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ELODIEUNDERGLASS

@elodieunderglass / elodieunderglass.tumblr.com

Scientist, official adult, angry swan, cautionary tale. Someone has to be the grownup here and I hate it when it's me

Turnips grown in moulds.

Thank you so much for thinking of me! This is weird because I instantly looked at this and went, “of course they weren’t grown in moulds - this is an art piece by that guy. YOU KNOW. That guy!!!” With such a specific feeling of confidence that I assumed we’d seen it before, right?

And while I went looking for it, I found That Guy (artist Kenji Suetsugu) on his Instagram (_tsukurimono_) and plenty of new references to this post going around: people reposting it on Reddit and claiming it to be the result of growing the daikon in a silicone mold, and other people saying no it isn’t, but they’re all pretty recent. Apparently “daikon legs” is a slightly insulting description of female legs in Japan, so it’s not just horrible things with legs, but also pun art, so it’s definitely in the wheelhouse of stuff I look at.

But all the conversations seemed to be pretty recent, and my brain insisted it was old news. So then I thought it was surely, surely something I had been talking about with a friend, but I cannot find any reference to daikon feet in our conversations. I definitely didn’t know the artist’s name, but my brain was pretty insistent that everyone knew about That Guy.

So I don’t know why I recognise this so instantly, and know so confidently that this was a piece by Some Guy, but there you have it.

Perhaps when I am extremely old, young people will have a good time holding up a selection of pictures to me, and I will speak prophecy on them: “that’s a meme from 2015,” I’ll say indignantly, for mild entertainment, like bilbo baggins probably did in his old age, or “They didn’t GROW those daikon, they’re an art piece. You know, by That Guy.” Net zero information, one hundred per cent confidence, no obvious utility. Is that a job? I’ll have that job.

As I walked home from the allotment I was stopped by three people who wanted to know why my courgette was so excellent.

Crab Day!!!

Where:

Here on Tumblr!!

What:

Buy crabs!

Why:

As we now know, Tumblr is $30 million dollars in debt. Oops. Tumblr has announced some major (and unpopular) changes to the site in their attempt to get back above water. The alternative is that Tumblr ceases to exist. But maybe we can change that...

How:

There are 327 million unique tumblr visits per month, and almost 500 million active accounts. If 10 million unique users (or less, if we bought more than one) bought or gifted Crabs from the Tumblr store, we could knock out Tumblr's debt easily. Buy crabs!

When:

July 29, 2023 is Crab Day, running through August 5 (for anyone who can't log on that day) as Crab Week!

Who:

Everyone!! If you truly can't afford to participate with a $3 crab, (or other item from the shop) post crab memes!

Time for Tumblr users to rise again and surprise everyone...

Please I need their next financial report to have a header that says 'Crab day'

Ok! so I have to take some responsibility for this. I signal boosted “crab day” early on, which definitely directly led to it becoming more widespread, and several people have kindly contacted me to inform me that I wouldn’t normally give a platform to the OP, because of their politics.

However, as the signal has gone out, I wasn’t quite sure how to handle this. I’d like to be on a website that has a Crab Day; it appeals to me. I am extremely fond of crabs, presents, mischief, the month of July, holidays, festivities, and birthdays. I do not agree with OP’s politics. I don’t think that tumblr’s methodology of “informing you that you wouldn’t like the OP of a post and then leaving” is a super helpful policy for a lot of things, though. It’s always pretty unclear what the best course of action is.

Nor do I think July 29th is a good choice - the historical precedence of Crab Month is written very clearly in the stars, and the ascendancy of Cancer ends on July 21st. It is exceptionally silly and amoeba-minded to have Crab Day fall outside of Crab Ascendancy.

But a correction never runs about as quickly as an idea. So here is my counter-proposal. It is largely believed on tumblr that intentions have great spiritual and moral significance. Have a Crab Day of your choosing and intentionally, and dedicate it to whatever influence you wish to reign. As OP is a conservative Christian, you can readily negate whatever spiritual impact you’re worried about them having! you can overcome them completely by simply dedicating your gifted crab to, say, Satan. Giver and receiver are both welcome to @ me, and I shall boost their joyful crab. The intentions and attention will make that crab more powerful; it shall therefore win the invisible magic war that Christians and TERFs are so worried about. I can’t stop Crab Day happening but I can sure as hell encourage it to go funny.

