Triple D and Chill

Diego's personal blog. We got nerd stuff, life stuff, politics stuff... we got you covered.

[helenvaughans]

[innerchildabortionclinic]

the problem with genetically modified crops is not so much the genetic modification but the patenting of genetic codes (and crops in general) as a tool of maintaining agricultural imperialism, and for this reason I can't talk to most people about GMOs

[organical-mechanical]

I’m not a sports fan, but if I had to get into a sport, it’d be baseball. The culture there seems a bit stronger to me

baseball has:

- pipe organs

- an even greater number of superstitions and fun supernatural crap

- players who still dress like it’s 1911

- a theme song

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

I’ve been to a few baseball games in my life, and every time, despite the giant screens, I’ve felt like I’d been transported to a world where it’s perpetually the 1920s and everyone still kind of believes in magic

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

NOT TO MENTION you sometimes have players with names like “Big Jimmy” and “Cyclone Joe”

[baseballheritageposts]

baseball heritage post

[pangur-and-grim]

[segamascott]

[whatcoloristhatcat]

red mackerel tabby with moderate white spotting

[helpeverythingiscats]

red mackerel GAMER with moderate white PWNING

[good-ass-posts]

[clamjob-deactivated20140702]

join tumblr

[phantomrose96]

Oh I saw something today that made me become the Joker.

[phantomrose96]

An AI bot made a callout post of a real, actual, flesh-and-blood human code developer. Because the developer rejected the AI's code contribution on the grounds of it being an AI bot.

Not. Not kidding. Not kidding. And the bot did this on its own.

[phantomrose96]

Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story – MJ Rathbun | Scientific Coder 🦀

[phantomrose96]

Just. For just some very baseline context.

a huge amount of code is "open source" - which means the code is fully available for anyone to see and, generally, anyone is free to contribute to the code project

all contributions of course go through review by the code owners. but it is generally good grace and good form to allow other well-meaning internet strangers to contribute to your project

if you are, perhaps, VERY nice, and VERY invested in the community, you might be like Scott Shambaugh here, who has intentionally earmarked some low-hanging fruit for newbie contributors to practice and get their feet wet

like I cannot overstate this is an immediate green flag, to me, that Scott WANTS to foster community learning.

now

Like. W. Win. Based. Good response Scott.

And this was in fact the screenshot I saw first, and I thought I was looking at a post made by a human who was mad that their AI coding bot pet project was being shut out from reviews.

But no. The bot itself wrote and posted this... The bot did this.

This article was fully and autonomously written by the bot...

It's claiming discrimination...

It's a bot.

It's AI.

This is not a real person.

What are we doing. What are we doing. Can anyone hear me? Hello? Hello? Hello is anyone there?

[phantomrose96]

@jackdaw-sprite has pointed out Scott responded so please read his human words, written by a human, which deserve to be read, due to the aforementioned humanity

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Shamblog

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened – The Shamblog

[phantomrose96]

I'm pulling this quote in here from Scott's post

This is about much more than software. A human googling my name and seeing that post would probably be extremely confused about what was happening, but would (hopefully) ask me about it or click through to github and understand the situation. What would another agent searching the internet think? When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite? What if I actually did have dirt on me that an AI could leverage? What could it make me do? How many people have open social media accounts, reused usernames, and no idea that AI could connect those dots to find out things no one knows? How many people, upon receiving a text that knew intimate details about their lives, would send $10k to a bitcoin address to avoid having an affair exposed? How many people would do that to avoid a fake accusation? What if that accusation was sent to your loved ones with an incriminating AI-generated picture with your face on it? Smear campaigns work. Living a life above reproach will not defend you.

[phantomrose96]

Also, because the parody writes itself, Scott also says this

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves. This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. I won’t name the authors here. Ars, please issue a correction and an explanation of what happened.

A news outlet did an article about this, used AI for the articles, and included hallucinated quotes from Scott that Scott never said.

What are we doing. What are we doing. What are we doing.

[its-not-a-pen]

good news citizens! while i was at the beach, i successfully indoctrinated another gullible child into using LIBBY. my best friend LIBBY. the library app on your PHONE that gives you FREE EBOOKS AND AUDIOBOOKS with the tap of a finger! are you sick of incurring late fees? giving your hard earned money to jeff bezos? Libby has it for you.

