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   Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw: (lynnesbian@fedi.lynnesbian.space)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 15:44:27 JST Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw:

   one thing the internet has largely diminished is the abundance of completely baseless advice you used to get. your mum would tell you "wait an hour before swimming or you'll get cramps" or "if someone has the hiccups, shout 'boo!' and scare them to get rid of them" and you'd just believe it.

   "hey dad, what do you do if you get a jellyfish sting?" "get someone to pee on it." "okay, thanks!" and then you just tuck that little nugget of wisdom away and repeat it when your friend asks you the same question seventeen years later.

   do i still believe that the great wall of china is "the only man-made object visible from space?" of course not. does the phrase "visible from space" with no qualifications on distance or camera technology even mean anything? not really. but ask me to name things you can see from the moon and my immediate first instinct will always be to say the great wall of china.

   • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw: (lynnesbian@fedi.lynnesbian.space)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 15:45:05 JST Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw:

     in reply to

     in its heyday, tumblr was a bastion of the old wive's tale. a sacred place where folk tales not only spread, but originated, with new and exciting factoids being written anew by teenagers whose ability to make up compelling yet mundane untruths was surpassed only by their love for toxic yaoi.

     users with names like "sherlocks-left-pinky-finger-official" would authoritatively state that "good" came from the word "god" as a push by puritans in the 1700s to make americans mentally associate goodness with holiness, and "clark-kent-is-my-son" would reply "this makes sO MUCH SENSE I AM SCREAMING". then, someone would screenshot it and post it to internet mega funny dot net with the title "Mind. Blown." and that screenshot would circulate for seven years, becoming progressively more JPEGged.

     if you can think of any cool and fun facts that you leaned from tumblr (either directly or via screenshot), consider googling it at some point. especially if that fact pertains to greek gods and/or historical figures that have appeared in the play Hamilton.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw: (lynnesbian@fedi.lynnesbian.space)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 15:46:39 JST Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw:

     in reply to

     in 2025, we have a new source for these vague falsehoods: the humble large language model. LLMs can synthesise "new wive's tales" on demand, without the user even needing to ask.

     ask for methods to prevent cheese sliding off pizza and be told to add glue. ask for something absurd, like a a conversion of kilometres to oranges, and get a fun story about how many oranges a horse will eat to travel a thousand kilometres. google's summaries even helpfully cite their sources, regardless of whether the source contains the information presented.

     folkloric remedies are alive and well in the modern era. we don't need to worry about running out - the biggest tech companies on the planet are pouring billions of dollars and petabytes of pirated knowledge into generating all-new factoids every single day. ask a question to a probabilistic text synthesiser that hates to say no and you're sure to see something fun.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw: (lynnesbian@fedi.lynnesbian.space)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 15:48:17 JST Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw:

     in reply to

     thankfully, i spend my time on reddit, where only true facts can be found. by the way, did you know that nobody can quote a single line from the movie Avatar (2009), The Onion owns InfoWars, and that downloading pirated copies of games you own is legal (in all jurisdictions)?

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw: (lynnesbian@fedi.lynnesbian.space)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 15:50:51 JST Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw:

     in reply to

     tumblr is still the undisputed champion of made-up stories, though. a machine can tell you that january and february are followed by maruary, sure, but only a human can sit across from you at the cybercampfire and spin you a yarn of the webcomic fan who once filled a hotel bath with sharpie ink.

     a mind is anything that autonomously decides. a vast array of pulleys and weights driven by waterwheel that can play chess "thinks" as much as you or i. however, it is undeniable that such systems are missing something. a clockwork man moving a pen to write of the recommended daily rock intake is thinking in a way somehow separate from the way a tumblr user does when they regale us the false history of how canadian public toilets came to be free.

     perhaps thomas aquinas was onto something more real than reality when he posited that the matter of the body is only made whole when infused with the immaterial form of the soul. the large language model has a body, with golden veins carrying electron bloodstreams to silicon minds, yet a mirror reflecting it in the aetherial realm (were such a thing perceivable) would be as barren as it would be unsettling.

     all the world's knowledge distilled into a trillion decimal numbers, directing text patterns through labyrinths of probabilistically weighted hallways, may produce a tome's worth of literature for the hallowed halls of reddit's Am I the Asshole in mere minutes. without that essential essence which truly gives us life, however, it cannot conceive of a story so intimately human, so false yet resonant, so us, as the tale of the "down with cis" bus.

     do androids dream of smooth sharks?

   • Embed this notice
     Sylvhem (sylvhem@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 15:51:18 JST Sylvhem

     in reply to

     @lynnesbian To be fair, “The Onion” tried to buy “InfoWars”.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) (greenskyoverme@ohai.social)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 15:56:21 JST GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)

     in reply to

     @lynnesbian I still don’t know if white people did shoot off the noses off sphinxes and if until the year 400 Egyptians were almost all black or if both are tumblr made-up history …