David T Pumpkins

[Jedi @dhe3g]

Have you ever stopped to think about how everything used to be created to generate peace of mind and accept those waiting periods?

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

If you actually read why they’re doing this it becomes obvious that this is the first useful thing Google has done in some time

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

There are only 35,000 venus flytraps left in the swamps where they grow. Poaching is killing them off.

Venus flytraps grow naturally in only one place on Earth: a 90-ish-mile radius around Wilmington, North Carolina. Wild populations have collapsed due to habitat loss, fire suppression, and decades of poaching for the houseplant trade.

Stealing them from the wild has been a felony in North Carolina since 2014, punishable by 25 to 39 months in jail. Conviction-rate enforcement is slow, and a poacher can still dig up several hundred plants in an afternoon.

Here's how to tell a nursery-grown flytrap from a poached one (US Fish & Wildlife Service guidance):

1. Look at the tray. Nursery-grown plants are propagated through tissue culture, so they're uniform in size. If the plants in the tray vary noticeably in size, some of them probably came from the wild.

2. Look at the soil. Nursery soil is uniform, sterile peat moss. If the soil has sand, gravel, or natural debris mixed in, that's wild soil.

3. Look at the pot. Nursery-grown plants come in clean pots. If there are other small plants, mosses, or "weeds" growing in the pot, the flytrap was likely dug from a bog.

If you want one and want to do it right, buy from a specialist carnivorous plant nursery. California Carnivores, Plant Delights Nursery, and FlytrapStore (in the US) all sell exclusively tissue-cultured plants. Big-box stores and roadside vendors are the highest-risk sources.

[Tigof @Tigof_]

dont fall for this bullshit. disabled artists have always existed and so have session musicians who need work.

[shea @sheanorling]

what should happen:
- studios promote young new directors
- smaller budgets
- less CGI, AI
- real movies produced with care, made by real people

what will happen:
- inde navarette funko pop
- OBSESSION cinematic universe

[seosamh 🇵🇸 @dayglowj0e]

for forty years there were just six star wars films. at one point, something new from star wars had an air of mystery about it. then disney took over and churned out so much shit in a decade that no one cares anymore.

[Vic Vaiana @vicvaiana]

All this in just 4 years.

Remember when they insisted it was impossible to build green infrastructure quickly enough

[Wholesome Football account @mr_notblah_]

Y’all gonna have hell packed like it’s Kyle field

[i. adan @Imman_Adan]

Team A *challenges call*

AI: “You’re entirely correct! Someone falling down is not a foul”

*call overturned*

Team B *complains*

AI: “Good Catch! You’re absolutely right, a two handed push from behind is what caused the fall”

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Mike Beauvais @MikeBeauvais]

When you see somebody calling it "literary gatekeeping" to suggest that you need to read *all* of a book to read all of a book, you start to understand why some people think writing a 10-page paper without ChatGPT is impossible.

We are cooked.

[local angry blk man @afropessimistic]

Students see no issue using AI to complete their assignment because they have been conditioned to treat schooling as a means to a capitalist end and not a tool for acquiring knowledge. The proliferation of AI is just making this very explicit for those who didn’t already know.

[Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman]

Hello @JeffBezos, since you question the results of our studies on the unfairness of the US tax system, please allow me to remind you of the main conclusions of our work, the most comprehensive research to date on this issue.

[🌽🌽 Erica, The White Trash Socialist 🌽🌽™️ @herosnvrdie69]

One third of Amazon workers are on government assistance because you don’t pay them enough. We are fully subsidizing the labor for your trillion dollar company. You are a parasite.

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

Btw you’ll never fucking guess who canceled Ebola prevention

[Joe Michael @theJoeMichaell]

this is going to create the craziest misinformation campaign ever

[Joe Gill @realJoeGill]

We got robots writing books and humans working 14 hour shifts at the Amazon warehouse

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

So…lying?

[Andy Bailey @AndrewDBailey]

Charles Barkley in his four seasons as a Houston Rocket: 16.5 points, 12.2 rebounds, 3.9 assists, 4.0 box plus/minus

Draymond Green’s last four seasons: 8.6 points, 6.5 rebounds, 6.0 assists, 0.5 box plus/minus