borzfahan

iranian spy. send me pics of important canadian infrastructure like overpriced condo, tim hortons, strip mall, etc. 25 he/him studying history of childhood. tme. whites DNI just kidding but you're on thin ice

[borzfahan]

[communistkenobi]

what do you think of this paper? [https :// www . media . mit . edu / projects /your-brain-on-chatgpt / overview /] nearly all "serious" "relying on gen ai makes you dumber" posts or essays quote it despite the authors explicitly asking not to use phrases such as "impact negatively" "dumb" "brain damage" "harm" etc. when talking about the results and listing a lot of the study's limitations. However, the conclusion is still this: "EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling."

link

If you use a calculator rather than doing all calculations by hand, would you see a reduction in brain activity on an EEG? If someone uses Grammarly to correct every grammar mistake they make rather than reading over their entire essay/email/cover letter/etc manually, would you see a reduction in brain activity? If I use google maps to map out what route I need to take to get somewhere rather than plotting it out by hand using a paper map and asking multiple people for directions, would you see a reduction in brain activity? Or, to use an example of something I did today - if I asked the Google search AI to write out the excel formulas I need to use to conduct statistical analysis on my dataset, rather than reading the documentation pages on Microsoft’s website for ANOVA tests/t-tests/etc and manually trouble shooting every time I ran into an error, would you see a reduction in my brain activity? Furthermore, because the study mentions poorer content recall when writing an essay via LLM, if you were asked to recall the processes of each of these tasks (eg, calculations, grammar, travel route times and directions, formula syntax) after having them automated for you, could you do it?

Like, almost certainly there would be a reduction in brain activity and poorer recall, because you are offloading cognitive tasks to a machine to do that thinking work for you. But neurological activity is not the language we use when we talk about other forms of automation, because it would be absurd to claim that there is collective cognitive decline happening as a result of Google Maps telling you where to drive or what bus to take. And this is a good comparison imo, because you certainly can't make the argument that everyday travel is less important/foundational to the functioning of society than writing an essay.

I suspect that one reason why the authors are asking people not to use these conclusions to call people stupid is because a reduction in brain activity is not an indication of stupidity (although they are incredibly bad at explaining this, which is very irresponsible imo). The assumption that a reduction in neurological activity when doing a specific task is a causal indicator of intellectual decline, which is what people are claiming, is asinine

[fenrichaita]

One major factor that makes the nature of psychiatric treatment intrinsically violent is the fact that the boundaries of the patient is considered an obstacle to treatment. The lack of consent of the patient is considered an obstacle to treatment. These obstacles are abhorred by psychiatry and are considered things that must be broken down. If the patient has a disagreement with the treatment, or objects to it, this is considered a symptom and therefore is seen as something not to be validated or respected. Thoughts, behaviors, beliefs; these are all considered symptoms if they are in opposition to treatment and must be broken down. However, compliance with treatment is almost never seen as disordered or symptomatic, even if the patient is fawning or similarly complying to avoid more harm done to them. The fact that only extreme compliance is accepted by psychiatry is inherently violent and conditions people to accept abuse. Isolation and violence are not vectors of healing.

[prokopetz]

The corollary of needing to be willing to frame arguments in terms of moral precepts you don't necessarily share is needing to be aware of subtext. Yes, it's easy to get a certain stripe of hyper-conservative folks to agree with anything you please by framing it in terms of opposition to Big Government, but a large part of that is because when you say "Big Government", what they hear is "Jews". You didn't hack their brain with magic words, you just didn't realise what you were saying!

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I don't remember what post exactly I said this in, but I remember I once saw someone doing this and had to be like "sometimes you think you're tricking the racist into agreeing with you when you're actually letting the racist trick you into agreeing with him"

[vacuiterror]

[anti-parent]

good morning! ok, as promised, today i'm opening up for feedback on the new book notes & discussion guide site.

(here's the link again)

things i'm specifically interested in:

is the language accessible to you? (if not, can you send me details on what you find hard to understand, so i can reword it?)

are there other features you can think of for a site like this that you would find useful?

are there any books you'd be really excited for me to cover?

if you have a book club, how do you usually structure your group discussions?

if you have a reading journal and/or personal knowledge management system, how do you structure your reading notes to get the most out of them?

but feel free to send any other comments/questions you might have as well. i'd especially appreciate feedback from minors & young adults.

[blackpyrefly]

really really awesome videos ar e being made on instagramb reals

[queersatanic]

Tweet

[yimra-deactivated20250209]

What the fuck

[screampotato]

This is absolutely fascinating. I've now been looking at Alex Colville's paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn't exist yet. Here's what I've got so far:

- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don't fade into the distance)

- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.

- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)

- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture

- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don't communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.

- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person's head in the snowy driving scene)

- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I've already listed. In other words, details in the "wrong" places.

What's fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.

But Colville wasn't a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?

[xradiorental-deactivated2025072]

omf i never thought i'd find posts about alex colville on tumblr, but! he's a local artist where i'm from & i work at a library/archives and have processed a lot of documents related to his art. just wanted to give my two cents!

my impression is that colville did see the world as an unsettling place and a lot of his work was fueled by this general ~malaise?? but in a lot of cases, he was trying to express particular fears or traumas. for instance, this painting (horse and train) was apparently inspired by a really tragic experience his wife had:

iirc she was in a horrible automobile crash, as the car she was in collided with a train. i find it genuinely horrifying to look at, knowing the context, but a lot of colville's work is like that? idk he just seems to capture the feeling you get in nightmares where everything is treacle-ish and slow and inevitable.

[kittydealer]

u/MambaMentality24x2

[deadgenerations]

our age of bronze is collapsing, the age of iron struggles to be born... now is the time of sea peoples

[kiwisodaz]

Pepsi dog

[escuerzoresucitado]

[holly-warbs]

Bobby in the morning.

