#arbitrary is a synonym of random

[catboynutsack]

being on Tumblr truly reminds you that people can hate--truly and deeply hate--based on the most arbitrary shit imaginable. And honestly that makes it so much easier to just Do Shit. Cuz when my brain is like ohhhh what if ur neighbors think ur a freak bc u walked your dog in your pajamas with messy hair. I just think to myself. bitch there's literally no such thing as freakless behavior. literally everything is freakish to someone out there. freak is arbitrary. always changing. different depending on the social group you're in. there is no such thing as a Freak. freak is a label ppl project when they feel disgust towards you and ppl feel disgust towards others for the dumbest fucking shit. freak can be anything from eating tree bark or it can be fresh baked bread cooling on the counter. just do you.

Freak Is Everything. Everything Is Freak. Stop denying yourself the best parts of life bc someone you don't even respect at all told you it's freakish.

[ouidamforeman]

Okay if you hope Neil dies then stop giving him money, stop giving him indirect revenue by keeping his fandom alive. Say it with your whole chest or don’t say it at all

Fandom is not an advertisement and I haven’t paid for anything that goes to him for years 😌 Pretending all fandom is “indirect revenue” to anyone who created a piece of media whether it’s a writer or anything else is disingenuous and performative and trying to control others to your arbitrary moral standards. You are not only reducing fandom to consumerism but dismissing many other people’s work as well. Pretending that something this indirect is causing harm is performative when people do things and Actually spend money on things that do real direct harm. I’m also suspicious of this attitude of “cut all monetary flow to bad people” because well while celebrities absolutely don’t need that money and can often use it for harm, “someone did a Bad and therefore they should not be paid” is a bit iffy to me. The degree to which money is power in these situations is subjective and I know it’s uncomfortable but whether one’s money is going somewhere it’s doing harm or not is your individual decision to make. I’m not even spending money on NG myself and im skeptical of what practical good “no more money” would do in this case. It’s largely symbolic. There are ways to cull a bad person’s influence that aren’t harassing random fans of work that was never even solely made by this guy on social media. I and others are perfectly capable of enjoying a novel or tv show while cutting support and acceptance of a writer. Discussion of this and not letting the issue be swept away is how we do this, not nebulous “you’re symbolically supporting a bad evil guy!!”. He did harm with his power and influence which we can prevent without being reactionary and acting like a work of art or adaptation are synonymous with the person who made them (and never made alone, even!!!) Pretending this man is a sole auteur of good omens or whatever the fuck else is giving him power he doesn’t deserve, and causing wanton destruction because you feel powerless to stop harm that’s already happened is unbelievably foolish. Genuinely go outside and think about what good you can actually do instead of harassing people who are not even supporting the guy materially in any way and are in fact committed to finding ways of keeping him away from vulnerable people in fan spaces and calling for him to be removed from productions so everyone else’s work can be honored without more needless destruction, you know, something materially practical that isn’t moral posturing. You have literally made up that I am funneling money to this guy when I am not, and you know what? If he gets paid for work he did I don’t really care. I care about stopping the influence he had over people. I don’t think “something you did could possibly be construed as an advertisement for something he contributed to!!!!” and “Make absolutely sure none of your money is in any way even indirectly going to the bad evil person!” are the way to do any of this.

Also like fuck Terry Pratchett I guess, there’s no way one of his best works deserves to go in the trash because the co writer is a shit guy. Different people are going to deal with this in different ways. We all just want to prevent harm and people WILL disagree on what the best way to do that is. I think it’s getting him to step down from these media projects and not be involved in spaces where he can exert influence anymore. You may disagree, but do Not pretend you are ostensibly in the only moral right just because it looks good to you to say fake activist soundbites like this in random financially powerless fans’ inboxes. I keep joking that i hope he dies because i actually am mad and want him to stop! I’m doing what my moral compass says is ok. And that’s all I’ll say on the matter. Go do something kind instead of trying to control others

[declawedwildcat]

how about 8 best graphic design/visual direction?

I don't know why I expected this one to be short and sweet when I literally got my degree in graphic design. Whoops. Hope you don't have anything else you wanted to see on your dash if you open the readmore

From worst to best:

