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@ohnofixit
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com
I'm a bit frightened for the time when someone less ethical than the person that did this decides to repeat the experiment but leave out the part where they come in later and announce that it was fake and people wind up diagnosed with the fake condition and all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensues.
I just googled this and⊠yes, itâs absolutely real.
And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.
So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.
The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.
Thank God someone bothered to check.
>I just googled this and⊠yes, itâs absolutely real.
Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.
Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A
https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138
Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll
Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (itâs a pdf)
Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic âfalse positivesâ per each square-millimeter un
Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesnât mean microplastics arenât a problem, though
That should be enough
how did they not fucking account for this. sorry but this is really really stupid
this is so funny.
@3liza they didnât account for it because they didnât realize it was an issue. The particles the gloves are shedding are not microplastics but they are similar enough in composition and under an electron microscope that because the scientists didnât know to account for them, they didnât realize thatâs what they were seeing.
Also they DID account for contamination in WET sample preparation, because theyâd already learned previously that the nitrile gloves could contaminate wet samples, but this was the first discovery that they were contaminating DRY or AIRBORNE samples as well.
All of this was very clearly laid out in just the last provided link - i didnât even have to read all of them to learn this, I read like 3 paragraphs of the nautil.us article and I was able to learn what happened and why it hadnât been accounted for.
Like, I understand the frustration, but this is the sort of thing that has to be DISCOVERED before it can be accounted for, and this is what that kind of discovery looks like, and berating scientists for not already knowing something science hadnât yet learned is kind of a pointless and bad faith approach to things.
Weâve learned that a lot of the studies done on microplastics in our environment were not actually accurate, and had unintentionally incorrectly inflated numbers of microplastics in their samples due to this issue, which means that while microplastics are still obviously a problem, theyâre not as overwhelming large of a problem than we thought! This is a good thing! Science has done its job and we have learned new things and can now do even better science! Thereâs no reason to be angry at or berate the scientists whoâve gone before. We know better now. Thatâs the important part.
I just googled this and⊠yes, itâs absolutely real.
And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.
So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.
The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.
Thank God someone bothered to check.
I have a wild idea. what if we supported our claims of fact by linking to a reliable source. better yet, what if we went hogwild and just straight up linked to the actual unpaywalled study
they put pussy in the water supply to keep the lesbians healthy
â Fact Check
There are currently no jurisdictions worldwide that mandate the addition of pussy to drinking water, nor have any clinical trials shown that the addition of pussy to drinking water has any significant effect on the heath of lesbians.
For more information on Tumblr Fact Check or to report inaccuracy, please see our reports page.
idk why but they buried the option to turn this feature off - but you can find it if you go to the FAQ.
WHY DID THEY NEED TO CLAIRIFY THAT
Tumblr has fact checking?
apparently???
yeah itâs new :/ they announced it on the staff blog here
HUH?????
Why did I find this out in a shit post about pussy and lesbians?????
have you got notifications on for announcements? you can find the setting here if not
Well, this is a mess of bad information.
This being the top answer with 10K upvotes is frustrating.
First, you can strain your eyes looking at white pages in a bright environment. White paper is around 80-90% reflective and the sun is very bright. Eye strain existed before screens did. Eye strain does not care if light is emitted or reflected, just how bright it is.
This all has to do with how our eyes adjust to different lighting environments. When things are bright, our pupils get tiny and restrict light. When things are dark, our pupils get big and suck in more light.
First, why do we need dark mode for screens?
In the case of reading text, we need good contrast in order for it to be quickly legible. Contrast is a ratio from the brightest thing to the darkest thing. The bigger the gap between the text and the page, the less work your visual system has to do to resolve the letters. So black on white and white on black provide a good reading experience for most people.
If we are reading a screen in a dim environment, our eyes are mostly adjusted to dim lighting. But if a screen is emitting a bunch of white light at full blast into your eyeballs, that can feel intense or straining.
You have a few options.
You can turn on extra lights so the room brightness is roughly the same as the screen brightness.
