Vasudha Shankar

I burn chrome in my mind... in German.

[theselongwars @theselongwars_]

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

There's a bit in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (written in 1979) where the heroes come upon an intergalactic flight has been grounded for thousands of years.

Its automated systems told it not to launch until it was fully stocked up with lemon-soaked paper napkins, for the comfort of its passengers. But the surrounding civilization collapsed, and the napkins never arrived.

Consequently it put all the passengers into hibernation (waking them once every few hundred years for coffee and biscuits) until such time as another civilization might arise, and restock its lemon-soaked paper napkins.

The Guide is a more accurate and prophetic account of modernity than most Very Serious Science Fiction writers could dream of creating.

[NASA Solar System @NASASolarSystem]

It's a moon. We checked.

@NASA's Cassini spacecraft got many close-up views of Saturn's icy moon Mimas, and still managed to escape and send the data home. Take a tour of Mimas and hundreds of other solar system moons at https://t.co/1y9DX7NcLo — and May the Fourth be With You.

[Daniel Franke @dfranke]

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection.

You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum.

You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom.

You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine.

You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two.

You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

1/2 Why AI is unlikely to become conscious – my 2026 @TEDTalks is now online. What do you think about the prospects for 'conscious AI'? https://t.co/OoXFavR3eG

[Jonas Čeika @Jonas_Ceika]

@atwtmvtvftvraIp She has a Shutterstock account where she posts all of them! Over 12,000 of these images
https://t.co/WssUzye7yI

[Jonas Čeika @Jonas_Ceika]

Those uncanny AI-generated animal images could never recreate the aura of the stock photos made by this 60-year old Ukranian woman

[jules @smudgehell]

@beanytuesday “Free college, free healthcare, free shmurda” is my politics

[yammi @sighyam]

Japanese and Thais have been fighting on Twitter all day. Here’s the tea lol:

A Thai man at a 7-11 attempted to buy a box of instant ramen. He opens it, pours hot water, and then goes to pay. Why? Because in Thailand this is common, as Thais live in a high interpersonal trust society and people can be trusted to pay for things at shops.

For added clarity, this practice is mostly done with noodles to save time and not much else.

However, in Japan, people are expected to pay for noodles before opening them. A Japanese 7-11 cashier corrects him. No problem. The man pays. Great learning experience. The video is shared online in case other Thais don’t know.

A Japanese nationalist account reposts the video: many Japanese netizens harshly criticise the Thai man, with many being racist and xenophobic, even attacking the man for not knowing how to insert cash into the machine, calling him backward, a country bumpkin, and stupid, etc.

Thais reacted by criticising the Japanese for their uptightness, saying how when Japanese tourists make mistakes, the Thai mindset and approach are to act calm and reasonable. Thais are confused why it’s so hard to adopt an “it’s okay” mindset, especially when no harm was caused. In Thailand, this is a quintessential mindset that Thais live by.

The Japanese side responds and basically says it doesn’t matter… you’re in Japan, and the Thai man is practically stealing.

Thais respond by saying, okay, understood but who attempts to steal and then goes to pay?

Thais then pull out receipts of all the times Japanese tourists have behaved badly in Thailand, pointing out that bad behaviour stemming from moral bankruptcy like discrimination, sexual assault, and theft is more common from Japanese tourists than from Thais, with many cases making headlines over the past few years alone.

Comments about Thailand being backward because the Thai man put the cash note in the wrong way were also met with confusion from the Thai side.

In Thailand, QR payments and e-wallets are the default payment methods, and most Thais now adopt this new-gen banking tech. Japan is still a cash heavy society and relies on older infrastructure habits.

It’s worth writing that not every Japanese comments are attacking the Thai man. Many are being reasonable and those who have travelled to Thailand have been pushing back against other Japanese netizens comments.

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

Yeah, so basically the current prevailing schizo internet theory is that AI nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.

The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.

Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".

The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).

1. They now can identify who is human and who is AI slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons

2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults

3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is AI slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do.

It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.

It fucks over everyone else.

Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy schizo theory and I unironically believe it.

[Vasudha Shankar @BoredMuse]

https://t.co/vEJtzHVRuH

[Vasudha Shankar @BoredMuse]

https://t.co/s3kVpOGKB2

[Corporate Absurdity @ConsoomerLs]

Ever get rejected from a job before you even apply?

[Sneedle @SRamirez68083]

We literally know this isn’t the case from brain damage patients who retain their reasoning abilities unaffected despite having their language center cooked, and from all the living beings who have cognition despite not having language.

But the techbro midwit is undeterred.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

First they steal your history. Then they erase it.

[wint @dril]

blocked. blocked. blocked. youre all blocked. none of you are free of sin

[Only In Boston @OnlyInBOS]

A love story in Medford tonight.

🤍

[Redwilld @redwilld3]

@atrupar 🤷🏻

[Vasudha Shankar @BoredMuse]

https://t.co/b9rMhCtdIV