Reblog if its ok to spam you with boops

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.

unfortunately, a lot of the userbase won't opt out. those who don't see this post, those who have posted to tumblr but don't anymore, users on older versions of the app who forget to opt out next time they're on desktop, etc. the point of making it opt-out is to take advantage of people who wouldn't have opted in but don't/can't opt out in time. automatically opting out people who have discouraged search crawling is a gesture that helps Tumblr look more kind, but from the fact that everyone else has to manually opt out, Tumblr is definitely not looking benevolent.

I wonder, will Tumblr/Automattic be selling images from deactivated blogs? I assume deactivated blogs can't opt out.

when will they start selling this data? Is it already too late to keep them from selling every image you've posted before you opted out?

and if they're especially malicious, I wonder if they could get away with saying "this image is from a blog that's opted out, but it was reblogged by a blog that hasn't opted out, so we're selling the image that's on that non-opted-out blog."

making users need to opt out to keep their images from being taken and sold is a shitty move that makes it clear Tumblr/Automattic don't respect our privacy, and @staff are really not giving us much info here to suggest otherwise.

An explanation.

OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

;-;

Anyone crying over this needs to think about how insufferable a dragon raised by a seagull would be

You bring French fries onto the beach. You angrily shoo away seagulls that predictably try to grab them. A HUGE shadow swoops over you.

Ok, the last two are new additions to me, and I am LOVING it

Scarlet-rumped Trogon (Harpactes duvaucelii), male, family Trogonidae, found in SE Asia

photograph by ardpixtures

Bro literally said >:(

@crowcryptid I love this

Spoilers!!

Alastor and Husk confrontation scene from Ep 5

matthew lillard the equivalent of a scream queen but for the killers. like if i find out he's in a slasher film i already know he's gonna be doing the most cuntiest kills

a post about when someone tags someone else on your post

love and beauty in the tags of this post. we are all humans and loving is all we can hope to do on this earth

went to see if my late package maybe showed up without being scanned

but the post man yesterday said it would be here at ooooooooooone

is 9…………. post office closing time…….  no pkg……………………………………………………… >:C

well at least i can skip my post office visit tomorrow

i mean what did i expect really

a package?

too unrealistic

amazon sent me a replacement for my lost package and it “arrived” today

omg she recognized me immediately and got nervous with me while checking the system using my name

she was just as distraught as me when it turned up “arriving tomorrow” again but then she had another idea

mail is dumb

The mail lady saying “NO. I REFUSE to say it again” was more climactic than the Braveheart speech.

oh my gosh, op’s bio says “The package was a laptop” which gives SUCH a new perspective

So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

This is it. This is when we reached peak AI

This is why aliens don’t want us in their Starfleet.

Are you fucking kidding this is why aliens should be begging us to join their Starfleet. The precision?? The CONTROL?? The absolute mastery this driver has over their 20+ ton of steel is superhuman. This person could weave a mothership through an asteroid belt without making a single scratch on the hull. Foh “aliens don’t want us” aliens should be sucking our dicks.

Thinking about vampirism in D&D again... Considering the tadpole shut down most of the abilities Astarion's just taken for granted for about 200 years, as discussed by him and Shadowheart:

Well, Astarion is probably used to watching his injuries start closing up the moment he gets them. This whole thing where wounds just stay open, potentially kill you and hurt all day is a new one. I wonder if he worked out his regeneration was nullified before he got himself severely injured... His assessment of damage might be a bit out of practice.

There's also the fact that vampires have supernaturally boosted physical capabilities; the default vampire spawn strength score is more along the lines of 16.

While I am attached to Astarion's horrible noodly score of 8, the concept of him absentmindedly trying to lift things far too heavy for him without vampirism giving him an edge is funny (and honestly could very well tie in to discovering the lack of regeneration when he hurts himself). His reflexes are still good, but they would've been better so he probably finds himself quite clumsy.

His senses of sight, hearing and smell might've gotten duller too (if he complains about this nobody is going to have sympathy - he's an elf, he has the sharpest senses by default). His sense of touch, on the other hand, might've been restored (it's duller for the undead). You know what will make Astarion's already charming attitude [affectionate-and-derogatory] better? Overstimulation.

And after he adjusts the tadpole is removed, and it's back to the adjustment period.

Assorted things Astarion hates that amused me, for some reason, gathered from the dialogue files and written down, I'm not fussing around with screenshots and picture editing right now.

Art:

Toys and apparently their owners aren't held in high esteem, either

Using his brain (ie, Puzzles)

Curious Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) standing upright and looking through porthole into the kitchen of arctic expedition ship M/S Stockholm in Svalbard, Spitsbergen, Norway by Andy Rouse               

Hahaha that’s great. By the way, this is the picture of him with his head in.

the upside of ADHD is that it makes you a fucking genius

the downside is that you don't get to decide when and for how long you're a genius.

Or what you are going to be a genius about.

You have a big work project?

Nah. You're now a genius at making boardgames. For 7 hours.

My family has started calling my cat "the beast" which is very funny considering she's a 19yo arthritic old lady who needs help up and down the stairs. Not to mention she doesn't really meow any more, just sits and stares at you, and im the only one who can reliably guess what she wants, so my parents are constantly messaging me "The beast awakens... I know not what she desires 😥😥" i feel like the chosen prophet of an eldritch god

Nay, verily... I have noted the position of the stars, and determined rather that The Beast Hungers... for her nightly plate of wet food

@calamitytrios @shitposting-hobbits-to-gallifrey The people have spoken

Behold, The Beast

this scene from the goes wrong show where they cast two different people as the head and hunky, semi-nude body of the same character during a live theatre production haunts my every waking moment

Now THIS is physical comedy

It’s that time of year again.