does croutons know how to count to 4
his mind is unburdened by the concept of basically everything

roma★
🪼

No title available

Origami Around
Monterey Bay Aquarium

★
Today's Document
dirt enthusiast
Cosimo Galluzzi
wallacepolsom
Keni
Xuebing Du
DEAR READER
tumblr dot com
h
Jules of Nature
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
art blog(derogatory)
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
One Nice Bug Per Day

seen from Russia
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from Brazil
seen from United Kingdom

seen from India

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States

seen from United States
@mostlygayy
does croutons know how to count to 4
his mind is unburdened by the concept of basically everything
ao3 asking if i want to see mature content. do i want to see birds in the sky. do i want to feel the wind in my hair and the grass under my feet
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Edited down a long tweet. (x)
cats are really good at looking at things. very useful
having two cats essentially means you have a bug and rodent triangulation system. if they are both looking somewhere you know for damn sure there is some unauthorised fucking thing there.
there is the line between bisexual and aroace and i am using it as a jump rope
they should invent a body that feels normal to be inside of
um actually there's nothing wrong with letting cats be outdoor pets. your cat is depressed locked inside forever. it's animal abuse. let it outside. more cats should be let outside more often. especially overnight.
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!!!
I wish I could go to a doctor and just list every single symptom I ever experienced no matter how small and unconnected they seem and the doctor is nice and patient and knows everything and they nod and smile and explain that every symptom I ever experienced is connected to like one rare and often overlooked issue that's sooooo easy to fix with like. a pill. and then I never have to worry about anything ever again.
i think its awesome when women refuse to adhere to gendered expectations i think its so fucking cool and great
So to be 100% clear:
tumblr just added an update that requires you to verify your age in order to view "mature content". I'm not sure how they do the verification (haven't yet checked), but given recent similar updates from things like Discord, it most likely involves sending them a photo of either your face or your ID.
In addition, over the past few months, and also years in the long-term, tumblr has been incorrectly marking things as mature content. These include:
Notifications about missing persons and requests for help
Posts about youth liberation
Posts about sex education
Posts about how the mature content is poorly implemented
Posts about being trans, more specifically about trans women and transmisogyny by both tumblr and users on tumblr
Non-sexual selfies by trans women/transfems
Trans womens'/transefems' ENTIRE BLOGS even if the blog contains no sexual content
Reblogs made by various blogs, mostly trans women, which add no additional content but somehow are marked as containing mature content, when the original post is not
Posts talking about racism and antiblackness both on and off tumblr
Posts by black people, especially black trans people, that are non-sexual
And likely many more I haven't seen
In essence, this update has mandated that a majority of users must either a) submit their personal information to tumblr, a website whose moderation has been EXTREMELY biased against marginalised people and who I would not trust with my ID, or b) be excluded from absolutely all conversations tumblr decides are "mature content", whether they are actually sexual in nature or not. Furthermore, anyone not over 18 will also not be allowed to take part in these conversations, or even see them, or interact with many trans women or people of colour on this site, as tumblr decides.
This update is complete bullshit designed to censor and exclude marginalised people, poorly hidden under a guise of "protecting teenagers from sexual content", and they know it.
I hope OpenAI goes under. I hope ChatGPT and all similar AI are unplugged forever. And I hope everyone who's been relying on it cries about it.
photos by the artemis ii crew
Saw a comment that reminded me most people are not close to AI in their discipline--which was someone wondering why anyone would 'program' an AI to do a certain ridiculous thing.
So I'm here to say AI isn't programmed--not in the traditional sense of "a set of instructions written by a person that the computer executes." And in fact, Software Programming and AI Development are genuinely different fields. I am a software developer. I am not capable nor trained in AI development.
I have enough career exposure to both to understand core differences. But to be entirely clear, my statements about AI development are from a college-class level of understanding. But my statements about software engineering and AI in the tech industry are industry knowledge.
A key thing about 99.9% of software engineering--and a detail I very strongly like--is that code execution is deterministic. And deterministic means that, when knowing all the inputs, you can with absolute certainty know the output. This will not change unless one of the inputs changes.
And programs are--simplistically--a highly detailed instruction list. If something is going wrong with the code, you can walk through it at a granular level. You can see every individual step it is taking and identify and isolate what is wrong. There are a million ways this can be massively complicated, but deterministic execution pretty much guarantees this is possible.
AI is not deterministic. AI is not code written by someone. AI is a plinko machine 1 million feet high by 1 million feet long that folds over itself 1 million times and eventually spits the balls out somewhere. It is doing math that cannot be solved by a million people in a million days, and is the domain of GPU chips alone. It is fundamentally unknowable on the granular level.
Humans train the model by giving it known inputs with known desirable outputs and tweaking parameter weights as to reward the machines whose plinko peg configuration most leans toward the desired output. And then they iterate on generations and generations of that plinko machine until they get one that was trained to be tailored to that known data, and also yields good outputs when testing it on a new set of data.
And the human trainers may be trying to configure the rows and columns of the plinko pegs as mapping to qualifiable concepts, but by and large the pegs don't map to anything material. By and large the process becomes math weights. And even if you gave someone 1 million years to memorize every peg in the machine, the individual pegs don't mean something like the pieces of a written program mean something.
If you're using a product I worked on and the user icon rendering fails, there will be a definitive step of the program's process which is going wrong, and which I can pinpoint and fix. It is entirely possible for me to understand this whole program and know exactly why it does or does not do things. And as such, a human is capable of having complete knowledge and complete certainty about what this program is doing.
If you're using an AI product at work and it keeps making up a guy named 'Bob', well the 1-million-high by 1-million-wide plinko machine that folds itself over 1 million times spit its balls out in such a way that talks about Bob. Indirectly, the training this model went through accidentally rewarded false information in the trained pursuit of providing information. Data scientists can try to train a new model that more strongly punishes false information. They might struggle if this ends up degrading other behaviors. Absolutely no one is physically capable of understanding the exact inner details of the 1-million by 1-million plinko machine.
And this, honestly, is a hugely important detail to me in my dislike of AI rampancy. We are incapable of precisely knowing why it does things. We can tweak it, and adjust parameter weights, and try to reward different behavior. But we do not have domain knowledge over it. It is a technology capable of doing what the fuck ever.