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]

all this said, it's still fucking gross to contemplate someone reading your 300k-word fanfic and deciding they want a sequel so they put it into chatGPT and somehow think whatever they're getting out of that is going to be in any way related to what you had intended to say.

fanfiction is like. here's a piece of my soul! here's the parts of me i didn't know what else to do with! i wrapped them up in something i love in an attempt to understand my own feelings and morals and maybe the whole world. hope you like it.

I know I put this on the tags of that "horses will eat meat and eggs" post but like if that's all it takes for people to get freaked out and think horses are deranged then they should also be aware that almost all other herbivores do the exact same thing. It's actually seems to be way less common for herbivores to eat 100% only plants than it is for them to eat meat occasionally (koalas are one of the suspected few strict herbivores bc their diet and digestive system is so specialized). They don't go out searching/hunting for it like carnivores and omnivores, but if they stumble across some carrion or some eggs (or some particularly easy live meat), that's fair game, even moreso if other food is scarce.

Like,,,,Deer will eat dead fish and rabbits, and have been recorded eating dead deer also. They've also been recorded eating live hatchlings from bird nests. Rabbits will scavenge birds a lot, and also do scavenging cannibalism. Snowshoe hares have been recorded scavenging a lynx, which is ironically their main predator when alive. Elephants will eat fish. Cows will eat live birds just right of the ground, along with eggs they may find.

Horses aren't deranged bc they'll eat meat, they're deranged bc theyre like if you put the ghost of a psychically-sensitive victorian child into the body of a 1500 pound mammal.

i’m going to start flagrantly lying about corsets to counteract all the historical costuming people being weird about them

corsets killed hundreds of women each day

corsets were responsible for the irish potato famine and the great chicago fire

It’s actually false that historical low life expectancy is due to infant mortality, it’s because corsets killed thousands of women a week.

not many people know this but it was corsets that caused the schism of 1054. masterminded the whole thing.

The explosion was because the Hindenburg was wearing a corset.

there wasn’t even a jack the ripper their corsets just did that

as soon as a line is drawn delineating two groups of people where before there was only one i will show you where the line runs down the middle of someone's body

@trustmeimageographer reblogged your post and added:

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value. 

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief. 

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months. 

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.

#very cool! #reference #this is why taxes on china were collected in rice too #for the same grain reasons #bc the peasants just ate yams which were quick and easy to grow #but rice is backbreaking excruciating work that keeps the peasant population under control #and requires a collectivity and organization that the bureaucratic state can provide #ESPECIALLY since you need irrigation for rice even more than you do for wheat and stuff #and irrigation planning and upkeep is a huge part of a local bureaucratic official’s duties in ancient china #i had no idea about the miller stuff in medieval times that’s very fascinating #there’s a lot to be said for how monks were healthier #bc they got to grow vegetables #and they were allowed economic autonomy as a result #but there’s another essay for that (x)

I’m a little curious tho, how does just seeds from the grain go bad?

Like if they lose their nutritional value so quickly how do they get planted the next year?

Part of how medieval farmers avoided the problem of grain spoilage over the winter was to plant their grain crop in the late autumn, and let it start growing over the winter. Then they’d sow again in early spring. The winter crop might get blighted by the cold, or it might come up early; the spring crop might not sprout as much and would take longer, but it might help you out if your winter crop failed. They were kind of hedging their bets in an imperfect system.

Faster causes of of grain spoilage are visibly “something has ruined this grain”–insects, molds, or vermin get in at the grain, so your grain is much more likely to be eaten, pooped on, or rotten when you take it out of storage. 

If you can get grain to survive those quicker methods, eventually grain can spoil simply by being exposed to air. After a few months the oil inside it oxidizes, which destroys a lot of its nutrients. You might get it to sprout six months later, but it’s a lot less nutritious if you eat it, and if you grow it the plants will get less of a head start before they have to rely on their root system to bring in nutrients from the soil.

