[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'James Cameron: Skynet Would Destroy Humanity With Deepfakes, Not Nukes

"It would actually look a lot like what's going on right now."

[...] "[Skynet is] not going to have to like wipe out the entire, you know, biosphere and environment with nuclear weapons to do it. It's going to be so much easier and less energy required to just turn our minds against ourselves,"'

https://www.pcmag.co...fakes-not-nukes

'People Trust Deepfake Faces More Than Real Faces

"Our evaluation of the photorealism of AI-synthesized faces indicates that synthesis engines have passed through the uncanny valley and are capable of creating faces that are indistinguishable—and more trustworthy—than real faces,"'

https://www.vice.com...than-real-faces

Spoiler

[Malankazooie]

huh, 22/02/2022 (day month year format). Something about it being a palindrome and an ambigram. Also, occurring on Tuesday ('Twosday'?). Gonna have super-dooper tacos tonight.

[Malankazooie]

Isn't it weird how things align and that there are coincidences to be discovered in the mundane?

So, on tonight's final Jeopardy clue the topic was Modern War and the answer was - "Called the longest siege of a capital in modern history, the assault on this city lasted from 1992 to 1996."

Isn't that crazy? Also, can you get it without looking it up?

[Tsundoku]

Spoiler

Sarajevo?

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 01 March 2022 - 10:35 AM

[Malankazooie]

yup.

[Khazduk]

Maiden behind the Iron Curtain was one thing, but this shook me to the core: Scream for Me Sarajevo (2017) - IMDb

[Malankazooie]

A challenge - say this name: Krzyzewski.

Hint, there is an easy way to do it.

[Tsundoku]

Cinder block dominoes:

https://www.goodnews...-spectacularly/

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

[Malankazooie]

[Nicodimas]

https://youtu.be/ifLqzLEB3E0

(They should do a Gilead version)

[Tsundoku]

So I took the Myer-Briggs test.

https://www.16personalities.com/

Turns out I'm an ISTJ-T. I guess that's how I was feeling at the time. May come out different on another day.

https://www.16person...stj-personality

https://www.16person...istician-istj-t

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 03 April 2022 - 08:54 AM

[Aptorian]

Tsundoku, on 03 April 2022 - 08:50 AM, said:

So I took the Myer-Briggs test.

https://www.16personalities.com/

Turns out I'm an ISTJ-T. I guess that's how I was feeling at the time. May come out different on another day.

https://www.16person...stj-personality

https://www.16person...istician-istj-t

The Team Leaders of the new Library Logistics division did the Meyer-Briggs test as a part of teambuilding day a few weeks ago.

We were all ISTJ og ESTJ. I'm definitely ISTJ with an assertive streak but there's a lot of uncertainty in my results because there's a difference between what I actually feel or want to behave personally and how I act in a professional context. I try to use empathy amd achieve a common consensus instead of just telling people they're wrong and they should feel wrong and THEY'LL NEVER WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN IF I SEE THEM FUCKING UP THE SORTING SYSTEM ONE MORE TIME.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 03 April 2022 - 09:21 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

[Gorefest]

Myers-Briggs is hogwash. The lady who designed it in the early 1920s has absolutely no background in psychology and just did it to test out her daughter's new boyfriend. It is just clever marketing. It has no scientific merit other than what people have retro-fitted on it at later stages. If your company HR team offers it up, just point and laugh. They have been swindled.

This post has been edited by Gorefest: 04 April 2022 - 07:25 AM

[Aptorian]

Eh. There's clearly some astrology and reading of the tea leaves going on in the results but the gist of the reports are not wrong.

I could see myself in the strengths and weaknesses they attribute to my profile. As a team building exercise it was really fun to hear how close our responses or feelings were about various subjects.

[Aptorian]

Azath Vitr (D, on 03 April 2022 - 11:58 PM, said:

SHOGGOTH!

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Some hope for the future:

'regular trips to the blood bank appear to reduce the amount of certain "forever chemicals" swimming around in the bloodstream.

While scientists aren't sure just how dangerous these widely [...] substances (PFAS) might be, they are sometimes referred to as forever chemicals because they tend not to degrade in nature.

[...] "[...] both regular blood or plasma donations resulted in a significant reduction in blood PFAS levels, compared to the control group,"

[...]

"While both interventions are effective at reducing PFAS levels, plasma donations were more effective and corresponded to a 30 percent decrease."'

Regular Blood Donations Have a Strange Hidden Benefit We Never Knew About (sciencealert.com)

In the US you can get paid for plasma donations (legally, that is... but not blood donations). Unfortunately some people feel like they have to do it to survive...


'"[...] they knowingly endanger the health of donors in the U.S. by harvesting them twice a week, while in every other place in the world you're only allowed to donate fortnightly," [...]

She admits to having lied to pass the screening after realizing that she had become too thin to pass the weight test, and "put on extra clothes, just to squeak past the weight minimum" of 110 pounds. Gabriella knows other regular plassers, many homeless, who use ankle weights.

[...]

I interviewed almost three dozen regulars at CSL and Yale Plasma. More than half of them confessed to frequent, bizarre tingling sensations; pains; rubbery legs; and severe dehydration, as well as to having been homeless, having lied to pass medical exams, and having used "tricks" that allowed them to pass protein-level tests. They lived in circumstances that made plassing a hardship, but said, "I can't eat if I don't plass."'

The Twisted Business of Donating Plasma - The Atlantic


Wonder if it might also help with:

'Microplastics found in human blood for first time

[...] impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.

[...] Half the samples contained PET plastic, which is commonly used in drinks bottles, while a third contained polystyrene, used for packaging food and other products. A quarter of the blood samples contained polyethylene, from which plastic carrier bags are made.'

Microplastics found in human blood for first time | Plastics | The Guardian

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 15 April 2022 - 07:42 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Cambridge University study finds Anglo-Saxon kings were mostly vegetarian

[...] elites ate no more meat than other social groups.

[...] peasants occasionally hosted lavish meat feasts for their rulers.

Researchers said the findings overturned major assumptions about early medieval English history.

[...] so many medieval texts and historical studies suggested that Anglo-Saxon elites did eat large quantities of meat. [...]

[...] "The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis."

[...] "We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in."

[...] "We're looking at kings travelling to massive barbecues hosted by free peasants, people who owned their own farms and sometimes slaves to work on them.

"You could compare it to a modern presidential campaign dinner in the US. This was a crucial form of political engagement."'

Cambridge University study finds Anglo-Saxon kings were mostly vegetarian - BBC News

Though 'mostly vegetarian' seems a bit misleading... not the same as 'their diet ordinarily only included at most relatively small amounts of meat'.

[Aptorian]

I'm not following the trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Herd closely but the tik tok clips being posted around the web are hilarious:



Sort of sad that two abusive addicts had to have their dirty laundry put on display like this but at least its entertaining for the rest of us.

Also, Depp is ridiculously charismatic in a lot of these clips.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 24 April 2022 - 01:57 PM