MetaFilter

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

cool here you go
posted to MetaFilter by They sucked his brains out! at 9:06 PM on June 5, 2023

Pretty clear to me that Werner Herzog is the perfect replacement.

you have elected to spin the wheel, a choice as pointless yet inevitable as life itself. having spun, you cry out for 'big money,' yet the money you seek is but a pittance compared to that controlled by forces which, unseen, shape your very existence. the wheel continues to spin, its outcome ambiguous for the moment. i invite you to remain in that moment, to allow the wheel to spin... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by logicpunk at 7:57 PM on June 12, 2023

One story:

I met Ted Kaczynski's brother and sister-in-law entirely by accident, around 2005. She, a fine professor at Union College, invited me to speak to her colleagues, which I did. After, she asked me if I minded going out to dinner with herself and her brother. Not at all, I said, and this is how I learned to Google everybody. The gentleman joined us and I, knowing nothing of this guy, and always being shameless, asked what he did with his time.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 3:11 PM on June 10, 2023

He (it is so often he) thinks himself free from the formal, recognized strictures of School, and he is. Unfortunately, this does not mean that he is free in general—rather, without extraordinary luck and discernment, he is completely at the mercy of whichever informants an unregulated marketplace has put in his path.

Just recently, I came across this amazing presentation from Brian Moriarty at the 1999 Game Developer's Conference about the Paul... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 2:13 PM on June 10, 2023

I actually found cricket easier to understand when I stopped thinking of it as "weird baseball" and more as "combat bowling with showing off."

YOU are trying to knock down the bowling pins. I am standing here in your way with my stick being an asshole about it and not letting you knock down the bowling pins. And to just show you how damn good I am at not knocking down the bowling pins, I'mma gonna whack the fuck out of your bowling ball so that it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Xiphias Gladius at 6:45 PM on June 4, 2023

Is it worth a FPP about the people that do urban exploring in these parks? You have some really fun stuff like the guys that literally spent days living inside EPCOT's Horizons but then you also have some crazy stuff like the search for the stolen Buzzy figure from Cranium Command.
posted to MetaFilter by JoeZydeco at 9:34 AM on May 31, 2023

The problem with copyright/plagiarism is that neural network training (not just LLMs, not even just all deep learning) is very deliberately mimicking humans. There is a very real sense in which that whole family of technologies learns how we do, and stores in an equally or possibly even more “pureed” internal representation of what terms like “asphalt-textured bumps” or “fish-scale-shaped” mean in the context of an oil painting or photograph.

If it’s... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ryvar at 3:33 PM on May 31, 2023

does copyright mean anything if you're poor? the valley has decided to assert "no".

There's no copyright infringement going on. Copyright doesn't entitle you to own an artistic style, nor does it forbid other people from analyzing your artwork. Does it infringe the copyright of Picasso's estate to say "he used more blue in his paintings in the year 1901 than he did in 1899"? That's essentially all these machine learning systems... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by riotnrrd at 3:23 PM on May 31, 2023

In the Twitter thread, the poster identifies this aesthetic as Utopian Scholastic, which is a term I'd never heard and will never forget. It filled me with such joy to see the gallery full of Myst games and How Things Work books and Eyewitness Travel Guides and mid-nineties educational CD-ROMs and all the rest...
posted to MetaFilter by ourobouros at 12:42 PM on May 30, 2023

I have bought 4 new cars over the last 25 years. I bought them all through an auto-broker at my credit union. The experience was wonderful, call the broker, explain what I want, get a call back later that day with a price and a specific car, take delivery at work the next day and they drive away my trade in. The broker was dealing with fleet sales at the dealerships and had access to the entire state, so finding what you were looking for wasn't too hard. No haggling, no salespeople, highly... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctor_negative at 12:39 PM on May 30, 2023

Convergent evolution! [pincer-bump]
posted to MetaFilter by Etrigan at 10:44 AM on May 30, 2023

No, only sideways.
posted to MetaFilter by Etrigan at 10:43 AM on May 30, 2023

It's worth noting that trees don't exist (phylogenetically)—that is, plants converge on tree-dom the way invertebrates keep turning into crabs. Also, venom seems to have evolved repeatedly over the past 200M years or so, most notably in limbless reptiles (snakes), although we have examples of envenomation using toxin-secreting bacteria—Clostridia botulinum in the saliva of Komodo Dragons, but also whatever the hell it is that makes cat bites so dangerous. And all solitary-hunting... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cstross at 10:09 AM on May 30, 2023

