Miguel Calatayud
Naomi Watts as Queen Gertrude in Ophelia (Film, 2018).
Plumas brillantes.
Iridescent plumage on Gould’s turkeys / guajolote norteño (Meleagris gallopavo mexicana) at Santa Rita Lodge. In Madera Canyon, Santa Cruz County, Arizona.
Heading home from the fields
A typical butterfly farmer's attire typically doesn't have a top. It's not like insects have anything to hide on their chest and it removes the hassle of fitting the clothes around their wings.
Poofy underskirts don't have a practical reason, country girls just want to be pretty too.
Planning a going away party in a place where you've burned a lot of bridges and lost most of your social connections is pretty weird. I'm inviting like, two friends, their partners, and my boss to have sushi at my partner's parents house ? That's too weird, man, I can't do that? My partner has lived in this town for 10+ years, me for 7 and despite racking our brains we can't even think of anyone else to invite.
Sooooo many ostensibly "plain" birds are not plain at all they're just common and it boggles the mind have you not actually LOOKED at a chicken? A magpie???! A starling? A pigeon???? I mean jesus pigeons are literally iridescent
This is an appreciation post for the cattle egret’s very slick peach hairdo
what do you guys have as desktop background? I always find the basic ones too boring and the pretty art too distracting
Medieval stained glass fragment incorporated in a later window at the church of All Saints, East Barsham (Norfolk)
image from here
2,300-Year-Old Plush Bird from the Altai Mountains of Siberia (c.400-300 BCE): this artifact was crafted with a felt body and reindeer-fur stuffing, all of which remains intact
This stuffed bird was sealed in the frozen barrows of Pazyryk, Siberia, for more than two millennia, where a unique microclimate enabled it to be preserved. The permafrost ice lense formation that sits just beneath the barrows provides an insulating layer, preventing the soil from heating during the summer and allowing it to quickly freeze during the winter; these conditions produce a separate microclimate within the stone walls of the barrows themselves, thereby aiding in preservation.
This is just one of the many well-preserved artifacts that have been found at Pazyryk. These artifacts are attributed to the Scythian/Altaic cultures.
Arguably one of the coolest looking nudibranchs is the Phyllodesmium iriomotense, an aeolid nudibranch native to Japan and Indonesia. It feeds on soft corals and gets to be about 2cm long. While it is small, it definitely seems like some alien one would find on an ice-planet!
“The machines we have now, they’re not conscious,” he says. “When one person teaches another person, that is an interaction between consciousnesses.” Meanwhile, AI models are trained by toggling so-called “weights” or the strength of connections between different variables in the model, in order to get a desired output. “It would be a real mistake to think that when you’re teaching a child, all you are doing is adjusting the weights in a network.”
Chiang’s main objection, a writerly one, is with the words we choose to describe all this. Anthropomorphic language such as “learn”, “understand”, “know” and personal pronouns such as “I” that AI engineers and journalists project on to chatbots such as ChatGPT create an illusion. This hasty shorthand pushes all of us, he says — even those intimately familiar with how these systems work — towards seeing sparks of sentience in AI tools, where there are none.
“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.
“It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.
[...]
Given his fascination with the relationship between language and intelligence, I’m particularly curious about his views on AI writing, the type of text produced by the likes of ChatGPT. How, I ask, will machine-generated words change the type of writing we both do? For the first time in our conversation, I see a flash of irritation. “Do they write things that speak to people? I mean, has there been any ChatGPT-generated essay that actually spoke to people?” he says.
Chiang’s view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. AI-generated text is not delightful, but it could perhaps be useful in those certain areas, he concedes.
“But the fact that LLMs are able to do some of that — that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement of their abilities,” he says. “That’s more a statement about how much bullshit we are required to generate and deal with in our daily lives.”
Source: archive.ph
