Weavers of Life, me, embroidery, 2021.
what the FUCK
...I want to refute this but no, I....yeah
[captions]
Person on screen: needs a couple pats of butter, a splash of olive oil, simmered on low with a bay leaf and a cinnamon stick. What?! You never seen a boy who knows his way around the kitchen?
Yeah my mom always wanted a little girl but she got stuck with me instead. That wasn’t gonna stop her though so all my friends were opening up nerf guns and bmx bikes on their birthday, I was getting crockpots.
(scene changes to the person dressed in a nice black suit jacket, bright pink dress shirt, and black tie) Yeah laugh it up! Take a picture while you’re at it 'cause this is the last time you’ll ever see me in a suit! How do boys wear these things??
(scene changes to the person dressed in the same shirt and tie with no jacket and the shirt cuffs unbuttoned and rolled up, with purple nail polish on their nails) No, I don’t know how to fight. I was only ever taught how to deescalate situations with healthy communication and emotional validation.
Anonymous asked:
got anything good, boss?
reasonsforhope answered:
Sure do!
-
“Weeks after The New York Times updated its terms of service (TOS) to prohibit AI companies from scraping its articles and images to train AI models, it appears that the Times may be preparing to sue OpenAI. The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT’s dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.
NPR spoke to two people "with direct knowledge” who confirmed that the Times’ lawyers were mulling whether a lawsuit might be necessary “to protect the intellectual property rights” of the Times’ reporting.
Neither OpenAI nor the Times immediately responded to Ars’ request to comment.
If the Times were to follow through and sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, NPR suggested that the lawsuit could become “the most high-profile” legal battle yet over copyright protection since ChatGPT’s explosively popular launch. This speculation comes a month after Sarah Silverman joined other popular authors suing OpenAI over similar concerns, seeking to protect the copyright of their books.
Of course, ChatGPT isn’t the only generative AI tool drawing legal challenges over copyright claims. In April, experts told Ars that image-generator Stable Diffusion could be a “legal earthquake” due to copyright concerns.
But OpenAI seems to be a prime target for early lawsuits, and NPR reported that OpenAI risks a federal judge ordering ChatGPT’s entire data set to be completely rebuilt—if the Times successfully proves the company copied its content illegally and the court restricts OpenAI training models to only include explicitly authorized data. OpenAI could face huge fines for each piece of infringing content, dealing OpenAI a massive financial blow just months after The Washington Post reported that ChatGPT has begun shedding users, “shaking faith in AI revolution.” Beyond that, a legal victory could trigger an avalanche of similar claims from other rights holders.
Unlike authors who appear most concerned about retaining the option to remove their books from OpenAI’s training models, the Times has other concerns about AI tools like ChatGPT. NPR reported that a “top concern” is that ChatGPT could use The Times’ content to become a “competitor” by “creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper’s staff.”
As of this month, the Times’ TOS prohibits any use of its content for “the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system.”“
-via Ars Technica, August 17, 2023
WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK???????????
His name is Medhat Mamdouh, he’s a 22-year-old hip hop and dubstep recorder player from Cairo. He’s been teaching himself this style since he was 14. This article links to his social media sites. He’s on Facebook and YouTube and Soundcloud.
so since this post is almost ten years old, for anyone curious like i was - he is still playing!
this is what he’s up to now (an upgraded version of what he’s playing in this video)
For those curious, he’s not alone in this scene either!
“RadioActive has been credited as the original flute-beatboxer (using a pan flute, and performing with the Spearhead around the world), and Tim Barsky with being an innovator on a classical Boehm system flute. Both artists came out of the Bay Area hip-hop scene.”
- Flute Beatboxing on Wikipedia
Some of you might remember Greg Pattillo;
But if you search flute beatboxing on youtube these days, there’s tons of new artists in the scene now, like Medhat Mamdouh, adding their own unique spins!
