Psyxe - Space Whale Aesop

aww nasa has a page for space technology terms you can use in science fiction

nerds

impostor syndrome is a common problem in academia. For example my colleagues keep putting me in the airlock and ejecting me into space

Buy a shirt; help old dogs have a home

Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary provides a home for senior dogs that cannot find people to adopt them—a real home, with beds

 and couches for them 

and love and vet care and a large property to roam on with custom-made boardwalks with ramps to make it easy for the dogs that have trouble with stairs. They also provide temporary and permanent foster homes for many more, with a unique thing called Forever Fostering, where people within 100 miles of the Sanctuary can foster a dog forever, with all veterinary care and medication paid for. 

They have around 20 dogs living in the Sanctuary, including blind pug Bugsy, who had to have his eyes removed.

three bonded pairs, such as Harley and Smily, surrended to a shelter when their lifetime owner had to move into an assisted living facility, which the Sanctuary took in together so they would not be separated

and new bffs

And they’re having a t-shirt sale to raise funds to keep taking care of these old dogs that have been abandoned or are too old to be considered “adoptable.” And you should give them your money. 

Buy a nice shirt. Help a nice dog.

Signal boost this, and I will buy a shirt for someone randomly chosen from the list of people who reblog this post.

https://www.bonfirefunds.com/life-is-good-at-ofsds

Teach ME a new word, please! Make it one nobody has said before.

[in my head] “snek.”

me to baby, after twenty minutes of trying to get him to chill: …and if that purple yacht gets sunk, Mama’s gonna buy you a pickup truck. And if there’s a pickup truck recall, Mama’s gonna buy you a wrecking ball. And if that gets CPS involved, Mama’s gonna buy you an age-appropriate doll -

me to baby, after forty minutes: …and if Olympus Mons gets razed, Mama’s gonna buy you some flying sleighs. And if the flying sleighs get banned, Mama’s gonna buy you a Congressman. And if he still won’t pass your bill, Mama’s gonna buy you a Silmaril. And if that starts an awful war, Mama’s gonna buy you a dinosaur. And if your dino won’t ride to battle, Mama’s gonna buy you a magic saddle -

Skinsuit mindset, or how Buddhism gets pwned too

1. Identify a respected institution. 2. kill it. 3. gut it. 4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

-@iowahawkblog

(The full tweet in question adds #lefties, but I’ve increasingly come to feel that the left wasn’t the monster itself, just the most prominent suit worn by the Skinsuit Monster at the time.)

Today’s case of skinsuiting comes to us courtesy of the MIT Technology Review, which posted this dumb tweet:

Originally I was just going to share it with my friends on ephemeral media and have a small chuckle about how this was omnicide-bait and MIT Technology Review really should have thought out their phrasing better. No man, no problem, as Rybakov put it. (often attributed to Stalin)

Then I read the full article, “What Buddhism can do for AI ethics”, and had a feeling of [screaming internally] before falling into cynicism. It’s not just the twit who tweeted omnicide-bait. The full article repeatedly tees up the case for omnicide and hardly seems to notice.

Buddhism proposes a way of thinking about ethics based on the assumption that all sentient beings want to avoid pain. Thus, the Buddha teaches that an action is good if it leads to freedom from suffering.

The Buddha also taught a way of thinking about how best for everyone to die and stay dead (not reincarnate), because all life on Earth would inevitably involve suffering. A substantial chunk of Buddhist meditation is oriented to becoming a zombie of sorts: walking dead, not feeling suffering because you’re not feeling life. If you gave an archetypal Buddhist a lasting killswitch for Earth, he’d press it. I contend this would be an important subject to cover in an article on AI ethics – if you gave a fuck about Buddhist teachings rather than being a monster wearing Buddhism as a skinsuit, doubly so when you’re halfway to making the case for the killswitch yourself.

Keep reading

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though I still love Chronicles of Narnia the older I get and the more I learn the clearer it becomes to me why it would have driven Tolkien completely insane

I MADE AN X-WING PILOT PLAYLIST IT’S A WORK IN PROGRESS.