(This is super flippant, but I already received a birthday crab from a kind friend, and I am taking complete ownership of my pleasure in my birthday crab. Sorry OP, I own it. My crab. I don’t care about anyone else’s crab. My crab.)

a reading list on the human labor behind AI, machine learning, data labeling, and content moderation

bringing a global labor perspective to the “ai is gonna steal our jobs!” discourse that usamerican creative workers don’t really like…

“If you want to ask, what is the secret sauce of Bard and ChatGPT? It’s all of the internet. And it’s all of this labeled data that these labelers create,” said Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at New York University. “It’s worth remembering that these systems are not the work of magicians — they are the work of thousands of people and their low-paid labor.”
ChatGPT is one of the most successful tech products ever launched. And crucial to that success is a group of largely unknown data workers in Kenya. By reviewing disturbing, grotesque content, often for wages of just two to three dollars an hour, they helped make the viral chatbot safe. WSJ’s Karen Hao traveled to Kenya to meet those workers and hear about what the job cost them.
Since the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, future-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers.
You might miss this if you believe AI is a brilliant, thinking machine. But if you pull back the curtain even a little, it looks more familiar, the latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run.
OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.
To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest. … The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour…
Among a range of conclusions, the Google study finds that the crowdworkers’ own biases are likely to become embedded into the AI systems whose ground truths will be based on their responses; that widespread unfair work practices (including in the US) on crowdworking platforms are likely to degrade the quality of responses; and that the ‘consensus’ system (effectively a ‘mini-election’ for some piece of ground truth that will influence downstream AI systems) which currently resolves disputes can actually throw away the best and/or most informed responses.
So-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems.
“The devil of this job is that you get sick slowly — without even noticing it,” said Wisam, a former content moderator who now trains others for Majorel. … While TikTok does use artificial intelligence to help review content, the technology is notoriously poor in non-English languages. For this reason, humans are still used to review most of the heinous videos on the platform.
“Any major technology company in the last 10 years has been powered by a throng of people … At some level, there’s denial. Investors like to hear that technology sells itself once you write the code. But that’s not really true.” … “Data work has a racial and class dynamic. It is outsourced to developing countries while model work is done by engineers largely in developed nations … Without their labour, there would be no AI.”
Most profit-maximizing algorithms, which underpin e-commerce sites, voice assistants, and self-driving cars, are based on deep learning, an AI technique that relies on scores of labeled examples to expand its capabilities. … The insatiable demand has created a need for a broad base of cheap labor to manually tag videos, sort photos, and transcribe audio. The market value of sourcing and coordinating that “ghost work” … is projected to reach $13.7 billion by 2030.
Over the last five years, crisis-ridden Venezuela has become a primary source of this labor. The country plunged into the worst peacetime economic catastrophe facing a country in nearly 50 years right as demand for data labeling was exploding. Droves of well-educated people who were connected to the internet began joining crowdworking platforms as a means of survival.
“We can’t have safe social media if the workers who protect us toil in a digital sweatshop… We’re hoping this case will send ripples across the continent—and the world. The Sama Nairobi office is Facebook’s moderation hub for much of East and South Africa. Reforming Facebook’s factory floor here won’t just affect these workers, but should improve the experience of Facebook users in Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, and other African countries.”
Here in Nairobi, Sama employees who speak at least 11 African languages between them toil day and night, working as outsourced Facebook content moderators: the emergency first responders of social media. They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal or banned content from Facebook before it is seen by the average user. …
The testimonies of Sama employees reveal a workplace culture characterized by mental trauma, intimidation, and alleged suppression of the right to unionize. The revelations raise serious questions about whether Facebook… is exploiting the very people upon whom it is depending to ensure its platform is safe
Microwork comes with no rights, security, or routine and pays a pittance — just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed. Stuck in camps, slums, or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life. This unequivocally racialized aspect to the programs follows the logic of the prison-industrial complex, whereby surplus — primarily black — populations [in the United States] are incarcerated and legally compelled as part of their sentence to labor for little to no payment. Similarly exploiting those confined to the economic shadows, microwork programs represent the creep of something like a refugee-industrial complex.
(an excerpt from the book Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism by Philip Jones)
A.I. researchers hope they can build systems that can learn from smaller amounts of data. But for the foreseeable future, human labor is essential. “This is an expanding world, hidden beneath the technology,” said Mary Gray, an anthropologist at Microsoft and the co-author of the book “Ghost Work,” which explores the data labeling market. “It is hard to take humans out of the loop.”
Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day

[book] Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri (May 2019)

Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. … services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none.
[follow-up articles about the book here and here]
“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. … “The hook is that we have this kind of hype circulating around AI so that we can masquerade really old forms of labor exploitation as ‘reforming prisons,’… They’re connecting social movements, reducing it to hype, and using that to sell AI.”
Crowdworking is often hailed by its boosters as ushering in a new age of work. With the zeal of high-tech preachers, they cast it as a space in which individualism, choice and self-determination flourish. … But if you happen to be a low-end worker doing the Internet’s grunt work, a different vision arises. According to critics, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk may have created the most unregulated labor marketplace that has ever existed. Inside the machine, there is an overabundance of labor, extreme competition among workers, monotonous and repetitive work, exceedingly low pay and a great deal of scamming. In this virtual world, the disparities of power in employment relationships are magnified many times over, and the New Deal may as well have never happened.

Found some remarkably terrible wall art that I want to hang in the hackerspace

I'm trying to make a display for the badges and programs we have from various cons so I'd like to have some computer-related art to go along with them and this is what came up in a search and it was so hilariously the opposite of what I wanted that I immediately knew I had to inflict this on my friends.

Live, Laugh, Log

Oh this is something. I don’t know what it is but it’s Something

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Someday I'm gonna open a free seminar on "How To Identify A Liar Or A Thief On Sight" and once the seats are all full I'm gonna open up a PowerPoint and the first slide is gonna just say "You Can't"

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like yeah there are some highly effective methods of spotting when someone is lying to your face or planning to pocket something but absolutely none of them are as simple as "refusing eye contact" or "Fidgeting" or "Being homeless" or "Using narcotics" and if you genuinely believe that every single red flag is 100% reliable then what you're doing is actually called Profiling and not only is it unreliable but it's also kind of shitty

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MYTHS AND FACTS:

MYTH: Unusual eye contact indicates dishonesty

Strong eye contact is a sign of respect and earnestness in some cultures. It's also a sign or disrespect and defiance in others. Some people change their normal eye contact patterns when they're nervous- but are they nervous of being caught, or of being falsely accused? Neuroatypical people may not instinctively guage how much eye contact is expected or appropriate, or may find that too much or too little eye contact is painful or distracting. This is not a useful meter by which to judge strangers.

MYTH: Twitching and fidgeting is a sign of a guilty conscience

There are a lot of reasons why someone might make sporadic movements like twitching, fidgeting, hand wringing, flapping, bouncing, etc. These can be self-soothing gestures, tics, stims, palsies, disorders, or spasms, and can be due to medical conditions, illnesses, or drug use. None of these things are definitive signs of dishonesty.

TRUTH: You can sometimes spot a lie by lying.

If you wash the dishes, then thank someone for washing the dishes, and they accept the praise, it could be that they're in the habit of lying about that sort of thing, and are caught in that they don't know that you know.

Or, alternatively, they may have a memory issue, or may misunderstand, or may have washed other dishes earlier in the day. They may just not be listening or fully understanding what you've said. Maybe they habitually doubt themselves, or maybe they're trying to appease you.

BUT, I you have enough of your variables covered, a well-placed lie can sometimes, SOMETIMES, catch someone else in one of their own.

This is a difficult method to use on people you aren't familiar with, though, and even if it's someone you know pretty well, it's an incredibly damaging thing to dive into with full confidence- it's manipulative, really, and given that there's a non-zero chance that you're just wrong, I don't reccomend it

TRUTH: The most reliable way to spot a lie is by gathering evidence.

People do all kinds of odd things for all kinds of weird reasons. The easiest and most accurate way to spot a liar or a thief is to observe and record them doing something, then ask them about it, and observe them declare a conflicting statement of events. Only then, after proving that they are of sound mind with full faculties and awareness of their actions, you can safely conclude that they are lying.

Which is part of what makes it so hard.

You cannot record someone without their consent, and being willing to do so over small stakes is.... sort of a weirdly obsessive thing to do, and not something I'd be willing to support unless someone is in physical, mental, or financial danger.

TRUTH:

Every kind of person lies, cheats, and steals, and the ones you watch are the ones you catch.

thinking about what is and what isn't allowed in frame with reference ecosystems in prairie restoration

Explanation from OP in the replies

restoration ecology tends to want to restore to a past state of an ecosystem, but magically that past state never involved people! Harvest, reciprocity, etc are all ignored because we pretend there's such a thing as prairie without people. Turns out, that imagined prairie never existed, there were always people here and there should people involved in restored prairie too!