5. sweet pool sweet pool was experimental in a lot of ways, but imo it really fumbled the landing on graphic design. The logo is... weird, visually it's fine I guess but it doesn't totally match either of the two aesthetics they have sort of competing against each other in the rest of the UI, and it doesn't really convey much on its own. Your main menu is largely plain black (with a teal accent that does not appear anywhere else), which is funny given that EVERY other menu is this weird, almost a bit maximalist design that seems to be going for an alchemic look? It's all vivid splashed warm tones, paper textures, and indecipherable cursive script. Why did they make the Extras menu all circular text like that. I'm not even sure what they were trying to do with the layout of the Save/Load menu but the odd random spacing of the save slots combined with arrows pointing in arbitrary directions between them just makes it confusing to look at and parse what order they're going in. The parts of the design that don't look like a medieval alchemy tome are what I assume is supposed to look like veins or nerves? Which is arguably better suited to the concept, but a strange choice for something like an Exit Game menu. In-game, rather than traditional VN choices, sweet pool presents every decision as a reaction of either reason or instinct... which is telegraphed to the player by glowy red and blue membranes in opposing corners of the screen, which when hovered over fill the screen with either a pulsating meaty frame and heartbeat sound, or like a film filter and windy sound effect I guess? It's not appealing to look at and not very intuitive, I can kinda see the vision they were going for but it just wound up weird. I'm running out of synonyms for weird. As for what you'll be seeing most in the game, their text box is just a transparent black gradient at the bottom of the screen, no further design and no name plates for character dialogue. The icon signaling the end of text looks like it's a cycling gif of the letters in the logo, except there's also some other letters going on in there, so I have no idea what's up with that and it's kind of distracting for a while at first. Its merch and official art couldn't decide on a direction either, they barely made any for it and most of it is Yupon chibis or otherwise has no particular theme or graphic element that makes it unique. As an IP it kind of coasts by on its whole identity being "high school", since none of the other games happen to (visually) feature just a normal school. Overall they obviously had something going on here, it's just non-cohesive and, consequently, forgettable.

4. Togainu no Chi There is branding in tnc, but interestingly it's not really carried in the game's visual design. The UI is generic; other than a couple elements that have the logo shape lightly incorporated, you could slap most of it on any other visual novel without even noticing. It's simple, letting a clean red/white/black color scheme tie together the assets that look completely off-the-shelf like the dialogue box with clearly custom elements like the choice buttons. The main menus are understated, using backgrounds and CGs with a couple solid red graphics for pop. It serves its purpose, but none of it really adds anything to the visual identity. As plain as it is in the UI/UX elements, it kind of makes up for it by doubling down in other places. The music and very consistent narrative tone give just as much of a distinct mental connection to the aesthetic it's going for as the deeply 2000s 3D render backgrounds and dramatic choices of CGs (specifically the ones with solid black backgrounds that are rendered about twice as much as any of the rest). The logo has so much edgy symbolism crammed into a tiny space that even the designer who made it basically said it was way too much lol. They also have easy motifs for working with merch: barbed wire, stainless steel, a splash of blood, it's easy to design something that calls to mind tnc's style and tone. It's just interesting that it seems to maybe have come together after the game's development without it really being reflected in the in-game visdev.

3. Lamento Lamento took me a bit to get used to, but I kinda dig what they had going on. They knew what they wanted and they stuck to it. The logo is a simple wordmark, but the font is stereotypically fantasy and has just the tiniest hint of the celtic-style design that forms the base of their aesthetic. Honestly a lot of the menu UI leans on basic fantasy visuals, leaves and filigrees in just about every element. Some of it doesn't completely match, they switch out the color scheme on different menu pages that separate them a bit, but the consistent and highly decorative fonts still leave them feeling related enough imo. In-game it gets just slightly more muddied; they sort of have a filigree that rims the screen most of the time, but it looks more blade-like and honestly I've thought it matches tnc more than the rest of the game. It does not use your typical text boxes - instead a transparent and slightly feathered black rectangle will take up however much of the screen they want for that moment, whether there are two sprites on either side with text between them, one sprite with text below or beside, or just full-screen text. It doesn't really add anything to the UX, but it is unique and once I got used to it I didn't mind it jumping around at all. The most interesting part to me is the sprite backdrops. Rather than let their characters stand against the environment backgrounds, rectangles of intricate, vaguely celtic patterns with some cat designs woven in will appear and become a bounding-box for the sprites. At first I didn't like this, it felt like it separated the characters from the world they were supposed to be inhabiting in a random and artificial way. However it let them add a lot of really cool movement that doesn't really work as well when a sprite has to inhabit the full screen, like a character slowly inching out of sight or Asato coming in upside down. Anyways, graphic design wise though they're a little bit busy and I also found myself wanting to see what the full image looked like without the sprites blocking 80% of it. Honestly the only thing I don't get is the game's icon; it's the only main game that doesn't use a picture of the protagonist, and the compass rose isn't very representative of the rest of the game's style. (It also, for some reason, has an alternate icon in the files that you can switch it to — but it's a picture of Kaltz? This only raises even more questions. None of the other games have alternate icons, at least on my copies.) Out of game, the little bits of merch Lamento did get similarly had an easy enough time matching the branding. Give it a fantasy forest, some celtic knots, most of their non-crossover designs are pretty effortless to the point you can pick out that one plate they made despite it not having any characters or saying Lamento on it at all.

