Claire Keane
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
blake kathryn
Today's Document
$LAYYYTER
Product Placement
JVL
The Bowery Presents
bliss lane
cherry valley forever
Xuebing Du
d e v o n
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oozey mess
h
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shark vs the universe
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@ithymedit
Remember when Xbox was going to basically ban used games for the xbox one, and Playstation made fun of them with that video titled "how to share games on Playstation" and it was just one guy handing another a game disk? And now Playstation is getting rid of physical disks entirely
It’s like they expect us to just forget their original marketing schemes in favor of more and more money grabs.
if your trans advocacy doesn’t include or forgets nonbinary people, it’s meaningless
^ and trying to shove every nonbinary person into the boxes of transmasc or transfem is not actual inclusion
As someone who is both trans and has a child, absolutely hilarious to me that society presents one of these as absolutely only to be done if you are 110% certain and have proved to several people that you want it bad enough and are ready, and the other is like. You might as well everyone else does. Just do it nobody feels ready. You don’t want to? Yes you do
Especially since one of those is pretty reversible if you change your mind after a couple years and the other one, well, technically but that’s pretty frowned upon
need to beam this tweet directly into everyone's minds right now
jade
theyre green for an amazing reason
🙏thank u sir
that’s his little guy!!
I wish I had what they have...
Imagine being so braindead that you think the UK being one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world is a good thing 🤡
wtf are you talking about, they didn't "deplete" the nature of their country, they cultivated their wilderness over centuries into some of the most idyllic pastoral landscapes in the entire world. And they did such a good job of it that the phrase "English countryside" is now synonymous with beauty and serenity and peacefulness. They didn't destroy their country's nature, they became its caretaker, they're right to be proud of it. All you're doing is pretending that the only kind of nature that should count is whatever is completely untouched by human hands.
The UK is literally ranked in the bottom 10% of most nature-depleted countries in the world. The 2023 State of Nature report shows just how dire the situation is. A third of UK bird species have declined since the 1990s, 97% of the UK's wildflower meadows have been lost since the 1930s, raw sewage is constantly being pumped into our rivers and seas with agricultural slurry also causing massive damage to rivers, three quarters of Britain's hedgehogs have been lost in the past 20 years and UK butterfly numbers are at their lowest ever, a sign of impending ecosystem collapse. Plus people in Britain are the most disconnected from nature in Europe.
Not to mention over populated deer destroying what little is left due to a lack of predators, 60 million non-native birds released for sport shooting every year, plus huge amounts of wildlife crime, including large numbers of birds of prey being shot/poisoned.
There is nothing beautiful about a sterile, ecologically damaged landscape that contains nothing but sheep and deer. Don't comment on something you clearly know nothing about. I live in England. I can see first hand just how dire the situation is.
REBLOG TO ADD WE ARE NOW IN THE
BOTTOM 5%.
:)
five fathers, five sins, five wounds, five gifts [#3]
[Part 3 of my freeform analysis of canto 9 & Rien's character. Today we'll be taking a deeper look at each of the nursefathers and the symbolism of the wounds Ryoshu's Arayashiki left them with, with a particular focus on Shiomi - DM] One of the things that stood out to me about canto 9 is the way in which it feels a bit like a folk tale, or a parable, in the way it approaches structure and symbolism. Ryoshu has five fathers, and she leaves each of those five fathers with a lasting wound when she leaves the House of Spiders. As I spoke about previously, I read Rien's wound (the cut on his face), as connected in some way to his 'sin' - the way he attempts to efface his identity completely, to not have a 'self' at all:
In this way we can also read Rien's 'wound' as a gift - by cutting his face, Ryoshu frustrates Rien from being able to pass for just a poor copy of Roland, and invites him to individuate and claim an identity in this world. Indeed, I argue that Canto 9 more broadly is suggesting that the wounds that cause us the most pain often hold the key to our salvation - the single spider's thread that leads us out of hell.
In fact, if we look at each of the five wounds that Ryoshu leaves the nursefathers with, we can understand these wounds as symbols for how each father has been hurt, and how each, in turn, goes on to perpetuate that hurt in the world. Specifically, we can also map each of the nursefathers loosely to the four types of grasping (upadana) in Buddhism. THATS RIGHT ITS BUDDHISM TIME AGAIN BABYYYYYYY
Here's how I map these types of grasping to each of the nursefathers.
