So I’m reading the teachers subreddit for my daily dose of misery and sense of doom about the future when I come across an unusually worded comment.
As an educator, I’ve got to agree - while crystals and essential oils can be lovely, they won’t replace a solid IEP or therapy. Let’s save the throwing for the baseball field, not the classroom!
~ /u/mohsinali- (343 Karma pre Suspension)
This comment reeked of ChatGPT. This is exactly the way an un-tuned AI writes, so I follow the rabbit hole downward to see what this is all about.
Entries Tagged - "essay"
Oct 23 2024An AI Horror Story
Aug 07 2024Ricotta Cheese is a PsyOp
I categorically refuse to believe anybody actually enjoys ricotta cheese. For those unfamiliar, this Italian cheese comes out of a mistaken way to boil milk in the Bronze age, and for some reason hundreds of years later, it’s still an ingredient people try to eat.
It’s tasteless, so all you really have to go off of is its texture, which is chewy, grainy, and offputting - it has the same consistency of curdled milk (because it is), except unlike curdled milk we’ve somehow been convinced we’re supposed to eat it.
Jul 10 2024They Don't Make It like They Used To
Nostalgia for the past has supplanted our yearnings for the future, becoming the default marketing tool for corporations. Instead of asking ‘what’s new?’, they ask ‘what have we done before that you liked?’. This trend transcends marketing tactics, reflecting a destabilizing era of remakes and reboots. Crucially, nostalgia is a finite resource, and its exhaustion bears unknown consequences.
Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulacra and simulation offer a valuable framework for understanding this phenomenon. In the post-postmodern era, the line between reality and representation has blurred into hyperreality, where simulations precede and replace the real.
May 07 2024The Incredible Power of Oil & Steel
There is Teflon in your bloodstream.1
Dupont knew about the toxicity of their chemicals since as far back as 1976, and to this day fight responsibility for their part in creating a ubiqitous chemical that does not naturally deteriorate. 2
The chemicals used in the production of Teflon (PFOAs and PFOs) were finally deemed toxic enough that DuPont, and the 13 other producers of it, don’t make it anymore - and have replaced it with New Teflon, and new chemicals. They claim these new chemicals are safe, despite the larger scientific body calling this into question3. To quote these scientists directly:
Apr 18 2024Three Dimensions - An Analysis
Marman & Borins “Three Dimensions” was a tri-installation pop-minimalist art exhibition open at Contemporary Calgary until March 17th, 2024, composed of three mini installations: Balancing Act, THX2020, and ABCD.
We wanted the viewer to walk away with ideas that we didn’t even think of when creating the work Jennifer Marman
All three installations were interesting, but “Balancing Act”, the first of the three, was most striking to me, and I would like to walk you through my own interpretation of it, filtered through the lens of my own biases and thought process.
Mar 26 2024Changing Grocery Shopping Habits
It is easy to forget how recent the phenomenon of the modern grocery store actually is - it only dates back to 1916, when the first Piggly Wiggly was opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Before that, grocers operated as “over the counter”, as in you would walk up to the counter at the front of the store, and ask the clerk to retrieve whatever quantity of items you actually needed, instead of wander around the store with a basket and select what you wanted from the shelves.
Oct 12 2023Laundry & The Responsibility of Search Engines
I’d like to take you on a journey through the world of scams, laundry, and search engines.
In 2016, Foldimate, a California based startup, showed the world a laundry folding robot - it was the size of a washing machine, with a slot in the top for garments that would be mechanically folded and then passed down into a tidy stack at the bottom.
I watched Foldimate with great interest, for you see, of all the daily chores of life that one must accomplish, folding laundry is the one I hate the most, put off the longest, and have tried to - mostly failing - hack my way out of for decades. I was (and honestly still am) the primary target market of this, frankly, very silly machine.
Aug 22 2023The Death of the Search Engine
In the early days of Google and Yahoo the best hack for getting your website to the top of rankings was Keyword Stuffing. You’d make the font blend in with the background and jam in as many relevant (or in many cases completely irrelevant, depending on your intent) keywords as you possibly could. Your users couldn’t see them, but search engines could, and they’d push you up the rankings, since with so many keywords the website in question must be super relevant to what you’re looking for.
Nov 30 2022Batman Is Kind of Strange as a Concept
Have you ever really sat down and thought about Batman? I had a surplus of spare time on my hands recently, so I went back and played through Batman: Arkham City. When it originally came out, people consistently told me it was good, but I never got around to playing it because I just never cared about superhero comics or any other type of cape media. It’s a middling game - lot’s of time wasting minigames - but I’m not here to elaborate on the game much further, just use it as a tool to examine how weird Batman is as a character.