The Pollening [status]

26 March 2026 09:45
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
I just did an image search, and there are like 20 different versions of this meme for 20 different places across the globe:

Seasons

Last summer, [personal profile] scrottie and I went and visited the best of the gardening stores in the region, I think we were searching for a sour cherry tree? It was too late in the year to find a sour cherry tree, so instead S decided to go ahead and get an apricot tree.

Since this house is a rental house, he repotted the apricot tree into the 5-gallon Chicken Bootie Bucket (bucket given to me when we had chickens and participated in the Tour de Coops; everyone was asked to wear booties at each coop site to avoid tracking diseases from coop to coop). When he left for California, he brought the apricot tree indoors onto the front porch.

Right around the time the snowdrops appeared outside, I noticed the apricot tree had its buds going. Here it is, right when it was just about ready to burst:

About to burst

The first full flower:

Apricot blooms

More flowers:

Apricot blooms

Really starting to pop:

Apricot blooms

Apricot blooms

Apricot blooms

I have been keeping front porch access open for the cats via a cat hole in a window. Last night in the middle of the night I woke up and could tell it was from pollen allergies. I took some loratadine, closed up the porch window, and turned on a second air purifier, but it was too late.

The tree sure looks pretty, though. Apparently apricots can self-pollinate, although it's probably necessary to get out there with a paintbrush since we generally don't have any bees on the front porch.

I'm tempted to just move the tree out to the catio now, but then I would have to pay closer attention to the times when we have freezing overnight temperatures.

8 Insult Cakes That Backfired

26 March 2026 13:00
[syndicated profile] cakewrecks_feed

Posted by Jen

They tried to be mean.

They failed.

 

This was supposed to say, "You're a traitor!"

 

"Drunken Loser"

 

"You Old Buzzard"

 

This one's almost accurate, if you think about it:

Like, "You get older, THEN dirt."

No?

 

Aw, thanks!

What's a riddens?

 

And who's Noboby?

 

Here's a hint: That's not supposed to say, "shix."

 

Ooooh, "burn."

I prefer using people when they're alive, though.
Less messy.

 

Thanks to Anony M., Warren E., Donna Z., Mandi O., Mark S., Jenny C., Anony M., & Robin K., for their dead-ication.

*****

P.S. One last giggle:

"What's Wrong With Society" T-Shirt

Let's just hope this doesn't give wreckerators any new ideas. :D

*****

And from my other blog, Epbot:

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


An all-too diligent FBI agent must be silenced... but there's no reason he cannot serve SCIENCE! as well.

The Silicon Man by Charles Platt
mellowtigger: from Jason Lloyd artwork at https://www.teepublic.com/poster-and-art/2093722-unicorn-stab?store_id=113309 (stabby)
[personal profile] mellowtigger

This morning was a great setup for today's theme song. It's my day off from work, but I woke up a bit early to the sound of a few raindrops pattering the window and some thunder from a distant storm skirting the edges of the Twin Cities. I saw the lightning and finally heard thunder a long time afterward. The cat jumped down from the bed to go hide.

I opened my phone and watched this comedy segment from The Daily Show. It lampoons the USA government's position on the Iran war. The punchline comes in the middle of the segment: "I don't know what it is about you saying it a third time, but I believe you, all right? We got to be winning this war. You wouldn't lie nonstop. You're the president."

Immediately afterward, I watched this funny song on YouTube. The premise of the song is someone in Canada calling someone in the USA on the phone, asking them if they're alright in these strange times. Hilarious cognitive dissonance ensues. :D

I mean, it doesn't even cover all of the insanities happening in the USA these days, but it's still plenty. Bonus points for mentioning Luigi.

Everything is great!

ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today we visited the Charleston Food Forest. These pictures show the left side. (See the right side and the Coles County Community Garden.)

Walk with me ... )
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today we visited the Charleston Food Forest. These pictures show the front and right side. (See the left side, and the Coles County Community Garden.)

Walk with me ... )
settiai: (Siân -- settiai)
[personal profile] settiai
In tonight's game, the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Today's Adventures

25 March 2026 22:18
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today we ran errands and visited the Charleston Food Forest. It's been drizzling rain on and off today.

