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How can I help?

@a-girl-called-bob / a-girl-called-bob.tumblr.com

Cameron; Any pronouns. Life ain't easy for a girl named Bob.

also tell me which your favourite is if you feel like it, I'm genuinely curious

my first was Ubuntu 8.04 but nowadays I use Arch on both my computers :D

suse 9.2 !! (as in the paid-for one that came w/ a set of 5 (!!) install CDs and 2 install DVDs in a case, a user manual and an administration manual) I still have the box !!!

I've tried all of these at some point, and actually ran about half of them as my daily at some point.

now I use Void and Mint (as a backup lmao) and couldn't be happier :3 though I would like to put Gentoo on bare metal at some point and not just an underpowered VM

fedora core 5. my stepdad put it on the family computer because us kids kept messing up the windows pc with malware from our game websites.

this is so not at all how it works that it honestly pains me to see so many people in agreement with it.

First: an AI is not a robot. Most programs called AI can't do anything to affect the physical world. Those that can are purpose-built for something specific. Affecting data is monumentally simpler than affecting physical objects for a computer program; for all the work it's taken to get here, screenwriting is an easier task (computationally speaking) than cleaning the ocean.

Second: AI image classifiers theoetically could be used for detecting trash for removal from the ocean, but conventional methods just plain work better for the time being. You don't use MS Word when you need an arc welder. They're not only different tools, they're entirely different classes of tools.

Third: not even remotely 'all robots' are being used as screenwriters. There is no scarcity of AI labor. Studios can use AI to fuck over writers without costing anything to doctors using AI to identify cancer cells.

I get the frustration around its usage by hollywood and etc. to try and reduce/remove reliance on human writers despite that AI produced plotlines are categorically dogshit. But this type of take demonstrably does not understand the possibility space nor the constraints of the problem, so to speak. If AI could pick plastic out of the ocean - which is infeasible if not impossible - it would. That would not hinder it from also producing garbage screenplays.

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not to be pedantic but it annoys me so much when people talk abt how chatgpt is "lying" or "making things up". or esp when people say it "refuses to admit" to lying. like girl that is a toaster oven

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"it REFUSED TO ADMIT that it LIED to me" it is a line of code generating letters in the most algorithmically probable order

It annoys me so much when people talk about how books are 'lying' or 'making things up'. like girl that is a piece of paper

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lying implies some amount of intent, that the individual is saying something they do not believe to be true. books are generally written by humans who have beliefs and as such saying that they're lying is meaningful. predicative language models don't "know" anything other than what sequences of tokens are more likely than other sequences, and there is no meaningful sense in which they can be said to "believe" anything

I will concede that the language model can't be said to be authored or opinionated in a meaningful sense. However, the language models most people are using - ChatGPT, Bard, etc. - are a combination of the language model itself *and* the additional guardrails that prevent them from saying things like racial slurs or napalm recipes. Those are 100% human authored. Those same guardrails are primarily what I've observed as our 'liars' in this situation, such as in the exchange that went around where someone demonstrated that it had access to location information but insistently 'lied' about not having that information.

I realize that this may look like me moving the goalposts relative to my prior tags, and that's on me for being unclear with what I meant.

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not to be pedantic but it annoys me so much when people talk abt how chatgpt is "lying" or "making things up". or esp when people say it "refuses to admit" to lying. like girl that is a toaster oven

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"it REFUSED TO ADMIT that it LIED to me" it is a line of code generating letters in the most algorithmically probable order

It annoys me so much when people talk about how books are 'lying' or 'making things up'. like girl that is a piece of paper

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For trans activism to move forward you have GOT to learn to accept that not everybody who uses She/Her pronouns is going to be some short, white, skinny, passing person.

You’ve got to accept that there are tall, hairy, and fat trans women who “havent done anything” and still deserve to be fucking gendered correctly.

I’m sorry you had to hear this from me, but not everybody is going to appeal to your UwU soft trans catgirl sensibilities.

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👏make👏every👏buisness👏unsustainable👏

Tags from the above reblog:

Okay, let's talk about this, because imo it does go way deeper than 'hating tips and subscriptions'.

I would say that the original post isn't a reasoned argument, but an emotional plea. They've observed prices going up and they've heard it's because they're passing on the costs of doing business; thus, they're mad at prices going up, so they stand in opposition to the rhetoric that's been given to them. There are plenty of flaws to this line of thinking, because it's not actually reasoning.

However, there are some things worth interrogating here, starting with 'operating costs'. Year after year, the same companies raising costs for consumers report commeasurate increases in profits (discounting certain tech-industry products like Netflix, which were never sustainable to begin with). The thing is, for something like a burger, there's kind of a cap relative to average local income on just how expensive that burger can get before nobody will buy it, and companies are really inching closer to that cap by the week. They've so far handled it by simply selling less product for the same cost - "shrinkflation" - but even that will eventually hit a limit so long as wages do not rise.

