erinptah: Rainbow stained glass (rainbow)
humorist + humanist ([personal profile] erinptah) wrote2025-07-31 04:27 am

color posting (blue, green, olo)

Is My Blue Your Blue?” – a site that gives you increasingly-mixed shades of teal, making you sort them as Blue or Green, then tells you where your mental boundary of “green turns into blue at This Point” compares to the population in general.

Mine is “hue 173,” moderately on the green side, i.e. the Exact Midpoint (“turquoise”) counts as a shade of blue to me. Did the test on a family call, where we picked whichever color most people agreed on…and managed to land on True Neutral.

Where’s yours?

The color “olo” can’t be found on a Pantone color chart. It can be experienced only in a cramped 9-by-13 room in Northern California. That small space, in a lab on the UC Berkeley campus, contains a large contraption of lenses and other hardware on a table. To see olo, you need to scootch up to the table, chomp down on a bite plate, and keep your head as steady as you can. A laser will be fired into one of your eyes, targeting more than a thousand of your cone cells. (The scientists will have mapped their location on your retina in advance.)”

What I wouldn’t give to get a look at this color. Doesn’t seem likely, though — apparently they’ve already gotten calls from a ton of interested artists, and the retinal mapping process is so involved, even the guy who named the color hasn’t gotten to see it yet.

(…Although the people who have seen it all describe it as some sort of teal. So maybe it’s not as unthinkable as it sounds like it should be.)


erinptah: Nimona icon by piplupcommander (nimona)
humorist + humanist ([personal profile] erinptah) wrote2025-07-29 12:20 am

Erin Watches (and you should watch!) Schmigadoon

Anyone else who got Apple TV for Murderbot reasons, you’ve gotta catch Schmigadoon! before you go. (…It’s the only non-MB thing I’ve watched so far and thought “yes, this is such a treat, I need to tell people about it.”)

The premise is “what if a young professional couple got isekai’d into a musical?” Melissa and Josh are both doctors, their romance is struggling, they go on a couples-retreat hike in the woods…and they walk into a bright colorful town where everyone keeps singing at them.

(The title is a riff on Brigadoon, which is also about normal modern people stumbling into a fantastical small town, but the characters and songs pull from all over. Most of the s1 references I recognized were from The Sound of Music. Gonna indulge in this whole Youtube playlist of Musical Fans breaking down the references.)

Promo poster for Schmigadoon

At first, our heroes assume it’s some kind of immersive performance! Then they can’t get out of the town. And there’s a leprechaun. And the only way to leave is to achieve True Love, while helping the townsfolk with their own problems along the way. Through song, of course.

The cast is star-studded. (They got Kristen Chenowith! and Jane Krakowski! and Alan Cumming!) The music is amazing — it’s all based on songs from classic musicals, not in a straightforward “we took the original song and gave it new parody lyrics” way, but still in a “hang on, this is a riff on Do Re Mi, isn’t it” way. The writing has a lot of fun with the tropes and the cheesiness of the source material, but the kind where you can tell they have a lot of genuine love and affection for it.

It’s barely a spoiler to say that, yeah, our heroes find True Love by the end of season 1. But after leaving Schmigadoon, they start missing it, and go back to the woods to see if they can find it again…and season 2 has them stumbling into the darker, grittier spectacle of Schmicago.

Now here I got a lot more of the references. (Chicago, obviously — then there’s some Sweeney Todd, some Godspell, some Annie, just a touch of Jesus Christ Superstar, and a delightful sprinkle of Rocky Horror.)

Promo image of most of the cast from Season 2

The show got canceled after S2. At least the writers were thoughtful enough to leave us on a hopeful/closure ending instead of a cliffhanger! But it’s a little bit tragic that we’ll never get to see Josh and Mel fumble their way through their custom mashup of Little Shop of Horrors, RENT, Wicked, Avenue Q, The Book of Mormon, and Fun Home.

Did you like the “normal cynical people dealing with a fantastical world of colorful joy” aspect of The Good Place? Were you into the “affectionate parody where we put our whole hearts into writing original music” vibe of Galavant? (Another musical-comedy that was canceled much too soon.) Are you a fan of any/all of the musicals I’ve name-checked so far? Then you should go check out Schmigadoon.

(There’s a nonzero chance that, after I get through all the reference-explaining videos, I’ll go back and watch the whole thing again.)


erinptah: Vintage screensaver (computing)
humorist + humanist ([personal profile] erinptah) wrote2025-07-19 01:32 am

A DA scam, more AI scams, and ChatGPT pulling a Drunk Janet

New scam going around DeviantArt. It opens when you get DM’d the line “Pardon me, may I have a moment of your time? I have a concern I’d like to share.”

The scammers are doing these from real people’s hacked accounts, so if you get suspicious and look at the user’s profile, everything about it suggests “genuine non-bot person.” I got suspicious and googled a whole sentence of their text, and found the above post about other scammers using the same script. Stay alert out there.

This post is from 2018, but I was looking for the link again recently, so I’m bringing it back. Concrete examples of ways you can change an image that don’t affect what a human brain perceives in them, but wildly messes with what a computer algorithm detects in them. (I’m pretty sure “AI poisoning” art algorithms, like Glaze and Nightshade, are doing a variation of this.)

“Builder.ai, once touted as a revolutionary AI startup backed by Microsoft, has collapsed into insolvency after revelations that its flagship no-code development platform was powered not by artificial intelligence—but by 700 human engineers in India.

“We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.” (Narrator: Nobody was surprised.)

“”Tasks that seemed straightforward often took days rather than hours, with [LLM “coding” bot] Devin getting stuck in technical dead-ends or producing overly complex, unusable solutions,” the researchers explain in their report. “Even more concerning was Devin’s tendency to press forward with tasks that weren’t actually possible.”

It’s worth watching the full “actual coder exposes the scam what Devin actually did” Youtube video linked in the previous article. (The speaker says he’s pro-AI! He’s just exhausted by all the fake hype!) Among other things, Devin gets access to a Github codebase, writes a completely new file that duplicates (badly) the functions of a file the project already had, fixes at least some of the bugs it just created in the redundant new file, and then submits this as “fulfilling the task to review the project for bugs.”

Reddit post: ChatGPT, you have the file and not a cactus?