking the minutes, why would you need your own notes?!"

Well Bob, first of all I happen to think it is a good idea to have a reference of what I (or more importantly you Bob) said I'd do so I can look back at it later when writing up my todo list

Second of all, I love Steve, really I do, but his minutes tend to a) be lacking in the details and b) sometimes never actually get sent out to anyone before they get lost. So my copy of the meeting ends up being what people refer to when they are bewildered by the fact that something hasn't been fixed yet and are trying to figure out who was supposed to be responsible. (It was you Bob, you said you'd do it, I have the notes from the meeting plus the emails from me months later checking in on you to see if you'd done anything...)

And of course since apparently no-one else really understands record keeping, if I didn't take notes there would be no notes.

Someone at an old job asked why I wanted to write up the meeting minutes for our team and I said 'i wanna control the narrative' and they were like 'what' and I pointed out that no one was gonna remember what we said in six months and so my interpretation of the meeting would dictate the assumed reality of what happened

"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"

That's how several coworkers decided I was a supervillain and how I learned several coworkers didn't understand record keeping as like a CONCEPT

[zombieshaveheartstoo]

Geoff’s comment on a clip of gerard singing demolition lovers

[vos-videmus]

spend the day

[stylinson-spagghetti]

"dont tell me you're not the same person. youre always my husband and ive been waiting.. waiting..." i sing, knowing full well that i have 0 love interests and an even lesser amount of patience

[rattinahatt]

I bring more of them

[bunningchaos]

[fullyfazed]

Hey so we all know this is Philza's second bout with big ol' eyeballs but I've yet to see that it's also Sneegs second time as well

[aakeysmash]

Btw just wanted you guys to know that writing smut does in fact bore me a lot. Fluff is delicate, intricate, sometimes complicated; angst leaves you on the edge of your seat sweating and biting your nails… smut? Smut is boring. Yaaaawn i’m gonna let talented people deal with it

[terrys-min-catl]

Okay, cecilos. No context

(reblog pls. me want active. at least some active)

[noodles-and-tea]

I think this was funnier when I sketched it at 2am.

[ineffablefool]

Excellent, I knew someone else would have transcribed Ked's tags (in the alt text). USAian public school students, seriously, memorize that shit so you can exercise your rights with confidence.

Also, Tinker v Des Moines may be of interest -- silent or otherwise non disruptive forms of protest, e.g. wearing a black armband, are legally protected same as opting out of the Pledge.

These are two of my favorite Supreme Court cases.

dear usamerican high schoolers looking for a way to resist fascism: sit through the pledge of allegiance.

no getting up. no looking at the flag.

everyone will be looking at you. you'll be sweating like a fucking hippopotamus. your teacher will sternly tell you to get up. you'll feel stupid and that maybe its not worth it because you're just a kid in a classroom. but I'm here to remind you that there are no real life consequences to detention. there are however real life consequences to resisting a thoughtless performance of nationalism.

[chuckecheeses]

So much color and tone variation just in the simple and humble domestic shorthair black kitty…

[lumsel]

chinese room 2

So there’s this guy, right? He sits in a room by himself, with a computer and a keyboard full of Chinese characters. He doesn’t know Chinese, though, in fact he doesn’t even realise that Chinese is a language. He just thinks it’s a bunch of odd symbols. Anyway, the computer prints out a paragraph of Chinese, and he thinks, whoa, cool shapes. And then a message is displayed on the computer monitor: which character comes next?

This guy has no idea how the hell he’s meant to know that, so he just presses a random character on the keyboard. And then the computer goes BZZZT, wrong! The correct character was THIS one, and it flashes a character on the screen. And the guy thinks, augh, dammit! I hope I get it right next time. And sure enough, computer prints out another paragraph of Chinese, and then it asks the guy, what comes next?

