Blazin's Misc Blog

She/her, 31, Aro/Ace/Agender, Artist

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[jacobwren]

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

[milquetoaast]

source

[yanguang]

[five-rivers]

Reflecting on some books I've read (or tried to read) lately, and trying to figure out if there's a subgenre convention I don't like, if I've just been unlucky in my choices, or if there's some secret third thing going on.

[five-rivers]

Like, the books I'm thinking of are Lightlark, Shield of Sparrows, and A Court of Thorns and Roses, specifically.

Lightlark is the only one I finished. Was it good? No. But it was enthusiastically not good. Like a teenager's first multichap fanfic. Definitely the worst written of the three, in terms of technical writing skill, but also the most tolerable.

For Shield of Sparrows, I was like, okay, this has been picked up for a movie. It's some kind of bestseller. Surely, there must be something good here. The pacing was incredibly, impossibly slow and repetitive. I'm not talking slow burn romance type stuff, it was like go, girl, give us nothing. I read sixty, seventy percent of it, hoping it'd finally get better. It didn't. I gave up.

With ACOTAR, I read enough to realize it was a poorly disguised Beauty and the Beast retelling, except that the Belle stand-in had one of the most repugnant, hateful personalities I've seen in a romance protagonist.

What's going on here? I'm not a huge romance fan, but I do read and like romantasy. I read Paladin's Grace, Witchmark, and Keeper of Enchanted Rooms not too long ago (and some of the sequels in those series, too!). Those are all romantasy. It's not the love triangle. Shield of Sparrow's love triangle is virtually nonexistent, because the guy the protagonist is technically married to is a nonentity. I never even got to ACOTAR's love triangle, if one exists, so that's not the reason. And yet... all three books feel kind of... similar... to me. Is it just that they're all books I don't like?

And now I'm reading the first chapter of Fourth Wing, and getting those same vibes... Is there some kind of stylistic thing that these books share that I'm picking up on subconsciously? What gives? Aren't these all super popular books?

[five-rivers]

I'm asking these questions seriously, by the way, not just complaining. If there's some genre convention in common between these books, that means I can identify and avoid it in the future. The problem is, I'm not seeing the connection, if it exists.

[valtsv]

it's always "you gnawed off your own leg to escape like an animal caught in a trap" and never "why didn't anyone try to help you out of the trap" or "why weren't you provided with any other resources to escape the trap with except for your own teeth"

[trufflesmushroom]

[swiftlark]

hot take possibly? but i actually think it’s okay for things to be marketed for adults. it’s literally okay if things aren’t suitable for children. i feel like we are losing the plot

[zoestorm]

Correct. Furthermore: children bending or breaking the rules to get a peek at something that's not intended for them is a part of growing up.

[gay-chef-boyardee]

Hey dude. Couldn't help but notice that the peaceful backing music cut out when you fixed me with a glare uncharacteristic of the traits we've seen you display so far. What was that all about.

[blumineck]

Be yourself as best you can whenever you can.

[rain3yaltoids]

F2U character sheet templates

A friend of mine was having trouble making reference sheets for her characters, so I made quite a few!

I figure these could be really useful if anyone else was struggling too, so these are all F2U

They could be really useful for Artfight, so keep that in mind :)

------Edit------

HOLY SHIT I did NOT expect this to blow up this much!! Thankyou!!

Here's my artfight! I really hope I get to attack some of the people that actually used my template, that would be so cool!

https://artfight.net/~Rain3y_Altoids

[release-the-sheep]

just witnessed something devastating

guy on the subway with one ear pierced, little gold hoop. other guy on the subway very quickly and subtly googling "which one is the gay ear". it is not the gay ear. visible disappointment on his face as he puts his phone away.

[gaslit-dipshits]

[appalachian-werewolf]

PoweredByWho — Who's Building Data Centers in Your Backyard?

Follow the money behind America's data center boom. Track 2,300+ projects, PAC spending, and the politicians who sign off on it.

[afloweroutofstone]

Google quietly added generative AI capabilities to Google Earth, allowing anyone to generate false images on top of real satellite imagery. It seems pretty rudimentary, but the potential for disinformation is sky-high.

Anyway, did y'all hear that they nuked the White House?

[afloweroutofstone]

Within the first few hours of its discovery, people on Twitter used this tool to generate an Epstein Island attraction at Disneyland, a mega-prison within Google’s headquarters, and a sequel to 9/11.

Google has already announced that they will be “rolling back” this feature because of screenshots like these:

The fact that they want to bring it back with “guardrails” is ridiculous. Screenshots like these are not the work of some malign actors, they’re instant proof that your idea is terrible on its face

[dama-the-drama]

You can reblog this only today

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have to dress in this style for the rest of your life!

(you do not have to follow the beliefs associated with the style if that style has associated beliefs. The wheel curse does not affect anything like that.)

Do you like it?

yes!!

it's okay I guess

no

NO.

I dress like this already

results/other/unsure

Remaining time: 23 hours 56 minutes

[somecutething]

A cat waking up from surgery

[daco-broman]

I am losing my shit

[yeahiwasintheshit]

everyone trying to get me in the uber

[queerspeculativefiction]

My cat Nosse had tooth surgery, and had a very strong reaction to the drugs given so he was high as a kite for a lot longer than expected. Apparently he was so desperately cuddly for people that they put him around the neck of one of the nurses doing paperwork, and he just hung there for an hour, purring like a chainsaw, drooling on her shoulder.

[funny-tik-toks]

[40ouncesandamule]

Activist charged with felony after giving border agent "duress code" that wiped his phone

The government says destroying his own data during an airport interrogation was illegal.

A few things of note:

This is why people to your left have been chiding you about the "pedo" panic: now, the government can accuse you of being a "pedo" to justify committing crimes against you.

This is why people to your left have been chiding you about the "terrorist" moniker: for the last half century, the government can accuse you of being a "terrorist" to justify committing crimes against you.

[the-implications-are-fascinating]

The American government is claiming, simultaneously, that they had the right to search the phone because it was a routine search (ie, they searched without evidence of wrongdoing), and that saying that password was destruction of evidence because the phone contained evidence (ie, they searched due to evidence of wrongdoing).

While this is technically a legal argument to make, it seems very unlikely to lead to a conviction because it's hard to prove to a jury beyond reasonable doubt that the government both does and does not have evidence of wrongdoing.

[40ouncesandamule]

You may beat the case, but you can't beat the ride.

The purpose of this lawfare isn't to get a conviction; the purpose is to make his activism more difficult. They arrest him and hold him and charge him and release him and slowly grind him down. He's currently out on bond. If they arrest him again for another bullshit charge, they can revoke his bond for the first bullshit charge.

All of this cost tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They don't care about getting a conviction. They care about making his life and his activism as difficult as possible in hopes that the future he is fighting for does not come to pass.

[headedoutleft]

also, and this is important from a legal perspective, if they don’t drop the charges ultimately and it does go to court and they do get a conviction, they’ve just set legal precedent that allows them to continue doing this to anyone. per the article, this is the first example of law enforcement using that particular law to press charges related to destruction of data on a phone, but if they succeed in making the argument then that makes it much harder for the next person to defend themselves because prosecutors can point back to this case and the fact that the court upheld the argument.

it will then require supreme court appeals and legal revision to change that, or legislative action to ban this type of behavior on the part of law enforcement. which is not likely to happen with the current court appointments and political environment.

so either way they harass activists and discourage anti-law enforcement action, and in the best case (for them) they get to mold the law to their benefit.