no fun allowed

bird screaming into computer

[todaysbird]

for all of you that are feeling a bit down today: here is a tiny bird called the blue-naped chlorophonia that really likes to eat bananas

x

[bunjywunjy]

look at them! they’re having such a good time!

[ostdrossel]

How I have missed this crest <3

[thiscountry]

yes sugar

[thingsfromthedirt]

[bartlebyshop]

Boat death chronicles

Finished reading Batavia's Graveyard last night, staying up for two hours to do so. It's a bit of a change from my usual of people enduring horrendous ship circumstances in icy places. They're wrecked near Australia and it's pretty darn hot. Would recommend if you want to learn a lot about Dutch weirdos of the 1600s, more examples of why never to go outside, how to collect nearly 40,000 cockroaches by bartering with alcohol, and of course how to found a mini society whose only rule is violence.

[weloveshortvideos]

[disgustinganimals]

Don’t hire this cleaning service

[setheverman]

i will hire this cleaning service immediately, don’t tell me what to do

[backyarddood]

my seed not you

[thiscountry]

It’s me

[hjartasalt]

Mods are asleep post forbidden tits

[hjartasalt]

Huh

[hjartasalt]

Huh

[hjartasalt]

Huh

[hjartasalt]

Hhhhhhh

[anothermarkiplierfan]

Perfectly balanced as all things should be…

[thiscountry]

hello

[dailymontreal]

Rosemont La-Petite-Patrie

[drxgonfly]

Winter landscape (by muttigiovanni)

[little-korora]

Ecco is a very snuggly bird

[yesterdaysprint]

The Sheboygan Press, Wisconsin, December 6, 1947

[thiscountry]

me?

[maxofs2d]

so you know how deep learning & neural network “AI training” is like, “here’s a task, and by trying billions of times the computer will eventually find the best way to achieve that task” ?

Someone is compiling a document of every time an AI ended up achieving the programmed goal in unintended ways, instead of what was actually meant, and it’s an amazing read. (you can also submit your own examples)

Creatures bred for speed grow really tall and generate high velocities by falling over

When repairing a sorting program, genetic debugging algorithm GenProg made it output an empty list, which was considered a sorted list by the evaluation metric.

Evaluation metric: “the output of sort is in sorted order” Solution: “always output the empty set” 

Evolved player makes invalid moves far away in the board, causing opponent players to run out of memory and crash

Reward-shaping a soccer robot for touching the ball caused it to learn to get to the ball and vibrate touching it as fast as possible

RL agent that is allowed to modify its own body learns to have extremely long legs that allow it to fall forward and reach the goal.

[maxofs2d]

Just want to come back to this post and add this amazing example as well

[solidusskink]

Heres an AI that was supposed to learn how to walk using six legs. 

After many failed attempts. It decided it was easier to walk upside down

[rubitrightintomyeyes]

“In an artificial life simulation where survival required energy but giving birth had no energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle that consisted mostly of mating in order to produce new children which could be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children).” Good Lord.

[squiddity3]

Relatable

[curlicuecal]

“AI trained to classify skin lesions as potentially cancerous learns that lesions photographed next to a ruler are more likely to be malignant.”

[goodson]

i wanna be friends with a crow but i know that wanting it means itll never happen. theyre too smart theyll smell my sweaty palms