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@long-delirious-burning-blue
You've been kidnapped but the main character of the last TV show you watched is coming to rescue you.
Who’s rescuing you?
I don’t want to talk about your car’s extended warranty I just want to talk about the performance of “Wild Mountain Thyme” done by Laufey, dodie, Jacob Collier, and the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center
And the best part about this isn’t even the fact that three award-winning singers collabed on this project, nor is it the majesty of the orchestra
it’s the way that Jacob stops in the middle to turn to the audience to direct them in 3-part harmony and they make something so beautiful and human
I’m never gonna stop thinking about this
You’ve heard of “i didn’t say it was good, i said i liked it,” get ready for “i said it had some technical problems & didn’t fully deliver on its themes, not that i didn’t like it”
#I voiced a criticism of some of its aspects#which in no way implies I did not like it#“and especially does not imply that I would like to hear a defense of it of the form 'shut up and let people have fun'”
REALLY endorsing these tags from galileosballs
i am not immune to a well choreographed fight scene with a fun song in the background
"Break Free," created by artist Disha Dua.
reblog if AAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
アアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアアア
啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊 啊
AAAAAAAAAHHH!!!
This is such an abstract type of comedy I don’t even know how to handle it
it’s not explicitly stated but we’re pretty confident eustace here is going AAAAAAA too
there's one thing that's certain: coworkers are NOT contributing to any declining birth rates
coworkers love getting pregnant it's a form of enrichment for them
there's always a 50% chance he's in jail currently
If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading
affirmations:
- it’s fun to be awake & in an upright position
- consciousness is a gift
- i CAN do this anymore
This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…
Listen, this is serious.
Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!
It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
Reblogging so you know which sites to totally avoid
Another inside tip from academia: Those papers in really expensive journals that are effectively inaccessible to anyone not in a university network? Depending on the discipline it’s very likely that same paper is on a “preprint” server somewhere, with no access restrictions.
Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.
So the next time you get hit with that paywall, you may not even need sci-hub, just click the arxiv link on google scholar instead.
if for some reason none of this works, the old “send a email nicely asking for the paper to the author” is always a good trick. remember most scientists hate the commercialisation of scientific knowledge
Don’t mind me, just gotta share this with my bf so that he knows what websites to avoid
Many authors of papers are on ResearchGate! You can ask for papers there, if they don’t just post a copy to download. If they’re associated with a college, you can usually find their email addresses in the department directory, also.
Always reblog.
So Hank Green got caught using AI and it’s a whole huge blow up, and I really don’t have much interest in adding to the pile on.
However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”
Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”
The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.
And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.
And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.
Anyway, my main thought here is you are not smart enough to outwit the dopamine machine. It wants your attention and nothing more. Do not assume you can resist just because you know what’s under the hood.
Whenever you decide to use a tool, you should consider “what is this tool designed to do” and for LLM’s that answer is “maximize user engagement.” Anything else is in service to that goal.
My read of this came from Hank’s own response to the situation which you can find here. I’ve screenshotted the part in particular that drew my attention and spawned this post below:
Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.
Some other notes:
1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-
2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.
3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.
4. I have book recs on this topic. As you can guess, this is an academic interest of mine. But that’s another post if folks are interested.
A lot of my personal political opinions boil down to “hey this thing clearly isn’t going anywhere so maybe if we’re stuck with it then we should make it better and see what’s good about it” and a lot of people on tumblr generally seem to interpret that sentiment as me saying “I think that the current system is perfect and am ignoring everything bad about it and also I’m going to kill your mother”
Personally I’m a pragmatist when it comes to politics. I wanna know what I can get done now and in the realistically near future. Which really annoys a lot of idealists, I’m learning.
If I have to work within the system to make things better I’m gonna do that. If working outside of the system works better then I’ll do that. Realistically you probably need a combination of both.
There’s a lot of “this is how it’s always been” attitudes out there I’ve noticed. And the two reactions that frequently annoy me are “so we can’t change it” and “so we have to tear down all of it”
First of all, no matter what you’re talking about it probably hasn’t always been like this. Things change constantly. Second of all, there’s a middle ground in life between tearing down the system to the foundation and allowing it to continue unchanged. In fact, that middle ground is where a lot of utilitarian, unglamorous progress happens while those two groups on the extremes are sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
The day to day actions of making the world a better place are boring and they’re often a repetitive slog. Voting, donating, protesting, volunteering, picking up trash, lying down in a government building, boycotting, planting gardens, working, parenting, walking from office to office and asking for things directly. Chipping away at a concrete wall with a spoon.