You can enable dark mode so there is less total light overwhelming your eyes while retaining a good legible contrast ratio.
Or you can dim your screen to match the dim environment.
The last option can be problematic depending on the type of screen you have. Even good LCD screens will have a reduced contrast ratio as you turn down the brightness. White will turn into dull gray and the contrast you need to easily read text will be diminished.
If you have an OLED screen, you may be able to turn down the brightness quite a bit more before you lose that high legibility. OLEDs sidestep this because the dark pixels emit no light at all, so the contrast ratio is more robust at different brightnesses.
Physical books have the opposite problem.
The brighter the environment, the brighter the pages. If you are in bright sun, a "dark mode" book will reflect less light and be less intense while maintaining a good contrast ratio for text.
However, if you take it in the shade or a dimmer environment, there may not be enough light to properly illuminate the white letters.
A book with white pages is going to have more utility. You can read it in both dark and bright environments. And if it is too bright you have options like sunglasses or finding some shade. For a dark mode book, you may have to add more light to get good legibility.
There are some folks with certain eye conditions that could really benefit from a dark mode book. For them, I'd probably recommend an e-ink display that can invert black and white.
I don't think making a dark mode version of physical books is practical. But the concept isn't "dumb."
@primal-ascension This comment makes me very sad.
I know folks like you are impossible to convince.
But, what the hell. I'll give it a shot.
And if you are not convinced, people can learn a cool space thing along the way.
The Apollo astronauts left 5 retroreflectors on the moon. These are special mirrors that can bounce light back in the exact direction it came from. This is how you can see road signs light up at night.
Observatories on Earth can shoot a powerful laser at these reflectors and get a signal back. They do this to measure exactly how far away the moon is. It's also how they discovered the moon is slowly drifting away.
There are 5 observatories that do this lunar range-finding.
Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
Observatoire de la CĂŽte d'Azur in Grasse, France.
Matera Laser Ranging Observatory in Matera, Italy.
Geodetic Observatory Wettzell in Bavaria, Germany.
Yunnan Observatories in Kunming, China.
These laser systems cost over $10,000,00. It would be quite the hoax to spend that much money for fake lasers doing fake science. You'll also notice they are located in various countries. I find it hard to believe China would fire a fake laser at the moon to perpetuate an American hoax.
You can visit some of these observatories. Take a tour. See the equipment. And if you go at night, you can witness the laser with your own eyeballs.
How in the world could we get a laser reflection back from the moon if astronauts hadn't left those reflectors up there?
Why would people construct these monstrous moon lasers?
And why would Italians and Germans and Chinese and the goddamn French spend millions of dollars to put on a pointless laser show? They are scientists, not Pink Floyd.
I just can't imagine any French person ever saying, "We should build a fake moon laser to bolster American moon lies."
EXPLAIN THESE LASERS.
Also, Mythbusters did a very cool segment on the moon lasers.
Corksniffing losers have to sully an awesome new space photo just to erroneously claim film is inherently superior.
I think this version is the original color processed version, which is still not as saturated or contrasty.
That's still an amazing result just from darkroom processing, but the deep blue version in the tweet definitely needed some help from Photoshop. And, personally, I think they overdid it.
The new photo was actually taken in darkness. It is a moonlit photo taken at extremely high gain (ISO 52,000). They did a long exposure to make it appear as if it were as bright as day. But without significant editing, that is going to make the colors less saturated and reduce the contrast.
The same thing would happen with film.
This is another version they did with a more accurate-to-eyeballs exposure.
Film is great.
Digital is great.
Space is great.
This is how uncanny close to reality ai videos have gotten. We're like weeks away from them smoothing out the last mistakes and officially rendering video footage meaningless anymore đ©
generative ai, beyond being generally wasteful and creating an economic bubble the likes of which has not been seen since perhaps the tulip bubble, is fundamentally disastrous due to the effect it has had on our ability to trust photos and videos as truth. for more than a hundred years, human civilization has been built on the foundation that a video is either accurate or painstakingly hand-edited over dozens if not hundreds of hours. the ability to conjure any video from nothing has destroyed our confidence in the reality of videos. that we can no longer look at a video of a cat being cute and go "aw, cute cat!" but instead must analyze it like a fucking fae is unforgivable and unconscionable.
