fernie !🌿

they/it • 19 • white

[matttkip]

We're carpooling to work

[alleesaur]

doodling a bunny vs doodling a hare

[alleesaur]

a few more quick doodles, for fun

[alleesaur]

mythical duo edition - jackalope and wolpertinger

[clowncarpool]

gf got me new posca markers for christmas, so i drew her brother’s cat. her name’s engine bc they found her in a car engine.

[clowncarpool]

engine update:

[jonahmagnus]

@alrtic

[iniro]

the besties

[louferrignojrofficial]

what age did you move out from your parents’ home

under 16

17-21

22-25

26-30

31-35

36-40

40+

i still live with my parents

Voting ended onMar 4, 2024

no judgements at all here. i was thinking about the possibility of moving out and wanted to know what age other people did

[skelkankaos]

[fleshadept]

looking at (vetted) gofundmes for people trying to escape palestine and i don't know how many of you actually click on the gofundme links you reblog but i would like to point out, for what it's worth, just how amazing it is that so many have raised so much money. it may overall feel like a drop in the ocean but the fact that several gofundmes have raised tens of thousands of dollars is amazing. it is so expensive to leave gaza right now, and people still need money after they escape. but regardless of what propaganda the US, UK, canada, and other western nations are trying to pump out, people across the world are doing what they can to help these people survive. many of them are still very far from their goals (like this one and this one and this one) and some of them are very close to high goals (like this one), and some of them have reached almost double their original goal.

and that's not even addressing direct aid or organizations that take continuous donations for distribution of food, menstrual products, etc. the PCRF has raised $16,000,000 of their target goal of $20,000,000 to fund current aid and long-term relief efforts in gaza. ANERA's febuary 13th update discusses the material ways they helped palestinians today:

(ANERA donate link)

my point is, it often feels like the world is turning a blind eye to palestine. but i would like to point out that there is an important difference between "the world" and "western political leaders and media narratives". a breathtaking amount of real people, the people who make up the world, are trying to help. in the face of israel attempting to commit genocide, the world is saying No. These people deserve to live. and literally sending millions of dollars internationally, through the internet connection that israel has desperately been trying to destroy.

it may not feel like it matters in the grand scheme of things. but to the people who get fresh clothes, or a hot meal, or blankets, or the kids who get new toys, or to the people who are able to bring their families to safety, it matters to them. go make someone's day better. i've linked so many options with ways to do that.

[secondlina]

New Crow Time 🐦‍⬛🦊🌟

[frightfullytreeish]

reblog to slowblink at your mutuals

[gaygaara]

[river-taxbird]

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)

Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.

[river-taxbird]

Today I had the exam for the class where the conversation that inspired this post happened. There was a question on Audit Technology and I was basically able to reuse a lot of the talking points from this post. My thesis statement was "While ML may seem exciting, it's better to rely on mature, reliable, human made technology, and only rely on ML as a last resort for complicated tasks that are not too high stakes. ML is incapable of scepticism and critical thinking and will never replace the human touch.

Thank you Tumblr, for discussing it with me and giving this silly and jargon filled post attention.

[u3pxx]

uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[u3pxx]

sorry for drawing women- hmph, foolish of you to be so easily tricked. i would never apologize for drawing women, i'm a feminist like that.

[pyrrhiccomedy]

so judging by how astonished people are by it every time we explain it to anybody, it seems like my wife and I might really be onto something here

during the pandemic, we invented something we call "astronaut time."

when it's astronaut time, it's like we are two astronauts wearing the big helmets, moving around the station on totally separate tasks. one of us is outside the space station and one of us is inside the space station. our radios do not work and we have no way of communicating with each other. we might see each other through the lil porthole windows, but we ignore each other because we both have different things to do.

"astronaut time" is how we get total privacy when we live in the same apartment. I will pretend you don't exist. You will pretend I don't exist. we have a nonverbal, zero-contact signal for when astronaut time is over (usually "I'll draw a smiley-face on the whiteboard in the kitchen when I'm done"). No talking, stay out of each other's line of sight, we are actively avoiding each other, unless you are currently experiencing a medical emergency goodbye.

it has been. a godsend. imagine living with your partner and being able to close every single tab in your brain related to social interaction. no fear of being interrupted by a "hey, quick question--" or "sorry to bother you, but do you know where the scissors are?" or "did you want something to eat, too?" Once or twice a month, we look at each other lovingly, hold hands, and say "baby I think I need some astronaut time tonight," and the other person goes "okay cool. bye! have a nice night!" and nobody's feelings are hurt and we both go and have a lovely evening completely by ourselves.

like idk it's a small thing but it's made our lives so much nicer, so if you and your partner/roommate are both people who sometimes need total privacy in order to recharge, maybe try it

[nerdygaymormon]

[porkue-deactivated20240304]

Wait fuck all this game shit. What is happening in Atlanta

[porkue-deactivated20240304]

?????????

[lastvalyrian]

The etymology of the interjection pog is so insane like:

1. People are saying "pog" because there is a twitch emote named pogchamp

2. It's called pogchamp because the face of the emote is this guy:

3. who is a youtuber and streetfighter player who made this face on a video because of a production mishap and later won a competition of the game Pog for which he made a video titled "Pog Championship" that featured this face

4. Pog is a game also referred to as "milk caps" where you stack disks and slam your disks into your opponent's stack to disrupt them. They look like this:

5. The game is called pog because it is commonly played with novelty bottle caps from a drink also called POG

6. The drink is called POG because it's an initialism for its ingredients passion fruit, orange, and guava

7. Passion fruit is native to South America and got its name because Portuguese missionaries used its five-part shape as an allegory for Jesus's stigmata to explain the crucifixion of Christ to the Brazilian natives

8. The word passion comes from the Latin patior which means "I suffer" in reference to the suffering of Christ on the cross

9. The Indo-European root of patior has been reconstructed as *peh- "to hurt" which is cognate with English fiend

[yarrowdraws]

very late to the meme, it's been done before but. here. turn on the sound pls

[to-dance-beneath-the-diamond-sky]

US folks, tomorrow (December 7, 2023) the senate is going to vote on sending $14.3 billion more in funding for Israel. (It’s a huge funding bill for “defense funding” for many things, but they also included more funding for ICE in the bill). Please take 2 minutes to use this action tool to call your reps and demand they vote no to more funding for Israel

And please share this action tool with 3 people you know. You can literally copy-paste this post to them if you don’t know what to say

[ursamajori]

[plain text: “You can literally copy-paste this post to them if you don’t know what to say”]

[minmos]

i love reading niche science news so much btw

this is the kind of thing that part of me acknowledges like This sounds like a parody of what scientists are getting up to. but then im also like YAYYYYY WOODCOCK HAS THE WHITEST FEATHERS!!!!!!!!!

[edible-drywall]