2. Slow Damage Surodame is the culmination of the 15 years of experience prior, and it looks every bit of it. I was going to put it first, but I don't think its out-of-game branding is quite as strong even though it's still mostly consistent in its identity. The main menus are creative, formed out of a diagetic space instead of intentionally flat graphics, and it hinders the readability/accessibility some but I don't think it's too bad apart from the settings page being a bit cluttered and hard to parse. In-game most of your informational menus are formed by notebooks, sticky notes, and brushstrokes. It's all beautifully cohesive without being repetitive. Your text box is a painterly splotch of pink and purple, and when a sprite appears as a dialogue bust instead of full screen, they come with a tiny matching background accent of their associated color. It's understated while still neatly accentuating the visual style they're going for. This game also has "interrogation" segments, which come with their own swath of unique UI; it's not quite as fitting as the more diagetically-styled portions, the meter targets for madness and euphoria don't fit in as well as the other elements, but I really like the tearing stitches as a background graphic and it blends with the rest of the aesthetic more than you'd think it would. Overall the graphic design is straightforward and harmonious, you get a crystal clear image of the intended visual direction and could easily evoke its style without having to think about it too hard. But to step away from the design side into performance for a second, I do not like how the smoke/aura was done as a VFX because whatever they did for it holy shit they did NOT optimize it. I have never had a VN crash so much or so consistently why the hell does it animate in a way that lags my whole ass gaming laptop I run triple A games at max graphics on this thing

1. DRAMAtical Murder Listen. I don't know that I could describe to you what DMMd's visual style is in any number of words. I swear it's like seven different things at once but it just works, everyone understands the assignment and can replicate it, it's so ingrained in the games that you can just conjure it even if you don't directly reference. Maybe it's because it's so disparate that anyone can pull it off. I don't know what they laced it with but DMMd's graphic design is as iconic as it is completely nonsensical. The menus are tech-y but in a pop sort of way, bright colors and clean vector art, all straight lines and rounded corners. It's geometric in that faux futuristic way and perfectly matches the vibe of the setting. The dialogue box and choice buttons are the same way with a decorative frame and slight scan-lines like it's a screen, and if I'm going to be honest it's a tiny bit reminiscent of how Kim Possible rendered backgrounds and gadgets. The pseudo-sequel Re:Connect mostly reuses the same UI assets, other than the main menu using an 8-bit layout that was only a cutscene element in the base game, but its opening movie and official art really hammered in the non-futuristic elements of DMMd's art direction: floaty, somewhat surrealist iconography, pastel colors, repeated and sticker-like images. This era had the look of a teenage girl's over-decorated three ring binder, but in a stylistically pleasing way. Out of game I would say more of its merch and branding leans into the pixel-and-pastel vibe that Re:C brought than the 2000s pop-scifi of the base graphic design, but the two flow together pretty nicely into a shockingly well-defined aesthetic. If anything the issue is almost that the others have gotten dragged too much into DMMd's visual territory, presumably because it has the strongest identity and sells the best. Crossover events feel overwhelmingly like they are bringing the darker, somber characters into the colorful and accessorized terrain of DMMd rather than anything daring to make Aoba look grunge.

{"Make me stack-rank my toxic yaoi" asks}

[sunstranded]

INTJ: Not knowing what to say

I did a very non-INTJ thing, which is to be socially competent and to keep up in conversations. I often abstain from social stuff that include half-truths and arbitrary compliments. However, I came to a realization about the INTJ type, the Fe-users, and by proxy MBTI.

I have met an INTJ that, to say the least but mean the most, is socially unaware making them aloof on accident. I would share something to them with the expectations of them to laugh or talk about the thing I had shared. But they would give me a random criticism or an objective observation. If I was not an INTJ that did the same thing, I realized how that situation could have left me offended. I brought it up, I had asked them why did they sound like they wanted to grade the meme I sent (fully knowing it's a tendency I also have). They said the most obvious answer, so obvious I did not even think to consider it: they did not know what else to say.

We all, let's not kid ourselves because even I know I tend to, want to talk about things we know about. Not to sound smart or not to appease, but mostly because it is not possible to talk about something you do not know. I cannot talk about, for example, thermodynamics and entropy, if in the first place I do not know that those words even existed. It's also somewhat related to why I can come off as a "smartass" because I use words that people my age (and those 'chronically' online) do not use, i.e. comeuppance, awry. If your listener does not know this word and you explain it by giving a synonym, they would be faced with the feeling that you could just have said it simpler.

However, comeuppance is not fully similar to retribution. Retribution involves active action for the interest of vengeance. It involves a person. Comeuppance does not. It could be interpreted as an inevitability akin to: if you have a win streak, eventually you will lose.

I realize that I often default to saying an observation or light criticism when someone shares something to me because it is what I know to say. I do not, in those moments, know that I could say a compliment to something I recognize to be better. I do not even think that I could have said a half-hearted comment because I was intensely listening or engrossed with the material sent to me that I took it seriously.

In that, I am not unique. I think it is safe to say that it's a default we always have: to say what we know and notice. For example, an Fe-user would say a compliment or a light hearted retaliation to an unserious joke because what they had noticed was the intention behind the message or the effect it had to the person.

This, once exposited is not even worthy to be a eureka moment. It sure does feel like it but I would rather describe it as the something so obvious I glossed over it. It serves as the same purpose as MBTI: to explain things. I enjoy MBTI because it is by no means a person. We are not static, we change, we are inconsistent, but just because I socialize often my personality can no longer be explained by INTJ. In short, I am still INTJ by personality and for understanding not INTJ as a character or caricature of my personhood.

[redditreceipts]

thank you for that intersex post. thank you for not using us as pawns for your arguments like so many people on both sides of the gender debate do, but rather treating us like human beings and offering a nuanced take.

Thank you! <3 If there are any other intersex issues that are important to the community, I would love to educate myself on them!

