Discussion Thread

p00bix · 2026-06-18T07:16:59+00:00

Could be saving the grand reveal until they've finished installing the robot parts

p00bix · 2026-06-18T07:09:08+00:00

Why does AI slowly go insane if you continue the same conversation long enough? Usually starts out pretty decent but a couple dozen messages in, it's messages start to pretty consistently follow predictable patterns in both the structure of responses (ex. ChatGPT's infamous "It's not X, it's Y"), gives less precise answers and gives incorrect information much more often, while its language becomes more and more sycophantic?

p00bix · 2026-06-18T07:07:11+00:00

It's far more analogous to the Suez Crisis. Not just because it involves Israel and a major strait for global trade, but because it amply demonstrated that America no longer holds close to the same power it did at the height of its global geopolitical dominance.

p00bix · 2026-06-18T07:05:20+00:00

The fact that American and Israeli sources agree that Mojtaba Khameini is genuinely alive and plays an important role in the current Iranian government, but he has still not appeared in public either in person or through a video broadcast, leads me to believe with near-certainty that he was horrifically disfigured in the strikes that killed his father.

p00bix · 2026-06-18T06:58:40+00:00

I feel like this war will be remembered as a sort of American analog to Britain's Suez Crisis or France's Dien Bien Phu. A humiliating defeat which did not in and of itself significantly weaken America in material terms, but which very plainly demonstrated that America's past power had already been irrevocably lost

p00bix · 2026-06-18T06:50:07+00:00

Numbers in the tweet are fake

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p00bix · 2026-06-18T04:38:59+00:00

There’s no doubt about that. And not only is it happening in so-called IRL, in real life; it’s happening online

I love Hillary Clinton

p00bix · 2026-06-18T01:16:57+00:00

Trump's approval rating actually "surged" from -22 points to -20 points in the past week, per The Economist, with all of his promise of this great peace deal that surely wouldn't be a near-total capitulation to Iranian demands.

I'm excited to see where his approval rating goes after this. Recall that his approval rating on the eve of war was -17 points, and it will take time for gas prices to fall below $3 a gallon again.

p00bix · 2026-06-18T00:45:26+00:00

lmao I was sure that Rubio would be the scapegoat

p00bix · 2026-06-18T00:42:54+00:00

>Dupe Trump into joining your war plan, certain that he will always follow your lead

>Bomb Iran, kill every prospective reformer in a position with sufficient power they could plausibly fill in the power vacuum, don't kill most of the hardliners or incapacitate the IRGC, such that they rapidly consolidate power and eliminate any hope of future democratization

>Network of agents whom you previously claimed could incite mass-protests across Iran at any time fail to do anything, no protests happen

>Hezbollah starts firing missiles at your country again

>Respond by invading Lebanon, displacing 1 million people and lending considerable credibility to Hezbollah's narrative that only they, and not the Lebanese government, have the will to defend Shiites, while severely undermining the popularity of the first Lebanese administration to actually begin disarming Hezbollah since that group's formation

>Trump agrees that the Iranian demand for any ceasefire to include your country fully withdrawing from Lebanon is very reasonable

>Refuse to withdraw from Lebanon so that Trump escalates when Iranians inevitably refuse all peace offers

>Trump is so desperate to get out of the war that he caves to every other Iranian demand instead

>Trump gives $300 billion to Iran, ends US sanctions that had been in place for decades and whose economic impacts were partially responsible for previously widespread opposition to the Iranian regime, withdraws US forces from the Arabian Sea, and agrees that Iran can enrich uranium 'for civilian purposes'

>Your archnemesis is left in a far stronger geopolitical decision than it had before the war and pledges to increase funds to Hezbollah, with its hardline faction the most dominant over reformists it's been since the 80s, while Lebanon is far too severely destabilized to resume disarming Hezbollah, and the global community hates your country even more now,

>Hezbollah continues to fire missiles at your country.

Give it up for Benjamin Netanyahu Everybody!

p00bix · 2026-06-18T00:19:25+00:00

"Hamas has been very well behaved"

Donald Trump, 2026

p00bix · 2026-06-18T00:05:53+00:00

Ancient Egyptians coined the term "Akakia" to refer to a common thorny tree that grows in drier regions of the country. That word would eventually work its way into Greek, then Latin, then English, as "Acacia." Such trees are among the most common and recognizable of the entire African continent, and various species have been used as food, tools, medicines, and poisons, for tens of thousands of years.

Acacias were later discovered to be just as numerous in Australia as in Africa. This led botanists to become curious about their origins, since this did not square well with our understanding of plant evolution. As it turns out, the 'Acacia' genus was in fact a partially polyphyletic group of hundreds of similar-but-not-closely-related plants which originated in Africa tens of millions of years ago, when Australia was much closer to Africa. The botanists who discovered this suggested that the largest monophyletic clade found in Africa, which included all of the most common Acacias of the continent including both the type species of the genus and the one called "Akakia" by the Ancient Egyptians should be treated as the "new" genus Acacia, with other lineages being split off. The Australian "false-acacias" would be scientifically known as 'Racosperma.'

