Pro tip: If you find large mysterious eggs on a derelict space ship, ALWAYS inspect them very closely. They tend to contain some really cool stuff. Mind-blowing, transcendental best stuff ever. I’m talking, like, way too legit to be legit, feel me? If you see movement inside, be sure to place your head close to the top of the egg. You should try to smell the egg or even give it a lick.

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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • The first versions were pretty brutal, even by the standards of the day. After all the revisions, those stories were probably more tolerable, but they were still pretty metal IMO. For example, here’s a quote from Cinderella.

    And when it was evening Cinderella wanted to go home, and the prince was about to go with her, when she ran past him so quickly that he could not follow her. But he had laid a plan, and had caused all the steps to be spread with pitch, so that as she rushed down them the left shoe of the maiden remained sticking in it. The prince picked it up, and saw that it was of gold, and very small and slender. The next morning he went to the father and told him that none should be his bride save the one whose foot the golden shoe should fit. Then the two sisters were very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it, for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed her a knife, and said, “Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will never have to go on foot.” So the girl cut her toe off, squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her with him on his horse as his bride, and rode off. They had to pass by the grave, and there sat the two pigeons on the hazel bush, and cried,
    “There they go, there they go!
    There is blood on her shoe;
    The shoe is too small,
    Not the right bride at all!”
    Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, saying she was not the right one, and that the other sister must try on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large. Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cut a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will never have to go on foot.” So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince, who took his bride before him on his horse and rode off. When they passed by the hazel bush the two pigeons sat there and cried,
    “There they go, there they go!
    There is blood on her shoe;
    The shoe is too small,
    Not the right bride at all!”
    Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how the blood was flowing from the shoe, and staining the white stocking. And he turned his horse round and brought the false bride home again. “This is not the right one,” said he, “have you no other daughter?” - “No,” said the man, “only my dead wife left behind her a little stunted Cinderella; it is impossible that she can be the bride.” But the King’s son ordered her to be sent for, but the mother said, “Oh no! she is much too dirty, I could not let her be seen.” But he would have her fetched, and so Cinderella had to appear. First she washed her face and hands quite clean, and went in and curtseyed to the prince, who held out to her the golden shoe. Then she sat down on a stool, drew her foot out of the heavy wooden shoe, and slipped it into the golden one, which fitted it perfectly. And when she stood up, and the prince looked in her face, he knew again the beautiful maiden that had danced with him, and he cried, “This is the right bride!” The step-mother and the two sisters were thunderstruck, and grew pale with anger; but he put Cinderella before him on his horse and rode off. And as they passed the hazel bush, the two white pigeons cried,
    “There they go, there they go!
    No blood on her shoe;
    The shoe’s not too small,
    The right bride is she after all.”

    That wasn’t from the latest Saw movie. That was from a book that’s intended for children, as far as the author is concerned. Who knows how messed up the first version was.




  • I think early Disney movies are pretty good. They usually just took an archaic horror story intended for adults, got rid of all the gore and murder, rewrote the rest, and somehow ended up with a children’s movie. Those ripoff versions became so famous and influential that people no longer think of the originals.

    Maybe in two hundred years someone will start ripping off Saw movies to make kindergarten holo-ventures. Oh no! Jeff Denlon, the ice cream merchant, got stuck in the freezer. Can you find the key to the door?









  • Judging by the comments, I would say that most Lemmy users are aware of the downsides of LLMs. The average GPT user probably hasn’t heard of half the points mentioned in these comments.
    Judging by the downvotes, I would say that many Lemmy users are also very passionate about it. The average GPT user might think of LLMs like any other tool.

    Unfortunately, I get the feeling that Lemmy isn’t a suitable place for having a serious conversation about AI in general (not just LLMs). I would love to have that conversation, but this just isn’t the place for it, as you can see. The people here seem to be too focused on LLMs, how they’re developed and how they’re forcibly implemented in places where they provide zero value etc. AI in general is such a broad category, and this kind of biased conversation misses 90% of it.

    When you say AI, people hear LLM, and that’s a genuine problem. When people say they hate AI, they probably aren’t thinking of things like image search, optical character recognition, automatic categorization of the events of your bank account, signal processing in audio and video, image upscaling, frame generation, design of 3D structures, route planning etc. There’s so much you can do with AI, but Lemmy users rarely mention those.


  • I’m pretty sure the ratio of rude people in the entire user base isn’t the same when comparing the two platforms, so that plays a role too. However, I think it’s mostly a numbers game. Even if that ratio was the same, a bigger platform automatically means that you’re going to bump into a lot of rude people there. Think of it like this: If the ratio is just just 1%, that’s 1 in a small place and 100 in a big one.

    On top of that, people tend to remember negative encounters very well. Even if you got only 1 nasty comment, it’s going to sting. If you got 100 comments like that, you’ll feel like the whole world is out there to get you. The human mind has this strange bias towards negative reactions.




  • Probabilities can be counterintuitive. Just because something has a low probability doesn’t mean it never happens. You can make those probabilities vanishingly small by stacking specific combinations like ethnic background, first language, country of origin, current country of residence, religious upbringing, and so on. The more you stack, the lower the probability of someone being exactly like you.

    I once visited a science expo that demonstrated this by asking questions about traits like eye color, ear shape, and even quirks: Do you write with your left hand? Do you kick a ball with your right foot? Do you peek through a hole with your left eye? When you combine all these factors, everyone turns out to be a “unique” snowflake.

    The counterintuitive thing is, even though the stacked probability of you existing might be astronomically small, you’re still here. Unlikely things happen all the time. If you expect to see a specific rare event, you’ll be waiting a million years. If you look at events that have already occurred, you’ll find their probabilities were just as tiny.