uwu

30+ Ger, Eng, (Jpn, Viet) OK. Like = mark for later

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: How to fold a flying pig. (cr简开JK)

(The name flying pig/feizhu飞猪 is inspired by Nezha’s mount the Wind-Fire Wheels. In the animated film, the Wind-Fire Wheels normally take the form of a flying pig.)

[the-big-mood]

human pov following objects 😭

[heyfruitcake]

Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

L'Odissea di Nolan tra "scheletri spazzatura" e relitti: Arpa al lavoro in Sicilia, che succede

Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i

[ignitelimelight]

They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government

[st-guliks-fnord]

Concerns about prop disposal as filming on new Nolan film comes to a close | www.italianinsider.it

Found an article on this in English

Also a different, unrelated article about concerns & possible violation of international law in using another of the film’s locations

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey used occupied land as a film set. That feels like a betrayal | Mohamed Sleiman Labat

The decision to shoot in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, where the Indigenous people can’t tell their stories without fear of imprisonment

[dogboysora]

The latest episode of this colonial drama stars the Christopher Nolan blockbuster using parts of our occupied territory as a film set. Sahrawis are aghast that scenes from The Odyssey – an adaptation of Homer’s poem immersed in themes of displacement, family separation, betrayal, and the agonising, decades-long struggle to return home – were shot on our lands. The irony would be comical were it not so tragic: we, the Sahrawi people whose land was used to film parts of the Odyssey, have been living our own brutal odyssey for more than 50 years.

Our homeland suffered a brutal military invasion from the north and south in 1975, when Spanish colonial authorities handed over the territory to Morocco and Mauritania. Today, half of our people languish in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, while the other half lives under a suffocating military police state, separated by a 2,700km militarised wall built by Morocco and fortified with millions of landmines.

Such realities and stories will not make it to the big screen. In a world lured to fiction by the magic of the cinema, it seems easier to “excavate” a 3,000-year-old story of suffering, separation and betrayal than to see that today, those exact themes are daily lived realities by the Sahrawi people.

…

Morocco weaponises cinema to whitewash its occupation of our land. By courting foreign film crews to shoot in Western Sahara while denying the Sahrawi the right to film and express themselves, Morocco uses cinema to manufacture a romantic, tourist-friendly image designed by a regime deploying every political, economic and cultural tool to keep the occupation’s status quo and deny Sahrawi existence and resistance […] Film-makers, in this context, are not neutral agents, their tools and positions can enable politics of erasure.

Excerpt from the very excellent and poignant article linked above; emphasis mine.

The film industry at large is disturbingly comfortable with the exploitation of colonized peoples and their lands, as well as blatant disregard for environmental protections (to harken back to where this thread started), as though these human and environmental costs are acceptable sacrifices to make in the name of art.

[gravityjunior]

Starting a collection

[dduane]

Oh, BTW...

Judge Gives Final Approval of $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the landmark settlement in the class action copyright lawsuit on Monday. Authors and publishers are e

Anthropic illegally downloaded some 500,000 titles, and 92% of those eligible for an award—both authors and publishers are entitled to payment—had opted into the class action. Martínez-Olguín denied all but two requests to opt out of the agreement. “We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers,” said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement. Pallante praised the court for recognizing that downloading from pirate sites “is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.” She also argued that fair use should not be extended to allow tech companies to copy copyrighted materials, and that tech giants should look to licensing agreements to train their AI models.

Now we'll see how long the payouts take to come through. I had between a half and two-thirds of my lifetime output stolen by these schmucks, but payouts from many of those thefts will be split 50/50 with the publishers. (Which strikes me as fair enough.)

So the waiting continues. Meanwhile, so does work...

[everentropy]

Anthropic Copyright Settlement Gets Final Approval: $3,000 Per Book, No Binding Precedent

Anthropic copyright settlement wins final approval: a federal judge signed off on the $1.5 billion payout — $3,000 per work across 500,000 t

This article has some good information on what this case might mean for future copyright claims for AI plagiarism cases in the future. The thing that worries me is $3000 is really low for a lot of these books, if that's the "price" that might be used as a guess for what the "cost" of using a book in training data is. Still, the fact that Anthropic lost at all is a good sign.