He guesses again, and he gets it wrong again, and he goes augh again, and this carries on for a while. But eventually, he presses the button and it goes DING! You got it right this time! And he is so happy, you have no idea. This is the best day of his life. He is going to do everything in his power to make that machine go DING again. So he starts paying attention. He looks at the paragraph of Chinese printed out by the machine, and cross-compares it against all the other paragraphs he’s gotten. And, recall, this guy doesn’t even know that this is a language, it’s just a sequence of weird symbols to him. But it’s a sequence that forms patterns. He notices that if a particular symbol is displayed, then the next symbol is more likely to be this one. He notices some symbols are more common in general. Bit by bit, he starts to draw statistical inferences about the symbols, he analyses the printouts every way he can, he writes extensive notes to himself on how to recognise the patterns.

Over time, his guesses begin to get more and more accurate. He hears those lovely DING sounds that indicate his prediction was correct more and more often, and he manages to use that to condition his instincts better and better, picking up on cues consciously and subconsciously to get better and better at pressing the right button on the keyboard. Eventually, his accuracy is like 70% or something -- pretty damn good for a guy who doesn’t even know Chinese is a language.

* * *

One day, something odd happens.

He gets a printout, the machine asks what character comes next, and he presses a button on the keyboard and-- silence. No sound at all. Instead, the machine prints out the exact same sequence again, but with one small change. The character he input on the keyboard has been added to the end of the sequence.

Which character comes next?

This weirds the guy out, but he thinks, well. This is clearly a test of my prediction abilities. So I’m not going to treat this printout any differently to any other printout made by the machine -- shit, I’ll pretend that last printout I got? Never even happened. I’m just going to keep acting like this is a normal day on the job, and I’m going to predict the next symbol in this sequence as if it was one of the thousands of printouts I’ve seen before. And that’s what he does! He presses what symbol comes next, and then another printout comes out with that symbol added to the end, and then he presses what he thinks will be the next symbol in that sequence. And then, eventually, he thinks, “hm. I don’t think there’s any symbol after this one. I think this is the end of the sequence.” And so he presses the “END” button on his keyboard, and sits back, satisfied.

Unbeknownst to him, the sequence of characters he input wasn’t just some meaningless string of symbols. See, the printouts he was getting, they were all always grammatically correct Chinese. And that first printout he’d gotten that day in particular? It was a question: “How do I open a door.” The string of characters he had just input, what he had determined to be the most likely string of symbols to come next, formed a comprehensible response that read, “You turn the handle and push”.

* * *

One day you decide to visit this guy’s office. You’ve heard he’s learning Chinese, and for whatever reason you decide to test his progress. So you ask him, “Hey, which character means dog?”

He looks at you like you’ve got two heads. You may as well have asked him which of his shoes means “dog”, or which of the hairs on the back of his arm. There’s no connection in his mind at all between language and his little symbol prediction game, indeed, he thinks of it as an advanced form of mathematics rather than anything to do with linguistics. He hadn’t even conceived of the idea that what he was doing could be considered a kind of communication any more than algebra is. He says to you, “Buddy, they’re just funny symbols. No need to get all philosophical about it.”

Suddenly, another printout comes out of the machine. He stares at it, puzzles over it, but you can tell he doesn’t know what it says. You do, though. You’re fluent in the language. You can see that it says the words, “Do you actually speak Chinese, or are you just a guy in a room doing statistics and shit?”

The guy leans over to you, and says confidently, “I know it looks like a jumble of completely random characters. But it’s actually a very sophisticated mathematical sequence,” and then he presses a button on the keyboard. And another, and another, and another, and slowly but surely he composes a sequence of characters that, unbeknownst to him, reads “Yes, I know Chinese fluently! If I didn’t I would not be able to speak with you.”

That is how ChatGPT works.

[arguablysomaya]

this picture is pretty funny because bruce is destroying slade but my guy ur expensive ass home is this only thing keeping u from being in the exact same position 😭

[enjoylentgreen]

i also moved from the east to west, and tried to buy one of those little covered butter dishes that you put it in to have it room temp when you want? THE FAT ONES DONT FIT

you wanna know something that fucks me up when i think about it. what really fucks me up. that the west coast of the us has different butter than the east coast. like it’s an entirely different shape. when i learned that my brain metaphorically exploded. something as fundamental and constant as butter is completely different based on whether you grew up in oregon or south carolina. where is the divide. why doesn’t anyone talk about this. oh fuck i’m thinking about the east/west butter divide again i gotta calm down