Jesus Chinese Jesus with the Woman at the Well

MORE PHOTS IN MUH REBLOG

Psst. Don’t tell the jolkein rolkein rolkein estate, but this is amazing. DO consider buying a print from the extraordinary artist responsible:

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/leiaham/

Original Twitter thread with the artist’s thoughts and commentary:

View on Twitter

Did I just employ the "Treat Them Like You are A Kindergarten Teacher Again" method with my insurance company today? I surely did. Did it work? Probably better than intended because I made an actual doctor feel contrite.

So, my insurance has been trying to not cover my SNRI because it is new on the market and no generic available yet, so pricey.

I apply for a refill and the request gets locked for review. Again. For the 3rd time.

This time I call and immediately ask to speak to the actual doctor making these clinical decisions. Very politely. Must be a slow day because they allow it.

ME: [Teacher voice] I'm calling in regards to the SNRI you have placed a lock on. Why was this decision made?

DOC: Well, there are dozens of other medications on the market in that tier, and far cheaper for you and [insurer]. We have sent a request to your doctor to consider alternatives.

ME: I am aware of that. So, can you do me a HUGE favor and look up my prescription history really quickly and tell me how many SSRIs and SNRIs were only filled once in 2022 for me, showing they were poorly tolerated?

DOC: It looks like eight.

ME: Great job! Now, can you please look at my genetic test for psychiatric drug tolerance and tell me how many medications are listed in the safe category?

DOC: Two.

ME: Awesome! Now, can you tell me what type that other drug is that I'm not taking?

DOC: Yeah, totally, it's an MAOI.

ME: That's correct, you're really knowledgeable! Should I be taking something as dangerous as an MAOI with my other medications, or even just in general?

DOC: It's contraindicated for sure.

ME: It is! So true! So, last question since you've been incredibly smart and helpful. Is it less expensive for [insurer] to pay out for the medication knowing they already get a huge manufacturer discount anyway, or is it more expensive for them to pay for me to need potentially long-term inpatient psychiatric care?

DOC: I'll clear the code, ma'am and flag it as medically necessary. I'm sorry about this.

ME: I appreciate you SO MUCH. You have a great day now.

WALGREENS PHARMACY TECH WITH 5 NOSE RINGS AND PURPLE HAIR STARING AT ME: ........... OKAY! It'll be ready in five minutes. You wanna come work here?

Yes you are asking to have your cake and eat it too, shocking level of self awareness on that one.

link

You mean to say that the side that hates gender norms doesn’t have men who follow masculinity? Shocking

Sheriff | Xuma

you can always tell when a meatless recipe is made by someone from a meatless tradition (indian, christians irt Lenten fasting, etc) and a recipe made by some bougie western vegan/vegetarian because one will be actually good and good for you and the other will look or taste like raw sewage and be made of ingredients only marginally meant for human consumption :)

This is horrible advice and will get someone killed.

why? genuinely asking

Boycott the LA Dodgers!

Sign the Boycott Petition to force the Dodgers to stop mocking Christians and Jesus Christ.

all the frothing-at-the-mouth posts about how "don't you dare put a fic writer's work into chatGPT or an artist's work into stable diffusion" are. frustrating

that isn't how big models are made. it takes an absurd amount of compute power and coordination between many GPUs to re-train a model with billions of parameters. they are not dynamically crunching up anything you put into a web interface.

chances are, if you have something published on a fanfic site, or your art is on deviantart or any publicly available repository, it's already in the enormous datasets that they are using to train. and if it isn't in now, it will be in future: the increases in performance from GPT 2 to 3 to 4 were not gained through novel machine-learning architectures or anything but by ramping up the amount of data they used to train by orders of magnitude. if it can be scraped, just assume it will be. you can prevent your stuff from being used with Glaze, if you're an artist, but for the written word there's nothing you can do.

