Well, here it goes

Trying to figure out what it means to live in this world she/her

[natural-blogarithm]

maybe if tumblr allowed you to typeset your posts in LaTeX it would have succeeded in becoming the next pdf

[kaijuno]

[evilwizard]

[arahir]

i just can't convey the frustration and sorrow that it's been to grow up at first without the internet and then watching it bloom into this useful, fun, connecting force you sometimes spent time on, only for it to degrade into this constant oppressive waste of time and energy where people are constantly pumping out algorithmically designed content for max algorithmic appeal and even the most simple search generates either no results or an infinite abyss of ai generated slop none of which is usable or correct. we briefly had a library of alexandria and then fed it into a paper shredder so advertisers could sell a random mash of pulp back to us at a premium.

[justacynicalromantic]

[snovyda]

The wildest thing about it is that UAE is one of THE main helpers in russia evading sanctions to buy western parts for its weapons. To kill Ukrainians. And now Ukrainians are being asked to help protect it.

[depsidase]

[megpie71]

As a former humanities student, I feel it is my duty to reblog this one.

[raylangivins]

[danshive]

In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.

Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.

“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”

“It insists she’s the mafia.”

“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”

“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”

[dexer-von-dexer]

I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.

This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.

There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.

Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.

TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help

[tsunderebot]

Having been to several talks on modern ai I can confirm

[maxofs2d]

I always think of this tweet when I see people praising machine learning and the new kinds of AI as a panacea.

[maxofs2d]

Firefox 148 rolls out with the promised AI kill switch: here's how to enable it

The "Block AI Enhancements" toggle was originally introduced in Firefox 148 Nightly in January following significant community backlash afte

The Firefox "AI kill switch" is here.

Go to Settings > AI controls. There, you can toggle the "master kill switch" on to fully block all the features, which means two things:

you won't see them,

you can't even be asked about them.

The default state is, like before, "available". This means the features are NOT on by default (they never were), but Firefox will let you know about them where they exist (e.g. when you create your first tab group) so that you can choose to opt in.

Please note that Firefox for Android or iOS have never included AI features, so you won't see these settings on your smartphones or tablets.

Please also note that, unlike popular belief here on Tumblr, besides "chatbot in sidebar" (which is simply embedding the same page you'd have normally browsed to), none of these features have ever interacted with anything outside your PC, because they download a small model to your computer, to do everything locally. These small models have never been and are not downloaded until you explicitly agree to turn on one of the features.

[screechfoxes]

I'm not going to let Sam ruin that birds are a meaningful symbol.

CRITICAL ROLE: COOLDOWN 4.16

[droppingartintotheinfinite]

fun math hack:

because fractions and decimals are weird, each number has a sort of "partner" number you can use to cheat multiplication and division

i'm bad at explaining this kind of stuff in words, but an example of this is 2 and 5

multiplying stuff by 5 the normal way is kind of a pain, right? if you're doing it in your head, at least. especially for bigger numbers. but because .5 = 1/2, if you divide by two and add a zero you get the same result. and dividing stuff by 2 is easy, since you generally know what half of a given number is off the top of your head anyway, right?

and it works in reverse as well. 12 x 2 = 24, and so does 12/5 x 10, though the latter is way less intuitive to solve so you'd generally only do it the other way around.

or for a bigger number, say you're trying to solve 2384 x 5 without a calculator. not too appealing! sure, you can do 4 x 5 + 80 x 5 + 300 x 5 + 2000 x 5 (or however you choose to handle the zeroes. personally i generally add them after.) but that's a lot of digits to hold in your head and you have to carry on literally all of them. and it just takes longer to do.

2384/2, on the hand, is easy. 1 is half of 2, 1.5 is half of 3, 4 is half of 8 (and add the .5 to make it 9) and 2 is half of 4. 1192. add a zero to get 11920 and bam, easy solve, barely even have to think about it if you're quick with simple calculations. (and if you're not... well, this is still probably easier)

the extra appealing part is that doing it like this lets you work from the biggest digit to the smallest rather than the other way around, which i personally find to be way more intuitive since it's the direction you read the number in.

this happens because we use base 10 for our number system and 2 = 10/5 while 5 = 10/2, so they match.

other number pairs:

4 and 2.5

8 and 1.25

16 and .625

as you can see, it basically only happens with multiples of 2 and 5, so it doesn't work for every situation, but memorizing the ones that show up a lot can let you solve math problems in your head that you'd otherwise have to pull out a calculator for, and in the right situation that can be pretty handy. also makes for a fun party trick to impress people with

(3 and 1/3 are also a pair but since the latter is an infinite decimal it doesn't come up nearly as often. ditto for other multipliers of 3.)

hope someone gets some use out of this. i have no idea to what extent this quirk of fraction/decimal interaction is common knowledge but it was something i figured out myself rather than learning in school so i figure it's probably not completely widespread, and it can make certain problems a lot easier to solve so i figured i'd share it.

[sexycraisinthanos]

“AI art is okay if you’re just making shitposts”

Have you forgotten our roots

[sexycraisinthanos]

This really resonated with you guys huh

[rosegardendeprofundis]

Source: @laceypaigepoetry on Instagram

[velvetvexations]

Weird Fantasy (1950) #18 written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Joe Orlando, with editor Bill Gaines

[velvetvexations]

So he said it can't be a Black. So I said, "For God's sakes, Judge Murphy, that's the whole point of the Goddamn story!" So he said, "No, it can't be a Black". Bill just called him up and raised the roof, and finally they said, "Well, you gotta take the perspiration off". I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, "Fuck you", and he hung up.

Al Feldstein, Tales of Terror: The EC Companion

[iconuk01]

Just to add context for those not aware of the impact of this story.

The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.

They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.

The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.

The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.

The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.

Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.

Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.

The black character was not a caricature, or comedy relief, he was a main character in his own right, a human who "simply" was black.

[assortedinsanities]

Ok, but this story is sadly revolutionary even now. That is not just a human who happens to be black, as far as every other character in this story is concerned this is the most important, maybe even the only human they ever see, who happens to be black.

As depressing as that is, but a black person just casually representing the entirety of humanity is a breathtakingly powerfull statement even today, a quarter of a century later.

[about-faces]

[alex51324]

reblogging for Black History Month!

[whimsiromance]

literally a plague on both your houses i’m not even kidding

[good-fwiend-in-wome]

i think it's worth remembering this xkcd from 2013 that's still equally true

[vamptits]

all public transport should be free unconditionally and I'm TIREDDD of pretending this is a radical idea

[mlembug]

there is a double standard where public transport is expected to bring profit, but roads and highways are treated as a common good and are built and maintained (e.g. patching holes) through taxes

fuck that

[marypsue]

maybe this silly little coffee drink will equip me to face the unrelenting and unendurable horror of existence