Something I would like to educate myself on more is the fetishization of intersex people, because I have encountered a couple of intersex people who did not want to disclose their specific variation in fear of people fetishizing them because of that (or to be referred to as the abbreviation of a hermaphrodite, which I learned is a slur, or a "futa", etc.)

Also, I would like to learn more about the "sex assigned at birth" vs. "sex observed at birth" stuff, because I have heard some intersex people say that sex assignment is an arbitrary practice of doctors trying to put intersex infants into male or female categories, so the sex is assigned. In endosex people, however, the term "sex assigned at birth" does not really describe what is happening, because there is no more or less random assignment, but more an observation based on biological reality. I've heard some intersex people say that nowadays, the term "AFAB" has become synonymous with "biological female", which erases the experience of intersex people who are not biologically female but still assigned female at birth. Phrases such as "AFAB people know what it's like to grow up with a vagina" ignore the very intersex people the term was originally designed for. Or phrases like "pre-HRT AMAB body", which tries to describe a biologically male body and throws intersex AMAB people who might have gone through a female puberty or have a uterus under the bus.

(And of course, the "normalization" surgeries that are performed on intersex people as infants, sometimes even without their parent's knowledge or consent, and the discrimination that intersex people face)

If you have any sources I could look into, I would be very thankful!

[lunarsilkscreen]

Caching, Abstraction, And a use for AI that isn't reliant on [Funding]

There are only two useful books in the world.

A Reference Guide, and A Good Fiction that seems to change [form] Every time you read it.

Any other book is solving a problem that can only be solved by reading *that* [particular book] once.

Oh. And a reusable Sketchbook or Journal. Cuz [making] things is as enjoyable as [consuming] them.

I come from a world that [Specializes] in [Data-Forms] and describing ways to use Data and Data-Types.

I often forget that I reside in a world where this isn't second-nature to your average person--So uh... Good Luck Learning <XML> to understand the rest of *this* post!

In XML; we focus on describing the *kind* of <HTML-Like> we need for the Application that we're developing.

Unlike In [Databases] which focuses on [Storing Data]; the core goal of [XML] is [showcasing] [that data] in a [aesthetically pleasing] and [understandable] fashion.

To whatever [Probably Human and/or Maybe.a.Computer] would need to understand it.

AI as I've called it before is an {Abstraction Definition} in which it takes a [something] and makes a [relation-tree] from that [something] to [everything it might could Possibly have be'en't].

So when a [Word] gets defined, unlike in our typical Webster's Dictionary, *that* word is defined closer as to what you might see in a Thesaurus.

Effectively; every word is defined by its Synonyms and undefined by its Antonyms. [Undefined in Specificity] I mean.

That's why the [Incorrect Stuff], one might perceive as Incorrect that AI would not, make intelligible sense. Despite being so obviously wrong.

Or; Why does the random Gunk AI spits out make sense from [ordinary randomness]?

And you might ask me directly to my face "Ok but what about some data point like an Arbitrary pixel-screen-point, which doesn't have directly defined Synonyms?"

"~ish?"

Every Red looks [Reddish] until it's*definitely* [not Red] anymore.

So, it's not literally the same. But it *could* be literally the same thing if I didn't know any better. Or *you* for that matter.

OK so we made it through that stuff you should have researched decades ago and still probably won't.

It works by definition. Mildly-influenced by perception, sure. But it's *more* influenced by the definitions programmed into the routines; and those definitions ability to mutate into some other defined or non-defined thing.

So an [Abstraction Engine] that spits out a perfect [Leather Shoe] every single time, can be forced or hacked to redefine that [Leather Shoe] into [Leather Horse Shoe]. And then tomorrow AI-Nightshade has taken over and changed everything into [Kittens] AGAIN.

What's That got to do with XML?

Look at <XML> as the procedures to create the definitions for <HTML> and <HTML Components>

Right now; the HTML definition has everything we could ever want or *even* think to bake into, right?

But that doesn't mean things won't change tomorrow.

So, Let's say *some* developer *today* makes a <Custom Component> for their Page today. Using an AE, That definition for that component could get cached to the Name that dev thought up when writing his Page.

Tomorrow; Nearly every developer is using this [before today: undefined component]. And now there's hundreds of different tweaks and improvements and whatever else.

The AB can tell what the preferred definition is for people who haven't experienced it *should* be AND the [one name] everybody just calls it anyway.

And even the most preferred version of the component *after* you're familiar with it. (As opposed to the basic newbie definition)

Effectively Caching [Definitions] online to make it quicker and easier for each subsequent user in a generalized environment {Like the Internet}

*More or less*

Obviously; [Garbage Collection] as always is a--[Highly Contentious][Subject].

As the trade offs are between

[To preferred have written like] and {[To preferred have had to interacted with like] or [Preferred to have Read like]}

To which gets thrown in the trash for recycling by whichever [marginal] [defines it next time]

OMG literary majors please take over this is breaking me....

[homunculus-argument]

I know that absolutely nobody making that sort of arguments is arguing in good faith, but the thing about identifying as something that some people really don’t seem to understand is that it’s not about what you want to be. The word “identify” is a synonym to “recognise”, you are observing yourself and recognising what you see, not picking an arbitrary random classification that amuses you. Sure, knowing yourself can and often does make people happy, but your innermost identity isn’t about what would be fun or convenient at the moment. You are who you truly are whether you’re happy about it or not.