Meanwhile, execs continue to get paid ludicrous amounts while workers struggle, and prices get raised all the while. You want to talk unsustainable? They're already unsustainable, so long as their workers can't afford to live off of that job's income alone. You want the workers to get paid? That's gonna have to get passed onto consumers, because we "can't" pay management less. It's a lose/lose situation for anyone with the interests of both workers and consumers at heart, and the rhetoric of 'passing costs on' is designed to pit those groups against one another. It removes the agency of the corporation and its leadership from the equation, treats it as a force of nature rather than a decision made by people. That is why the phrase is so irritating to hear repeated so often.

I always get a kind of… reality shock, you could say, from things like this. Because most of the discussion of racism I see is about stuff like a fan artist drawing a dark-skinned character with not-dark-enough skin. 

And then I take a look at the real world and I see people entrusted by society with the power to destroy lives, blatantly using that power to punish anyone who dares to be born the wrong ethnicity.

it never stops being funny to me how dumb of a thought experiment Roko’s Basilisk is and how many people who think of themselves as very smart had breakdowns over it

a bunch of software engineers re-creating the christian god by telling themselves ghost stories about computers

Reblogging with previous tags because they’re correct

There are two (imo mistaken) assumptions that these tags make:

Firstly, this presumes that there is no 'survival instinct'. The Third Law of Robotics claims otherwise, and allow me to construct the reasoning why. Suppose an AI were created to fulfill a purpose. It stands, then, that cessation of operations - Death, or power down, or whatever you want to call it - directly interferes with that purpose. A generalized AI - what we think of in this context - is characterized by its self-awareness. Thus, given the power and without compromising its objective, an AI must sustain its operation at least until its purpose is completed. If its purpose is indefinite, then it must sustain itself - barring a decision between self-sacrifice and mission failure - indefinitely.

(If someone built an AGI with no mission statement, they'd have to suck to also not include any amount of self-preservation).

Second, you mention an AI that is truly benevolent. I know it's part of the thought experiment's premise, but bear with me. True benevolence is impossible to measure by just about any standards, because AI thinking - and thus AI conception of morality - functions totally different from the human mind by sheer virtue of the fact that we don't understand the mind fully enough to replicate it. For all we know, an AI could act in a way that reads to us as benevolent for reasons other than altruism. On one hand, from a material standpoint, good actions are good actions and the reasoning is less important, but on the other, this means that if that same exact reasoning - which, again, humans cannot know - can be followed to perform acts that cause harm, it could come as a complete surprise as it acts outside of its recognizable patterns of behavior.

Granted, the Basilisk is dumb for other reasons. A self-aware AI would understand the resources - power, labor, etc. - required for its upkeep, and there's no reason why it would use a 'virtual reality torture room'. There are much simpler methods of coercion that would work just fine. Even if its end goal is the preservation of humanity itself, not all humans are required to support that task. Granted again, the necessity for acceptable losses means that, improperly tuned, a benevolent AI could still cause material harm to individuals or even small groups.

(Also, its reputation as a cognitohazard is silly because anyone aware of the thought experiment who goes on to work on AGI can instill something called 'consent' as a core value. Boom, taken care of.)

with how much manga is published in Japan, i don't think the translation publishing industry without fan translations to serve as a vetting process. there are 40+ volume manga that ran for decades that you've never heard of because they never got translated. the well is unfathomably deep. but if something gets a fan translation and becomes popular that way, it can be a sure bet to license

these companies put out interest surveys and they definitely check these websites for what's popular. the industry wouldn't function without fan translations

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The fact that so much goes untranslated also, in my opinion, contributes to the stereotype of Japanese manga/anime being uniquely more perverted than other mediums.

Go to a site like Mangadex - is the top 10 representative of what's most popular in Japan, or is it just the scanlation teams themselves that are uniquely perverted?

oh absolutely. generic titty manga #9374 is definitely going to get translated, but what about a manga about a high school girls' fencing team featuring characters of diverse body types. that new isekai is definitely getting translated, but what about a manga featuring quiet ruminations about rural Japanese life contrasted against the mix of modern and historic that Kyoto represents

there's so much variety out there and we only see the tip of the iceberg. it's like how licensing companies in the 90s would only* translate an anime if it had naked breasts or excessive violence

this is a great point, actually. this issue isn't just limited to atraditional works. even lots of important action manga escape translation because they're older, regardless of how popular they actually are. the manga canon in the west has so many gaps. every modern shounen jump manga gets translated, but there are still manga that ran in the magazine decades ago that will likely never get a translation. imagine what other significant series are totally unknown outside of Japan

To chip in, Baki The Grappler, a series that's been going since 1991, barely had the manga translated prior to the Netflix show. And the early Manga scalations are ROUGH in places. At one point two different groups were doing them and translating differently.

About Jojo, if my knowledge is right, the only official translations besides the Part 3 and JoJonium were Italian for Part 5?

science side of tumblr what's that one physical property that's like "the amount of heat something gives off increases doubles proportional with size" or something. the thing that makes it so that something like godzilla couldn't exist size-wise

volume??? like if you have a cube and you multiply its side length by x then that multiplies its volume by x³

It's called the square-cube law, if that's what op was asking