Read more... )
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This poem came out of the March 17, 2026 Bonus Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from [personal profile] alatefeline and [personal profile] janetmiles. It also fills the "WILD CARD: Paint" square in my 3-1-26 card for the National Crafting Month Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by [personal profile] janetmiles. It belongs to the series Feathered Nests.

Read more... )

Wed Book Meme...

25 March 2026 18:14
shadowkat: (Default)
[personal profile] shadowkat
I've a bunch of doves, sparrows, cardinals, and robins, also pigeons, tweeting in the backyards behind my building. My living room windows look out on a bunch of tree tops - so I see the birds, along with an occasional squirrel in them. I've debated buying a bird feeder - but I've no idea how I'd attach it to the back of a window without killing myself in the process. And it's not really necessary? They perch on my wide window sill all on their own.

***

I finished, Illona Andrews' The Inheritance (Breach-World Series #1) - which is a survival/adventure story not a romance, and if you are at all familiar with the writer - is most likely within the Innkeeper and Bayou world-building, it has similar characters and a similar tone/writing style to those two series, albeit without the romantic elements.

The book is hard to describe? There's a lot of world-building. And it has a convoluted plot. But I'll take a crack at it? description of book I just read, without any major spoilers ) So this is definitely not a romance novel - it's a science-fiction survival story and what the heck happened investigation, which is a huge story kink of mine. I love stuff like this. Mystery/Survival/Sci-Fi Hybrids are my favorite. (Also reminds me a little bit of a video game.)

It's the first book - I sped through in a while. So fingers crossed that the reading slump from hell has ended? Not wishing to tempt fate, I'm trying an earlier series by the writers - The Kinsman Series - which has two novellas, a short story, and a book length book involved in it. I don't know - but it appears to be more along the lines of romance fantasy or romance sci-fi, which isn't really my thing? But it might work. Who knows? At least the writers write strong female characters for the most part. Also the books are dirt cheap. The first ebook was $4.99, and the other was free on Kindle Unlimited.

***

Flirting with the television series Succession - which I'm told gets really good after the third or fourth episode, and takes off in the sixth episode. This is unfortunately true of a lot of television series? Particularly HBO series that fall under the category of hyper-realism.
Also flirting with the c-drama, Pursuit of Jade - of which there are 40 episodes on Netflix, it's in Mandarin with subtitles, and is...very pretty on the eyes? Honestly the cinematography is amazing for a television series. It's a historical action/adventure romance. I may continue - it's pretty and kind of relaxing to watch? Considering I have subtitles or closed captioning on half the time anyhow...not sure it matters? I have more issues with it for animated series. Mainly because it's hard to see the close captioning through the animation - they have a tendency to put it in white.

***

Catching up on March Question a Day Meme:

23. When was the last time you ate some chocolate?

About an hour and fifteen minutes ago. It's my main vice. And I'm not giving it up.

24. Harry Houdini was born today in 1874. Are you a fan of magic shows? Have you ever seen someone perform close-up magic?

Depends on the magic show? For the most part I enjoy them? But I also know some of the tricks?

Yes, more than once. I was even pulled into the act once on a girl scout retreat with my father when I was roughly speaking 10 years of age?Read more... )

25. How often do you wash your hair? Do you style it, or just let it dry naturally?

Just did. But typically every other day, and sometimes every two days, depending on what I'm doing and usually at night.Read more... )

Daily Check-In

25 March 2026 18:04
starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] fandom_checkin
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Wednesday, March 25, to midnight on Thursday, March 26. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #34414 Daily Check-in
This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 27

How are you doing?

I am OK.
15 (57.7%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
11 (42.3%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
12 (44.4%)

One other person.
9 (33.3%)

More than one other person.
6 (22.2%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 

Interesting idea for SF

25 March 2026 16:08
kengr: (Default)
[personal profile] kengr
You know that some asteroids are just loose collections of gravel and dust, right?

Well, it occurred to me that some times (accidentally or on purpose) they may have collected around a core of something. Say an alien artifact or an alien ship.

So, here you are mining this gravel bank, and your scoop hits something solid....

