every july. every fucking july this post gets reblogged to shit. why. why does this god forsaken website love egg. i gave egg a voice in 2013 and it always comes back. i try to forget egg. i bury egg as far as i can but somehow someone always finds fucking egg post. this post could be dead for months but it always managed to come back like some sort of zombie egg. enough egg. no more egg. fuck eg
I now have this scheduled to reblog every year on July 1st at exactly midnight
IN A DISTANT and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part …
See …
“GNU Sir Terry Pratchett” - L-Space Wiki / Ursula K. LeGuin / “Terry Pratchett” - Wikipedia / “GNU” - Urban Dictionary / Going Postal by Terry Pratchett / Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett / Brandon Sanderson / Paul Kidby / The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
Do you think those cat/dogs learning to talk with buttons thing is actually accurate? I know even primates apparently dont know how to parse human words (with regards to sign language) so i struggle to understand why dogs or cats suddenly understand complex english
They don’t actually understand what the buttons mean. These animals aren’t capable of processing language like we humans do and they tend to react more to your tone and visual cues then the actual words you’re saying.
The buttons are just very basic operant conditioning. I very basic form of cognition in animals. They press the buttons because they are rewarded for doing so, not because they actually understand the meaning behind the buttons.
You can see in those videos (they do usually edit it out, but sometimes the creator of these videos just outright admits it) that it can take their pet something like 15 - 20 minutes to respond via the buttons.
Claims that the pets are asking questions ect. feel very staged / trained (like the below for example). Remember these videos are all coming from people on tiktok and people will do anything for a bit of internet fame. Scientific research has shown that dogs do not pass the “mirror test” but the mirror test is a very outdated way to show self-recognition in animals.
You compare this to the language studies done by Pepperberg with African Grey Parrots like Alex; in which they were able to ask questions they weren’t already trained to ask, form sentences they weren’t previously trained to do, display self-recognition (via asking what colour they were), could understand syntax and form their own words eg. Alex called apples “banerries”, a combination of “banana” and “cherry”, two fruits he was more familiar with.
I prefer not to touch on koko the gorilla because that research is already pretty widely criticised with a lack of actual data, and there was evidence of the Clever Hans effect (her trainers’ unconscious cues were prompting her to display specific signs).
I lecture on this, and my students are always very disappointed when I have to explain this.
Thing is, it IS communication. Dogs are clever enough to learn, via operant conditioning, that certain words are linked with certain events or behaviours - pretty much anyone who has ever owned a dog can tell you that they learn what “dinner” and “walk” will lead to without you teaching them. These buttons definitely allow clearer communication between dog and owner. But that’s not quite the same thing as them understanding the words themselves.
One of the early examples from Stella, the pioneering dog with these buttons, was her owner asking her what order she wanted to eat, play, and go for a walk. Stella responds by pressing those three buttons, and the owner claims this is her expressing her preference. But here’s the problem: dogs have never yet been found to have sufficient cognition to understand the concept of future states vs present properly. If we believe Stella was genuinely weighing up her options and deciding she wanted to go for a walk before she has dinner and then spend the evening playing, then we are assuming she is capable of an unscientific level of future planning that her species lacks the neurology for. What’s more likely is that she’s simply repeating the words she just recognised in the moment - she knows that “eat”, “play” and “walk” are all good things, and so she repeats them back in the hopes she’ll get them. She has no concept of what order they’ll come in. She’s just hoping for all three, and also, she knows that her owner gets weirdly happy when she presses the buttons, and Stella is the goodest girl who deserves many treats.
The problem is that humans are very taken in and very easily fooled by words. We know what words mean, and we have trouble with the idea that an animal using them doesn’t. One of Stella’s videos shows her pressing the buttons for “good” and “bye” when one of her owners leaves the house, which was suggested as evidence she was creating the word “goodbye”. It’s straight-up nonsense - that’s a ridiculously advanced level of cognition and linguistic capability that dogs are absolutely not capable of, but if you want to see a talking dog, you’ll see a talking dog. Stella pressed two unrelated buttons, and they happened to sound like an English word - so, that’s what the human brain sees.
But, these boards are absolutely a great communication tool between dog and owner, since they do give the dog the ability to communicate a basic level of wants and desires in the moment, and that’s a good thing! They just aren’t speech, and it’s easy to see something that isn’t there.
My dad used to drive us around all the steel mills and refineries outside of Gary and Chicago when we were little. I have loved them ever since. I feel the same bliss as when I look at a beautiful castle.
