moved to twitter @sybaritick @sybaritick-moved - Tumblr Blog

Once, I encountered the funny story of an AI image descriptor with a sheep obsession. It had been trained on pictures of fields of sheep. Therefore, it tagged anything in a field as 'sheep', including an empty field, because they work on statistical probability. Therefore, it thinks "ah, a field! there's probably a sheep here." (It's a bit more complicated but basically that.) It also couldn't recognise sheep in places that weren't fields, such as petrol stations or barns. [cont]

Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?

this really does sound like an episode of black mirror

architeuthism

But wait, it’s even weirder than that!

retroactivebakeries

This is gonna produce some absolutely baffling pornography.

crazy-pages

…. oh my fucking god they actually are using open source software. They’re using a fucking one-layer unidirectional bicategory tag-trained neural network. This will never work. Literally, it will never work. There’s just not enough algorithmic complexity to do what they’re asking of it. I bet you I could prove on a mathematical level that this joke of a neural net fundamentally lacks the abstraction necessary to do its job.

This will never get better. Their algorithm will never stop fucking up, it will never actually flag porn reliably and it will always require a massive quantity of human hours to deal with the deluge of mistagged pictures. This isn’t just a case of an insufficiently trained algorithm, it’s just … this is the most basic neural network you can make. It probably hasa a lot of neurons and has loads of training data but like … you can’t just brute force this kind of stuff. One layer of neurons is just Not Enough.

crazy-pages

Also, just to make this clear, Tumblr lied. I mean, we already know this, but I mean they liiiieeeeed. All that stuff they promised about what would or would not be censored? That cannot be delivered on with a system this simple. Nude classical sculptures, political protests, male-presenting nipples (really Tumblr?), nude art outside the context of sex, all that? You cannot train a bicategory one-layer neural network to exclude those things. It cannot be done. Tumblr never intended for those things to actually be permitted, they were just lying. Because the system they have cannot actually do what they said it would and never will be able to.

Also, this kind of system is super vulnerable to counter-neural strategies. I bet you before the end of the month someone hooks up their own open source one layer bicategory neural network which puts an imperceptible (to humans) layer of patterned static over arbitrary images, and trains it by having it bot-post static-ed images to Tumblr and reinforcing based on whether the images are labeled nsfw or sfw. Seriously, within a month someone will have an input-output machine which can turn any image ‘sfw’ in Tumblr’s eyes.

This is genuinely pathetic. Like, I have real pity for whoever implemented this, because it’s clear Tumblr doesn’t actually have any engineers with any expertise with machine learning left at all and they foisted the job off on some poor bastard who has no idea what they’re doing and is going to get all kinds of flak for their (perfectly reasonable and predetermined) failure from management.

#cs #ai

hannesflo

A Moment Apart v2 by hannesflo

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#winter

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aka my favorite audio file in the world

#lmao #tftbl #handsome jack

sigalawin

kill the boy and let the man be born based on @smol-hux‘s headcanons!! specifically the “Hux was the type of child to try and rescue injured animals” one yes hello and goodbye

#kylux #fanart #oh this is a hc i like

guerrillawar

shitpost-senpai

ding dong you are wrong

unclebeanbag

Yep, they can.

joosh-actual-deactivated2018092

#snakes

fandomsandfeminism

Humans are a communal species that have banded together and cared for their sick, disabled, and elderly since before we were ever modern man. Resources were shared even as skills specialized.

Capitalism isn’t natural. A community should not have members dying of starvation or exposure while there is an abundance of resources. That isn’t how it works. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

g-taire

ok so my roommates are anthropology students and their favorite example for debunking the ‘survival of the fittest’ bs is shanidar 1. (x, x, x)

shanidar 1 is a neanderthal who, at a pretty young age, was hit in the head hard enough to blind him. this also led to that side of his brain shutting down and withering his right arm, and possibly crippling his entire right side. not only that but his skeleton also shows that at some point, he broke a bone in his foot and, in addition to the other factors, resulted in a noticeable limp. there are some sources which say he likely had degenerative diseases. (arthritis was really common in neanderthals)

going off of widespread ideas of “”primitive”” (no longer the word used in anthropology/academia to describe early-modern humans) societies, shanidar probably died really young, deliberately abandoned or killed. i mean, he was severely crippled, blind, etc., he couldn’t contribute anything, he would have been a “”burden to society””, right?

except he lived to be between 40 and 50 years old. (about ~80 in human years)

this means that his social group had to have taken care of him for a minimum of two or three decades without his ‘contributing’ anything significant to the group. this discovery (and Shanidar III’s) was huge because it basically proves that early humans had a concept of hospice. early modern humans cared for the sick and the elderly, greatly extending their lifespan, simply because they cared.

tl;dr: the concept of someone needing to be ‘’useful’’ or ‘’’productive’’’ in society in order to be valued and cared for is a very modern concept and our quasi-predecessors would be ashamed

ekjohnston

Also, Shanidar I was buried with flowers. They cared about him after he was dead, too.

nyardynn

I want to contribute as a biologist and stress that this doesn’t pose an argument against natural selection. The human success was never exclusively based in our bodies, it is very much, if not most, based in our intelligence and social structure that makes us compassionate and working together. No other animal on earth is able to coordinate groups as large as modern human cities, entire countries even. That’s millions of people and it’s an awesome skill!