not to be cynical but the genie is already far more out of the bottle than most anti-AI people realize, i think. there is nothing you can do to stop these models from being made and getting more powerful. only the organizing power of labor has a shot at mitigating some of the effects we're all worried about

this post had over 10k notes and lots of people in replies getting very angry and panicky and threatening imaginary bad actors and begging people not to put their fics into chatgpt. the reply is authoritatively saying "anything that is given to AI it can use it later to draw from." no source! like - i don't know if they save your prompts. they probably do for some other nefarious purposes. but:

these are the size of the training sets used to train gpt-3. as a rule of thumb in natural language processing, one word is on average two tokens. the common crawl dataset alone is around 205 billion words; for gpt-3 they don't even manage to use all of it. this is the scale of the data they need. they are not re-training their model with the little prompts you put in, and even if they did, it's like... a drop of water in the ocean. it's not gonna have an effect on how the model behaves. i think people are, on a gut level, still understanding these models as "collage machines." they're not. they are not borg-assimilating all your best ideas from your fics to frankenstein them back together. they are statistical models. they are compressing gargantuan amounts of data down into smaller (still huge, but much smaller) models of that data by looking at trends and likelihoods and repetitions. i'm not saying you're a great person if you use gpt to autocomplete old fics but even if they were for some reason adding your prompts to their datasets, it's not gonna have an effect. the culture on here about anti-ai stuff has approached, like, mythology - making up shit about what they can do, talking about how scary they are, ghost stories, moral panic. this wild overstatement about what they can do only benefits the companies selling them, and those trying to use them as pretense to undermine labor.

Honestly, I think part of the problem is that we’ve allowed the companies shilling these models to call them “AI” with relatively little pushback. Remember when one- and two-wheeled personal conveyors - like a Segway without the handles - were rebranded as “hoverboards” in 2015 as a Back to the Future reference? It’s the same thing. And the problem here is that just like hoverboards don’t hover, “AI” isn’t intelligent. They’re just statistical learning models with sophisticated outputs.

But allowing the companies to own the branding on them, and allowing that branding to be “AI”, invokes all the science fiction we’ve ever read. If you’ve been on TV Tropes for ten seconds you’ve seen the “AI Is a Crapshoot” page, and that’s kind of how society is treating these tools, when, honestly, they’re just web scrapers - fundamentally the same web scrapers people have been using for decades - and statistical models.

yeah, this is a good point. "AI" literally doesn't mean anything.

It has referred to a range of different technologies since the 50s, some of them including no machine learning at all. I forget who coined it, but there's a lovely quote about how AI is just "whatever problem computers can't totally solve yet:" as soon as it's considered acceptably solved, the moniker moves on to the next big thing. (example: voice recognition systems, like the ones you talk to when calling tech support. didn't use to be a thing! used to be fancy and unreliable! now totally invisible, taken for granted)

[ID: First image is an anonymous ask reading "oh I wasn't aware it was feeding the AI. I've inserted hundreds of fics into ChatGPT for their continuation or for a different plot within the same context just for fun and out of curiosity... but I've never posted any of them...." the response is "Indeed, anything that is given to AI it can use later to draw from. That's why it doesn't matter if you post them or not as it now has access to those writers' texts without their permission." Second image shows a table charting five "Datasets" against their "Quantity (tokens)," "Weight in training mix," and "Epochs elapsed when training for 300B tokens." The table is labelled "Table 2.2: Datasets used to train GPT-3." The largest dataset is "Common Crawl (filtered)," with 410 billion tokens, a weight of 60%, and .44 epochs elapsed. The other datasets are WebText2 (19 billion tokens), Books1 (12 billion), Books 2 (55 billion,) and Wikipedia (3 billion). The table's caption reads: "Weight in training mix refers to the fraction of examples during training that are drawn from a given dataset, which we intentionally do not make proportional to the size of the dataset. As a result, when we train for 300 billion tokens, some datasets are seen up to 3.4 times during training while other datasets are seen less than once." end ID]

today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.

The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."

Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response

what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.

