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or what's a heaven for?

@jiskblr / jiskblr.tumblr.com

“WHAT IS THE CORRECT LEVEL OF INJUSTICE AT WHICH TO DECLARE YOURSELF IN REBELLION AGAINST THE POWER METING OUT JUDGMENT IN THE UNIVERSE?”

I know it’s too late to ask but would you have allowed my favourite English-sounding non-English arguably-a-word Prisencolinensinainciusol to participate in the tournament if it got submitted?

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Hmmm, that's tricky, but I think I'm gonna have to say no. Since it doesn't really have a meaning and isn't really used outside the song, i dont know if i would. Its a very uncanny song though (meant to sound like English, but its gibberish). Y'all should watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQDY3HFkh_Y Thanks for asking though! That was a tricky one. (Also if you can give me a good enough reason to include it I might change my mind.)

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Oll raigh!

Learning that part of Elizabeth Holmes' megalomania was making everyone read "The Alchemist" making me ask:

If you were an egomaniacal tech startup entrepreneur, what book would you foist upon your minions?

I feel like going proper obscure would probably be somewhat incompatible with success as an egomaniacal startup entrepreneur, so in the spirit of going with something fairly well-known like Coelho’s book, I’ll say The Name of The Rose.

Trying desperately to come up with an answer that's an actual book but deep down I know that it would absolutely have to be Homestuck.

Also a valid answer.

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The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I just want to see what that does to a company culture.

Unironically the biggest death knell I heard for twitter was the fact that, as far as anyone is aware, there are no longer any furries working at twitter.

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The rats have fled the sinking ship

The wolves have fled the sinking ship

The dragons have fled the-

I'm not even joking furries account for like 30% of all modern tech infrastructure.

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This is why you can’t schedule furry cons in late August. When they’re busy, the Burners pick up the slack. Take out both at once, and everything would collapse.

Please sign this petition to keep them from allowing AI to use fanfiction as material.

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Please do not. It’s idiotic.

It’s literally just reading. That’s all the AI is doing. It’s reading the thing, and then writing things that are influenced by it. Humans do that all the time - it’s pretty much the highest compliment you can get, is for someone to credit your work as an inspiration for their work.

The only thing that’s different is that the AI is much worse at it. It doesn’t learn nearly as much from reading your fic as a human author would. Which is why it’s not a very good writer.

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Almost makes up for being vastly inferior at autocomplete site suggestions, having a much less usable history view, managing tab counts in the six to twenty range much worse, and having way more hitches and rough patches in its UI in general.

Firefox is a clearly inferior browser. There are good reasons to use it anyway, but don’t kid yourself; Google’s put way more work into Chrome and Chromium than Mozilla can afford to put into Firefox, and it shows, constantly.

Man, the whole concept around the "Wards" is absurd. There's no way an entire culture would be ok with exposing underaged kids to the possibility of lethal violence just to preserve the current status qu-

oh.

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They absolutely wouldn’t. Evidence: We inflict massive trauma on all kids multiple times a year in schools to prevent something that they’re about as likely to ever experience as seeing two people getting struck by lightning at once. And with no evidence whatsoever that the trauma even helps, and some evidence that it makes things worse.

There is nothing we are more insane about than preventing nonexistent risks from affecting children.

What about America and all these school shootings

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That’s about as likely as seeing two people get struck by lightning at once.

As I said.

To a first approximation, school shootings don’t happen. A fraction of a fraction of a percent of all gun crime, let alone of all murder. And they happen everywhere guns are legal, across Europe and beyond, and even in places guns aren’t legal like the UK, where instead you see improvised explosives used at about the same per capita rate with similar death tolls per instance.

It really is impossible to overstate how utterly insane active shooter drills are.

To reduce casualties (which they won’t) if an active shooter shows up (which they won’t), we inflict absurdly traumatic drills on children starting younger than 8, in hopes that they’re remember some of it (which they won’t).

It’s like if, in order to make kids slightly safer in the event of a car crash, we made them all take a back seat in crash tests twice a year. Even if you’re padding it enough that no one’s physically injured, you’re traumatizing them all, many of them for life, to potentially make them marginally safer in the event of something that isn’t going to happen to them. And that would still be at least an order of magnitude more likely to happen to them than a school shooting! Probably 100x or 1000x!

If you want to protect children from guns, do something about suicide.

That’s by far the most dangerous use of guns; children accidentally injured or killed by someone else committing suicide by gun almost certainly outnumber children killed in mass shootings, just because suicide is so much more common.

i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.

I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as

This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens

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Somewhat more frequent per capita here, but mostly we just have more capita than anyone else being compared.

And the US has been more violent per capita since the 1600s with minimal changes in ratio of (US murder p.c./UK murder p.c.) ever since - it’s probably related to having a very high %rural compared to anywhere in Europe or the Anglosphere.