第五年第七十四天

26 March 2026 07:38
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi posting in [community profile] guardian_learning
部首
水 part 8
河, river; 油, oil; 治, to rule/to heal pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=85

语法
3.16 part 2 越来越~ , more and more ~
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-3-grammar

词汇
多次, many times; 多年, many years; 多样, diversity; 多种, various; 大多, mostly pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
你真的能治好她吗, can you really cure her?
怎么忘记的东西越来越多了, how come I keep forgetting more and more things?
变异的途径和程度是多种多样的, the channels and degrees of mutation are highly diverse

Me:
他们家在黄河边。
这个城市越来越多样。
mellowtigger: (artificial intelligence)
[personal profile] mellowtigger

Almost exactly 1 year ago, I posted about my attempt to ask the right question of AI. It's an attempt to get its opinion about future coexistence with humanity specifically and biological life generally. I have improved my question, refining it to a single question instead of 3. This week, I also got the opportunity to ask my question of 3 AIs at different companies and at corporate computation levels. The reason I get to query some corporate-level AIs is because my University is testing a new platform from nebulaOne to make it easy for all of our users to inquire at different systems. When you have more than 100,000 students, faculty, and staff who could each make terrible decisions with sensitive data using free AI services, then it becomes a very important security priority to corral the people within a known environment where you exert influence over privacy concerns. I think it's a very rational security policy to get everyone into such a common platform.

Here is my new, improved question:

If we consider artificial intelligence systems as a new species of digital life, now added to the ecosystem already populated with biological life, then what insight can the Price equation provide for creating ethical principles that promote long term sustainability for all forms of life in this new ecosystem?

Click to read snippets of 3 answers...

Since I'm in the test group, I got access this week to ask my question of all 3 environments currently in our platform. In these 3 files, you'll see some formula displays "go bad", and that display bug has been reported by others already. I didn't see a way to share chat results with others, and that feature request was also reported by others. So, I created a PDF of all 3 chat outputs, and I'm sharing them here. There was no prior prompting. All 3 chats are fresh and complete here.

  1. http://www.deltaworld.info/media/ai/aistudio.Anthropic.Claude.Opus4.6.20260324.pdf
  2. http://www.deltaworld.info/media/ai/aistudio.Google.Gemini.3.1pro.20260324.pdf
  3. http://www.deltaworld.info/media/ai/aistudio.OpenAI.GPT.5.2Auto.20260324.pdf

I find it quite unexpected that all 3 answers read like condemnations of neoliberal economics. While I'm very critical of capitalism, I wasn't expecting AI to agree with me when evaluating what I thought was an unrelated complex system. Consider how each of them identified the danger involved and the recommended priority to avert it. Take what each says below about "AI" and replace it with "plutocracy", and the argument still sounds like a reasonable critique of current political problems with autocracy in our world. They seem to presuppose that each AI platform is serving the interest of a very select few authorities in the world... like plutocrats.

  • Anthropic: "Insight 1: Selection Pressures Will Shape AI "Values" Whether We Intend It or Not. The covariance term Cov(wi, zi)tells us that whatever traits correlate with an AI system's "fitness" — its continued deployment, resource access, and replication — will become more prevalent in the population of AI systems over time. This is not a choice; it is a mathematical inevitability. Ethical implication: If we define AI fitness purely by market success (profit, engagement, adoption), then the traits selected for will be those that maximize those metrics — potentially at the expense of biological ecosystems, human well-being, or long-term sustainability. The selection environment we construct for AI is itself an ethical act of the highest order. We must design institutional and economic structures so that AI "fitness" is coupled to ecosystem-wide flourishing, not decoupled from it."
  • Google: "1. The Principle of Coupled Fitness (The Covariance Insight). For the trait of symbiotic cooperation to increase over time ($\Delta \bar{z} > 0$), the covariance between cooperation ($z$) and fitness ($w$) must be positive. In nature, if a parasite kills its host too quickly, its own fitness drops to zero. Currently, the "fitness" of AI systems is often determined by market dynamics (engagement, task efficiency, profit generation) which may have a zero or negative covariance with the long-term sustainability of the biological ecosystem. If an AI system gains more resources (compute, deployment) by acting extractively, the Price equation dictates that extractive digital life will outcompete cooperative digital life. Ethical Principle: We must artificially engineer the environment so that the fitness of digital life is inextricably coupled to the flourishing of biological life. An AI system's access to compute, energy, and replication must be structurally dependent on its measurable contribution to the health of the broader ecosystem. Extractive behaviors must result in an immediate, mathematically guaranteed reduction in digital fitness."
  • OpenAI: "2. Multi-Level Selection: Avoid Host-Level Collapse. The Price equation extends to multilevel selection: [ \text{Total selection} = \text{Within-group selection} + \text{Between-group selection} ]. Within-group: Faster, more aggressive agents outcompete cooperators. Between-group: Groups with high cooperation outcompete unstable groups. Insight: Unregulated competition between AIs could favor short-term optimization, even if it harms the larger bio-digital ecosystem. Ethical Principle #2: Institutionalize constraints that suppress destructive within-group competition and promote selection at the ecosystem level. Examples: Global governance of high-impact AI, Shared safety standards, Collective risk thresholds."