So no, you can’t identify as an attack helicopter. I, however, can and will identify myself as a workplace safety hazard (he/him).

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

honestly, im really, genuinely curious, and I’d like to hear you talk about it. Why aren’t psychopaths an actual thing?

Yes! Thank you for asking! So, let’s start with the most obvious question: what is a psychopath? You certainly hear the word a lot. People will also frequently say sociopath. They’re used kind of similarly, mostly. What’s the difference?  Well, this is the problem we run into. There isn’t any fixed definition. The usual authority on these issues is the DSM, or Diagnostic Standard Manual. It provides names and agreed on definitions that accredited psychologists will diagnose. There’s no category in it called “psychopathy” or “sociopathy”. No similar organization has such a definition.  But isn’t there a checklist or something? Yes, there is, but it’s not put out by an organization like the DSM. It was written by a random psychiatrist as a proposal and it hasn’t found universal acceptance. There are a few writers who write about psychopaths and sociopaths, but all of them have their own definitions, meaning there’s no one universal definition you can pin it down to. That means it can’t be diagnosed or even defined, really.  But that’s not the biggest problem with the idea of psychopathy and sociopathy. It probably wouldn’t be too hard for the psychiatrists who write about it to get together and agree on a single defined symptom list. There even are already two diagnoses in the DSM that people who worked on it say were meant to be their stab at representing what a diagnosis for the general idea of sociopathy/psychopathy might look like: antisocial personality disorder and dissocial personality disorder. Those diagnoses are defined, but not officially linked to the terms psychopath and sociopath.  So what’s the bigger problem? Well, to answer that we, first have to look a little closer at what a diagnosis actually is. The usual idea people have is that every diagnosis represents some kind of brain, something real inside the mind of the person it’s a diagnosis of. According to this idea, a diagnosis has a sort of causal power: you act in certain ways because you have a certain type of brain.  But that idea is more like the GOAL of psychiatry, not the reality. In reality, especially for personality disorders, it’s the opposite. Rather than people acting a certain way because they have a diagnosis, they are diagnosed because they act a certain way. Every diagnosis is a list of behaviors, and if you meet a certain number of them, you’re eligible for the diagnosis. But it’s hard to know if people act that way because of that diagnosis, that is, that it represents something about their brains or if it’s just an arbitrary grouping. It would be as if we grouped animals based on what they DID rather than whether they can breed. “Skittering” might represent a meaningful group of animals, but would “swimming”? Or “hiding?” Maybe several different diagnoses represent various different ways people deal with a specific kind of brain. Maybe many different types of brain can lead people to act in similar ways, and get lumped into one diagnosis. So the question is: when we look at the sorts of behaviors that people tend to associate with the terms psychopathy/sociopathy, is there reason to think that they represent a sort of brain, as there is with, for instance, the term autism, or is there reason to suspect that many kinds of brains could behave that way and the behaviors are only associated in some other way? And HERE is the big problem with psychopathy/sociopathy. Especially when you look into the history of the terms and the research that the people who use it did, it becomes very obvious that what psychopathy really is is “commits crimes disorder”.  One of the big names in popularizing the term psychopath is Robert D. Hare. And guess where most of his research is done? Prison. And if you look at his checklist, his criteria are a mix of criteria from several other diagnoses with criteria that are subtle variants on “commits crimes”. And what other researchers, including one I’m about to quote, have found is that what happens is a lot of prisoners with completely different disorders that have been involved in their criminal history check off the criteria that are just doing crimes and the criteria that are from the issue they actually have, and thus get labeled with psychopathy rather than their real issue. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a professor of psychiatry at Yale writes: “To this writer’s mind, psychopathy and its synonyms (e.g., sociopathy and antisocial personality) are lazy diagnoses. Over the years the authors’ team has seen scores of offenders who, prior to evaluation by the authors, were dismissed as psychopaths or the like. Detailed, comprehensive psychiatric, neurological, and neuropsychological evaluations have uncovered a multitude of signs, symptoms, and behaviors indicative of such disorders as bipolar mood disorder, schizophrenia spectrum disorders, complex partial seizures, dissociative identity disorder, parasomnia, and, of course, brain damage/dysfunction.“  And this gets to the darkest part of psychopathy/sociopathy, which is its use in the law. Despite the fact that it’s not a diagnosis, people like Hare get brought in to testify about it at trials and it increases the penalties for offenders. Psychopathy is an astonishingly, I would argue, suspiciously convenient disorder for our prison system. Once someone is deemed a psychopath, there’s no use treating them or giving them sympathetic therapy. The only answer is locking them up, because that’s all you can do with a psychopath. And fortuitously, that’s already the path of least resistance for the prison system.  So, tldr, psychopathy isn’t a real diagnosis. It doesn’t have an official definition. And the definitions people have made are suspicious. Often the people they call psychopaths have other things going on, and the term psychopath seems almost tailor made to excuse the prison system for its cruelty and failure to do anything but lock up people with numerous mental health issues. 