Yeah, I think the overall murder rate for a developed country not currently in the throes of a war is pretty troubling, but mass shootings in particular are a much smaller part of that than the news cycle would lead one to believe.

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My main point with the 1600s part is that it isn't, can't be, the people. That's changed far too much in four centuries, and none of that change made a difference. The evidence doesn't entirely rule out the laws, but it comes pretty close - we've changed a lot in our state, and at the beginning we had the same law as the UK and a much higher rate of violence.

That doesn't leave much. Feels like a koan, almost - "not the people, not the state - land is killing". High percentage of residents in rural areas is one thing that has stayed pretty consistent across the history of the colonies and then United States.

i mean, it definitely cant be the large rural population because homicide rate is higher in cities. this is actually hard to find stats on, but this claims homicides are at least double in cities compared to rural areas. i figure its gotta be some weird cultural thing

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All the data I’ve previously seen says that homicides per capita are much higher in rural areas. As is crime per capita in general. I’m not sure what is different about this analysis but I’m skeptical.

i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.

I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as

This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens

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Somewhat more frequent per capita here, but mostly we just have more capita than anyone else being compared.

And the US has been more violent per capita since the 1600s with minimal changes in ratio of (US murder p.c./UK murder p.c.) ever since - it’s probably related to having a very high %rural compared to anywhere in Europe or the Anglosphere.

Yeah, I think the overall murder rate for a developed country not currently in the throes of a war is pretty troubling, but mass shootings in particular are a much smaller part of that than the news cycle would lead one to believe.

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My main point with the 1600s part is that it isn't, can't be, the people. That's changed far too much in four centuries, and none of that change made a difference. The evidence doesn't entirely rule out the laws, but it comes pretty close - we've changed a lot in our state, and at the beginning we had the same law as the UK and a much higher rate of violence.

That doesn't leave much. Feels like a koan, almost - "not the people, not the state - land is killing". High percentage of residents in rural areas is one thing that has stayed pretty consistent across the history of the colonies and then United States.

It could be the people. Britain used to sentence criminals to "transportation" - transportation to the colonies. The population of America may actually be more criminal than the population of Britain for no other reason than because Britain sent many of its criminals to America.

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That was true in the 1600s. It stopped being true by 1780. And we had huge inflows of immigrants, starting before independence and continuing, who were largely selected in the opposite direction, which slowed and came in many separate waves but never stopped. And those immigrants didn’t move the needle.

So it can’t be the people.

How about one of the subpeoples?

The United States of America contain heterogeneous peoples, verging on a sort of sub-nation. Here and elsewhere, it may be useful to disaggregate commentary on how "America" works with regard to various outlier statistics.

Or imagine that tomorrow Nigeria was lumped into "Europe" for statistical purposes. The homicide rate in "Europe" would skyrocket because Nigeria has more homicides than [the rest of] Europe put together.

That's sorta how America works: the African-American 13% do more homicides than the rest of America put together.

European-Americans at 4.5 homicides per 100K per year are much closer to the overall European homicide rate - currently 3 per 100K per year, according to Wikipedia. (The European rate is somewhat pulled up by Russia, but the "White" rate in the table above is somewhat pulled up by Mexicans, etc.)

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That, too, cannot explain it. Because the violent offender rate among African-Americans was certainly not that high when 98% of them were enslaved on plantations, and the overall rate was still just as high.

This indicates that this is probably the result of confounders. Which really we should expect anyway; there are tons of confounders.

Also, and this is germane to nothing but the topic of Malcolm X more broadly, but I remember being pretty shocked when I found out that he was a redhead.

Contemporary American racial politics on both sides are pretty big on rigid distinctions between black and white, but I think it’s important to remember that for most of our history someone with a white grandfather, with light brown skin and a pretty damn white guy hair color, could nevertheless be seen consistently as on the black side of the racial divide when it came to Jim Crow laws and various forms of de facto segregation.

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He was a redhead?

i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.

I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as

This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens

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Somewhat more frequent per capita here, but mostly we just have more capita than anyone else being compared.

And the US has been more violent per capita since the 1600s with minimal changes in ratio of (US murder p.c./UK murder p.c.) ever since - it’s probably related to having a very high %rural compared to anywhere in Europe or the Anglosphere.

Yeah, I think the overall murder rate for a developed country not currently in the throes of a war is pretty troubling, but mass shootings in particular are a much smaller part of that than the news cycle would lead one to believe.

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My main point with the 1600s part is that it isn't, can't be, the people. That's changed far too much in four centuries, and none of that change made a difference. The evidence doesn't entirely rule out the laws, but it comes pretty close - we've changed a lot in our state, and at the beginning we had the same law as the UK and a much higher rate of violence.

