Illustration by Richard Scarry

This is how I expected the world to work.

there will never be another headline that comes close to comparing with this

[image description: Bob Ross painting a scene with a lake, a forest, and mountains, with the caption "As long as you're learning, you're not failing." /end id]

Keep spreading the word

"Here is our master plan for how we're going to take away all your rights and fuck up the economy and environment even harder and how we're going to obliterate free speech and turn everyone into slaves and hey wait where is everyone going? Why do they hate us all of a sudden?"

if you haven't heard about project 25 or perhaps don't know what it actually entails, john oliver did a great segment explaining it on last week tonight. you can skip to 5:25 to get to where he starts talking about project 25 specifically

oh this is a life saver

So these are both “Aw Fuck I’m outta real food” meals BUT ALSO:  if you’re learning how to cook, these are great “baby steps” meals to learn how to cook basics into something enjoyable without “wasting” anything expensive.  Though I maintain that even cooking screw-ups are valuable in terms of lessons learned.

Also they’re great for when you get absorbed in something and you realize your blood sugar is dropping and you need to make something Quick.

Making basic storecupboard or fridge ingredients less basic and more nutritious.

This is wonderful.

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.

I knew pastry would save the world one day.

This is a good use of AI! Do the tedious work so the worker can socialize with the customer. And then use that same AI to fight cancer. This is fantastic! I hate AI “art” but not AI as a whole.

I recreated Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofornes” in Kid Pix Studio from 1995 using a mouse. Here's the video I made doing it.

I love humans. We're just funky little guys doin some absolutely amazing stuff sometimes 😭🩷

“Why should rich people pay more” because fuck ‘em

“So you are okay for paying more when you have money” I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘em’ when relevant

“I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘‘em’ when relevant” is surprisingly powerful as both a statement and philosophy

do not forget the patron saint of these weeks that we celebrate ourselves proudly and openly in the streets

her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.

remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.

thank you, Marsha. we remember you.

Stealing my friends post valor

@redacted-metallum

today in "google AI is fucking useless because it hallucinates things that never happened", i bought a couple CVS thermometers that have both been acting up, tried to search if there had been a problem with the whole product line:

there is no record of this product recall. it did not happen. the date "feb 8 2024" is the date someone listed a thermometer for sale on ebay.

You know what, fuck it. Figure skating is now my favorite sport. Unless there's another one that will let a competitor dress up in a silly costume and do all these silly jumps and wiggles and fall on purpose, IN THE OLYMPICS, there's no contest

"HOT VIKING GUYS ARE WAITING TO MEET CHASTE ENGLISH LADIES IN YOUR AREA"

via indiarosecrawford

Frog Paints a Water Lily Pond 🪷🎨🐸

𝑓ₒᵣ ⲕᵢ𝑛𝑔 ₐ𝑛𝑑 𝑐ₒ𝑡𝑡ₐ𝑔ₑ