Warning: AI content: Summarize.tech provides AI summaries of videos, and here's their summary for this one: Summary of Investigation: Who’s Telling the Truth about Disco Elysium?. It summarizes each of the three hours, and then you can click See More to see summaries of each five-minute segment.
posted to MetaFilter by kristi at 6:18 PM on May 29, 2023

That Jarrell poem has haunted me ever since I read it in high school 30 years ago. Still the most horrifying piece of English-language prose I know of.
posted to MetaFilter by mykescipark at 1:04 PM on May 29, 2023

wordshore gonna wordshore

WORDSHORE ON METAFILTER is an anagram of REWARD NTH TOMFOOLERIES
we wuv woo wowdshaww!!!!!!!!!
posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 10:56 AM on May 29, 2023

I took my 15-year-old back-yard rescue arthritic deaf toothless half-blind cat with kidney disease to be put to sleep yesterday and I am very sad, because you can do the right thing and still feel horrible about it, even though the veterinarian said her kidneys were "crunchy" and I was doing the right thing by not keeping her alive to make myself feel better. My grown kid rushed down to be with me at the vet, insisted on paying for the euthanasia, and took me out for coffee and a long... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Peach at 3:43 PM on May 29, 2023

Just to return to Succession, I’ve never watched it, assuming it’s about dismal people being awful to each other. Reviews seem to suggest it’s that, but dramatically satisfying. Is that accurate, or is there more to it?

It's not about them being awful to each other, exactly. Which I know is such a fine hair to split, but I think there's a distinction which explains why so many people had the experience of finding the few few... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:43 AM on May 30, 2023

Thank you! I am also seeing the name as https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Joan-Giralt-Lerin/3A0C6FC1D7D5208F Joan Geralt-Lerin. It's like everyone is just taking guesses. The signatures are all the same ;)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by the webmistress at 2:16 PM on June 3, 2023

The Strange, Sad Story of the Ken Doll’s Crotch.
posted to MetaFilter by warriorqueen at 1:55 PM on May 26, 2023

Gretzky is so far above everyone else that one of the records he holds is Most Points By A Pair Of Brothers. His brother Brent had one goal and three assists in the NHL. The only set of siblings with more points than Wayne and Brent are the Sutter brothers, and there were six of them, and if you picked any five of them, the Gretzkys would still have more points. Given that Wayne and Brent have two more brothers and a sister, you could say that the Gretzkys also have a claim... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Etrigan at 7:13 PM on May 25, 2023

Hey, I happen to work at the front desk of a pool! (It is my part-time retirement job.) We have to close the pool on a too-often (in everyone's opinion, including staff and patrons) basis. When someone poos in the pool, we have to close the pool for 24 hours in order to treat the water to make it safe again. When patrons ask why it is closed, we tell them there is a mechanical problem (and I guess that's accurate: a problem with the "mechanics" of someone's body).... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by SageTrail at 8:04 AM on May 4, 2023

Stephen Wolfram (of "Mathematica" fame) has a long, detailed article about how ChatGPT works. I confess that I've only skimmed the article, but it looks very good.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by alex1965 at 4:03 AM on May 6, 2023

The best detailed explanation I've seen is GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin. It explains pretty much everything going on in GPT-3 (the architecture of GPT-4 is unknown, but probably similar), but does assume some prior understanding. There are other resources, many of which build off of the paper which sort of started it all, Attention is All You Need. One important difference between GPT-3 and the model described in that paper is that there's no encoder stack (the paper was primarily interested... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by justkevin at 3:50 PM on May 5, 2023

This list is good and fine and legit and all, but it is bringing the knife to the gunfight. We play to win in this household.

You find those Safeway coupons slightly, uh, erotic? Don't want the devil tempting you with lurid Best Buy ads for black friday? Does it move a little when you get AAA pamphlets? Are you willing to debase yourself for 10 minutes at the post office to make it all stop? Then prohibitionary USPS Prohibitory Order Form 1500 is the form for you!... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by furnace.heart at 5:23 PM on May 24, 2023

Back in my software engineering days, a coworker told us about the most frightening piece of code they had seen. It was 100’s of pages of assembly language with no comments. Except about 75% through the code was one comment.

