Random @katlover1758 - Tumblr Blog

"The Fencing World Championships will introduce the "Sword Tip Visualization System." This system was developed by Japanese engineers, used at the Tokyo Olympics, and can track and display the sword tip's movement trajectory without any markers." (X)

twinkboobs-deactivated20250801

i wish people were nicer about the whole transgender thing

ublock-origin

Koko the gorilla did irreparable damage to the average hearing person's understanding of sign language

40ouncesandamule

I would love to learn more if you've got a rant locked and loaded

ublock-origin

Koko, as with most "signing" apes, was "taught" modified ASL (bc their hands are different and they physically cant make all the same signs we can) by hearing scientists who did not speak ASL. They would learn a few signs, and then teach them to the apes, who would associate signs to objects and rewards.

The most jarring thing was, the apes are completely unable to learn grammar, and would say things like "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you" (actual quote by Nim Chimpsky), which their handlers would interpret as a sentence, when in reality the apes are simply mimicking signs in hopes of getting a reward. Those hearing handlers would see things like "Nim eat" and "eat Nim" and intepret those as equally meaning "Nim wants to eat".

More damning, the lack of understanding of ASL by the hearing scientists meant that most of what Koko and Nim Chimpsky "spoke" was purely the scientists just seeing what they wanted to see. A Deaf person was brought in to interact with Nim, and they were instructed to not give him any food until he signed "food". They spent hours with an increasingly distressed chimp who did not sign anything, but Nim's hearing handlers would see him move his hand close to his mouth and go "oh! there it is! he signed it!", and while they spent the whole day signing, they didnt see Nim signing back.

With Koko, her handler would claim Koko would sometimes mix up signs like "need/knee", "I/eye", "people/nipple" because they "sound alike/rhyme" but... they don't. Those words rhyme in spoken English. They don't rhyme at all in ASL. Koko wouldn't know those words rhymed in english because she DIDN'T speak english, she "spoke" modified ASL. Of course, as the scientists did not speak ASL either, they didn't realize it, and just assumed random movements Koko meant were signs, and tried to think what she "could have meant instead" by thinking of what words sounded like the ones equivalent to what she had just "signed", even though an ASL speaker would not make a mistake like that.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that almost all of what those apes signed was due to direct prompting from scientists, the fact that they did not use language when alone, or the fact that most of what they answered was complete gibberish (which resulted in videos like Koko's climate address (yes, really) having to be heavily edited and cut to make it seem like she was actually speaking anything that made sense).

One really nasty side effect of this was like. The amount of hearing people who decided to try learning ASL and other sign languages because of the vague possibility of being able to communicate with apes, instead of, you know, the ACTUAL possibility of communicating with and appreciating Deaf people. (one person even said that Koko inspired them to learn ASL so they could communicate with their deaf friend, like... why the fuck did your FRIEND not inspire you to learn ASL??? did you really have to wait for a fucking gorilla failing to learn sign language to think "hmm, maybe talking to my friend would be nice!"??????)

The talking ape experiments helped cement in hearing people's consciousness the idea that ASL, and sign languages in general, are just poorly transcribed forms of spoken English that can be easily learned even by a chimp, instead of complex, independent languages with their own histories, cultures and internal variation.

the-real-seebs

when we got the kid, they tended to go nonverbal from stress sometimes, and i didn't actually learn ASL, because we have text messaging, but I picked up enough fingerspelling and a handful of signs that we could communicate a little if we needed to. and this seems to have worked fine, and eventually it stopped happening, i guess?

anyway, i later found out that the bioparents had an alternative strategy, one which simply hadn't occurred to me, which was to say "use your words, you lazy bitch". honestly, even now that it's been brought up, so it does occur to me, it... seems like not a great choice?

but yeah, like. you can actually just learn communications skills if they're helpful for communicating with people around you.

lesbianshepard

Current twitter drama is Europeans confidently declaring that they don't need to drive or use overpriced public transport to get to the MetLife stadium for the World Cup; they will simply walk down the highway to get there. Girl it's New Jersey. They're gonna splatter you for fun.

lesbianshepard

I think a lot of Europeans think that the stadium is in the middle of a city and surrounded by infrastructure, which is why they keep insisting that they can just walk from point A to point B. It's not! It's in the fucking Meadowlands!!!! You have multi lane highways and a literal toxic swamp and that's it!

lesbianshepard

"Well if there are a LOT of football fans they'll stop for us!"

