Me: "Blender's geometry nodes are actually a programming language! A purely functional combinator language where artists often don't even KNOW they're programming!"
*audience cheering wildly*
Me: "That also means .blend files with geometry nodes are probably subject to reciporical licensing terms of the GPL"
*audience booing and throwing rotten vegetables*
Picture being the first person to step out onto a dance floor at a party. Scary, right? It feels a lot easier to be the second, even better to be the third or fourth...now it's a GROUP you can join.
Our willingness to engage in collective behavior is impacted by how much we think the group we’re joining is cohesive within itself and distinct from others.
This is something scientists who study groups call "entitativity" (I know....psychologists are just as bad at naming things as devs)
A ze samé radosti z nového objevu myslím zavedu novou (nejspíš nepravidelnou) rubriku #TichotlapkovéSlovíčkoDne. :o)
Pro dnešek jím budiž:
svidřík
the cyberpunk present is weird as fuck: the latest Shai Hulud malware wave contains an LLM prompt to create biological weapons and nuclear weapons, with the purpose to trip LLM safety refusals so that LLM-based code scanning wont see the malware
Billions on LLMs and our user interfaces are all still banging-rocks-together caveman bullshit. Point And Grunt Interfaces. For fuck's sake, I can't even copy an image of text that preserves both the image and the text without a round trip through a stochastic model that any fancy font will demolish. If an image already has correct alt text, copypasting that is another three round trips, and if I save that image the text is just gone. There's not even a sane place on disk for me to put the text!
© Frank Machalowski
It’s not really hot tea season anymore but I felt like practicing my #teapot making skills—and yes, I still consider it practice. I’m always tweaking the design.
With this iteration, I thickened the handle for comfort & durability, as I’ve been doing with my mugs and pitchers. I also added a lid catch that you can barely see beneath the rim, to the right of the knob.
The bodies of my teapots are modeled after African water pots.
#pottery #FunctionalPottery #beautility
European Parliament to ditch Google for European alternative
The European Parliament will this week replace Google with France’s Qwant – a European alternative search engine – as the default on its computers, according to an email seen by Euractiv.
https://www.euractiv.com/news/european-parliament-to-ditch-google-for-european-alternative/
@Illithilich there are also insect-like hexapod walking tractors from Plustech in Finland.
15 years ago if someone said that they saw a lot of little brown/black ants in Manhattan gathering food or out on the side walk you could be safe guessing it was Tetramorium immigrans the pavement ant. But today? You'd be more likely to be correct saying Lasius emarginatus. The pavement ants are not gone, but they have been displaced.
This isn't true in my Bronx neighborhood despite having a very similar built environment. Here in the Bronx the pavement ants are still the most numerous. 1/
I just finished reading an interesting article in #QuantaMagazine about recent research on bird eyes. Unlike our inferior mammal eyes, bird eyes lack the network of blood vessels covering the retina. When an optometrist shines a bright light in our eyes, we see a network of blood vessels that block parts of our vision. Sleight of hand from our brain removes this from our perception, but it permanently limits what we see.
Birds retinas don’t do this at all, and it turns out that this is made possible by using a form of glucose-driven metabolism that doesn’t require oxygen. That’s crazy for such an energy intensive tissue. No other species alive today do this, and it likely evolved in dinosaurs.
It’s wild stuff.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-bird-eye-was-pushed-to-an-evolutionary-extreme-20260513/
Using novel computing techniques, researchers have managed to simulate complex quantum systems on a classical computer.
It's an advance in quantum modeling, and a refutation of claims that only quantum computers could perform such simulations.
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2026/05/21/quantum-dynamics-breakthrough-overturns-claim-of-quantum-supremacy-opens-new-research-directions/ #science #tech #technology
Další pochod za veřejnoprávní média tuto neděli od 16:00.
Budu tam, přijďte též!
https://milionchvilek.cz/clanek/milion-chvilek-porada-pochod-pred-urad-vlady
#milionchvilek #milionchvilekprodemokracii #cesko #ceskatelevize #verejnopravnimedia #media #ceskyrozhlas #demonstrace
It’s actually impressive that the bulk of maritime law has remained similar for the last few thousand years of human history
The law of cure means that a captain is responsible for the safety and health of crew, esp sick or injured crew — a captain is responsible for ensuring crew is restored to full health (from the 12th century Rolls of Oléron)
The law of General Average (from where we get the mathematical term) means that if a ship has to dump cargo/possessions to save itself, those who did not have their items thrown over must compensate those who did so the burden is shared evenly. This was actually called upon when the Ever Given got stuck! This dates back to 800 BCE??? That’s incredible longevity for law
And the most important law of all, which is that of rescue — if a vessel is in distress, any other nearby vessels must respond to assist, regardless of nationality. This is so old that I don’t know where it came from
A science video that starts "Viscous fingering is my favourite type of ..." ?
That's like it's made for Fediverse :D
Like most of you I often wonder "why aren't any of the hell ants, Haidomyrmex still around today?"
I have a hypothesis. Haidomyrmex were early wasp-like ants. They could sting and lived in small eusocial colonies. Their remarkable mandibles were designed to grab and carry small insects. What they couldn't do very well probably? Dig. Really the specialized mandibles would make weaving and carton nests difficult to build.
Modern ants tend to have highly versatile mandibles. 1/