Here’s the thing though. There’s a lot of people with spoons. So unless you’re planning out the revolution all by yourself then get swinging with that spoon of yours.
The way I explain it to people is:
I can have all the ideas and dreams in the world, but no one is going to FUCKING listen to me because I'm ME. I'm a pudgy woman over 40 who doesn't have a male owner and can't reproduce. I've got light skin and a US passport going for me, and that's it. And for most of the people who make big decisions, that's not enough. I'm not rich or powerful or decorative, and I'm smarter than a brick, and all of those things have been used to disregard my opinions since I was a literal child.
But I CAN cook a big vat of soup. I CAN sew quilts that keep people warm (and also repair their clothing so it keeps them warm in the winter). I CAN make your kid stop crying. I can do basic first aid, and I can sing and tell stories, and I can walk forever and sit on the floor for a really long time and annoy the absolute shit out of politicians.
So I will protest outside my horrible congressman's office in a homemade Captain America costume, and I will get the local news to cover it so that THIS time the horrible congressman can't have all the protesters arrested without making himself look ridiculous on the local news. And then everyone in the district will find out about his shittiness that got Captain America to protest his office. Would it be better if I didn't have a horrible congressman who sics the cops on peaceful protesters? Sure. And nine months after I pulled that stunt, he lost a midterm election (partly because more people in the area learned how shitty he was) and now that district has a congressman who knows a cosplayer can kick his ass, and acts accordingly.
Would it be better if we had a system where no one horrible got into power in the first place? Of course. But I was born into the system we have, so I will improve things as I can. That district is better off with a rep who sits up and takes notice of any constituent wearing a Captain America T-shirt or button. I never had the option of remaking the US government, but I DID have the option of taking out some trash. So I did, and now there's less trash.
And I can take out more tomorrow.
i’m so upset
I just realized that the reason ghosts say Boo! is because it’s a latin verb
they’re literally saying ‘I alarm/I am alarming/I do alarm!!
I can’t
present active boō, present infinitive boāre, perfect active boāvī, supine boātum
Recte!
if it comes from the latin word, they’re actually saying “I’M YELLING!” which is even cuter
do they speak latin because it’s a dead language
get out
This is exactly the kind of content I come here for like I want to print this out, frame it and put it on my wall.
A story in three parts
PIZZA READING CHALLENGE: JUST LIKE THE 90s!
HOW IT WORKS
Dates: Now until September 30th.
Set your own reading goal. Some suggestions for goals: a TBR list, your own bingo sheet of different genres, a time- or pages- or books-based goal, etc. It needs to be a goal that is, in your opinion, worthy of a pizza.
Decide your pizza reward. It can be a Pizza Hut personal pan, aka The Original, or any takeout or frozen or restaurant pizza of your choice, or a pizza you make yourself. It can even be many pizzas. This is up to you. We're grown-ups now.
Make your pledge. Tell us your goal and reward.
Blog your updates as often as you like. Please do not skimp on the pizza pics. I will be eating my own pizza, but I also want to vicariously enjoy more pizzas than is humanly possible to consume.
Hashtag is #PizzaReads.
☆♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆
For folks unfamiliar, since 1984 Pizza Hut has run a reading program called Book It!, where children read books in exchange for coupons for free personal pan pizzas. It's mightily nostalgic for many USian millennials.
I’m so in! Here we go…
GOALS:
- Start and finish Emily Wilson’s Iliad and Odyssey translations
- Finish at least 2 of my little pet project book reviews
- Actually get my library card in the new town
REWARD:
- A whole pizza date night for the epics
- Lunch slices for the library card and reviews…gonna go treat myself to some mid-week exploration
If I attain my goals too quickly, I reserve the right to update new goals and bribe myself with more pizza.
Trung Le Nguyen's epic Pride & Prejudice thread was so magnificent I had to gif it.
For your convenience, the Pride and Prejudice live-posting super-thread 📚 [contains quote post or other embedded content]