johnrickards.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

There’s a Turkish phrase about the upside of hitting rock bottom being that things can’t get any worse. It goes göte giren şemsiye açılmaz and it means “an umbrella up one’s ass cannot be opened”

submitted 128 days ago • 28 comments

Waitrose getting into the spirit of the times.

submitted 128 days ago • 0 comments

My god, this bullshit just never ends. (A perfectly solid one-line summary of most gen-AI output, come to that.)

submitted 183 days ago • 0 comments

At the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Conference, if you run over your time, you are literally forced to exit, pursued by a bear. The bear can and will take your paper from you to shut you up.

submitted 191 days ago • 21 comments

the "an average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid is actually just a statistical error. an average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in a cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted

submitted 201 days ago • 36 comments

Minor gripe: phone’s on an office furniture spam list. Tapped “report junk”, which deletes msg & blocks. Get reply from O2: “our spam team will look into it. Pls reply with name or no. that sent the text”. … That’s not in the report? What is? And do it from memory, cos msg is deleted by reporting?

submitted 201 days ago • 1 comment

I've got no problem with people using their faith to guide their decisions, but a massive issue when they use it to make decisions about me. One day, I'll post about my beloved grandads final days, and why I've been a supporter of assisted dying (with strong safeguards) ever since.

submitted 201 days ago • 9 comments

orca feeling good about his new hat orcawear killer whale: too small you fucking DUMB ASS

submitted 201 days ago • 147 comments

Not pleased that Bluesky's messing with the default order in which replies are displayed. It's only a small step to then having a fully algorithmic feed, which is what's shit about other places. To reset your replies, go to: - Settings - Content and media - Thread preferences

submitted 201 days ago • 4 comments

I am still confused about who buys this and how the design could ever get approved.

submitted 206 days ago • 8 comments

Whoever could have foreseen, in a petrostate-hosted COP, that etc. etc.

submitted 208 days ago • 0 comments

Editor: You get that chicken painted on to the van? Photographer: Sure did boss, real fuckin sexy just like you asked. Editor: what

submitted 208 days ago • 10 comments

-Gaetz had to drop out because he liked 'em young -So, Em Young was a bar to being AG? -Oh no, Em wasn't involved in that. It was Bush that made Barr AG -Then Gaetz hated Bush? -Yes, that's why he had to drop out

submitted 208 days ago • 0 comments

"okay! i've got all the sheep! hallo?! boss?? I HAVE ALL THE SHEEP!"

submitted 214 days ago • 400 comments

Well this is fucked. And good for @kibblesmith.com for kicking this to the curb. But this shit is insidious.

submitted 213 days ago • 26 comments

Potential snag in the "drill, baby, drill"-our-way-to-permanent-prosperity plan: The law of supply and demand.

submitted 215 days ago • 0 comments

To everyone sharing the MS Word experiences post, it's not Gen AI at all AFAIK. "Connected experiences" is a dreadful term, but it's spellchecking, transcription/text-to-speech, machine translation, etc. that pushes/pulls data from another MS service. Full list: learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/micros...

submitted 215 days ago • 1 comment

Today, I will be showing you how to make a deliciously comforting beef ragu.

submitted 215 days ago • 0 comments

Though graffiti-editing vigilantes still aren't top of my all-time favourites, as this archive gold dust from my local paper shows.

submitted 215 days ago • 0 comments

re the last repost, 2 weeks ago I started a part-time job proofreading clerical docs at my local hospital (hedging vs the vagaries of freelancing w/o needing to actually stop freelancing), and every day I pass by graffiti calling for: "Sex socks now!" I'm never less than curious what prompted it.

submitted 215 days ago • 1 comment

Many commentators say that vigilante groups are never the answer. But they clearly don't know about the masked Ecuadorian trio named “Acción Ortográfica Quito,” who roam the streets at night with a singular purpose: to correct all the spelling and grammar mistakes they find in graffiti.

submitted 215 days ago • 807 comments

This remains one of the finest and most earwormy renditions of a very old song. m.youtube.com/watch?v=7CxX...

submitted 612 days ago • 0 comments

It isn't normal for questions about a medical treatment that haven't produced any evidence to contradict the mainstream consensus to result in halting that treatment and I don't think we say it enough.

submitted 624 days ago • 6 comments

remember the lady from New York who was cursed forever by ass-biting cockatoo ownership

submitted 625 days ago • 56 comments

Me: train’s woke Wife: what Me: grabbing shotgun, heading to front door train’s gone woke

submitted 629 days ago • 12 comments

So this is what happens when you give ChatGPT the prompt: “What can you suggest that would be more horrible and pointless than the Metaverse?”

submitted 629 days ago • 0 comments

The funniest outcome from the AI thing would be if they can only use out-of-copyright works to train the models, and so we end up with a class of incredibly powerful artificial intelligences that all talk like Victorian pamphleteers.

submitted 631 days ago • 41 comments

I'd like to register a COMPLAINT to the wordsmiths of yore: The phrase BOOKKEEPING is a HEINOUS LIE! WHERE is my BOOK SHEPHERDING CROOK? Where is my LIBRARY CORAL? WHY are all these NUMBERS necessary? I feel this is false advertising and demand a proper BOOK HERD to KEEP immediately!

submitted 631 days ago • 8 comments

The only personal upside I guess is that my own books are now so obscure they've not made it into the data sets. (Aside from whatever septic fungal spores power ChatGPT, where my output varies wildly.) Still, that's a very, very thin silver lining to a cloud consisting mostly of slurried shit.

submitted 631 days ago • 0 comments

A thing that bums me out about AI discourse is that there are incredible scientific applications for it and it’s used all over the place for the good of humanity for example climate change modeling (and many other areas!) and as usual the tech bros have just fucking ruined it and turned it evil. 🧪

submitted 631 days ago • 32 comments

I wrote a thing on books being used to "train" learning algorithms. Is it a positive? Spoilers: no. The Grim Future of AI Writing - namelesshorror.com/2023/09/26/t...

submitted 631 days ago • 0 comments