I’ma start a business manufacturing cat carriers that look like cardboard boxes.

Yeah, Jane Austen’s easily one of the top 20 English novelists of all time, and one of my personal favorites. She gets kind of a mixed appreciation these days bc the movies made from her novels usually focus on the romance (often in a way that would have scandalized her) and skimp on her commentary about human nature and society’s pressures. And plus her prose is just gorgeous and that is difficult to adapt to film. Probably the best adaptation is the BBC 1980 Pride and Prejudice miniseries ( wikipedia , tubi ) which was adapted by Fay Weldon, who was a novelist in her own right. That miniseries turns a lot of Austen’s prose into dialogue, which is beautiful to hear in that context, though as a consequence the series is a little slow for a wide modern audience. Really you have to read the books themselves.

Mary Ann Evans, who wrote as George Eliot. Middlemarch is imho one of the best novels ever written in the English language.

So you’re saying “No TRUE fascist”, huh?

ojala escribes un cancion de metal despues de hacerlo.

<bun><chocolate_cookie>ice_cream</chocolate_cookie></bun>

I just realized when a fish* wears fishnets its like a human wearing a cage.

*ok, a mollusc.

check out these feeds of Lemmy communities:

• memes and humor (not focused on politics or tech): https://piefed.social/f/highmemecontent
• general (not focused on memes, politics, or tech): https://piefed.social/f/highsignal

Insane Clown Posse - Throw Em Up.

FYI check out pixelfed. Here’s a preview: https://pixelfed.social/web/explore

It’s basically a replacement for Insta rather than Threads, but the upside is it tends to be less technical. Also iirc it includes all the image posts from Mastodon. If you create an account, click on “Global Feed” and start following individuals and hashtags.

I found a caption that claims that the crossbow was “designed for use as a silent weapon in counterguerilla operations, such as in Vietnam.” I suspect it was designed to be simple, resilient, and with easily-interchangeable parts.

I’ve thought a lot about this post over the last couple days.

Postprandial somnolence (colloquially known as food coma, after-meal dip, or “the itis”) is a normal state of drowsiness or lassitude following a meal. Postprandial somnolence has two components: a general state of low energy related to activation of the parasympathetic nervous system in response to mass in the gastrointestinal tract, and a specific state of sleepiness.[1][medical citation needed] While there are numerous theories surrounding this behavior, such as decreased blood flow to the brain, neurohormonal modulation of sleep through digestive coupled signaling, or vagal stimulation, very few have been explicitly tested.

Yeah another consideration is that there were many different regional differences among the French. i.e. people from Brittany were very different from those around Paris or those from Occitanie. In the same way you’d have conflict among nationalities if you threw them all together, they probably had conflict within the French group.

Sounds like you’re ready to listen to The Naught.

“The dead know only one thing: it’s better to be alive.” -Full Metal Jacket

The tenure commitee was on the fence until they learned that he authored this package.

Lots of fascinating info about this prison here: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/portchester-castle/history-and-stories/portchester-castle-and-prisoners-of-war/

Most of the prisoners held at Portchester were French, but there were also many Dutch and Spanish prisoners. Other nationalities included Americans, Danes, Germans and Italians, and Lascars from south-east Asia (Malays). This cosmopolitan mix reflected both the global nature of the war and the international make-up of some national armies. The prisoners also included soldiers’ wives and families, as well as passengers and crew from civilian ships captured by Britain.

(note: The caption to this image on that page says that this is a picture of the prison’s Keep, so these prisoners were probably meant to be Dutch as evidenced by the following)

Different nationalities tended to be kept apart within the castle to avoid conflict. During the 1790s, for example, French prisoners were held in prison blocks in the outer bailey. Spanish prisoners were housed in Assheton’s Tower (at the north-east corner of the inner bailey) and Dutch prisoners in the keep. A report by prison inspectors made in about 1796 noted that

the Dutch prisoners … have conducted themselves with the utmost propriety, remarkable for cleanliness, consequently healthy, and never been guilty of selling their clothes, or other irregularities in common amongst the French.

(ofc the British would say that, lel)

“Frank McFalsus”, huh?

There are three kinds of voters of this post. Those that vote without reading the article. Those that vote after only reading the beginning of the article. And those that vote after reading to the end:

… the danger is not that language models enforce some nefarious agenda because of evil programming. The danger is that these models have no capacity for independent thought at all- and that this mindless echoing is exactly what fits comfortably within today’s institutions, both technological and polical.

In this way, LLMs are a mirror for the unthinking human animal- not just the progressive “activist” who parrots the last thing they heard from MSNBC, but also the comfortable professional who nods obediently along with whatever the “experts” say. If you agree with the model’s answers just because they sound official or make you feel smart or confirm your liberal bias, it’s not the AI that has failed to think. It’s you. When you stop questioning, stop wrestling, and start letting a word-cloud of platitudes stand in for your conscience, you are every bit as empty as the chatbot.

Large language models are not teachers. They’re not arbiters. They are not surrogates for your own critical thinking. If people continue to embrace their programmed speech as “intelligence” or “wisdom,” they’re choosing brainless conformity over real judgment.

Team Rocket would!

Pull the couch out from the wall a couple inches and lay a blanket up there and I bet you could fit a couple more cats.