There's a video online of a trucker who accidentally hits a flock of sheep in the middle of the highway at full speed and splatters them. Has to turn the windshield wipers on to wipe away the blood. This is what every Jersey driver yearns to do once they get on the turnpike.

lesbianshepard

girl help they're now demanding NJ build a bridge over the highway (???? from where???) or shut down the fucking I-95 (one of the busiest highways in the country that everyone commutes on) for their little soccer game.

effervescible

I live close enough to the Meadowlands to regularly curse the hubris of the American Dream mall and this is the funniest shit I have read in YEARS. A lot of the European twitter people seem to think we are DEFENDING the Meadowlands and the general layout of the area like we think it was good urban planning. Girl no! It is a shithole, we know it is a shithole! (Although the actual swamp is kinda pretty from the window of a train heading to Secaucus Junction.) We are not trying to express pride, we are trying to save your life!!!!

I MEAN. I know people talk a lot of shit about American arrogance and they're not wrong to do so, but look at this, my fucking god.

obama-stolemy-vcr

._. Let them perish

Whats funny is they think ppl are defending the infrastructure. Like...no bitch we know it's ass. We are telling you it LITERALLY can't be done

brehaaorgana

Right like, no no. We KNOW it is horrible. We KNOW it should not exist like that. MetLife stadium shouldn't have been built in a swamp like that. Everything about its existence is bullshit. This is probably the WORST stadium to try and get to, considering that it is illegal to try and walk there.

FIFA has also intentionally MADE it worse. Because they're closing the parking lot. They're also preventing ride shares from what I can tell??

Meanwhile the governor of New Jersey is saying this is going to cost NJ $48 million to deal with the ridership, and wanted money to offset that, which FIFA doesn't ever do. So they decided to massively inflate train fares to offset the cost.

Again, while trying to prevent rideshare services from occurring.

Oh, ALSO people in New Jersey and New York City are all being told to "work from home" on days of the world cup matches because the public transit congestion is expected to be that bad, coincides with rush hour, and because for some of it, they're full closing off public transit to anyone who doesn't have FIFA tickets.

And then there are people complaining about our "shitty national stadium" and I don't even know how to begin to explain that MetLife isn't even the biggest capacity stadium in the US. It's not even in the top ten. (It is #15).

I genuinely do hope everyone is just being a bit of a troll when they say they're going to walk on the 95 or some shit because people will 1000% die. I don't even know what a comparable metaphor for this is.

But you cannot just shut this road down:

systlin

It is. Illegal, on most USA highways, to drive LESS than 45 mph. This road system, to our immense grief, was built for the vehicles, not for pedestrians. The seventy foot semi going 80 mph cannot stop if you dart out in front of it. I 95 does not have breaks in traffic. Trying to walk I-95 is literally going to get someone killed. The US reliance on cars SUCKS trust me we know, but I do not want people to get killed trying to get to a sports game. I am begging people not to try and walk 1-95, people on that road drive like they're auditioning for Mad Max. This is not a county with a sane pedestrian friendly walkable road system. Pay the $150 please PLEASE or get a ride do NOT die on 1-95.

It is actually ILLEGAL to walk I-95 or other major highways for the same reason there is no pedestrian traffic on the Autobahn in Germany.

gentlest-impulsion

Any Europeans (of which I am one) confidently claiming they will be fine walking on a highway is definitely full of shit. That cannot be done and live to tell the tale here either.

However. I do believe that people who have never been to the States and didn't bother to put any research in, beyond the occasional Hollywood movie, really REALLY cannot grasp the concept of not being able to walk where they want to go if other methods fail. Like, there's BOUND to be a train and if there isn't, oh well, sucks if it's hot, but guess we'll just walk.

There are other ways to get places than waking along a highway. And we generally don't believe there couldn't be.

When I worked in the US for a year I once wanted to get from a parking lot on one side of a busy street to a parking lot right on the other side of it. I thought it would be ludicrous to get in my car and drive to the other side, when I could just walk there in about 5 minutes. Well. After about 15 minutes of trying - and failing - to find a way to cross an inner town (!!) 4 lane road without risking my life, I admitted defeat, walked back to my car, drove to the other side and parked again.