Very occasionally, archeologists turn up ancient seeds that still sprout, but those seeds are usually exceptionally well preserved–for example, sealed in a jar in a tomb that was undisturbed for thousands of years and magically it never got hot or wet enough to spoil. But you can’t store large amounts of grain like that, partly because the simple existence of large amounts of grain will attract pests that will spoil it. The ones that survive are the one-in-a-million cases.

My absolute favourite under-acknowledged agricultural hazard is self-heating and thermal runaways.

If a plant isn’t actively growing it is, in fact, decomposing - the speed at which it’s doing that depends on things like external temperature, moisture, etc and can be anywhere from very slow to very fast.

Stuff that is decomposing produces heat.

Grain is an amazing insulator, so all of that heat gets trapped in the middle of the bin.

High heat encourages more decomp. Which produces more heat. Which produces more decomp. Which, eventually, can lead to a thermal runaway, in which the grain passes its ignition point and begins to smolder. (And if you’re really unlucky, that can spark a dust explosion.)

This is one of the reasons that grain farmers are Very Concerned about moisture content - high moisture content means faster decomposition, and thus faster spoilage but also the risk of your grain bin blowing up. Modern farmers carefully control the moisture content and air circulation of their stored grain to maximize quality and shelf life, while avoiding inconvenient explosions.

I don’t know that medieval farmers ever would have produced enough grain to be at risk of thermal runaway - but there are hazards to storing large amounts of grain even aside from pests and loss of nutritional value.

I feel almost certain I’ve read of medieval city fires that started in moldy haylofts and silos.

Thermal runaway can happen to hay as well. Hay stored indoors under a roof will last well as usable animal fodder for a long time, but only if it is VERY dry when put in, and a leak in the barn roof can cause a fire by this method-- if the hay gets wet and starts to decompose, then it'll catch itself on fire. This is still a problem in the modern day, and causes barn fires to this day.

But yes the importance of the potato cannot be overstated. Potatoes can become dangerous in storage too but this is much rarer.

Cirilla

A double exposure experiment using 5 photos.

Ciri and nilfgaardians photo by @alphagravy, Emhyr photo by jellybearby(IG), Geralt and 2 Kaer Morhen pics from my PS4 gameplay.

Tutorial: How to make 3D embroidered thistles

I’ll start by saying that these are not the easiest element to create. It took me some experimenting to develop the technique and practice to actually make them well. I’ll do my best to explain everything and I promise it will take a few tries, but trust the process and you’ll be fine. They add such a beautiful and unique element to a piece so they’re worth the effort to learn

Keep reading

It doesn’t look that exciting, but this linen is from the New Kingdom (ca. 1492–1473 B.C.)

Thinking about it for too long makes me feel absolutely insane.

The description on The Met includes the line ‘The cloth was repaired and laundered in ancient times’ and that also makes me feel light-headed.

It’s so beautiful and so simple and so so old

A system built of cruelties is damaging to everyone inside it including those who aren’t being directly targeted, but that’s a conversation that too many people aren’t ready to have

Fascists fucking hate fat people bc to them we’re a living symbol of degeneracy and that’s yet another reason you should love and support us tbh

If I had a quarter for every time I’ve seen some nazi use genocidal and dehumanizing language to talk about fat people, particularly fat women, I’d have enough money to buy one of those nice soaking Japanese bathtubs.

Thin libs and leftists don’t really talk about this that much and it’s partially because they’d have to confront their own shitty beliefs about fat people.

Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.

Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.

Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.

Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer

...Not to get weird and dark on a useful/amuzing writing post, but...

Years and years ago, I read someone's experience of finding out that his mom's boyfriend was a serial killer. How much it sickened him to put together odd bits and pieces of their experiences together, recontextualizing them, suddenly understanding new and horrifying things.