[guelwaar]

whose definition of "graphic violence and torture" ? do we think maybe those conceptual boundaries depend on factors like the speaker's prior ideological commitments? have we ever read a censorship policy?

at what age does a child cross from innocent pre-exposed object to sullied brain adult? what is the normal age to experience or witness violence? where does that leave those who experience and witness violence at younger ages? who may never have lived a 'violence-free' existence?

do we actually think that children are ontologically incapable of being interested in violence, or are we merely so threatened by the idea they could be that we refuse to even speak the possibility?

is it the worst thing in the world to pick up a book and then decide its subject matter is unappealing, frightening, or overwhelming? is that such a foreign fucking concept? did anything scary ever happen to you as an 8 year old? did it have an instant off-switch as effective as 'close the cover and pick up something else'?

what kind of violence? is all violence the same? do all depictions of violence have the same literary merit, political meaning, or emotional effect?

[txttletale]

the more i design/play/think about games, the firmer i become in my belief that the commonly-espoused divide between 'narrative/flavor/aesthetics' and 'mechanics' does not exist

[txttletale]

an example:

"flying" is an 'evergreen' mechanic in magic the gathering, which means it's been used in every single expansion in the 30 years since the game came out, from 1993 to the present day.

flying is commonly cited by mark rosewater, the game's head designer, as the game's best mechanic in part because it's so intuitive: flying creatures can't be blocked by creatures without flying¹. it's elegant and crucially it's memorable. it instantly 'makes sense'. you hear that and think 'oh, they just fly over the other creatures, okay'. very few players misunderstand flying. and even better, the art of the game helps to reinforce that. almost every flying creature ever printed is shown either actively flying/levitating or with huge conspicuous wings. remove the text from cards and ask players to tell you which creatures have flying and they'd get it right 99% of the time.

in fact, the biggest reason why anyone ever has a problem with flying is that the art being such a reliable tell means it can also mislead them: breaching hippocamp got a few players confused because the art makes it look like it flies. rosewater considers whippoorwill's art to be a mistake because it confused players by straight up depicting a winged bird flying on a card without it:

so, you know, the rigid art/flavor-mechanics divide would hold that these are just cases of players being mistaken, of not understanding the mechanics of the card. but as anyone who has tried to write rules text for anything will tell you, if your rules text is consistently misread in the same way, you're doing something wrong! the players who played as though breaching hippocamp and whippoorwill had flying had their mechanical experience severely impacted by the art!

and those edge cases aside, the fact that flying is usually so conceptually intuitive and easy to convey with art makes a huge difference to the mechanical design of cards! a card with a more complicated keyword like ninjutsu, undying, wither or evolve loses a lot of the space it has allocated for complexity. flying, however, uses almost none of the mental bandwidth that goes into understanding a card, and this has an extremely tangible impact on what kind of cards can get flying compared to those other keywords! if you can rely on the art and in some cases the creature type (birds, dragons, angels) to make the 'flying' on the card 'stick' in a players' head, you don't need to worry about how it contributes to the overall memory and complexity issues that card might pose.

& none of these things would be true--i.e. the 'mechanics and gameplay' of the game would be substantially different--if flying were just called "Untitled Ability Keyword #1"

¹or reach, but that's besides the point right now

[jingerpi]

people love calling everything a psyop but the moment you tell them the "genocide" in Xinjiang was fabricated, largely by Adrian Zenz - a man who works for the victims of communism memorial and claims to be "on a mission from god against china" - based largely off shoddy evidence like a survey of 8 people, and then spread by the UN, NED, and U.S. government, using a diversity of methods including a DoD agent lying about being a Uygher for a reddit AMA, as well as numerous mislabeled photos reaching the top of all time on reddit, all with the intent of manufacturing consent against China, when the U.S. themselves were largely responsible for the rise in terrorism in Xinjiang through funding religious extremists in the area to destabilize china, then the very same people will call you a crazy genocide denier.

and thats not even to mention that China put out an open invitation to come tour the alleged concentration camps, which the US refused, many other nations accepted, with many muslim nations noting support for their policies publicly. Or the declining birth rates chalked up to forced sterilization, which was really a result of free birth control, with Uygher muslim population still on the rise at double the national average, or the fact that religious freedoms are explicitly protected in xinjiang, muslims have legal protections against hate speech, something which can hardly even be said for half of the west.

it really starts to make you feel dizzy

watch this video

its only 2 minutes, straight from the horses mouth.

further reading

[morlock-holmes]

The problem with the kind of Suburban sprawl we get in the US is not the density of housing, it's with the density of literally everything else.

The suburbs are where there is literally nothing but the same exact houses in every direction for a mile, and the thing to do at the end of that mile is a large mall full of chain stores.

There's no bus that goes to that mall from where you are.

The only sidewalk that goes to the mall is on the side of a six lane throughway with a 40 mph speed limit and several crosswalks in front of freeway onramps. You've already had several near misses walking here, because obviously nonody here walks so the drivers don't even look for pedestrians anymore.

No, you can't cut through the enormous spaghetti pile of residential streets where all the houses are, those are all just a bunch of cul-de-sacs that don't connect to anything.

There are no trees on this giant street, and no buildings either, so if it rains you get soaked and if it's sunny the enormous pile of concrete creates a heat dome.

You can take the bus into the city, as long as it's a weekday between 6 and 10am and 3 to 7pm, because those are the only times the bus actually runs.

You are entirely surrounded by civilization and yet walking through a place that feels as desolate and hostile to your presence as a desert.

None of this is necessary, none of this is inherent to a neighborhood full of detached single family homes, we don't have to choose between this and Kowloon walled city, there's nothing that required our country to fill up with anti-human architecture, but we did it anyway.