[shituationist]

Heya I was hoping you might be interested in elaborating on your comments about libertarian socialists and anarchists who don't think of centralisation as a dirty word, like what kind of centralisation in your opinion is aligned with libsoc organising?

I think “centralization” is a term that describes some feature of an organization or system, and that in trying to turn centralization and decentralization into vices and values in and of themselves is setting ourselves up for misunderstanding.

I wrote about this for c4ss earlier this year. In that article I explain why I think the terms are being misused in a lot more depth, and where the emphasis on decentralization can and does lead our organizations to operational failure. I also try to explain why centralization does not have to be a synonym for “hierarchy.” In the first place, every democratic organization features some level of centralization of decision-making: the democratic body itself is a centralized one, although power within the organization is distributed throughout it.

The more important issue is how power is distributed in an organization. The faults of the Leninist model are rooted in the concentration of control in a politburo virtually accountable only to itself with rarely changing membership. The further concentration of power within the politburo into the hands of a mostly static General Secretary (or some similar title) only further increases the chances of bad or delayed decision-making (because distanced from on-the-ground operations) and personal abuses of power. But if this control were distributed throughout the organization, such as by making the politburo subject to recall, or to rotate out the central committee regularly and at random, this would not be such a problem.

There would still be problems with the Leninist model if there were organizational bottlenecks slowing down the pace of decision-making, which can cause unnecessary lag in the organization’s primary operations. A weird glitch in Leninist organizing I’ve noticed in that vein is the PSL (or some other ML alphabet soup combination) not allowing local chapters to communicate laterally at all - they have to communicate through the central leadership. Obviously that imposes arbitrary limitations on the local chapters and their ability to organize, and potentially makes the organization less robust.

Overall though “centralized” organizations are capable of coping with these problems without abandoning centralization altogether in favor of a “peer-to-peer” or purely cellular model of organizing. Our organizations can benefit from federations and federal bodies with clearly delineated responsibilities. This kind of “metasystem” as Viable System Model researchers call it is probably ultimately necessary for sustaining the anarchist movement, and it doesn’t have to impose authoritarian control from the center over primary operations.

[tthael]

Hello, I have a note taking app on my computer and I converted indelicate to a pdf with ao3 and put it in the note app and I've been rereading it and using it as a tool to become a better writer bc your writing is absolutely stunning dude. And having read it before and rereading it with the additional knowledge I'm blown away by how well you communicate your thoughts about the characters onto the page. It's so beautiful. I hope you dont mind me doing that btw.

Several years ago I was working on a writing project that involved a teenager very frustrated with figures in positions of authority abusing their authority and discounting hers and her family’s needs, and I distinctly remember looking at the page of long-written stuff and going, “Oh. I have explained every possible interpretation of this scenario, assessed to what degree the character feels it, and then discarded the ones that are no longer useful.” And I realized that I didn’t trust my readers very much--something one of my favorite readers told me years later.

And then I was in a Gothic literature course studying Henry James, and the instructor was talking about diagramming the sentences in The Turn of the Screw, and how when you read them it seems like all of those disparate clauses shouldn’t add up coherently, but eventually everything gels together.

“Yes,” I thought to myself. “I want to transgress on the lines between human and animal, between upper and lower class, between male and female, between the familiar and the foreign, between comfortable and frightening. I want to write like Henry James.”

And then I concluded that I was not Henry James, and I talked with that favorite reader of mine about the fear of being misunderstood and misinterpreted, and I thought a lot about Mark Twain’s quote about the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. I thought about how when you’re really fluent in a language, every word has individual connotations, and how when you understand those connotations and implications it’s very hard to say that any word has a synonym, because “arbitrary” and “insignificant” and “random” all have very different vibes, and I decided that as long as I conveyed what I wanted to in its most precise aspects, with all of the implications and messy raw edges of natural thought, I was happy with what I wrote. I didn’t care if I used 2 descriptive clauses to describe something when other readers with a red pen might prefer me to choose one (can one concept really be that similar to 2 things? Yes), and I decided to have more confidence in the things I wrote.

And I got a lot of positive feedback (like this) and I began to feel much better about my writing capabilities, and deciding that even if there are these “rules” about adverbs and descriptive language and limits on numbers of comparisons--a lot of people seemed to like what I was writing.

So I’m very flattered by this message. I know that my style is probably not super compliant with the basic lessons of writing workshops and writing 101 or even the doctrines laid out in On Writing by Stephen King himself, but I think it sounds like me. And I used to do that when I was learning how to write, too--I would identify a passage as “good writing” and copy it out in its entirety. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl was one of the ones I took excerpts from, just to start understanding what it felt like when good words came out of my pen. So was the section about the gang shootout in IT.

I’m very lucky to be able to write fanfiction and get the audience and approval that I have over the last year-plus, and I really feel like I’ve grown a lot as a writer since I started cranking out Things That Happen After Eddie Lives. So thank you so much for giving meaning to these last hard years of my life.

[lalafrombombay]

Popular words formed through the coinage process

Kleenex : The brand name Kleenex was coined after the earlier brand Kotex. Kotex is said to derived from "cotton" and "texture," hinting that the product was soft like cotton. "Kleen" is a creative spelling of "clean."