; and now for some magic
posted to MetaFilter by njohnson23 at 7:09 PM on May 23, 2023

This is third-hand, but it's still my favorite Steve Martin story. A friend of a friend used to be a UPS driver in Beverly Hills. Steve Martin was on his route, and he got packages like every day. My friend's friend would get buzzed in past the gate, and stand at the door waiting for Steve Martin to come sign. Apparently Steve Martin had a) big crystal glass panels in his doors and b) a bunch of pinball machines within view of the door. He'd be playing pinball when our guy... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by PikeMatchbox at 11:48 AM on May 22, 2023

over on Facebook, somebody's having fun with "power names" for boys. Stuff like Punch, Aggro, Strong and my fave, Landlord.
posted to MetaFilter by philip-random at 6:16 PM on May 21, 2023

there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone, and yet it would remain afloat for 2 1/2 hours as all this became clear.

I actually found this topic really interesting, there's a wiki article about the lifeboats of the Titanic and an interesting comment on /r/askhistorians explaining why the whole lifeboat issue might have been safety theatre like the TSA was after 9/11. I'll summarize as best as I can, but it's still really long...... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by xdvesper at 8:29 PM on May 20, 2023

There was an ad from some christian organization, “Satan says ‘Believe in yourself’, Jesus says ‘Believe in me.’”

That Satan sounds like a good influence.

It makes perfect sense to me that Satanism, the worship of an embodiment of concentrated evil, should have a kind and benevolent underside.

Because that completes it as a mirror image of Christianity.

Consider one of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jamjam at 9:51 AM on May 20, 2023

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, innit
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 12:28 PM on May 18, 2023

SCORSESE: Got to. Got to. Yeah. I wish I could take a break for eight weeks and make a film at the same time [laughs]. The whole world has opened up to me, but it’s too late. It’s too late.

OK, I have to tell a story now.

In 1995, the putative 100th anniversary of cinema, I attended an event held by the Cinema Archive at Wesleyan University, my alma mater. (I'd graduated about two months before!) The occasion was that that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dr. Wu at 10:26 AM on May 18, 2023

This interview with Scorsese about the movie has been getting passed around my friends online. It ends on quite a poignant note:

DEADLINE: You’re 80. Do you still have that fire to get right back behind the camera and get the next one going?

SCORSESE: Got to. Got to. Yeah. I wish I could take a break for eight weeks and make a film at the same time [laughs]. The whole world has opened up to me, but it’s too late. It’s too late.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fight or flight at 7:09 AM on May 18, 2023

Seen on Mastodon:

my favorite metaphor for AI weirdos is that they're all trying to sell us radium cures and shoe store fluoroscopes, wringing their hands about whether they might accidentally create Godzilla with their new technology while actually just giving us all cancer

posted to MetaFilter by TheophileEscargot at 9:19 PM on May 17, 2023

The threeness of its structure—three outs, three bases, 32 innings and the same number of players on the field—as well as the way baseball dramatizes and celebrates the human impulse to depart from home and to return or at least to help others to do so, all of this speaks to something deep within the us.

After work, I'll be jumping on the train to meet Mrs. Ghidorah, to watch our beloved Chiba Lotte Marines. She's off today, and will be going early... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:08 PM on May 17, 2023

As a layperson, the way science works is that there will be all these exciting headlines about time travel or whatever and then you read the actual article and it's like, "If we technobabble these particles over here, it's also possible to technobabble those particles over there." And it goes on like that for decades, with nothing really changing while we all drive our Hondas to our crappy unsatisfying jobs and get cancer. And then, every 40 years or so, science is like, "Oh, hey,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ursula Hitler at 2:36 PM on May 17, 2023

I'm an optical physicist. This result is not nearly as exciting as it sounds (though interesting for optical physicists.) It's nothing to do with sending people back in time or running events backwards or anything like that. It's just about pulses of light. If you arrange for a light pulse to be brighter at first and then get dimmer before going off, you pretty much know how that should interact with a mirror... The reflected pulse will also be brighter, then dimmer, then off. With this kind of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by OnceUponATime at 1:59 PM on May 17, 2023

When I saw this last night I decided that I am personally going to be Patience Fish when I start my next career. I will go by my full name, or maybe have "Patience Fish" as my first name such that my whole name would be Patience Fish Frowner. My next career is going to be in a fantasy world located somewhere between late Ankh-Morpork and Amalo, a bit less silly than the one, a bit less sad than the other. I'm thinking some kind of clerkship, small room somewhere, sober and threadbare... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner at 8:23 AM on May 17, 2023

yeah, it got kind of dusty in the room at the end...