Painting I made inspired by the refineries
OP I live near a place full of chemical refineries and I too have old memories of late-night car rides past the massive buildings sparkling in the night. Thank you for reminding me.
I’m all for going about queerness with the goal of not being able to be understood by outsiders but like. you’ve GOT to be normal about aro & ace people if you do. you can’t go on about being confusing to cishets for fun and then complain about ace & aro people who go about sex and romance and attraction in ways that don’t make sense to you.
supporting queerness that confuses others should include queerness that confuses YOU too even if you’re queer yourself.
“Why don’t people recognize Link in TOTK” bc everyone imagines the legendary swordsman to be built like Ganondorf and Link doesn’t bother correcting anyone bc being hailed as a hero is like on the bottom of his priorities, which are topped by things like “Bake one of every pie”
Rando farmer: They say that once the noble hero of legend passed by this very village! Isn’t that wonderful to imagine, genderfluid stranger?
Link, 5'6" with 2" heels and wearing a backless dress suspiciously stained with blood: no yeah that’s wild
“Wouldn’t they recognize him bc he’s with Zelda” Everyone interacting with Zelda was like “Wow, the princess!! The princess who saved Hyrule is here, talking to us! Plus some guy with three sets of pronouns who’s building a bomb but more importantly The Princess!! Wow!!”
ALT
Zelda keeps coming across spare genders she doesn’t need and Link follows behind scooping them all up off the ground like a starving trash possum
the great reddit API meltdown of ‘23, or: this was always bound to happen
there’s a lot of press about what’s going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven’t seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.
disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you’ll at least find all this interesting.
profit now or profit later
before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that’s helped me contextualize some of this stuff.
(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia’s been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what’s important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it’s solicited via donations or it’s just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.
(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of “everything on the internet used to be this way” because I don’t think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money’s always been trading hands, obvious or not. it’s indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren’t trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)
(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the “make money now” part is obvious, so these things don’t feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one’s shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW’s been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.
(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you’d think. “make money later” is more or less the entire startup business model—I’ll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as “selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop.”
companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).
so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back…
(an addendum) you’re free to take this as an anticapitalist critique, because it is, but I also just realized that I merely gestured at some of my key feelings on this whole thing and want to state them clearly: specifically that while capitalist market forces may be responsible for reddit’s possible demise, those capitalist market forces are equally responsible for reddit’s creation and continued existence—for better or for worse. and so I don’t think it’s possible to fix reddit (or really, the internet as we know it) by surgically removing the capitalism from its core; reddit has only been chugging along for as long as it has thanks to a literal billion dollars in VC funding and untold amounts of unpaid moderator labor. what we’re seeing now is the most logical way they can close that loop. poorly handled or otherwise, an IPO was always on the horizon.
which is also why I chafe against the “the internet before capitalism tainted it” narrative: it comes packaged with an assumption that that’s something we can return to, despite that narrative being largely fantasy (and, even if it wasn’t, describes a time when the internet operated on a much different scale). a Better Internet is something new we have to envision and create, not something old we can fall back onto, and I think it would be radically different from the internet we use now. even the free and open-source tools that people herald as our anticapitalist escape hatch really aren’t, and can’t be, especially considering how many of them rely on serious corporate funding in addition to regular old donations and volunteer work. (super duper kicking myself for not including this as an example of Type One Websites lol.)
let me close with an anecdote: I’ve seen a lot of comments on hacker news bemoaning the current state of reddit, and rightfully so… but many of those comments also hold up hacker news itself as one of the last bastions of the open net (i.e., free and no ads) and brainstorm aloud about ways to build a reddit alternative that follows the same principles.
except hacker news is only free and ad-less because it’s a glorified billboard for y combinator, the very same giant VC firm that gave reddit their first $100k in seed funding (plus quite a bit more down the line). and no one on hacker news ever acknowledges this! which is crazymaking on so many fucking levels! like, reddit’s current predicament is ultimately VC firms’ investments coming home to roost, and one of the last so-called free and open forums left is just another VC entity that openly states itself as such (its domain is literally news.ycombinator.com), and a bunch of extremely techy people who’ve been getting in flame wars longer than I’ve been alive are still scratching their heads wondering why we can’t simply figure out how to do Websites, But Free and Good.
Oh my fucking god , do you know how many times am I going to link to this post as the introduction to anything I could talk about the tech bullshit world?
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