Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
It’s not that the focus or the quality of the photo is that great but I think this is one of my best cat photos lately. Such a charming cat. She’s one of the yard cats next to our co-working space.
Here’s the kitten with a friend, who I previously featured here. They’re probably cousins.
Today is Bulgaria’s national holiday. Happy liberation day to all of us! 🇧🇬
Unfortunately, we couldn’t visit the celebration this year. We used to have fireworks, which the kids loved and gave us a reason to go to the ceremony. The fireworks were cancelled a year or two ago to not upset the animals.
At least fluff wasn’t disturbed.
In How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie argues that criticism is futile. Criticism opens the gates to hell, little devils fly back, criticize, gossip, and destroy morale.
Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement.
And yet, walking around all day with your zipper open while your friends politely say nothing isn’t kindness either. So while we search for the middle were kindness wins without criticism, remember this cat.
This is the most critical cat in my recent catblogging history. I tried to blog about her several times and didn’t know what to say. I tried different crops, and neither worked.
I know she’s not really criticizing me for taking photos of her but she looks that way 🙂 and eventually inspired me to write a brief essay about criticism.
A story about the 33-year-old cat Rusty took Reddit by storm. Rusty passed away at the age of 33, making him into top 10 of the oldest cats in the recorder cat history. The poster submitted proof to the mods of r/cats that Rusty was real. People rushed to update Wikipedia’s list of oldest cats, expressed condolences, sent love and wishes. The post generated 134K likes and was probably viewed by most of the non-bot Redditors.
Unfortunately, Rusty was AI slop. Rusty:
The post and the bot that submitted it got deleted.
I think my attempt to restrict Reddit to a few essential subreddits like r/cats is not very successful and I still have exposure to something that I wouldn’t even call AI slop. More like farming for free human-generated text for the purpose of training LLMs. Rusty helps me understand why the sudden rush to gather personal IDs and verify humans on social media. All the social networks are vulnerable to slop and risk losing engagement if they don’t put it under some level of control.
Here’s a real orange cat for you, blissfully unaware about the decay of r/cats.
UPDATE: this is a male cat named Pesho, also known as The Son of a Mother. Likes cuddles and bites for no reason.
Fluff from 5 posts ago moved 5 meters to the right, proving he can move if there’s a warmer surface nearby.
Veselin.blog 