Matthias - clings to sensuality & material things - (loses his arm) Callisto - clings to his worldview - (loses his art-flesh) Valencina - clings to her rigid discipline - (loses her eye) Rien - clings to the not-self - (loses his face) Shiomi - clings to the self - (loses her tongue)* [also, like....five fingers of a hand....grasping?? IT KINDA FITS RIGHT I'M COOKING WITH THIS ONE] Let's unbox each of the nursefathers one by one. First, Matthias:
This one isn't too complicated. Matthias killed his Middle family for a cool anime sword. When someone gets in the way of Matthias getting what he wants, he intimidates them or uses force. He spoils Ryoshu and Kira and showers them with material things in lieu of providing appropriate parental love and guidance. When his hand gets cut off, he uses his ridiculous grit to cling to his cool anime sword even tighter. Second, Callisto:
Callisto can only engage with Yoshihide through his OWN lens of artistic taste and formal analysis. He seems largely unable to relate to her outside of his specialist focus. Despite presumably understanding at some level what the House of Spiders is for, he hopes Ryoshu will found an art movement someday, without ever really considering if that's something she would be interested in, or find meaningful. He spends a decade fashioning a sword in his style to accompany her, and she destroys it along with his gallery, as if to invite him to look outside his current way of seeing the world and to try something new. Third, Valencina:
Valencina is an abusive disciplinarian that will tolerate nothing less than perfect form, perfect stance, and perfect drill. Something particularly important about her characterisation is that the way things APPEAR is of vital importance to her. Lucio must LOOK the part - he must be 'Textbook'. Ryoshu as a small child is punished for the way it LOOKS for her to get cake on her face, eat immodestly, and smile. She doesn't demand Ryoshu not want to start trouble, she demands that Ryoshu not show a hint of it ON HER FACE. Valencina is obviously very emotionally labile, swingy, and triggered by things looking 'wrong', she controls others as a way of regulating herself, and she judges on appearances. Ryoshu cuts her eyeball with Arayashiki. She invites her to not lean so heavily on the relic, and perhaps also draws her attention to her near-constant hypervigilance, scanning her environment for the next threat and if anything is out of place.
Fourth, Rien - we've covered in part 1 and part 2. Lastly, Shiomi:
Shiomi is categorical on the supremacy of her own misery. She has, of course, suffered hugely - betrayed by the world, her organisation, her body, and the people she trusted. Her struggles are almost archetypal - as a woman she is cloistered, loses her independence, is forced into a caretaker role she does not care for, dragged out a world of comforts and freedoms - her own world - into the house of spiders. She wears a bride's outfit. The game is not subtle about this. However - Shiomi is self-obsessed. She cannot ABIDE Ryoshu being sad, because it 'takes' from her misery, it waters it down, it implies her suffering is less-than-special. She must be THE victim. Neither can Dihui Star abide Ryoshu for existing - as though by growing up and becoming her daughter, Ryoshu is 'eating' her individuality as a person and consuming her. This is why her 'first and only request' is that Ryoshu not become like her. Shiomi has her tongue cut out. Now, I think Shiomi is a special case. When this scene happens, Ryoshu knows immediately that something has gone terribly wrong, which is different from the other times we see Ryoshu using Arayashiki against her fathers.
While Ryoshu suffers - Shiomi is triumphant, laughing.
I think Shiomi is laughing because she is getting what she wants - she gets to be the Victim of Ryoshu's violence, and has engineered a situation where she unambiguosly can cast Ryoshu as the Bad Person, the abusive ungrateful daughter that pinned her own mother down and cut out her tongue! After everything she sacrificed for her. In this moment, Shiomi has won. I don't think Ryoshu can stand that. Not after all the abuse she's suffered. I think this is why she kills her. ...the real gift, I think, would have been to leave Shiomi unwounded, unharmed. Whereas four of the fathers have their wretched foreverwounds, keepsake of their daughter, Shiomi would be 'spared' that violence and that injustice - denied a special claim to misery, and left instead with a lasting symbol of her daughter's refusal to resent her. I imagine that would burn just as much as Rien's scar does. Of course, that's not the way this story goes. [if you made it this far, thank you for reading. It's a delight to finally get some of these thoughts down and I feel very lucky to have had such an appreciative audience. Next time, we'll be looking at the way the LCB gets split up in canto 9 part 3.]
✦
WHY IS HE PINK???????????????
Heathcathy??
Oh good I'm not the only one who noticed I thought I was going insane. 90% of the stuff that people seem to want to automate with LLMs to 'revolutionise [X] industry' was already being automated much better with bots, which is depressing because before this wave of LLMs we were all complaining about how shitty all the bots make everything when they're used to do things that shouldn't be automated, but now even a misimplemented non-AI bot is a comparative relief.