But while that was awful, what really fucked him up later wasn't the clues he'd missed or anything-- it was that, one time, they'd been working together on some kind of home project, and he'd been on a ladder and suddenly gotten off balance-- and his mom's boyfriend had immediately reached out, yanked him back, both of them frightened and swearing and then gasping in the aftershocks of panic, and how grateful he'd been that the boyfriend had been there, how they'd both started laughing as the adrenaline washed through them and out again, hugging fiercely, how grateful he still was that the boyfriend had been there, because he owed his life to this man, this almost-father that had kept him safe and had been afraid for him, and the cognitive dissonance of that, the visceral disgust and the aching love and what it meant to be beholden to a monster for the gift of that moment--

And that's why we need to practice the little lies of fiction, where we can see that characters may not always be rendered in black and white-- it helps us learn how to live in a world that may serve us the worst people we may ever know doing us the greatest kindness of our lives.

I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me I’m pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say “but SURELY you agree I’d be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!” bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables—it’s hard bc they’re more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but they’re what we evolved eating the most of so they’re what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you don’t do it, it isn’t doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is “makes you less likely to do it again in the future.”

You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Don’t waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.

And ONE MORE THING—listen. We are NOT evolved to lose weight, we are evolved to hoard it. We came about in a world of famines. Not only does your brain have MULTIPLE failsafes built in SPECIFICALLY TO PREVENT WEIGHT LOSS, but there are epigenetic factors—factors that are not DNA but travel with it and affect how it is expressed. So if your parents or grandparents lived through a famine, like, oh, say, the Great Depression, YOU are more likely to gain weight and more likely to have difficulty losing it. AND! We live in a world highly affected by industrial pollution—there is no corner of the world free from it, micro plastics and industrial chemical pollution have been found literally everywhere ever studied—and many of those pollutants affect our endocrine systems. Looking at records of lab animals going back to the 1960s, where we have excellent records of what genetically essentially identical animals ate, we know that LAB ANIMALS FED THE SAME AMOUNT OF THE SAME CHOW WEIGH MORE NOW THAN THEY DID THE IN SIXTIES. So no. You’re not fat because your willpower is somehow busted. (Willpower, fun fact, can be depleted! By DEPLETING BLOOD SUGAR! Baumeister’s work in the 2000s demonstrated that.) You’re fat because your body wants you to live, and because the ultra rich have knowingly poured poison into the world because they don’t care if you die.

So YOU need to care if you live. And how you live. Please love yourself, because the billionaires will never give a shit about you. Weight Watchers has a 96-99% failure rate. Weight loss is a scam that makes billions of dollars every year. Love yourself too much to fall for that. Don’t wait until you’re thin to love yourself or to start living, because a) that day may never come and b) it’s okay if that day never comes. You are worthwhile and enough right now. I promise you that.

Did I mention that all studies on the subject are very clear--like, we do not need more studies on this, which is a bananas thing for a scientist to say--exercise does not lead to weight loss. It just doesn't. Anyone who tells you it does is wrong. It's good for you because it's good for you, not because it makes you thin. It improves your blood vessel health; it improves your heart health; it improves your body's ability to manage blood sugar; it improves your muscular health. It does not make you thin.

Reducing calories can reduce weight, but your body, as previously mentioned, is trying REAL HARD not to lose weight. I see a lot of recommendations for 1200 calorie a day diets. Google "starvation study" and look at how much the men in that study were given. It was over 1500 calories a day, and they were miserable. They became skeletal. They felt awful, depressed, foggy--because your brain is the single biggest user of calories in your body. It is so metabolically active that your brain uses around 30% of all the calories your body uses. Guess what happens when you starve your brain? You feel like shit. You feel stupid and depressed. Don't starve yourself. It doesn't work and it makes you feel awful and you will get rebound weight gain above whatever you lost, guaranteed, and then you'll blame yourself for "letting yourself go" because our society is built on lies.

We also cannot and should not ever suggest that anyone can lose more than 5-10% of their body weight and keep that off. It's just not possible. Bariatric surgery is a WHOLE other can of worms, I don't have the energy to explain why I almost never recommend it to my patients, but just know that if anyone has ever suggested you lose more than 10% of your body weight through behavioral changes, they are bullshitting you.

Blackfly Director: Christopher Hinton | Song: Wade Hemsworth Studio: National Film Board of Canada | Canada, 1991