...Just read this thread. JUST READ IT.

damn trans ally dale real

the problem is that pretty much all pride flags are horizontal, theres no vertical tricolours or anything

bisexual ireland

bireland

okay so no one wants me carnally

jimmy carter in poland

i stepped in my kitchen late last night and I ain’t had a single snack in the cribo. went back to bed mad disgruntled. felt like oliver twist. like a pre industrial revolution british kid or something

This is why I decided to learn how to bake.

brother i said i missed the bus and you telling me this is why you became an astronaut. where do we go from here?

The /gardening subreddit is actually full of hippie anti-plastic anti-lawn freaks (affectionate) and I find it enjoyable and I saw a nine-word horror story I thought tumblr would enjoy

The emotion in this photo

New Curse Unlocked!: Establish Mint

I know, I know, gatekeeping the outdoors, that's supposedly bad, right, but I think if you show up to do a hike and you brought a portable speaker with you to play music while you hike, I think, like hear me out, there should be a gate, and someone at the gate should keep you from doing the hike.

playing music in public should get strong social disapproval

Recorded music, anyway. Live music is different rules. If you want to lug an entire cello up a mountain you can do whatever the hell you want.

Carrying a speaker on a hike to make everyone listen to your bullshit, and simply sitting under a tree and playing a fiddle in the woods, are two activities so different they may as well not exist in the same world.

I think the critical difference is that the bringing of recorded music with you ties the space to Elsewhere, whereas the creation of live music with an instrument you brought both binds you to the space, and drags everyone who hears you play into it as well.

I think you're right.

Yeah I'll accept this into my belief system.

forces you to watch dragonball z for the sole purpose of getting you to respect short men characters

The Journal, New York, May 17, 1896

I’m getting genuinely emotional y’all don’t understand how ISOLATING it can be when cultural dress for most other Asian countries are popular and represented and Filipino clothing barely is, LET ALONE PRE-COLONIAL?!

I- 🥹

I hope to find the time and energy to fulfil my dream of making the clothes and dressing like this

everyone who says that bdsm is just improv should probably ask their improv groups to stop tying them up and flogging them with whips i dont.think improv groups are supposed to do that

starting to suspect you guys' improv groups have deeply misapprehended the term slap stick comedy

WHICH ONE OF YOU SPENT ACTUAL AMERICAN MONEY ON THIS

i immediately messaged my friend to ask if this was the car they told me about seeing a few months ago. turns out it wasn’t. however, i am sharing this photo of THAT car because the owners of these 2 cars need to meet

OWNER OF CAR LICENSE PLATE # “DESTIEL” AND OWNER OF CAR LICENSE PLATE # “CASTIEL” PLEASE MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE MISSED CONNECTIONS BOOTH

comic that came to me in a vision

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]

My new Spider-Sona

Writing prompt? No. Writing much delayed.

Sopranos Sunday: A Call To Action

Are you feeling morose about the end of HBO’s Succession? Does the current state of television, vaguely defined by binging shows in a week and mostly forgetting them, make you sad? Have you always wanted to watch The Sopranos, considered by many to be the greatest show of all time, but you just haven’t gotten around to it? Well, I’m like you, and I have an idea for you, inspired by this tweet I saw yesterday:

This struck me as a good idea for tumblr, because it would involve many things tumblr loves, namely:

So. Let’s do it. This Sunday, June 11th, let’s start a journey back to turn of the millennium New Jersey. That evening, around 8-10 PM (prestige tv timeslot) go to HBO Max or an… illicit… website, and turn on episode 1 of The Sopranos. Blog about it. Speculate about what might happen in future episodes (it’s more fun if you don’t spoil yourself). The next Sunday, watch episode 2. And so on, and so on. This will be a Commitment (The Sopranos has 86 episodes, so at a pace of one a week that’s nearly two years) but I believe in the tenacity of tumblr users. And I think we’re ready for the odd Breaking Bad memes but about The Sopranos now.

If you feel moved to join me, spread the word! Post any liveblogging etc in the “sopranos sunday” tag! And if you’ve already seen the show, maybe this would be a good time to rewatch? Anyway, have fun! I hope to see you all this Sunday night!

JACKSONVILLE, FL—Expressing concern that he might have played up his facility with witchcraft and dark magic at the expense of other qualifications, local man Timothy Sellers told reporters Tuesday that he might have mentioned sorcery a few too many times during a recent job interview. “It seemed to go pretty well, but maybe I should have made fewer references to the various arcane and esoteric rites I have mastered,” said Sellers, wondering aloud whether it would have been better to include Photoshop and Excel on his résumé’s special skills section instead of necromancy and incantations.

Full story.