Okay I had more thoughts and got more excited than I realised (because computer science is cool) so here goes
#it honestly depends on how pedantic you want to make your definitions#the definition changes HUGELY with context#for example#if you define 'AI' to be any non sentient thing that acts 'intelligently'#well then your washing machine is intelligent!#it can decide how much water is needed based on the amount of clothes#it can do you laundry differently based on the type of clothes#assuming you feed it the type of cycle as an input#sure but none of us like that definition. Even though very technically speaking you'd define automation as a subset of AI#we don't think of it like that#okay then cool. Now then there's the learning type. you'd say that's AI yes?#what about your keyboard? the one on your phone. or the one word apps used to have#they detect grammatical errors which#frankly#I myself may not catch#they can (with a good chance of being right) catch mispellings and give the right word#and they do learn#if you say hey this mispelling is intentional. boom. add word to dictionary. learnt#and the behavior changes accordingly#but oh nonono that doesn't count! you say#that's just statistics#well guess what LLMs are buddy#they're the best statistical models we can currently create of the human language#AND by modelling the human language they are able to 'reason'#an LLM has enough background data to say hey#a lion is to a lioness what a king is to a queen#that's automating the part where we write down and hardcode all those vague connections and keep updating the connections and numbers#as an aside this is actually so fucking cool!! the way the better we get at modelling the human language the better we get at mimicking US#and convincingly! in a way that the words being spit out are cohesive and meaningful!#i mean what is it exactly that makes us so different? The better we get at making things 'intelligent' the more we narrow our definitions
What I wanted to add here was - would you call a Tic-Tac-Toe playing program 'intelligent'? The intro to AI courses definitely do! But I think we just take it for granted that computers can do these things. That we can convert abstract math into physical circuits and 'tell' those circuits to do vastly various things. Back to the point - tic tac toe programs go through all possible plays, evaluate the opponent's possible plays and so on and so forth, evaluating each outcome's favourability in a very mathy way. We understand it and it makes sense to us - it's a process we explicitly define and we don't think of it as AI.
Okay diverting back to why I started typing so much in the first place - I see people say things like 'AI is evil' or talk about LLMs as if they are word generators that are incapable of anything. There are a couple of things here
LLMs are good at what they do and are frankly exceedingly fascinating
We WANT Computer scientists and engineers to do computer sciencing and engineering! Again, this is a very very interesting field
Yes, LLMs are not the same as automations and scripts we are used to
Yes, LLMs can be useful! Let's say you want to build a tool that alerts people if the web page they're on seems to contain a trigger they want to avoid. If I were building a solution, I'd probably use a language model. And probably a Large language model! Because Large Language Models are good at nebulous, language related tasks that would be a pain to try and even define clearly
But love the tool hate the wielder! Right now the industry is foaming at the mouth with a 'shiny new hammer can be used to fix everything ever. Smash 'em till they seem better'. And right now, the shiny new tech that corporations are dropping employees for functions to expose very clearly that
They've never cared much about workers over profits (revolutionary new knowledge)
They will make any excuses they can to 'optimise' the visible results while turning a blind eye to long term issues, reliablity implications, ethical implications, employee health and on and on and on and on
And also keep in mind that they profit from hyping this up as much as possible. They are creating and filling up the AI bubble.
Anyways my point is that people are focusing on the wrong thing!!! We should be driving towards fixing all these pre-existing issues instead of burning the tool! Every symptom that we talk about is a symptom of a fucked up society!!
Last couple of asides - I'm pissed about the fact that fields like 'AI Explainability' or other types of AI or even completely non AI fields are being swallowed whole into the LLM, genAI hype. Papers and tools just keep getting shittier because everyone wants to hop onto the next big thing that will get them money. This happened before, when an APPLICATION of blockchain (bitcoin & cryptocurrency - which is so fucking cool in its own right) got blown out of proportion to monetise the hell out, stunting what it could be!
Abstraction is everything! LMs are structs we have set up using mathematical constructs, putting pieces together to try to model language processes better (and we have been working on these for decades, based on how you want to define them). 'Regular' code and scripts are something we write that allows us to model a variety of processes (including language processes) using logical structs like 'if this then that' (which eventually funnel down into math anyway). At my level of abstraction, these are the same thing! What level of abstraction are you looking at this from?
Again, yes they are shitty! Because tech corporations are bypassing ethics, fiinding loopholes, blowing up the hype and rushing to push a new tool/model into doing things it may not be well equipped for! For money!!!! But what is it that bothers you? The capitalism or the tool it is misusing? Check with yourself!
Mood. Have to add my other fave Darwin Being Hyperfixated On Invertebrate Taxonomy quote
