I need your help! If you have been better than me at saving/bookmarking good threads, blogs, articles etc. explaining how LLMs function scientifically or critiquing/assessing their use in a complex way (ie not just calling them “plagiarism machines,” tho I do agree), can you share your links here?

since oscilloscope graphics are doing the rounds again, here's some photos from that time a few years ago when I built a gizmo to show dril tweets (and assorted other nonsense) on my ancient Tek 466

Earwormed by @josie.zone with an excellent comic adaptation of Jack & Diane Now it’s everyone’s problem m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QX5...

Jack and Diane but most of the lyrics are "suckin' on a chili dog"

YouTube video by Tom McGovern

m.youtube.com

Wild what powerful people will just straight-up say on the record.

The Wall Street Journal@wsj.com · 16h ago

New York City’s business elites are long accustomed to direct access to City Hall, where even Democratic mayors felt the need to court the city’s wealthiest and most influential corporate leaders. That access is getting shredded by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

A pereceptive reader pointed out problems with some of my claims RE: Tolkien's support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. I've issued a correction and edited accordingly. When people notice holes in our work, it’s important to be honest and fix them, especially when they complicate our arguments.

Tom Emanuel@realtomemanuel.bsky.social · 2d ago

You've probably noticed that a lot of right-wing ghouls love The Lord of the Rings: Giorgia Meloni, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, many such cases. In my latest essay, I set out to put neofascist affinity for Tolkien in religious and historical context - and to show why the far right gets Tolkien wrong.

Promise???

Charlie Stross@cstross.bsky.social · 9h ago

My answer is LOL ROFL (dickbrain) The terminally AI-pilled can't even *imagine* some people have *never* asked stochastic parrots to cheat at their job for them.

Ok and one more quick thing before I move onto the actual story. I also had a cube prim av. It literally looked like the default cube build object. I would hide in people's builds and watch them freak out when they couldn't select or move me. Ain't no God like a trickster God.

Ok, it's friday night and thanks to @defaultfriend.bsky.social's cursed Gorean Culture class idea that very much needs to happen, I will use this prompt to repost my story of having to be tech support for Goreans when I was at Linden Lab as a developer of Second Life. 🧵 follows

Katherine Dee@defaultfriend.bsky.social · 2y ago

Would anyone be interested in this if I did it for real?

I think of this line every time my dog dives into the snow

15. Rec and review: Monarchs of the Sea by @dannastaaf.bsky.social. Want to learn some WILD shit about prehistoric tentacle weirdos and their shells? Want to fall in love with the author's childhood pet octopus? Do it, do it NAOW

The next time someone groans at one of my puns I am going to haughtily note that puns are WORD MAGIC. SO THERE.

David M. Perry@lollardfish.bsky.social · 3h ago

" puns in Greek literature serve a somewhat different purpose from puns in the present day. Today, people often see puns as the lowest form of humor, but, in early Greek literature, puns are more like word magic" neat. I did not know this.

Agender computer scientist arguing that they're heterosexual by definition because it's only gay if personA.gender == personB.gender and in any SENSIBLY typed high-level language null == null does not evaluate to true.

Bro if you want NSFW accounts to keep existing you might wanna know about threats to the sector. The gummint and the payment processors are coming for your titty pics

Hypno-Scream (Comms Open)❤️🩷💜@hypnoscream.bsky.social · last mo.

Saw a post saying "I don't want NSFW accounts to talk about voting, just let me jack off" Buddy, NSFW artists and sex workers are being constantly attacked by a government of nonces trying to distract from their own crimes by pinning the blame on porn. They have the right to speak up about this.

And I have to clarify that American mistletoe (Phoradendron leucarpum) is different from European mistletoe (Viscum album). The latter is named for a sticky glue-like substance called "birdlime", in Latin 'viscum', from which we derive "viscous". Old English 'lim' meant "glue". Bird glue.

MIKE TAKES DOWN MORE BAD INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT WORK, YEAHHHHHH

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 4h ago

Pretty obvious I am working through some of my former-development-worker trauma with this one

one thing that i found both enchanting and upsetting was becoming old enough (i.e. reaching the age of approximately 18) to learn that pre-scriptural religion does not tend to be codified and as such contains a lot of crap like this where a particular belief exists only in a particular area/time

David M. Perry@lollardfish.bsky.social · 4h ago

"For instance, the Odyssey is the only surviving Greek literary work from the Archaic Period that describes a marriage between Aphrodite and Hephaistos; every other surviving source from this period takes for granted that Aphrodite is unmarried." I did not know this

I hear squeaking, squeaking in the air Think a little doggy's having playtime over there

Winter is for eating like a peasant (torn bread, cheese, questionable pickle), summer is for eating like a bear (pound of blueberries and pikachu shaped goldfish someone was throwing out)

Bugs Bunny is the direct descendent of unhinged medieval marginalia rabbits.

honestly, the fact that we have made it through the atomic age *without* another use of nuclear weapons since 1945 is a miracle we don't fully appreciate

Rebecca R Helm@rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · 20h ago

Today is the day the story There Will Come Soft Rain is set. An amazing and heartbreaking work of fiction for our modern age. Read it here:

I thought that came in the Sigma-Eldritch catalog

psssst anyone have any recommendations for queer romances with characters dealing with chronic pain, *preferably* historical

If the Odyssey has you getting excited about epic poetry, ancient history, and what happens when an oral story gets written down, we have a Lingthusiasm episode for you!

Lingthusiasm - Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral...

Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing othe...

lingthusiasm.com

whoever invented the Wikipedia disambiguation page and the extensive use of "Not to be confused with" was a hero of our age

happy bisexual visibility day

Dogofthedesert@dogofthedesert.bsky.social · 21h ago

Who says guys don't look good in pink and purple? Here's a male roseate skimmer (Orthemis ferruginea) in the Corrales Bosque on August 4, 2026. #nature #naturephotography #dragonfly

Town-building sim set in a post-soulslike milieu where you recruit villagers by prying environmental storytelling skeletons off of giant spikes and rehabilitating them.