humans...how weird @traineecryptid - Tumblr Blog

Translation Masterlist

(will be kept updated to the best of my abilities)

(subtitle files not listed are available for requests! just dm me♡)

(translation commissions open, more details below)

#dmbj #dmbj extras #dmbj actors #overworking man #when you're in love #liu chang #the mystic nine

redstonedust

forgotten middle child syndrome the number 68 stuck between her funny number siblings 67 and 69. is this anything.

redstonedust

im bad to argue with because i have jesters blood if you misintepret me i'll just go along with it. when i was a teenager i was trying to explain the concept of the heterosexual default to someone and they were like "so you think everyone should become bisexual?" and i was like. what the hell sure. lets have legally enforced bisexuality. i'll die on a hill for the bit dont fuck with me.

calligrificator

Hello hello I’d like to respectfully req:

Gorilla grip pussy is OUT!! Panini Press Pussy is IN!!!

stiffyck

Heck, if he wanted to do open-heart surgery on me, I’d probably let him.

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

Bank of England are letting you vote for what animals you want on their new bank notes: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/help-us-design-our-next-series-of-banknotes

Pine martens are an option!

PINE MARTENS??!?

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

Oh my god, you can choose up to two from each category:

HOW CAN I NARROW THIS DOWN

calligrificator

"It's just a little aimless."

"Use the sights."

calligrificator

“He’s also got a cloaca” Um. Don’t read into this I also have no context for this quote.

ursiday

Pajama shark I have grown quite fond of you

kaiasky

its terrible for any number of reasons, but i think if we invent immortality there should be an extreme sport called civilizational speedrunning where teams of 20 go into the wilderness somewhere and try and be the fastest build the first internal combustion engine. i bet you could get it down to like 3 years tops

biggestzam

The real trick is to eat seed heavy food before the speedrun starts so your first poops are halfway to agriculture already

kaiasky

i want you on my team holy shit

escuerzoresucitado

churlsgonewild

dragon-in-a-fez

when a government bans young people from using social media, and then categorises messenger apps like Signal and WhatsApp as "social media", they are pushing those young people toward using text messages, a fundamentally insecure form of communication. texts are not encrypted in transit and can be read by both the sender's mobile carrier and the recipient's. that also means they can be leaked in data breaches, subpoenaed, or just handed over willingly to law enforcement at the carriers' discretion.

hmm. I wonder why governments might want this

dragon-in-a-fez

this is not JUST about destroying kids' privacy by the way, although that is bad on its own! but think about it: if you can push everyone to spend their formative social years communicating through an insecure protocol, most of them are not going to do the work of moving to a secure one the moment they're legally allowed! banning everyone under 16 from Signal and WhatsApp creates a whole population of people more likely to continue, for the rest of their lives, to communicate using a tool the government can access at the drop of a hat

dragon-in-a-fez

fantastically poignant that the person in the replies saying "actually WhatsApp IS social media and that means children need to be kept off it" has basically their entire blog dedicated to anti-Palestinian propaganda. like I would have put in the effort to explain how trying to isolate young people from community and information is connected with authoritarianism but thanks for doing all the work for me

boccher

little miss memory loss is once again shocked by how much memory she's lossing

telekitnetic-art

ITS PRIDE MOTNH~!!

If you wanna support an Indigenous LGBTQ+ artist who is very much relying on any and all shop orders and freelance art opportunities to pay their bills, consider checking out my online shop!!! I'm running a 20% off sale on everything!! Just click the link below and/or use the code "GAY" at checkout!!

Visit TeleKitnetic at Ko-fi for 20% discount off Shop

And thank you so much to everyone who's supported my artwork endeavours all year!! You all give me the confidence to keep going through it all!!

hollowedskin

I got a 4 min long video of Kimchi dreaming today, so here's a clip

You get the whole walk cycle and the little sprint at the end.

Sometimes her sprints last for like 4 or 5 seconds and she can shoot herself off the couch or into a wall if she gets a grip with her back claws. If she does it next to a wall, her head smacking into it sounds like someone is trying to break into the house. She doesn't wake up.

Later in the dream she injured her paw and was limping, and earlier she caught something and ate it.

ltwilliammowett

The Danish training ship “Georg Stage” (1934) dresses in rainbow colour, 2021

dragon-in-a-fez

not the kind of gay ship I’m used to seeing on tumblr but cool

dubiousculturalartifact

ship georg is an outlier but SHOULD be counted

oddly-romantic

generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

headspace-hotel

There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.

Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.

mikkeneko

"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!

Well. They did, at the time.

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis.

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time.

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

---

I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead:

Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.

digitaldiscipline

I think less of friends I've known for decades because they use it, and they admit to using it.

sharkbeneaththelotus

I think it's also important to add that calculators and POS machines aren't behind a pay wall. No one is going to suddenly up and increase the price of the calculator to bleed more money from you.

Calculators replaced mental arithmetic and people got worse at it, but there was no mechanism by which someone can take calculators away.

AI is already set up to drain money out of people, the monetisation is built in already.

They can open the tap any time.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

humans...how weird