Breakfast At Ralf's

Since the Ceramic Frog thing has regained traction and I’m getting asks, here ya go.

Citadelle de Calvi vue à travers les pins…

my talented wife painted a magnificent mural of me dead in a field being picked over by vultures on every wall in our bedroom

Doggy loving the snow

(via)

Convair employee working on missile function analysis

An original Apple Lisa 1 with the dual Twiggy floppy drives.

Every Republican voter and every Democratic voter knows Biden is the better man.

Republicans know Trump derives satisfaction from power over others, not service to others.

Trump's dark and toxic behavior is a result of a lifetime of seeing what he believes he can get away with.

We all know this.

i wish i was famous in the 70s so i coulda gone on the muppet show and flirted with the muppets

Yeah, yeah. It’s all fun and games until Miss Piggy tries to fight you in the studio parking lot for “stealing her man.”

LEGENDARY

bisexuals. Attack

I JUST sat down.

The Supreme Court has decided to transform the very nature of The State this week and only a clear-eyed and massive movement can reverse what's coming....

I stopped reading How Democracies Die and just pay attention to the news to see an example first hand. The Supreme Court of the United States- bringing us fascism since 1981!

This just in: SCOTUS has ruled anything a president wants to do is perfectly legal so long as it's printed on white house letterhead.

^^This. But also, the goal posts for artificial intelligence keep moving, and that's a GOOD thing.

Early computer scientists thought that if they could teach a computer to beat a human at chess, that would mean it was as smart as a person. Alan Turing wrote some of the first chess programs in the 1950s but never lived to see a computer play a human and win.

But then that happened in the 1970s and people decided no, natural language conversation (the "Turing test") was the real way to prove a computer had human intelligence. When a computer could bamboozle somebody into thinking maybe it was a real person at the other end of the terminal, THAT would be the day computers were as smart as people.

But chatbots have been a thing since the 1960s (Eliza) and were mostly perfected by the 1990s. By the 2020s LLMs have made chatbots as realistic and boring as some real humans.

But LLMs are not AI. Which we currently define as having the ability to reason and grasp concepts the same way a human does; to solve any problem, not just (badly) answer questions about hotel room availability.

When we achieve that, the goal posts will move again.

Which is to be expected.

as a knitter, you start to notice how rare it is for characters in tv shows and movies to knit correctly. from worst to best, it ranges from:

- laughably incorrect, just flinging yarn around

- knitting the most basic scarf incredibly slowly because the actor Learned How To Do It For The Role

- old lady actresses casually knitting an intricate lace pattern while doing a monologue

- gromit from wallace and gromit

1. that’s a garter stitch, which you can clearly see despite it being made of clay

2. they took the time to animate a modified continental style of knitting, including showing how his working yarn is wrapped around his pinky, and that he’s flicking with his index on his right hand

3. he only has four fingers and yet this is better than the vast majority of knitting on tv

Dorothea Tanning - Les Trois Garces, 1953

Interviewer: So what was your inspiration for Chewbacca?

George Lucas: Oh, a painting I once saw

the kind of shit mordecai and rigby would almost die over

its like i just watched the episode

@catgirlconspiracy

About 10 years ago I watched a video of a guy who bought a 50 pound bag of monkey chow with the intent of making it his sole diet for one month because it 'has all the nutrients needed for a primate' and upon taking his first bite of kibble (which took an alarming amount of effort) remarked, "wow monkeys must have strong jaws".