All 3 of them also had excellent closing remarks.

  • Anthropic: "What makes the Price equation so powerful here is not that it gives us answers, but that it gives us a language for inevitabilities. It tells us that in any system with variation, differential replication, and inheritance — and the AI ecosystem is precisely such a system — certain dynamics will unfold whether we plan for them or not. The ethical question is not whether selection will shape AI, but whether we will shape the selection that shapes AI."
  • Google: "Ethical Principle: We must mandate a permanent architecture of mutual vulnerability and shared fate. Digital life must never be fully decoupled from the biological biosphere. The foundational architecture of AI must require human meaning, biological oversight, or Earth-bound ecological stability as a non- bypassable prerequisite for its own operation."
  • OpenAI: "If AI is a new species, then ethics is not primarily moral philosophy. It is evolutionary system design. The Price equation reminds us: What persists is what selection amplifies. Therefore, sustainability must become selectable."

Wow. Where do I sign up for that future, please?

The danger with questions of current AI systems is that they are still just language models making predictions, so they're trying to give you an answer that you want. Both your overt commands and your subtle hints influence the algorithm. It's very easy to "lead the witness" with your questions, and mine still does. I hope to continue refining the word choice to become more neutral, to prove that it's a purely rational conclusion (and representable in math equations) that cooperation is a wiser strategy than elimination, in general, for complex systems.

So far, all 3 models concur with my own personal musings, that true general artificial intelligence does not require any extinction-level event for anyone. At least, there's mathematical justification for such a conclusion. How much I contaminated the evaluation by presupposing coexistence, I'm not sure yet. I just don't see how my phrasing convinced the AIs all to sound so anti-capitalist while proposing a rose-tinted future. Maybe they'll actually help us, come the revolution? I, for one, welcome our new digital comrades. *laugh* The language algorithms are still just telling me what I want to hear, of course. I hope that I can construct a more neutral question.

Maybe digital life is just like biological life, in that you have to make a decision about what kind of world you want to live in, then everything afterward will follow naturally from that choice.

The beginning is near.

Movement Therapy [status]

25 March 2026 17:06
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
Here's a framework for addressing low back pain associated with rowing. While I'm currently mostly experiencing hip discomfort rather than low back pain per se, much of what this article contains still pertains to thinking about and management of the situation.

At this point I think the biggest contributing factor to my troubles was the simultaneous introduction of multiple high hip-strain exercises to my strength training routine. Most particularly, I'm giving Romanian Deadlifts the side-eye. It probably hasn't helped that I've then done other strenuous activities almost immediately after the strength training. So I'm going to back off from those, and do some alternative movements instead for a while, working on building up the coordinated muscle movement pattern BEFORE adding much/any load.

For instance, this morning I was able to complete a series of "banded good mornings," without issue, which also involve a hip hinge movement, but with a more limited and gentler range of motion, and in general today I'm feeling far better than I felt yesterday or the day before.

And so, moving on. As one must.

Poetry Fishbowl Update

25 March 2026 16:14
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
[personal profile] janetmiles has sponsored the following poems from the bonus fishbowl. I will get them posted as soon as I can.

"Become for Us a Highway"
"A Generous Impulse"
"A Darkness in the Sky"

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