Star @0x5742 - Tumblr Blog

increasingly thinking about torching my blog on account of the wildly stupid things tumblr has been doing on all fronts lately

#if i do vanish you can always find me via my webbed sight

stephendann

#ok i need the whole monologue now

tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva

anyone else find boomer comics funny in an ironic way? like, if some kid actually said this I would think it's fucking hilarious

pankendev

(snaps out of it) OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING!! HOLY JESUS CHRIST FUCK WHY DID NOBODY TRY TO STOP ME (eases back into it) ahhhh. yeah this feels right

thekalpar

My spouse and I were talking last night and the jeans problem came up so I want to talk about it with tumblr here.

The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.

This came up because my spouse was talking about thrifting and spooky things (two of her favorite things) and how there was this trend of buying a landscape painting from a thrift store which was probably going to end up in a garbage dump and painting a sheet ghost on it to make it art millennials would like. But now you can go to Michael's or Home Goods or wherever and just buy a landscape painting with a sheet ghost on it, mass-manufactured by a corporation. The counter-culture once again being monetized and absorbed by the culture. It's the jeans problem again.

evilnicegirl

this would have got 100k notes as a tumblr post in 2018

redstonedust

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

ralfmaximus

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

depsidase

vriskarune

"there's no way toby can wrap all this up in just 2 chapters!"

toby, preparing to drop chapter 6 chapter 1:

kidzbopdeathgrips

deltarune fans in 2031 sitting through chapter 6 chapter 5 intermission 25 when they thought the whole thing would be done three years ago:

complimentaryculler

ozzyuncia

dogpuppy

nineteenyearoldmeblog

im fucking crying

inlandwest

starrymyst

Star needs hugs 🤗

creepycrag

If you remember being a teenager you're a creep because you straight up saw yourself naked back then. The only way to be righteous is to obliterate your mind with drugs until you can't remember anything

thepromiscuousfinger

luna-azzurra

What helped me write trauma better is remembering that the nervous system learns predictions. If danger used to come after quiet, calm can feel threatening. If kindness used to come with a price, kindness can feel suspicious. So healing is not just “they know they’re safe now.” Healing is the slow, annoying, deeply unfair process of teaching the body that the old prediction is not always the present truth.