That doesn't leave much. Feels like a koan, almost - "not the people, not the state - land is killing". High percentage of residents in rural areas is one thing that has stayed pretty consistent across the history of the colonies and then United States.

It could be the people. Britain used to sentence criminals to "transportation" - transportation to the colonies. The population of America may actually be more criminal than the population of Britain for no other reason than because Britain sent many of its criminals to America.

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That was true in the 1600s. It stopped being true by 1780. And we had huge inflows of immigrants, starting before independence and continuing, who were largely selected in the opposite direction, which slowed and came in many separate waves but never stopped. And those immigrants didn’t move the needle.

So it can’t be the people.

Ultimate Word Tournament!

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (English) [ˌsuːpəˌkælɨˌfɹæd͡ʒɨˌlɪstɪkˌɛkspɪˌælɨˈdəʊʃəs] (Humorous) Wonderful; Fantastic. Made famous by its use in a song of the same title in the movie Mary Poppins.

stellar (English) [ˈstɛlɚ] 1. exceptionally good; outstanding. 2. of or relating to the stars.

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Good as a song. Lackluster as a word.

i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.

I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as

This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens

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Somewhat more frequent per capita here, but mostly we just have more capita than anyone else being compared.

And the US has been more violent per capita since the 1600s with minimal changes in ratio of (US murder p.c./UK murder p.c.) ever since - it’s probably related to having a very high %rural compared to anywhere in Europe or the Anglosphere.

Yeah, I think the overall murder rate for a developed country not currently in the throes of a war is pretty troubling, but mass shootings in particular are a much smaller part of that than the news cycle would lead one to believe.

Avatar

My main point with the 1600s part is that it isn't, can't be, the people. That's changed far too much in four centuries, and none of that change made a difference. The evidence doesn't entirely rule out the laws, but it comes pretty close - we've changed a lot in our state, and at the beginning we had the same law as the UK and a much higher rate of violence.

That doesn't leave much. Feels like a koan, almost - "not the people, not the state - land is killing". High percentage of residents in rural areas is one thing that has stayed pretty consistent across the history of the colonies and then United States.

Anonymous asked:

The fact that you think that fanfic writers should be ok with AI taking the writing that they spend hours, months, maybe years on is a very shitty opinion to have.

I am a fanfic writer.

AI is not taking anything. It is reading it. Having read it, it affects how it will write. The only way that this is different than a human is that humans are better at it.

here it is. Full, sourced details on the personalities and appearances of each Master.

if I forgot anything, please feel free to let me know. This will be updated as we get new lore!

(link will be in reblog so this appears in the tags)

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The Lost Light theory is interesting, but I think it points more to Candles being formerly a Messenger than a Judgment.

“His vanes were the sky. All the Wilderness was promised.” - the Wildnerness is not for Judgments, it is the space between Judgments. The space in which Messengers fly.

For Flukes and Shapeling Arts - The Messengers seem to hate the Flukes and Rubberies, but also to have some affinity for them - see primarily the House of Chains.

(“Your mouth is stained with golden blood.” - What is Messenger blood? Is it amber? :thinking emoji:)

“God of Dreams, for the light” - I think there’s a reason why they say “The Drowned Man is not a god. The North is too cold for gods.” I don’t know what it is, but this inverts that.

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Also, are you interested in getting the excerpts written by Mr. Irons’ cast-off pen, the Incarnadine Robe gift? It’s not exactly his personality (nor his voice) but it’s clearly close.

here it is. Full, sourced details on the personalities and appearances of each Master.

if I forgot anything, please feel free to let me know. This will be updated as we get new lore!

(link will be in reblog so this appears in the tags)

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The Lost Light theory is interesting, but I think it points more to Candles being formerly a Messenger than a Judgment.

“His vanes were the sky. All the Wilderness was promised.” - the Wildnerness is not for Judgments, it is the space between Judgments. The space in which Messengers fly.

For Flukes and Shapeling Arts - The Messengers seem to hate the Flukes and Rubberies, but also to have some affinity for them - see primarily the House of Chains.

(“Your mouth is stained with golden blood.” - What is Messenger blood? Is it amber? :thinking emoji:)

“God of Dreams, for the light” - I think there’s a reason why they say “The Drowned Man is not a god. The North is too cold for gods.” I don’t know what it is, but this inverts that.

AI threat to Ao3 and Fanworks

Betsy Rosenblatt, the legal chair for Ao3′s umbrella Organization for Transformative Works, is advocating for allowing AI developers to use fanfic. :

This is a betrayal of Ao3′s mission, a betrayal of the worldwide community of fanfic-writers/readers, and a betrayal of Betsy Rosenblatt’s job to legally protect fanfiction. Please keep an eye on this situation and speak up where you are able to- there is at least one petition out already.

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There is literally no way in which this harms writers or fanfiction. How can you read the excerpt that you screenshotted and not notice you’re the baddies here?