What made Shanidar a gift to society despite his disabilities might easily have been his mind, noone says he was useless. Not a single old man and woman was useless to a tribe of Neanderthals, there always was a lot of work they could do and were utterly needed to do and Shanidar? Maybe he learned and became a wise man? Maybe he spent his time preparing food? I bet he did not sit on his ass like we make old people do nowadays, because back then every hand was needed.

anosognosic

Whoops you stepped on my pet peeve. I’m just gonna adapt something I’ve already written on the subject.

No question that people have been caring for each other through sickness and disability since before the dawn of civilization. No doubt plain caring about your family, your clan, the people around you, played heavily into it. Also, tribal peoples are not stupid, and would be able to recognize that many injuries are temporary, and that many disabilities don’t make it impossible for people to contribute altogether–especially since “contribution” can span a variety of activities that go beyond the bare work of survival, including acting as a repository of knowledge and experience. And even to those who will never be able to contribute in these other ways, tribal societies are not necessarily Hobbesian nightmares–there is, as you might imagine, a lot of variation between groups.

But let’s take a look at the data, shall we?

Outright killing the old in tribal societies was/is relatively rare, but still common enough to be shocking to anyone in modern society. Abandonment, neglect and other forms of death-hastening were/are far more common, perhaps the norm rather than the exception:

source, p 63

Ability to care for oneself and contribute and the availability of resources seem to be the most common deciding factors. To wit:

source, p6

Ironically given all the blame imputed on capitalism, property rights are a fairly strong predictor of good treatment of the elderly precisely because they give the elderly control over resources–see the following couple of pages of the above source.

Infanticide in tribal societies has also been extensively recorded.

source (pdf), p 112

And, relevant to this discussion:

same as above, pp108-9

It’s harder to find resources on the anthropology of disability outside infancy and old age. I can only present the general impression that anthropologists are pushing hard this whole perspective about cultural construction of disability and anecdotal evidence about care being provided, which is fine as far as it goes, but which is not far in determining trends in the treament of people with disabilities in tribal societies. What I did not find was an assumption that care was given across the board. In this example, for instance, whether someone is cared for or abandoned is predicated on how impairing a condition is in the context of the group’s way of life:

source, p30

But even in the absence of solid quantitative conclusions, given what we know about the treatment of infants and the elderly, I would be very surprised if average standards of care (in terms of resource and effort allocation, even setting aside technological advancements) for the disabled among tribal societies were better than those of contemporary industrial society. In fact, by today’s standards, we would probably find their callousness shocking.

anosognosic

more anecdotally, i know a doctor who runs an ngo that treats natives deep in the amazon. he told me about how, in one tribe he visited, old people who can no longer fend for themselves are treated basically like dogs, fed at others’ mercy, and not infrequently starve to death.

enough already with this noble savage bullshit.

voxette-vk

Also, the number of people who die of starvation in the U.S. or any developed capitalist country is negligible.

The number of people who die because they (or their parents / caregivers) are not able to obtain food is zero, or close enough to zero that it’s impossible to measure. The people who do end up starving are those with eating disorders like anorexia, as well as children and others who can’t take care of themselves who are maliciously abused.

Of course, a larger number of people have bad diets and suffer from nutritional deficiencies (or… surpluses) that contribute to their deaths, but today one can eat far healthier on a poverty budget than in the early 20th century, when Southerners routinely died of pellagra because all they could afford to eat was cornmeal.

Furthermore, the elderly have gone from being the poorest age cohort to the richest, with the average 80-year-old household having twice the wealth of a 50-year-old (and of course many times more than those younger).

Now, of course, you can make the argument that the reason starvation isn’t common in the U.S. is the welfare system, and that the elderly became the richest group because of Social Security, Medicare, and other programs instituted to help them when they were the poorest in society. And that if we had full, consistent capitalism, then death of the old and the disabled would be rampant. I’m not going to get into that.

But insofar as this is a critique of actually existing mostly-capitalist mixed economies (a category that certainly includes the Scandinavian states), it’s misplaced.

#tumblr is dying post politics

boingoalive1988

if you ever feel safe please remember that im out there

what even

i just think characters who are kind & gentle doctors/scientists are inherently gay. mad scientists are also inherently gay. science is gay

sybaritick-moved

since none of us are sure how long fan tumblr is gonna survive, @anyone who wants to keep up with me feel free to follow my newly-made twitter! I’ll still be posting here for now too.

https://twitter.com/sybaritick

#self rb

earthstory

Flags

I have had 3 mineral posts flagged as adult content today. They contained a tourmaline, a muscovite, and a galena. On Friday I had 3 fossil posts flagged as adult content, including a fossil fish, a fossil tooth from a mastodon, and a Tyrannosaur vertebrae. I’ve submitted appeals for each. This has been getting worse over the past month, apparently most of geology content is now only for adults.

shanlonwrites

Apparently you can’t get your rocks off on Tumblr anymore.

vrabia

i am contractually obligated to congratulate you on this reply

#stupid but wonderful

sybaritick-moved

since none of us are sure how long fan tumblr is gonna survive, @anyone who wants to keep up with me feel free to follow my newly-made twitter! I’ll still be posting here for now too.

https://twitter.com/sybaritick

#self rb

fakehistory

The death of Tumblr. (2018)

#cs #ai #yes all im reblogging is memes about this tumblr meltdown but sometimes it be like that

since none of us are sure how long fan tumblr is gonna survive, @anyone who wants to keep up with me feel free to follow my newly-made twitter! I’ll still be posting here for now too.

https://twitter.com/sybaritick

#sybaritick.txt