This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years

I've been researching the history of conservation in the USA...and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.

The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.

In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.

I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!

We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They're still here. They're reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost

There was a time most American cities almost never saw a blue sky. Brown and yellow smog was the norm and rivers were garbage sludge that are now teeming with fish. People don't know that government environmental regulation actually did succeed, that the EPA really worked as intended. Now it gets eroded because people think it isn't making a big difference, and they think that because they haven't seen what it's still holding back.

why! are you, as a man, not a master of your urges! and not constantly pursuing more enriching activities! are you nothing but a little monkey boy? Sad! read a book. exercise! learn a trade. we are sapiens for a reason! stop being a slave to your body and instead be a devotee of your spirit! feed your soul!

Warning: do not delete any sideblogs

I’ve been seeing it happen to a handful of people, but apparently if you try to delete your sideblog you will end up deleting your MAIN tumblr account entirely as well I don’t know if this is a bug or something, but I’ve seen it happen to ~4 people now, so until this possible bug gets worked out do NOT delete any of your sideblogs unless you want to risk deleting your account entirely

As far as I know, this is not a programming bug. This is bad design resulting in user error. It is safe to delete sideblogs if you do it the correct (non-intuitive) way.

Source: I have successfully deleted multiple sideblogs over the years. And I have unfortunately heard of many people accidentally deleting their whole accounts over the years too. This Tumblr help page corroborates my experience and outlines the proper way to delete a sideblog. (Note the difference between the headers: “Deleting Your Account” vs. “Deleting a Secondary Blog or Leaving a Group Blog”)

The mistake people make:

When you go into the settings of a sideblog, there’s a button at the bottom that says “Delete [sideblog url]”

Of course, people think this button will delete only the sideblog they want to delete. But the thing is, this button shows up at the bottom of every blog in the settings page, and the url displayed will match whatever sideblog you’re looking at. It will still delete your entire account, as intended by staff.

What you need to actually do:

When you want to delete a sideblog, you must go to the members tab of that blog and hit “Delete this blog”

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/[sideblog url]/members

Reasoning:

Sideblogs are meant to have the potential to be shared by multiple users. So the thinking is, if you are one of 5 members of a blog and you want to leave, you go into the members tab and leave. The 4 other people still share the blog without you.

That same line of thought applies when you are the only user. When you are the only owner of a sideblog, you must ‘leave’ the ‘group’ from the members page to delete it. Deleting any blog from the settings page will delete your entire account.

If you’re still unsure, you can follow these steps:

Important question does the same thing happen with the *Delete this account* button on the mobile app or no?

As far as I’m aware, the mobile app actually works in a way that makes sense. Deleted some sideblogs recently and I’m pretty sure I just pressed the Delete This Account blog, it prompted me to enter my password and warned I’d lose all my current content and access to that specific URL and well the rest of me is still here

No no, they truly believe they’re “saving” kids from this “unending lifetime of suffering” they think it’s kinder to deny them all the happy moments in their life so they don’t suffer the bad moments. Apply this logic to the real world, they’re basically saying like 80%? (Made up) of people shouldn’t have ever been born.

Basically, unless you have the perfect, happy life (which is impossible), you should just die to be spared a painful existence. This argument would genocide the entire human population, way more than just 80%. It's a horrible argument, but annoyingly popular.

The Christian is not to be involved with or support the occult, witchcraft, demonism, or any other thing that uplifts the occult. To do so is to contradict God’s word, dabble in the demonic, and invite judgment from God.

Biblical reference:

God strictly warned the Israelites against being involved with the occult (Leviticus 20:6). The pagan nations that surrounded Israel were steeped in divination, sorcery, witchcraft, and spiritism, and this is one reason why God gave His people the authority to drive them out of the land (Deuteronomy 18:9–14). The New Testament says that the rise of interest in the occult is a sign of the end of the age: “The [Holy] Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons” (1 Timothy 4:1). More theological understanding of the occult here.

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