“Meeting Connie Chung felt like a miracle,” Ms. Koh wrote to me in an email.

At the photo shoot, the photographer, Connie Aramaki, 46, told Ms. Chung that she’d originally thought her parents had chosen the name Connie because they wanted their daughter to become a journalist like Ms. Chung. Now, she’d come to appreciate what they actually intended: “What it means is your parents want... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by chavenet at 11:13 AM on May 12, 2023

Obligatory reminder she wrote "Jolene" on the same day that she wrote "I Will Always Love You."
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 10:20 PM on May 11, 2023

The whole sovcit thing is just one of the many manifestations of witchcraft worldview.

When these people look around them and see lawyers in a court of law, or researchers in a science journal, or doctors in a clinic, they don't see people using words, making sense of the world, and persuading judges or persuading peers.

They see people casting spells and making things happen.

Well, if those people can cast spells, they... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by tclark at 2:37 PM on May 11, 2023

This was my first real workplace after college — the full name of the department was MTV News & Documentaries (‘News & Docs’). In the early 2000s I took what I thought was a temporary gig and ended up staying there for several years.

This was during a time when some key producers within the department were really pushing to cover events and issues beyond the music world. Working mainly on the Docs side of things I had limited involvement with the News folks,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by theory at 2:39 PM on May 10, 2023

I have a strong suspicion that centuries from now "Here Comes The Sun" has as good or better a chance of sticking around in the culture than any single McCartney or Lennon song.

It's not my personal favorite, but it really has a timeless optimism that rises far above triteness and cliche, and is just a lovely song to listen to.
posted to MetaFilter by tclark at 5:03 PM on May 10, 2023

The challenges of mainstreaming VR strike me as similar to the challenges of mainstreaming fur suits. As it stands, VR is a niche activity with huge front loaded costs to participate in. Despite that, there is a vibrant community that exists and some people are even making a living catering to that community.

However, to truly mainstream VR, you have to make a business case that entices VCs and bosses and advertisers and to do that you have to disassociate VR from the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Reyturner at 1:10 PM on May 9, 2023

I'm very eager to see what Apple's headset looks like next month. Apple, historically, has been very good at figuring out what people like about various form factors—but it has also been historically bad at figuring out how to make engaging social software. (Case in point: the Apple Watch has become an incredibly successful piece of hardware, but virtually 2/3rds of its initial software functionality was stripped away within a couple of years of its launch. RIP,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 8:25 AM on May 9, 2023

The head of marketing at our company sent an urgent message (red exclamation mark and everything) to the legal team in April of last year noting that we needed to "protect our brand assets for the inevitable shift into the Metaverse." I responded that I wasn't sure what a B2B food ingredients business would even do in the metaverse but promised to look into it. Glad I can cross this one off my to-do list.

Our family does have two Oculus... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by AgentRocket at 7:58 AM on May 9, 2023

I just never saw the appeal in anything Zuck was bringing to the table with his idea of what the Metaverse should be. Also, does he not realize that VRChat, Fortnite, & Roblox are already in existence and offer much more and much better versions of that kind of connectivity/social-space. And people are at least doing some interesting things in these spaces. They're not perfect by any means and they're trying to achieve different goals, but they are at least interesting and unique. Something... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fizz at 7:21 AM on May 9, 2023

I used to work in a window factory. We had a drop saw we used to cut steel, typically 5mm channel for making fire-proof window frames. All the sparks were guided towards the wall behind it and over time it began to form what I called the fin, because it looked like a shark fin.

When you cut steel like this you have to account for the width of the blade in your measurements. The two new lengths of steel aren't the same combined length as the original. The remainder was... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by adept256 at 6:37 AM on May 8, 2023

It's just a matter of mature content. You can take players straight into the maw of hell itself, but suburbia crosses the line.

You're making a joke here, but honestly where is the lie? I think that turning this question inside out is a much more useful way to look at it. Starting with a blank, infinite canvas of possible urban designs, in which we could build literally we can conceive of, without regard for economics or physics or anything... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 12:10 PM on May 6, 2023

If I'd been the crew of the Götheborg I'd have been so, so tempted, upon receiving this distress call, to put on whatever clothes were reasonably old-timey at hand, and then on meeting the sailboat in distress be like, "ahoy there stranger! this be the year 1875! what strange foreign clothes ye be wearing" etc. etc.
posted to MetaFilter by daisystomper at 4:44 AM on May 6, 2023