4/13 homestuck this 4/13 neils tunes that. why don’t you gather “forth your team” of musicians who reneged on this deal with the devil in a desperate bid to outrun him once and for all

by Naya Kotko

just got out of mass here’s s medieval depiction of werewolves receiving Communion

Finished a major Lancer commission batch a couple months ago

Abhorsen by Tommy Arnold

“In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a  flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion.

The Portuguese government—which had little desire to accept any of these refugees—sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”

—Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

it’s fun that Mormonism is based off pseudo-archeology and Scientology is based off pseudo-psychiatry. By that logic the big American New Religious Movement of the 21st century is gonna be based on… pseudo-computer science?

Name: Squeaky Hinge

Pronouns: he/her/he/her

Likes: Squeaking

Dislikes: WD-40

How a CT Scan machine looks without its outer casing 😱😱

Picture painted by Zdzisław Beksiński, 1979

ALT

Cannot for the life of me remember where I read this quote - honestly, probably a tumblr post - but it's stuck with me ever since

i dont think you guys understand how atrocious this decision is in Mahmoud Khalil's case. The judge had ordered the government to present evidence and in turn the evidence was a two page memo that basically said "we dont need evidence." This has devastating effects for anyone coming in affiliated with organizations or political parties that America doesnt like. I dont expect anything less because as a law student the idea of courts being a "check" is laughable and they have enabled the deportation of political dissidents throughout history, but god what a stupid fucking judge

"There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?' And someone else said, 'A poor choice of words in 1954'," he says. "And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the '50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we're having now."

So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics. "It's genuinely amazing that...these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text," he says. But, in his view, that doesn't make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, "but no one wants to use that term, because it's not as sexy".

'The machines we have now are not conscious', Lunch with the FT, Ted Chiang, by Madhumita Murgia, 3 June/4 June 2023