♠Andi Looking Up♠

[robertreich]

Tech billionaires want to force data centers on us with little to no regard for water usage, energy price spikes, environmental harms, or basic democratic decision-making. We must rein in AI before it's too late.

[sharkgirldick]

People who claim that cracker or yank are slurs painfully revealing that they think slurs are just mean things to call someone and not language used by oppressors to dehumanize groups of people they think are lesser.

[neshatriumphs]

The people who get upset at being called "white" take the cake for me. What do you even mean? That's literally the thing you made up for your people to be called

[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.

[fatliberation]

anti-fatness is not just body shaming.

anti-fatness is discrimination. anti-fatness is having next to no legal protections for being discriminated against. anti-fatness is being denied housing, jobs, receiving less pay and promotions (legally) because of your size. anti-fatness is being denied access to clothing, seating, transportation, and other human rights because infrastructure has been designed to exclude you. anti-fatness is less likelihood of receiving a fair trial. anti-fatness is dehumanization. anti-fatness is being denied necessary surgeries, but not surgery that amputates the digestive tract with the intent to starve and shrink you (it doesn’t work either). anti-fatness is mutilation. anti-fatness is being subject to torture devices that bolt your mouth shut. anti-fatness is being told by close friends, family, and professionals that you are better off living with an eating disorder or other life-threatening illness. anti-fatness sells you starvation as a guaranteed opt-out of oppression, but doesn’t tell you that bodies will always regain weight to survive. anti-fatness blames and punishes you for failing at an achievement that is quite literally impossible. anti-fatness is a $90 billion dollar industry. anti-fatness is being denied gender-affirming care. anti-fatness is being barred from in vitro fertilization and reproductive healthcare. anti-fatness is being barred from adopting children. anti-fatness is being removed from your loving parents because they couldn’t make you thin. anti-fatness is intentionally starving your own baby so they won’t get fat. anti-fatness is disproportionately high suicide rates. anti-fatness is being killed at the hands of medical neglect and mistreatment. anti-fatness is the world preferring a dead body over a fat one.

[fatliberation]

reblogging this again because so many people still do not realize that fat liberation is deeply political. fat liberation is not body positivity. it is not about loving yourself or being non-judgemental. it is about THIS. 👆

[dungeonmastersconsortium]

"All religions are cults if you think about it"

Actually they're not all cults and you're doing the work of making sure actual cults can slip under the radar when you say stuff like that

Cult leaders LOVE that trend, because they can point to it and say, "people will call anything a cult, it's basically meaningless"

I'm begging you all to stop using the word cult until you really understand what it means

[jakeperalta]

not using AI genuinely feels like the rest of the world is experiencing some kind of mass amnesia. if someone says they never use it, the immediate response is that can't be true because "everyone" uses it to write their emails or answer their questions. saw a comment suggesting that not using chatgpt to write an essay is "like the 90s". girl I graduated in 2021 and we weren't doing that! how is it that everyone has suddenly forgotten that they were entirely capable of doing these things all by themselves for their entire lives up until the past few years!! am I going crazy!!!

[roycohn]

"the world you grew up in is gone" but not in a reactionary "there are too many brown people" way more like i woke up one day and suddenly everyone is illiterate and believes jewish people are literal demonic pedophiles, raw dairy and steak cure cancer, and AI chatbots are their friends. and i want the old world back

[roycohn]

"the world you grew up in is gone" but not in a reactionary "there are too many brown people" way more like i woke up one day and suddenly everyone is illiterate and believes jewish people are literal demonic pedophiles, raw dairy and steak cure cancer, and AI chatbots are their friends. and i want the old world back

[mckitterick]

[rip-quizilla]

[depsidase]

[periodcostumefantasylover]

The Princess Bride 4k

[scurviesdisneyblog]

Concept art for Peter Pan (1953) by Mary Blair

[catchymemes]

[futureblackwakandan-deactivated]

me hanging out with black people in the summer: “aye, yall don’t forget to put on sunscreen”

them: 

[futureblackwakandan-deactivated]

@flipflibberinflippinghell

Use the Walgreens Brand which is pretty cheap and it does wonders and doesn’t leave me with a white cast. And I’m dark as hell so I hate looking ashy but not all sunscreens are made equally and it’s one of the better ones I’ve used.

[angelic-tokkii-deactivated20220]

Wait cocoa/shea butter and coconut oil don’t protect you from the sun we really do need sunscreen??

[futureblackwakandan-deactivated]

Yea fam. All that “we don’t need sunscreen” shit is a myth. Combine that with the fact that most dermatologists don’t know how to spot skin cancer in Black people and it’s a nasty combination.

[jamaicanblackcastoroil]

Yeah, it’s harder for us to get it but when we do it’s deadly. I know two people who died of skin cancer, both were Black.

[lo-cotidiano]

“While incidence of melanoma is higher in the Caucasian population, a July 2016 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology showed it is more deadly in people of color. African American patients were most likely to be diagnosed with melanoma in its later stages than any other group in the study, and they also had the worst prognosis and the lowest overall survival rate.”

- https://www.skincancer.org/prevention/skin-cancer-and-skin-of-color

Sorry about the link, I’m on mobile. But this is from August 2016, which I know isn’t the most recent but it’s still SUPER IMPORTANT. Y’all please wear sunscreen. With Google it’s even easy to find smaller, Black-owned brands.

[sensei-aishitemasu]

https://blackgirlsunscreen.com/ is Black-owned!

[dykepuffs]

Mind The Gap, by Malone Mukwende, Peter Tamony and Margot Turner, is a really good picture handbook of how various skin things present on Black and brown skin and generally on skin with different amounts of melanin.

There is also SKIN DEEP -

Skin Deep

Skin Deep aims to improve the diversity of paediatric skin images online. It is a project led by Don't Forget The Bubbles and the Royal Lond

Which is freely available and also has quizzes and resources for parents to identify conditions on their kids, as well as for doctors.

You shouldn’t *have* to prepare yourself before you go to the doctors, but.

[vetchtibbles]

[departmentq]

This is the world capitalists want to return to.

Instagram

[penguinsweaters]

Over 4,500 of Lewis Wickes Hine's photographs have been digitized and are available online at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)'s website.

You can browse the collection by state or as a whole here.

[the-big-mood]

A few months before he passed away in 2003, a 74 year old children’s television host sat down in the same studio where he had filmed 895 episodes over 33 years and recorded one last message. It wasn’t for children. It was for the adults who had grown up watching him.

Fred Rogers hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on American public television from 1968 to 2001. For over three decades he walked into the same set, changed into a cardigan and sneakers, looked directly into the camera, and spoke to children as if each one of them was the only person in the room. He never raised his voice, never talked down to his audience, and never rushed a single moment.

In that final recording, he looked into the camera one last time and said “I’m just so proud of all of you who have grown up with us. And I know how tough it is some days to look with hope and confidence on the months and years ahead. But I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger. I like you just the way you are.”

He passed away from stomach cancer on February 27, 2003. He was 74.

[curiousmsmeg]

Sometimes you're in your 50s and still need a dose of courage from Mr. Rogers when the world feels scary.

[uniquewastelandpeach]

I will forever miss Fred Rogers. RIP