It especially looks like Altajmusic has made an impact on tiktok and spawned a ‘beatbox recorder challenge’, getting even more new young folks to join in and experiment!
Disclaimer that I am not at all an expert in this scene and some of this stuff I just learned while researching points to add to this post! I just remembered Greg Pattillo (as I was low key obsessed with his music for a few years) and seeing the enthusiasm in these notes, I wanted to let yall know there’s even more out there!
"what are you a cop" is bookaziraphale's entire mindset btw. "is it very angelic to hoard books and be mean to customers" what are you a cop? "should you really be married to your adversary" what are you a cop? "should your husband be parking his car there" ah you ARE a cop. explodes your ticket notebook with his mind. like in his mind if the lord herself doesn't come down to tell him off he's doing just fine. because he's doing it. and if she DOES come down (where is the flaming sword I gave to thee) well then. what is she a cop
no so true. in fact I think this was a key experience in his conviction that he is correct about everything ever. after all she did not ask him again
book Crowley: you’re an angel, you can’t do the wrong thing
book Aziraphale: you are absolutely right. everything i do *is* the right thing
book aziraphale really took ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ and ran with it
like a fool i have always forgiven the dc metro system every time it fucks me over because the stupid sexy 70s brutalist aesthetic is just too swag i am sorry
except you. you are a testament to american hubris and were never supposed to exist
I am so sorry to do this to you but I actually have to talk about it because it is a very specific and weird story. So pictured here is the longest escalator in the western hemisphere and it’s specifically western hemisphere because at the time of construction it was the cold war and usa government was in a dumb competition with ussr government to see who could build the longest fucking metro escalator which would prove….something, i guess. usa lost and the 3 longest escalators in the world are in St. Petersburg. so this and the st. petersburg one are all actually in fact freaky long escalators
I have ridden the longest escalator in the Western Hemisphere many times because I used to live there, and y’all, it is LONG. I used to pull out a book and read four or five pages while I stood there.
I cannot fathom that there are three (3) longer ones in Russia.
Whoever decided to put the largest shopping mall convenient to that branch of the metro immediately outside the goddamn Wheaton station deserves to be congratulated for feats of creative cruelty, and then savagely beaten
"Longest escalator outside St Petersburg" and "lots of folks with lots of bulky shopping bags" is not a good combination
Reblogging again because I got an anon last week whining cause they did this to one of my unfinished series and the bot killed Y/N so now they want ME to give them a happy ending. Like. No. Suffer, bitch.
AI is the death of creativity. Anyone who does this to my stories and is stupid enough to brag about it will be blocked from ever reading my work again, AND I'll let everyone on tumblr know that you do this. We'll see how much fic you get to enjoy when every author blocks you forever.
Fic is a gift. I've said it before. Don't shit all over your lovingly handcrafted gifts, m'kay? This should be fucking obvious, but apparently for some of you it's not.
THIS GOES FOR AI ART AS WELL.
Thing is, I don't think tumblr staff is uniquely transphobic - especially since it's not just trans women's selfies and transmasc art getting censored, but classic queer comics, Black bloggers (especially women), and more, even as our more visible staff members keep talking about trying to fix the problem.
I suspect it's something much bigger and with much worse implications for the entire internet.
I suspect more appeals are being left to the automated system than we think (which they're NOT supposed to do but due to the sheer volume theyre having to deal with, well...) and, between the evergreen problem of report-brigading by bigots, the other evergreen problem of a company internally sucking at determining where justified criticism of their practices ends and harassment begins, and the problems of fighting the porn bots (because every single one you see is a product of survivorship bias) leading the algorithm to become sexist (remember #girlgate?), the automod algorithm is basically collapsing in on itself and learning all the worst biases of society MORE than ever before.
Which, given that these systems are being deployed all OVER the internet and being touted as objective and unbiased because ~computers can't be bigots~, should fucking horrify you.
