so. @canis-diogenus - Tumblr Blog

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There’s annoying tendency in left-wing film criticism to write reviews of movies with the twist being that the reviewer never saw it. All the trenchant commentary they made was based on the publicity campaign, the word from other reviews, and predicting forward from past films from that studio or franchise. Zizek did it with Matrix Resurrections and SMG did it with Avenger’s Endgame. It’s dumb trope and I *like* SMG and Zizek. I’m sure you’ve seen the trend going around.

It’s a joke see, that everything is so predictable that an observer of culture can see it without seeing. And yes, true, you’re very clever, but so what? I’m clever too - so what have you TOLD me that I did not already know? Every time we watch a movie is an encounter with the Real. We can choose to see only the properties we expect - how likable the characters are, is the franchise fading, whether right wing OR left wing tropes appear and how many - or we can actually see the thing in itself. We can notice that for all Love and Thunder is cheap mood-killing jokes for the first hour, there’s a half an hour of dead serious emotions filmed in black and white. We can notice how incredibly cute the outfits of the horror movie’s Final Girl are. We can apply our own perspective to the film - not just in our ideological interpretation, but simply what details you caught no one else did.

This is why the greatest sin is to read only the reviews and the fanfic and godforbid the DISCOURSE around a film and think you don’t actually need to see the movie yourself. To think picking up “the vibe” is enough of a replacement for direct experience.

To know the truth, you must see Goncharov yourself. Until then, everything is shadows against the cave wall.

danshive

In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.

Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.

“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”

“It insists she’s the mafia.”

“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”

“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”

dexer-von-dexer

I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.

This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.

There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.

Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.

TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help

ectogasm

Visit Original Link

i’ve had this going through my head for a week and i had to physically get it out of myself to make it stop

thosegoodboys

[Audio description: part of the song “U Can’t Touch This” by Mc Hammer, except instead of the words “can’t touch this” it plays Griffin and Justin saying “come fuck this” from their spore playthrough. It syncs up perfectly.]

I do not like being stalked and hunted; I especially dislike others facilitating it.

slimetony

Can a horse become king?

classicmeevs

whats a king to a horse

quimstick-deactivated20221106

what’s a horse to a different king

akiraita

what’s a horse

argumate

what’s updog

unexplained-events

Reported Bigfoot Sightings

mavenmemnon

unexplained-events

IHOB = International House of Bigfoot

ingridverse

Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize, snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”.

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

curlicuecal

an extension of this is doing the ‘you’re just cookie-seeking’ thing when someone does something decent

I love it when Osho proverbs pop up in inspirational settings and we all just pretend it's some other dude

kiichu

“You can’t keep doing this! You can’t keep doing shitty things, and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay! You NEED to be BETTER!”

— Todd Chavez

#bojack horseman #shows I should've watched sooner

unaverage-confessions

Therapist: “Are you experiencing any suicidal thoughts?”

Me:

#don't worry y'all i'm still chugging along

charlesoberonn

Out of all the comics to address discrimination within the LGBT community, The Flintstones wasn’t what I expected. But here we are.

charlesoberonn

Issue #4.

Fred and Wilma are facing discrimination from the people of Bedrock for their monogamous lifestyle, which goes against the free-for-all fuckfest that is the norm in the prehistoric society. A clear metaphor for same-sex couples.

They go on a getaway trip with a bunch of other married couples. But on the trip, they discover the trip leader, despite preaching acceptance for married couples and being a trailblazer of social reform, has his own prejudices. Specifically against same-sex couples.

In the next two pages, Fred explains why they’re ought to care about more than just themselves when it comes to preaching tolerance and rights.

featherless-wings

Fred Flintstone’s supportive gay dads are just two of the many reasons this series was so fucking good please read it

theunitofcaring

load-bearing

Sometimes people hit a place in their life where things are going really well. They like their job and are able to be productive at it; they have energy after work to pursue the relationships and activities they enjoy; they’re taking good care of themselves and rarely get sick or have flareups of their chronic health problems; stuff is basically working out. Then a small thing about their routine changes and suddenly they’re barely keeping their head above water.

(This happens to me all the time; it’s approximately my dominant experience of working full-time.)

I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.

It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice - they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”

When you know what’s important to you, you can fight for it, or at least be equipped to notice right away if it goes and some of your ability to thrive goes with it. When you don’t, or when you’re thinking of all these things as ‘nice things about my life’ rather than ‘load-bearing bits of my flourishing as a person’, you’re not likely to notice the strain created when they vanish until you’re really, really hurting.

everything-is-optional

Almost two weeks after reading this, and I’m still kind of blown away at what a ridiculously fruitful definition this is. Like I had no idea that load bearing things were a thing that needed to have a word for them, but now I’m like holy shit I’m so glad that there’s now a word I can use to refer to this really important class of Thing.

brightlotusmoon

This is astounding. Load-bearing. Forget spoons, this concept is wonderful. I’m going to update my Spear Theory with this.

thantos1991

@thebibliosphere @sister-forget-me-not

jumpingjacktrash

don’t forget spoons. the two can coexist.

that section in the dump in Detroit: Become Human is uh, intense

#really intense

putting off transitioning for biological reproduction and then realizing you're not gonna biologically reproduce is like

the worst

#nthe #trans

writing-prompt-s

The year is 2022. You and your gang shoot down Amazon delivery drones and sell their contents for a living.

minelskede-deactivated20190606

This isn’t fiction. This is going to be my career. @writing-prompt-s wanna start a gang?

writing-prompt-s

I am down. What’s our gang name?

writing-prompt-s

Amazon Crime is looking for members. Comment your expertise and explain how it could revolutionise our operations.

writing-prompt-s

Hired!

HIRED!

Hired!

HIRED!

Hired!

writing-prompt-s

Hired!

We need a logo!

robogal328

My hand slipped

writing-prompt-s

I promise I will look after each and every member and that we split the loot evenly

brucesterling

*Round them up, Jeff

wilwheaton

This is amazing.

henstomper

Overwatch Update 1.9 Patch Notes

Hero Updates

Torbjorn

New Ability: Torblefeet

“Torblefeet” replaces Torbjorn’s “Build Turret” ability. Torblefeet increases Torbjorn’s speed by 500% for a period of 8 seconds, with a 10 second cooldown.

Torbjorn’s Rivet Gun has been removed.

Developer Commentary: With Torbjorn what we wanted to create was a sort of stealth flanker character that sprints between enemy’s legs and whacks their knees with his hammer. However, many players used him more defensively, setting up his turret in a defensible location and using his Rivet Gun to kill anybody that tries to come near it. With the removal of the Rivet Gun and the addition of Torblefeet, players are now encouraged to play Torbjorn as a more mobile harasser type character, snapping the enemy team’s puny shins and pathetic ribcages, all the while collecting their bones to craft his horrible trinkets of protection.