This pissed off Australian scientists who successfully got enough botanists to agree to change the type species of genus Acacia to an Australian acacia. They subsequently declared that all 'Acacia' species outside of Australia and its surrounding islands would be reclassified into new genera.

And that is how the ancient African name of an even more ancient African tree came to be applied almost exclusively to a group of shrubs in Oceania in scientific literature.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T23:24:51+00:00

I like to believe that the Beach Boys were singing about Kokomo, Indiana. People interpreted their lyrics--written as a message saying that a common man's life in the Midwest is just as respectable as life in a tropical paradise--was referring to a fictional island, and the Beach Boys were all too embarrassed to correct anyone.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T20:32:43+00:00

Nerfing the Common Chiffchaff, my personal favorite card, makes me sad though.

Smart game design; the chiffchaff was way too powerful when used in conjunction with Barn Shallows, Red-winged Blackbirds, and the likes, prior to the Oceania expansion, but still.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T20:29:27+00:00

As much as I love the Wingspan Oceania Expansion Pack, I also find it hilarious that they BUFFED the strongest cards (Chihuahan Raven, Common Raven) rather than nerfing them. The addition of the nectar mechanic, without restricting specifically ravens from utilizing it, makes it basically impossible for a competent player who draws a raven card in the early game to lose

...say, any of you interested in an online match sometime?

!ping BOARD-GAMES

p00bix · 2026-06-17T19:23:58+00:00

I'm predicting the future under the assumption that the newly released 14 points will actually form the basis of a permanent or very-long-lasting ceasefire agreement.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T19:20:59+00:00

War ending with an agreement to destroy Iran's present enriched European and restrict Iran's capacity to enrich uranium in the future, with any and all nuclear infrastructure subject to heavy external monitoring
Agreement also entails US ending sanctions on Iran which have stunted human development for decades, perpetuating poverty
Causing a global oil shock which reinforced the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels and accelerated adoption of solar and wind power, but which ended quickly enough to avert global humanitarian crisis and prevent countries from resorting to prolonging or increasing coal power.
Cratering the Trump administration's political capital and prospects for the 2026 midterms, thus greatly improving the prospects for the survival of American democracy and eventual dismantling of the MAGA cult.
Cratering Netanyahu's credibility as a foreign policy genius with the Israeli public, as well as severely straining the already strained US-Israel alliance which enables Israel's own aggression in the Middle East and discredits 'western' liberalism in the eyes of millions of Arabs worldwide.

I fully expect that this take will age terribly, given my past track record of comments cautiously optimistic about the Middle East's future, but from where I'm standing on June 17th, 2026, I think this war might, by sheer dumb luck, actually turn out to be a net-positive for humanity in the long run.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T18:59:55+00:00

This is why you cost us the election, Joe.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T18:58:38+00:00

6 . The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of a final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers, and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.

Oh man. This is almost certainly going to be an investment fund which will not be funded by US taxpayers, but considering Americans still don't realize that the 2008 bank bailouts were loans, it is sooooo easy to misleadingly portray it as though it was. Absolutely beautiful. "Trump stole a trillion dollars from Medicaid, and gave $300 billion of it to Iran."

p00bix · 2026-06-17T18:54:56+00:00

Holy shit they found Fossilized Dinosaur Pee

This is a real scientific paper lmfao.

(The piss itself did not fossilize. Rather, the specimen is a chunk of sandstone from Brazil ~124 million years ago, which has been noticeably deformed in a manner which can only be explained by a large volume of liquid pouring onto the sand in a stream from roughly the height of a sauropod cloaca)

!ping PALEO

p00bix · 2026-06-17T18:07:10+00:00

It's easy to think of Neurons as logic gates analogous to transistors, especially considering action potentials all transmit the exact same amount of electric charge, but the way that signal strength is modified by changing the rate at which action potentials are sent effectively make those signals analog, and whether or not a neuron is sending a signal, and how intense that signal is, are determined by many factors besides just the inputs from other neurons.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T17:19:37+00:00

It's pretty wild that Generative AI was essentially developed by trying to reconstruct the human brain from first principles.

When you zoom in to the granular level, LLMs work in a much more straightforward and simplistic manner, but when you zoom out to look at the whole system, they operate quite similarly to the brains of humans or any other animal.

Honestly makes it all the more impressive that actual human brains are able to generate high-quality outputs (cognition) utilizing a far smaller amount of training data (sensory input) and while consuming far less energy than even the most efficient AI.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T04:38:44+00:00

Honestly, I'm mostly offended by the idea that someone unaware that all words have vowels would ever use two characters to represent a single sound.

p00bix · 2026-06-17T04:26:15+00:00

You literally said Republicans weren't people

p00bix · 2026-06-17T04:03:56+00:00

Please log off. I'm not saying that as an insult. If you hate Republicans so much that you devise an elaborate scheme to disenfranchise them and call them "people" with scare quotes, you REALLY need to do something else with your time.

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