Yeah everyone who says "but photoshop already existed!" or "but movies and fiction already existed!" is a dumbass because those things took effort and skill. Someone had to work hard to fake something convincingly. Now bots can just flood all channels and platforms with things that never happened for literally no purpose other than farming engagement numbers. Soon you'll just never again know if cute, silly or amazing clips represent delightful things really going on in your world. This really is a dark, bleak, horrible shift.
We're the last people who got to enjoy a world not overrun with what will, withon a few more years, probably be billions more fake slop videos than real ones. Documentation of real things will be *dwarfed,* in no time, because it's that quick and easy and automated bots are already let loose to do it on their own.
Horse figure of the day: Schleich Pegasus #70423
Wing placement on this one is so distressing I had to draw it.
@elodieunderglass
Aah I love that! Now interestingly- although the photo is unfortunate, Schleich didn't ENTIRELY forget how wings work. Instead of being attached to her chest, they're in the "proper" position at the withers, and the mare is supposed to be standing with her wings folded, like this:
But you'll note that Schleich forgot some key visual indicators to show us this from the angle we're looking at. Namely, defining the chicken wing (shown in red) would have really helped us to understand what we were seeing.
Feathers have their own anatomy. The Schleich figure's are upside down, backwards, showing the wrong side of the wing, and angled incorrectly. Fixing the feathers would have done a lot here.
I'm very aware that I'm in a poor position to come across as nitpicky, as my own art is so slapdash and scribbly - but I comfort myself by knowing that it's just me doing it (rather than a whole design team) and that I don't charge money.
This is another cherry-picked, garbage comparison.
They just took bright exposures from the old movie and compared them to darker exposures from the new movie. And then they heavily cropped the compositions, removed all context from the scene (time of day, light sources, desired mood) and declared the new movie looks terribleâdespite only a minute of footage existing.
These examples are in completely different environments.
They could have at least matched scene for scene.
Wait a goddamn second...
Something is awry.
THE TWEET IS FULL OF LIES.
Someone cranked up the exposure of the original movie to 11.
As if someone was trying to create nostalgia rage bait for internet points.
They were correct about one thing, exposure is an artistic choice. A lot of photographers fall into the trap of "correct exposure." You should always trust your eyes over a light meter. And a brighter exposure is not always better.
Contrast is a ratio, not an absolute.
There is a concept called "scene white." Your eyes adjust to different exposure levels and the brightest white in the scene is your brain's reference for contrast. And because contrast is a ratio and not absolute, your eyes will adjust to the exposure of the scene.
You can have two scenes with very different white levels, but the amount of perceptual contrast could be very similar. Your brain goes, "what is the brightest thing and what is the darkest thing?" If the difference is small, you will perceive low contrast. If the difference is vast, you will perceive high contrast.
This looks like a bright exposure on its own.
.
.
.
.
And so does this.
The "scene white" in the old movie was actually a *tad* brighter. But your eyes adjust and perceive them both as bright.
And if you put them side by side, the brightest white wins and your perception is skewed. If you compare two different compositions with different scene white levels, your eye is going to gravitate to the brighter exposure. Even though, in isolation, one may not notice how much brighter one scene is over the other.
The original movie had plenty of darker exposures with a lower white ceiling.
And not every frame of the old movie was a visual spectacle.
It's actually a bad thing if you make every scene a spectacle. The visuals need to serve the story and if they are constantly overwhelming, that can actually hurt the immersion.
If I cherry pick, I can make the old movie look bad and the new movie look great.
Boy, the old movie sure looked bland.
But look at how much depth the new movie has!
Look at this squished subject composition in the old movie.
The new movie has much more balance and symmetry.
Visual spectacle should be used dynamicallyâjust like music. If music doesn't have quiet parts, the loud parts will have less impact. And sometimes the quiet parts allow you to hear important detail that the loud parts obscure.