[nylarac]

not to be a pedantic hater but i wish tumblr accent wasn't the commonly used term to describe tumblrina typing quirks and phrases bc that is Not an accent it's a dialect!!

[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.

[wouldyourathervisit]

Would you rather visit

Berlin 🇩🇪

Munich 🇩🇪

Remaining time: 6 days 4 minutes

Hey all, for the short term I’m going to just do a round of major city showdowns from different countries because I am truly running out of steam (and ideas) but I want to keep this blog going!

[worldwright]

movie yapper scale (HOME movies we're not being public menaces)

0- NO talking during movie NONE. i will kill you

1- a couple comments but keep it short. no pausing

2- frequently points out little stuff ("ooh cool shirt", "are they stupid")

3- i will pause occasionally to have brief discussions about the movie

4- frequently discussing movie stuff. might talk over dialogue occasionally

5- it's just nonstop. can't enjoy the film if im not engaging with it!!

depends on who im watching with / depends on the movie

not a movie watcher

Remaining time: 2 days 20 hours

[bigboysdrinkmilk]

Why is there a diarrhea parasite outbreak in America?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies cut funding to disease prevention and control.

Why is measles back in America?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including RFK Jr, cut vaccine and measles prevention funding and programs.

Why is the New World Screwworm infecting cattle in Texas, when it had previously been eliminated from the area?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including Elon Musk, cut USAID funding, which in part worked to monitor and prevent screwworm outbreaks.

Why was there a flu outbreak in our armed forces?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including Pete Hegseth, cut vaccination requirements for our armed forces, putting all of them at risk alongside our military readiness.

What contributed to the Covid outbreak?

Donald Trump and his Republican allies cut funding to a pandemic prevention program in his first term because Barack Obama had created it.

“America first” sends its regards. Trump voters, please learn your lesson. And if you don’t, it’ll be taught to you again with yet another diarrhea outbreak.

[bigboysdrinkmilk]

[vaspider]

Please give credit to Matthew Cortland, the disabled lawyer and activist whose work is reflected in that last screenshot. They work hard on documenting what Trump and his cronies have been doing & they deserve credit.

[queersatanic]

To @vaspider's point, this otherwise useful Bloomberg article is sullied by them just taking an individual's work and repeating it without credit:

As Parasite Spawned Chaos, Taylor Farms Slow-Walked Response

The US Food and Drug Administration had apologized, Taylor Farms said in a post on X. An agency lab test linking its produce to the country’

Taylor Farms gave $1 million to a political action committee supporting the president last year. Chief Executive Officer Bruce Taylor had attended an event with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and hundreds of agriculture executives, members of Congress, and federal staff just days earlier, celebrating 250 years of American farming at Mount Vernon.

[wokefrogvirus]

let’s have a blast with mama

[oblivioustoast]

photographer credit from the notes!

[augustdementhe]

YAY, CREDIT. Go buy a print from him, if you're so inclined:

SHOP | kunalphotography

[sinni-ok-sessi]

I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things

my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say

[darklynoon-deactivated20170407]

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

[picsthatmakeyougohmm]

hmmm

[have-you-been-here]

Inside a cave, anywhere on earth

Have you been here?

I have been here

I have not been here

Remaining time: 5 days 20 hours

[apolladay]

Which of your joints hurt the most?

* fingers/toes

* wrists

* ankles

* elbows

* knees

* hips

* shoulders

* neck

* jaw

* spine

* somewhere else

* see results

Which of your joints hurt the most?

fingers/toes

wrists

ankles

elbows

knees

hips

shoulders

neck

jaw

spine

somewhere else

see results

Remaining time: 5 days 7 hours

[undeadhousewife]

[eeby-deeby-dark-and-creepy]

Ok now I’m curious… Which do you prefer:

I have lived in and out of the city, I prefer the city

I have only lived in the city, I prefer the city

I have only lived out of the city, I prefer the city

I have lived in and out of the city, I prefer out of the city

I have only lived in the city, I prefer out of the city

I have only lived out of the city, I prefer out of the city

Bald/vanilla extract/I reject dichotomies under all circumstances/I can’t read

Remaining time: 2 days 22 hours