Xerox : 1952, trademark taken out by Haloid Co. of Rochester, N.Y., for a copying device, from xerography ("photographic reduplication without liquid developers," 1948, from Greek xeros "dry" (see xerasia) + -ography as in photography.). The verb is first attested 1965, from the noun, despite strenuous objection from the Xerox copyright department.

Kodak : brand of hand-held camera, arbitrary coinage by U.S. inventor George Eastman (1854-1932), U.S. trademark registered Sept. 4, 1888. In 1890s, practically synonymous with camera and also used as a verb (1891). Kodachrome, registered trademark for a method of color photography, 1915; the product was discontinued in 2006.

Nutella : The name Nutella is derived from the English word 'nut' and the Latin suffix for sweet – 'ella'. The first batch of Nutella was sold in April 1964 and one year later, the iconic Nutella Jar was designed.

Aspirin : coined 1899 in German as a trademark name by German chemist Heinrich Dreser, from Latin Spiraea (ulmaria) "meadow-sweet," the plant in whose flowers or leaves the processed acid in the medicine is naturally found, + common chemical ending -in

Escalator : 1900, American English, trade name of an Otis Elevator Co. moving staircase, coined from escalade + -ator in elevator. Figurative use is from 1927.

Google : "to search (something) on the Google search engine," 2000 (do a google on was used by 1999). The domain google.com was registered in 1997. According to the company, the name is a play on googol and reflects the "mission" of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin "to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web."

Nylon : 1938, coined, according to DuPont, from a random generic syllable nyl- + -on, a common ending in fiber names (compare rayon and later Dacron), said to be ultimately from cotton. "Consumer Reports" in 1939 called it "duPont's much-publicised new miracle yarn, which is scheduled to appear in 5,000,000 stockings next year and which is meantime giving rise to many rumors, hopes and fears." As an adjective from 1939. Nylons for "nylon stockings" is from 1940.

Jeans : Jeans are named after the city of Genoa in Italy, a place where cotton corduroy, called either jean or jeane, was manufactured.

Sandwich : 1762, said to be a reference to John Montagu (1718-1792), Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who was said to be an inveterate gambler who ate slices of cold meat between bread at the gaming table during marathon sessions rather than get up for a proper meal (this account dates to 1770). It was in his honor that Cook named the Hawaiian islands (1778) when Montagu was first lord of the Admiralty. The family name is from the place in Kent, Old English Sandwicæ, literally "sandy harbor (or trading center)."

Gold : c. 1200, from gold (n.); compare golden. In reference to the color of the metal, it is recorded from c. 1400. Gold rush is attested from 1859, originally in an Australian context. Gold medal as first prize is from 1757. Gold record, a framed, gold phonograph record to commemorate a certain level of sales, is from 1948.

Heroin : 1898, from German Heroin, coined 1898 as trademark registered by Friedrich Bayer & Co. for their morphine substitute. According to tradition the word was coined with chemical suffix -ine (2) (German -in) + Greek hērōs "hero" (see hero (n.1)) because of the euphoric feeling the drug provides, but no evidence for this seems to have been found so far.

Band-aid : trademark name (Johnson & Johnson) for a stick-on gauze pad or strip, by 1922. See band (n.1) + aid (n.). The British equivalent was Elastoplast. Figurative sense of "temporary or makeshift solution to a problem, pallative" (often lower case, sometimes bandaid) is attested by 1968; as an adjective in this sense, by 1970.

P. S. Coinage is the least common of all word formation processes

[cothers]

Direct RAM Access

All programs operate on RAM regardless of its programming language, operating system or hardware, be it a smartphone, cloud, desktop, laptop or a machine as tiny as Arduino.

Nowadays, RAM is used as a synonym for main computer memory. In reality, it is an abbreviation for "Random-Access Memory". Here, random means not as in something random; the last thing you expect from a RAM is randomness. The connection between words "random" and "access" with the hyphen means any data in memory is accessed arbitrarily by the programs.

In this context, the opposite of random is sequential, which means the memory is accessed one-by-one as we can still see in SQL result-sets. In old times, memory hardware like "tape" was sequential; to access an arbitrary location, all previous locations on the band should be visited. The access types of memory hardware may seem outdated today as tapes are obsoleted as storage devices; almost all memory are "random" for the last 20 years.

Memory types like hard disks and CD/DVDs are randomly-accessed, but one thing separates RAM from the former is the fixed access time for each location. For disks, a device called "head" should be rotated so that access times may vary depending on the location. Nowadays, hard disks are rapidly replaced by SSDs (Solid State Drive) that can store as much data as disks and provide fixed access time as RAMs.

From now on, let's assume a RAM is a sea of bytes that is addressed by a number which is represented by the data type int.

In C, you can directly access RAM via its address. Let's start with an example:

#include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { char* p = 0; printf("%c\n", *p); return 0; }

Here, we start introducing the infamous "pointers" in C. Pointers are used like "references" in modern languages, but they really are memory addresses in C.

The term "char" (character) in the variable definition is the main mental block for understanding pointers while learning C. In reality, any type of variable definition with an asterisk (*) is always an int. The preceding type specifier is used to represent data in that address later.