The trailer had several spectacle moments.
That looks great!
I have no idea if the new movie looks better or worse. I literally do not have enough information.
But if we're going to edit images for rage bait...
LOOK AT HOW LIFELESS THE ORIGINAL WAS!
The movie needs to be judged holistically. You can't take extreme crops of single frames, edit them to be 200% brighter, and compare them to make any kind of determination.
All they proved is that when people see brighter exposures next to darker exposures, their brain goes, "Ooooh, that one is brighter! I like bright things!"
Wut-In-Tarnation is really What-In-The-Entire-Nation with southern accent
Itâs time for the fascinating history of the word tarnation, which has nothing to do with the word nation
In 18th century America there was a trend of finding nicer ways to say curse words so they could shout exclamations without committing blasphemy. âHeckâ and âgoshâ originated at this time. âWhat in Sam Hillâ was just a censored way of saying âWhat the hell?â
Damn and damnation became darn and darnation
At the time the word eternal was mostly associated with God and heaven, so the slang term âtarnalâ was created to speak about eternity without invoking God
The new soft-curse word darnation sounded a bit like the slang word tarnal so people mashed them into tarnation (source)
âWhat in tarnationâ means âWhat in eternal damnationâ which also means âWhat the hellâ which also means âWhat in Sam Hillâ thanks to a bunch of Americans in the 1700s wanting to say bad words without incurring the Lordâs wrathÂ
And the linguistic term for this is a minced oath! âJeezâ, âZoundsâ and âEgadâ are a couple other examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath
It seems the new slop meta is "AI generated porch cam videos"
Yeah I was fooled too but here's a vid breaking it down.
French people when you call it bukake and not "nut a la visage" and shibari instead of "corde attacher l'submissive"
Pisse? In le pantalons???
Mon tabarnak j'vais te décùlisser la yeule, cùlice!
hell yeah always reblog academie slander
@icharchivist
Keeping prev tags because they're pretty useful
As stated above, this parody has unfortunately lost its context
The article being parodied
Use âjeu video de competitionâ instead of "e-sports", language watchdog the AcadĂ©mie Française says.
Case in point...
RFK is going to kill more people.
I'm so tired.
There was a single case where an incision was made, but the procedure was halted shortly after. Most of these cases were caught late, during surgical prep, but current safeguards still prevented premature harvesting. It's true these probably should have been identified sooner, but RFK is clearly trying to make this into a horror movie instead of an issue of needing better protocols.
I hope you accidently get incised.
You are trying to play down an extremely dangerous problem just because you hate one man.
op needs to read what RFK Jr wrote and what the sensationalist tweet below it said. RFK Jr said organ harvesting procurement processes were started while still showing life.
Which is 100% what happened. Don't confuse who said what.
Hi, OP here.
While his initial tweet may have careful wording, it still clearly telegraphs what he wants to communicate. And the more sensationalist tweet was a sign of "message received" from the people who support him.
Do not give this man the tiniest benefit of the doubt.
RFK could not contain his guarded rhetoric for very long. He has since repeatedly said they were harvesting organs from living people.
In this video he tweeted he told a story about a woman who "awoke while they were harvesting her organs."
Even in the original tweet, he is clearly trying to give people the impression doctors are holding kidneys and livers in their hands and going, "Oops, they're still alive!"
In reality, many of these cases were drug overdoses in which signs of life were masked and it was difficult to determine actual brain death. Something he also fails to mention.
No organs were harvested in these cases.
I am fucking BEGGING people to include proper sources when talking about news and current events. A screenshot of a headline or a social media post is not a proper source.
It really concerns me how many people have run with the idea that, "oh, well, mainstream news media CLEARLY can't be trusted, so I get all MY news from REAL trusted sources: unverified posting from randos with zero credentials on social media!"
If I had more free time I would make a gimmick blog called "I Add Sources," where I actually add the fucking sources to all the random article screenshots people post without proper links on this damn site.