It's a mind-fuck for Europeans.

weaselknievel

giggled at something and my coworker comes out of the break room and goes "I just heard like, a haunted child laugh... so weird." and I'm like okay so it was a normal regular alive adult laugh actually

temporalreplicsimile

🌈rice🌈

raccoonmilf

When I was in grade school I used to send emails to biologists and zoologists asking them questions to get answers to include in school projects I was working on, and would cry when they did not respond because I thought I was stupid for thinking that some random kid would ever be deserving of a response from someone who does something as smart and cool and important as *checks notes* studies frog fungus.

Now, at 29, I’m lowkey having a panic attack because my academic email is filled with middle schoolers wanting me to answer their questions about pygmy raccoons and I keep putting off answering them because I’m so overwhelmed with all the other raccoon stuff I have to do.

Anyway, greatest apologies to any scientist I ever emailed as a child and also an adult.

raccoonmilf

I know your research is really important and I appreciate all you are doing but this is so fucking funny

kangals

my YouTube algorithm has been showing me a lot of horse racing recently and since the Kentucky derby is today, the last few days all my recommendations have been filled with every middle-ages dudebros podcast about gambling and betting strategies and How To Pick The Real Winner and how to min-max your bet and bla bla bla. Buddy I’ve already got my favorite horsie picked out and it’s because he’s Silly.

kangals

reasons i like the horsie Great White:

he's about 6 inches taller and 200lbs heavier than any other horse in the field. big ol honse.

his record kind of sucks and when an interviewer asked his trainer "what do you think [the horse] will need to do to win the derby?' the trainer just said "get a lot better."

the horse was deadset on eating the landscaping shrubbery during the interview

thats all i need, absolutely sold, go get em Great White.

kangals

this couldn't have ended any more perfectly

kangals

guess which one is great white

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.

phantomrose96

The Ship of Theseus is a story of a ship which, over time, has part after part replaced. By the end, 100% of the original ship's pieces have been replaced. The paradox begs the question of whether it is still the same ship.

The Ship of Theseus is a story of a ship which has its pieces replaced one after another. By the end, every single piece of the original ship has changed. The paradox asks if this is the same ship.

The Ship of Theseus tells the allegory of a ship whose crew are replaced one at a time. Eventually every single crewmate has been swapped for a new one. No one left knows what the carved initials in the mast mean. The paradox wonders whether the ship is still the same ship.

The Ship of Theseus refers to a company which has experienced complete turnover and rebranding. The query wishes to know if it is still the same company. The debtors are asking.

The Ship of Theseus is about a family. The original constituents are dead now, replaced by younger generations which have dispersed, found love, married and gained new names. No one is Theseus anymore. No one remembers the bones. But the genes never forget. Who is the family now?

The Ship of Theseus is you, shed of all the cells which first made you. They're stardust again. You'll be stardust many times over. Who are you?

The Ship of Theseus is me. All my words have changed. Who do I get to be now?

ammnontet

my nothing

tinyyellowflowers-blog

Went to the grocery store with my kindergartener. We weighed some bananas: 2 pounds even. We weighed a watermelon: 4 pounds even. We weighed some mangos: a little over 1 pound. We weighed the watermelon AND the bananas: 6 pounds even.

“That’s funny” said the child “because 2+4=6 and two pounds and four pounds is six pounds. It’s like the same as math!”

“What happens if you add 6+1?”

“SEVEN”

“What if we put one pound of mangos on the scale?” <mangos added>

“IT’S THE SAME!!”

“OK, what’s 7-4?”

“Three?”

“What if we take the four pound watermelon off the scale?” <watermelon removed>

“Mama! Are you telling me math works In Real Life? Think of all the things you could measure!!”

thistoowillpasss

animentality

interquad

Super disappointing to finally see artwork accurately representing my body and realize it’s being reposted on subreddits like “awful taste but great execution” and “diwhy” :( Like this is so cool

(Note- none of the people reposting it to make fun are posting a source and I haven’t been able to find one after an hour of searching, so I can’t say for certain what the artist’s intentions are/if it’s intended to be about intersex genitals or embryonic genital development or both)