Verdx - Verdx

check this shit out, I found it in the british muesum

(sorry about the reflection)

I wish people still had winged garden lion phalluses

Also I got a close-up of the description

The sushi-shaped isopod is a crustacean like no other.

(Image credit: Aquamarine Fukushima)

Once I was caught unexpectedly in a downpour on the top of Mount Pilchuck. In the course of five minutes a bright, clear day that let me see all the way to the Olympic Peninsula turned into a phantasmagorical nightmare. I couldn't see more than a few feet in any direction, my skin was turning a sickly white, the rocks kept sliding out from under me. I almost twisted my ankle several times. If I had remained more than a few hours up there my chances of freezing to death up there would've been high, and my odds of successful navigation on my own seemed slim.

As I struggled, a great black bird appeared before me. I say "appeared" and that should be taken literally — one moment I was cleaning my glasses for the umpteenth time, trying to see through the driving rain, and the next, this incredibly solid and enormous raven is soaring up to me. I would've been scared, but I was already terrified.

The bird could easily have encircled me in its wings. In the almost total darkness, I could see nothing but its outline, outstretched, almost triumphant, fluttering and blowing about like a spruce in a pitch-black tempest, a black flag somehow darker than the fathomless sky.

My guide darted, flickered, and spun, cutting through the torrents of water as I stumbled and staggered endlessly downwards. I expected to risk falling or twisting my ankles, but somehow every time my foot fell on solid, stable ground. Little splinters and spikes of ice seemed to course up my calves, but the nauseating feeling of wrongness that I've felt every time I've twisted or sprained anything never came.

As though I had been hurled out of the forest, I crashed full-speed into the hood of my car with a dull thud. The heater core has long given out on this old jalopy, but I figured at least I could've dried myself off with the paper towels in the trunk, and huddled underneath the thin car-blankets I keep at all times.

However, before I could unlock the passenger door (driver-side lock doesn't work. I told you, jalopy), I found myself looking into a pale face framed by a wild cascade of dark hair. The rain coruscated on his cheeks and ran around his mouth and down his chin. Without the crude intermediary of speech, his intent unfurled in my mind—I must join with him and be part of his company of riders in some Other Land.

I opened my mouth to assent, but before I could make a sound, the curséd voice of pragmatism tumbled out: "I must set my affairs in order! I haven't been to a lawyer recently, my house will end up in probate! It will be hell for my loved ones! Give me a week to decide!"

A sneer curled that noble face. Before I could try to cram the words back down my throat, the strange rider had turned away, and in that motion, he became one with the darkness. The rain gathered itself up from the ground and leapt into the air. The sky brightened with a rapidity that made me stagger, and I was left shivering, soaked to the bone on a bright Summer day.

Just realised they have a very similar vibe

(Also I don't know the name of the mucha painting or its cycle(there are more similar ones) so if anyone knows something please share :) )

BAN ON CONVERSION PRACTICES IN THE EU. GO SIGN IT. DEADLINE IS FUCKING MAY 17. WE'RE STILL MISSING 800.000 signatures. FUCKING DO IT.

eci.ec.europa.eu

European Citizens' Initiative

Give your support !

More train than dragon but I fold, metro train from the DC area cause public transit is cool

what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?

would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?

The problem here isn’t that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It’s that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text. So when they are provided with a database of some sort, they use this, in one way or another, to make their responses more convincing. But they are not in any real way attempting to convey or transmit the information in the database. As Chirag Shah and Emily Bender put it: “Nothing in the design of language models (whose training task is to predict words given context) is actually designed to handle arithmetic, temporal reasoning, etc. To the extent that they sometimes get the right answer to such questions is only because they happened to synthesize relevant strings out of what was in their training data. No reasoning is involved […] Similarly, language models are prone to making stuff up […] because they are not designed to express some underlying set of information in natural language; they are only manipulating the form of language” (Shah & Bender, 2022). These models aren’t designed to transmit information, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when their assertions turn out to be false.

ChatGPT is bullshit