I made the blog đ
@itsalexvacca: BREAKING: MIT just completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users & the results are terrifying. Turns out, AI isn't ma
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM,
the original paper, for anyone interested
"Here's the terrifying part: When researchers forced ChatGPT users to write without AI, they performed worse than people who never used AI at all. It's not just dependency. It's cognitive atrophy. Like a muscle that's forgotten how to work.
THIS IS THE METAPHOR THAT I KEEP USING ALL THE TIIIIIIIME
I would like to point out that this study has not been peer-reviewed yet and may or may not replicate.
It looks real bad, and it might be real bad, but it's not necessarily definitive proof that AI Rots Yer Brain.
I would like to add that the authors of the study provided a FAQ that says the following:
Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"? No. Â Please do not use the words like âstupidâ, âdumbâ, âbrainrotâ, "harm", "damage", Â and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.
and
Additional vocabulary to avoid using when talking about the paper In addition to the vocabulary from Question 1 in this FAQ - please avoid using "brain scans", Â "LLMs make you stop thinking", "impact negatively", "brain damage", "terrifying findings".Â
And I would like to point out that the twitter OP uses at least two of these terms, the Time story quoted in the middle of this post discusses "harms" that the study authors are not certain are harmful and that the tags are full of people saying that this is terrifying, horrifying, will rot people's brains, we're cooked, we told you so, etc, which are specifically things that the authors didn't want to have as the takeaway for the story.
I'd also like to note that the OP of the twitter thread is the COO of a company that sells AI assistants whose entire twitter presence is using AI-written threads about AI to generate social media traffic to drive to his AI sales company.
His takeaway from all of these, and the original thread on this post, is that people should use the AI *he* sells.
The MIT preprint is an interesting preliminary study that has suggestive findings about the way that habitual AI use changes users' behavior; it also had interesting points to make about how the search engine arm of the study was noticeably influenced by terms that had been promoted by google ads, and it recorded that people who used search engines had brain connectivity that was reduced compared to people writing only from their minds. But nobody is talking about the horrifying, harmful cognitive debt making us dumber caused by search engines (and they shouldn't be!)
The guy who is calling this cognitive atrophy is an AI shill who wants to use terms that the study's authors don't stand behind in order to make AI seem more powerful than it actually is. The study (and the Time article screencapped above) both note that the highest level of mental engagement was from people who had previously written essays with no assistance writing a final essay *with* AI assistance (so in that circumstance the use of AI strengthened cognitive response). To quote that article directly: "The second group, in contrast, performed well, exhibiting a significant increase in brain connectivity across all EEG frequency bands. This gives rise to the hope that AI, if used properly, could enhance learning as opposed to diminishing it."
So, basically what we've done here is let a 200-word AI summary of a 200+ page paper take the burden of cognitive load off our shoulders instead of taking the time to think critically about where we're getting our information from.
I continue to be less concerned about AI rotting our brains than I am about how infrequently people click through links on social media.
I'd recommend reading some of the study if you've got time. I found the ways that the English teachers and the AI used by the study differed in their analysis of the papers - because, please note, the authors of the study used LLMs for some of the data - really interesting.
I'm sure false etymology posts aren't like actually more common than any other type of misinformation on this website, it just happens to be a type of misinformation I'm better at spotting and a type of misinformation that shows up in the type of posts people I follow tend to reblog. but dang false etymology posts sure are common
tips for spotting false etymology:
if you happen to know what common greek and latin roots mean you can spot someone mistranslating them, which comes in handy very often
normal sounding words are almost never coined as acronyms. if someone claims something is an acronym you should literally always fact check it
sometimes the story presented by a proposed etymology falls apart if you like. think about it. why would a hypothetical continent be named after an animal speculated to not live there? why would an idiom's original form be something that very obviously sounds like something you'd say as a comeback to the version everyone already knows?
that one happens enough to get its own numbered point on this list, if someone claims a common expression is the "short version" of another older phrase that means the opposite thing they are either lying or uncritically repeating something they saw on tumblr once. you almost don't even need to fact check this, you can just assume they're wrong