To take this a step further, I feel tumblr's moderation problems are a, uh..."lovely" preview of what we might need to be on the lookout for going forward with social platforms on the internet, in MULTIPLE horrifying ways.
Because...look. It's flawed, but from a human cost standpoint it is FAR better for the majority of moderation to be automated. Manual moderation is a PTSD meat grinder. The stuff you don't see that gets filtered out automatically from most platforms includes everything from CSAM, to execution videos, to animal torture, to hate speech so intense and graphically violent that it would make you nauseous, to actionable threats of violence aimed at kids and animals, and more. There is no ethical way to expose people to that 8 hours a day, at the volume demanded by the modern internet. We know this, because that's how it's worked in the past and the trauma it inflicts on people is well known. Never mind that, conditions in domestic cubicle farms are bad enough, but this work is often outsourced to the global south, 8 hours a day is a SHORT shift for a lot of the people working these jobs, which only makes the whole situation even worse...
But for one, we know for a fact that algorithms are...NOT ready to handle that job. For example, here on tumblr, we still see a ton of porn bots and other spam bots, but remember:
For every single one we see, I would hazard a guess that at least 20 get banned before anyone even gets a chance to notice, and they go away pretty fast once reported...
But we still see the ones that break through. Which, to be fair, is even worse under solely manual moderation, since an actual human person has to see the problem in order to stop it, but it is still very There to prove that the system is fallible. Luckily, we have the report button. Unfortunately, it depends on users knowing how to use it...and using it in good faith.
So, in the interest of trying to keep moderation...okay lets be totally honest the corporate reason is to make it CHEAPER; making it less harmful to human workers (because people still need to train the system, but they need to be exposed to a lot less horrible shit to train an algorithm than to actively monitor a website) is just a side effect, but the point is that we end up with...bias automation, which seems to only get worse and worse as time goes on.
For two, let's look at the current tech zeitgeist. As much as I hate to bring up the drawbacks of the AI fad because it makes a lot of people's brains just shut off in vehement rejection of anything that looks like AI might be involved, this really is one of them - too many people are trusting machine learning WAY too much. This is still in very experimental stages. It's FAR from unbiased, as we've just discussed. Yet, because tech companies want to sell it NOW, they're presenting it as Totally Ready To Sell, and The Future, and...Objective. Cold Hard Data.
Imagine how much worse it will be if these algorithms end up getting used in not just internet moderation, but full on law enforcement, before they get better. After all, they're already trying to use facial recognition that way.
And, to make it even more horrifying, let's also look at it from a legal standpoint on the platform's end.
Tumblr, under Verizon, settled a lawsuit over moderation bias. They were ordered to go back to more human oversight and retrain the algorithm, and...for a while things were going okay-ish, the problem never went away but it SEEMED to be doing slightly better?
...but they can't roll back the porn ban, because SESTA/FOSTA are a thing, and payment processors restrict services when it comes to anything they declare too "adult", and KOSA is at risk of actually getting passed (PLEASE keep calling and writing your representatives!!), and so much else...
And we have a wave of book bans and state laws that formally declare queerness to be "sexually explicit" going down...
So, website operators are being put in a HELLISH catch-22 situation. On the one hand, we have nondiscrimination laws. As a business, you CAN'T just declare that a protected class of people is more Inherently Sexual than others. On the other hand, we have legal precedents being set that being queer IS inherently pornographic. In other words, we're approaching a situation where it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a platform to stay legally above board. You DON'T censor the queers, you're "providing porn to minors". You DO, you're violating nondiscrimination laws.
I cannot begin to stress how absolutely hellish that will be for EVERYONE - both users and webmasters alike.
Tl;dr: yes tumblr's moderation is biased, and the probable reason makes me WISH it could be attributed to just some absolute raging bigoted fuckweasels on staff. Buckle up and call your representatives and for FUCK'S SAKE DO NOT LET DESANTIS GET ANYWHERE IN 2024.
