I unno what meme this is, but I’m here for this.
It’s called the Millennial Falcon
Rebloggin’ the Millennial Falcon
I will always reblog the Millennial Falcon
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this is a legitimate problem in robotics.
like, if you're a bomb disposal guy and your team has a cool bomb-disposal robot which you've given a cutesy name to, you may hesitate to put that robot in harm's way, which is NOT OPTIMAL in the bomb-disposing field.
it also doesn't help if you hold funerals for the robots after they get exploded (this happens pretty regularly).
anyway nobody has worked out how to stop humans from pack-bonding with literally inanimate objects and they probably never will. (like even knowing it's a problem, I *still* think those EOD robots deserve funerals).
In 2007, the US military rejected a multi-limbed anti-mine robot because it's demise was too inhumane.
ALToh perfect, this is EXACTLY what I was talking about
Scientists in films: this alien/AI is not human and therefore undeserving of any kindness or sympathy
Scientists irl: This is my friend Robob he's five feet long, has ten legs and was built to explode mines and if anybody hurts him I will tear apart time and space to get revenge
Ah, I remember seeing a video about Mark Tilden back in the day: he was demonstrating his technique for building “BEAM robotics” in a way that allowed them to adapt to changes to their physical configuration. I remember quite distinctly him being very proud of what was basically a robotic stickbug, and then demonstrating how it continued to operate as he mutilated it beyond repair relative to previous sorts of robots, and I felt that he was being extremely cruel to it.
I guess I wasn’t the only one.
God, remember when we all learned what CDDB was and the first programs to auto-add that data became available???
Remember when Phish did Rodeohead and System of a Down did The Legend?
So like, the Reddit strike going on right now, yeah? I've been seeing a lot of people comment on how they appreciate the protest and then go on to say that this has the notable downside of them constantly looking up questions and not being able to easily find the answers because all of the easily-findable answers are exclusively on Reddit. I am not sure if most of the people making this observation are within the line of thought of "man, maybe this protest isn't such a good idea after all" or "man, it really sucks that we've let the internet get so consolidated," and I'm really hoping its the latter.
Like, all of this? This right here? Reddit making a shitty, anti-consumer grab for money and control over how people are allowed to access the information on their servers, and the website going dark in protest causing tons of people to not be able to access important information? This is exactly what people mean when they say that it's bad that the internet has shrunk down so much and is mostly comprised of, like, 10 websites. It's a fucking problem that one company making one bad decision and causing their website to crash and burn can jeopardize so much of humanity's cumulative information.
This two-day glimpse into the internet without Reddit is the warning shot. Imagine what will happen if Reddit actually goes down for good for one reason or another one day. Imagine what will happen if/when Discord or Fandom bites the dust, or gets rendered practically-unusable without paying an ever-increasing premium because they're owned by blood-sucking corporate leeches.
Another big thing is Twitter clamping down really hard on your ability to DM people if you don't have Twitter Blue. If this goes through, it'll put a ton of artists and sex workers who rely on Twitter DMs for their business operation into a shitty situation. Now, obviously, it's not gonna be the end of the world for them, but once again, it feels like a warning shot to me. Twitter is a sinking ship, and unless something changes and it starts to course-correct, I worry that it'll go under and all of the creators who rely on it will suddenly be in an extremely precarious situation.
These are the sorts of things that we, as the users of the internet, need to seriously think about as time goes on, and if we don't find an adequate answer sooner, we're going to pay for it later. I still hold that the best solution is to start making and using more individual, niche websites. Things like Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc. have their place, of course, but I seriously think a lot was lost through the death of things like individual forums and the existence of many different wiki-hosting sites.
We need a concerted effort, not just on the side of larger creators, but on the users themselves, to stop exclusively using these larger websites and support the creation and growth of smaller, more niche websites, and prevent a catastrophe before it actually happens. I simply hope that people with larger platforms than my own pick up on all this and start talking about it and swaying people to act sooner rather than later. I know it's possible to correct the problem of the mysteriously tiny internet before a modern Library of Alexandria moment happens, I just don't know if that correction will actually happen in time.
I want people to also realize that the Internet of the 80s and 90s was actually better about a lot of these things in some way. People are talking about doing federated/distributed versions of Reddit, and trying to come up with all sorts of complicated protocols for that, when back in the day we already had an Internet service for this, called NNTP (aka Usenet), where it was standard for different ISPs to run their own Usenet nodes and for people to access Usenet through it. And there were dozens of different clients with different accessibility concerns and user interfaces and plugins and so on.
And then people might be tempted to say, well hey, if Twitter DMs are becoming useless, let’s make a new DM-based service that lets people send each other messages and negotiate things and send sketches and progress images back and forth and so on, and like, my dude, you are reinventing email.
The web-ification of the Internet has been Not Great, and while Usenet and email both have their problems (especially where spam is concerned) they were already distributed/federated protocols that allowed people to do all sorts of things, decades ago, better than what we’re trying to replace today!
Shout out to anyone that ever made a character that’s a ‘Secret
Government experiment’ that escapes the lab and is now wanted and
misunderstood.
That’s top tier character design, thank you.
Booooooy how people don’t want to look at this.
Arguably, with age, the majority of people do become disabled.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
“Why should healthy people pay for sick people?”
“Because the only things separating healthy people from sick people are time and luck.”
All the previous reblogs with commentary being in 2019 is fucking haunting.
ID:
Redditor asks for help. He wants to call his adoptive mom
“mom” instead of her name
(Reddit Post:)
My bio parents put me (15m) up for adoption when I was born so I was always in foster homes until I was twelve.
I had a teacher Janice (33f) who was my home room teacher.
Janice found out about me being a foster kid and how I wished I had a family. Janice had also been a foster kid growing up and so long story short she then became my foster mom and adopted me.
Janice is the best mom I could have ever asked for She has been so unbelievably kind and loving to me and I absolutely adore her The problem is that I don’t call her mom, I just call her Janice.
I want to start calling her mom but have no idea how to without making it awkward. Please help me internet strangers.
Update:
So… was not expecting this big of a response.
Thank all of you for responding and some of the ideas made me really
tear up.
Anyways this morning I went to Janice and I said “good morning mom” she just looked at me and started crying then came over and hugged me and kissed my forehead.
I hugged her back and she said I could call her whatever made me comfortable and that she loves me more than anything. I just replied with “l love you mom”.
End of ID.
King
Worth noting that he protested loudly against the WWE doing a show in Saudi Arabia after the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, and the company retaliated by making sure he hasn’t been on TV or PPV since. Not fired, of course, so they can keep selling merchandise with his face on it (and keep him from joining the competition), just out of the public eye so he and his protests gets forgotten by the fans.
Picture that: an ubiquitous celeb and household name like John Cena basically got black bagged and vanished for speaking up for human rights. That’s the power of capitalism, kids
I do not know a thing about wrestling but I knew of John Cena because he was that famous, like the Rock or Hulk Hogan or Mr. T, just a massive presence and household name beyond the WWE. It only hit me from reading this post that one day I just suddenly stopped seeing or hearing about him in the media ever again. Is this fucking why?!?
the-backspin-alchemist