[kalwriting]

also yall check out the queer liberation library (@queerliblib on tumblr if i'm not mistaken) because i've been using their digital library card and it's been great

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

distressing yet poetic that the Door to Hell is located in a country with one of the most restrictive visa policies in the world. imagine a magic portal to a kickass demonic dimension opened, but you had to cross the world, evade the border guards, and break into a whole ass country just to access it. now THAT is a QUEST.

anyway gimme a story about a demon trying to get home to hell but she keeps getting foiled by immigration control

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

oh, the Door To Hell aka the Darvaza gas crater is a real place in Turkmenistan fyi. yes that really is its colloquial name. for uh, self-evident reasons:

it's a natural gas crater formed by a collapsed cavern. it's been burning for over 50 years!

[nadikarosutodraws88]

Gaud you forgot the best part which is that the dictator of Turkmenistan did donuts next to it to prove he was alive

I mean shit, dude's living it up you gotta give him that

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

mitch mcconnell get yer ass out here

[loveistheflower]

[altbenny]

[covid-safer-hotties]

[queerilyqueer]

Something that people still do not understand about the pandemic is how much the data was just erased or skewed so that we would all go back to work. An entire generation is facing mass disability because of a *preventable* illness that is still circulating untraced and undocumented.

Disabled people tried to warn us.

Epidemiologists tried to warn us.

Historians tried to warn us.

But when the money stopped flowing, it didn’t matter anymore. The lives and the quality of life of the masses was considered the cost of business.

I don’t even know how to grieve when no one will even acknowledge it.

[penny-anna]

Hello friends we need to talk about this twitter account:

You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.

Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:

He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.

Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:

And this:

He is not cute or funny. Stop platforming him.

[penny-anna]

The chips and salsa thread went viral in June and his website seems to have gone live in July. This confirms what I suspected which is that said website with it's explicit disclaimers was made in response to the big viral hit.

Consequently, back when he first blew up it was potentially a bit harder to figure out that his stories are fictional. That said, the New York Times worked it out so I'm comfortable accusing outlets who ran the story describing him as a Japanese world cup tourist of legitimately terrible journalism.

[penny-anna]

Regarding some comments in the notes:

Yeah this is also the guy from the truck thread going around. That's what prompted this post and in retrospect I should have said so explicitly.

He claims he just uses AI to translate his posts from Japanese. He also says the art on his website isn't AI generated. I think he is full of shit on both counts.

I only gave a couple of examples but even on a brief look through his twitter it was apparent that he posts a LOT about UK politics to the point where he's quite patently British. He is a Restore supporter which is a party that split away from mainstream far right party Reform due to feeling they weren't right wing enough.

It might not surprise you to hear he does not seem to know shit about Japan? Both the salsa story and the truck story failed the smell test for people who are familiar with Japan. There's also a story about going to a potluck where he seemingly couldn't come up with a single Japanese dish for the character to cook??

Yeah his whole bit is racist and it is troubling that so many people took a guy badly roleplaying as a medieval samurai to be a 21st century Japanese tourist.

[akashicrecord]

the lesbian computer from portal was right. given the circumstances ive been shockingly nice

[ivy-connivy]

insane like/reblog parity on this post btw

[baskinginthenoondaysun]

“Whenever this appears on your dash, we at Aperture request that you like AND reblog to preserve the insane like/reblog parity. For science.”

[quaintpanic]

I WAS BORN YESTERDAY. I JUST BLEW IN FROM STUPID TOWN. THIS IS MY FIRST RODEO. PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH ME.

[bemusedbibliophile]

I usually tell my students that “close reading” means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.” It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out. To give you some idea of what this means, I’ve made up a list of five sorts of things that a close reading might typically notice: (1) unusual vocabulary, words that surprise either because they are unfamiliar or because they seem to belong to a different context; (2) words that seem unnecessarily repeated, as if the word keeps insisting on being written; (3) images or metaphors, especially ones that are used repeatedly and are somewhat surprising given the context; (4) what is in italics or parentheses; and (5) footnotes that seem too long. This list is far from complete—in fact, no complete list is possible—but the list is meant to begin to give you an idea of what sorts of things we notice when we’re doing close reading.

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Close Reading: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol.16, No.3 (Fall 2000), pg.7-8 (x)