The variable p is assigned the address 0, or in other words, the location of the very first byte in memory to p.

char *p = 0;

Here, *p represents the data in address p as char. We'll try to write it on the standard out (stdout) with printf():

printf("%c\n", *p);

When you run this program in a PC, it crashes with the following message:

Segmentation fault (core dumped)

In Windows, it pops a message box that says "Access Violation". This fault is similar to NullPointerException, NullReferenceException etc. in modern languages.

The above program crashes because the ability to reach an address doesn't mean the memory location it refers really exists. Because modern operating systems like Linux, Windows run many programs (or processes as they are called in that context) simultaneously, they should manage precious RAM resources carefully by a mechanism called "virtual memory" that often abbreviated as VM.

Modern systems would block writing to address 0 because it almost always means a programming fault like the exceptions mentioned above. But C is also used for embedded programming, which means writing programs for very tiny CPUs which helps electronic controller hardware. Those machines have constrained hardware resources so they may not have the luxury for controlling memory access. In this instance, reading the memory at 0 or an arbitrary location may not crash.

Now let's try to assign an arbitrary address to the p:

char *p = 5500;

The compiler would give a warning for that number.

warning: initialization makes pointer from integer without a cast

This error won't halt the compilation process. But as a wise programmer, we should not accumulate warnings. Thanks to "casting", it is possible to convince the compiler that we know what we are doing with a cast:

char *p = (char *)5500;

When you run the program, the result is again the segmentation fault. As you can see, C makes it possible to shoot yourself in the foot. But you are still lucky if you shoot yourself in the foot because at least you can go to a hospital. However, if that kind of error results in reading or writing from a legal memory, then your data integrity breaks and god knows where this error pops in the future.

Playing with Valid Memory Locations

Enough of crashes. Let's use some valid memory addresses, starting with the following example program:

#include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { char c = 'A'; printf("%u\n", &c); return 0; }

Here we define a variable of 1 byte (or 1 ASCII character) as c. It represents a location in RAM which stores a byte of data. The & operator takes the address of a variable, so the output is something like this:

1868946151

Let's play a little bit more and add any variable we've encountered throughout our little program:

printf("argc %u\n", &argc); printf("argv %u\n", &argv); printf("c %u\n", &c); printf("main %u\n", main);

It outputs something like this:

argc 1527215996 argv 1527215984 c 1527216007 main 448100010

As you can see, our main function's assembly code is located somewhere in our RAM.

Now let's play with them via a pointer:

char c = 'A'; char* p = &c; printf("c %c\n", c); printf("*p %c\n", *p); *p = 'B'; printf("c %c\n", c);

Here we define a pointer p and assign it to the address of c. So p becomes a reference to the c. The output is:

c A *p A c B

Now let's do something dangerous:

char* p = main; printf("%c\n", *p); *p = 'A';

This program has the ability to read and print the first character of the main() function but crashes when trying to write into it. Modern CPUs can distinguish between code and data and prevents overwriting the code.

U Segmentation fault (core dumped)

If you try the example above, you probably get warnings but, it doesn't stop compiling anyway.

To get even more dangerous, we will use a technique called the "pointer arithmetic".

char c1 = 'A'; char c2 = 'B'; char *p = &c1; printf("C1 %u %c\n", &c1, c1); printf("C2 %u %c\n", &c2, c2); p++; *p = 'Z'; printf("C2 %u %c\n", &c2, c2);

When you run this program, the output will be:

C1 69358686 A C2 69358687 B C2 69358687 Z

As you can see, the value of c2 is changed magically by a series of manipulations.

char *p = &c1;

We first assign pointer p to the address of c1.

p++; *p = 'Z'; printf("C2 %u %c\n", &c2, c2);

Remember, a pointer is actually an int that represents a memory address. Since it is an int, it is perfectly legal to increment it. By that, we can magically change the value of c2 without mentioning it.

Control is costly. Programs written in C are very fast because allowing direct manipulation of RAM avoids that cost.

Other Languages' Perspective on Accessing RAM

Most modern languages other than C and C++ prevent direct access to RAM. Instead, they control accessing it through carefully defined interfaces called "references". First, there is no notion of taking the address of a variable for basic types like char, int, double etc.

Second, object instances are stored in a variable of reference type. The reference is an opaque type; you can't take the address of it. They are used as-is. Of course, you can change the object which the reference points to, but you can't make it pointing an invalid arbitrary address like 5500 as we have given above.

Of course, object instances do live somewhere in RAM and in the 1990s references may leak that info when you convert them into a string. Today garbage collectors (GC) may move objects around the RAM for efficiency and heap defragmentation, so that info should contain something more independent than a mere memory address.

The following Java program creates two instances of class Object and converts them into a string:

public class Xyz { public static void main(String[] args) { Object o1 = new Object(); Object o2 = new Object(); System.out.println("O1 " + o1); System.out.println("O2 " + o2); } }

The outputs are some random hash values that uniquely identify the instance that is managed by the GC. As you can see, the hexadecimal numbers are unrelated.

O1 java.lang.Object@3af49f1c O2 java.lang.Object@19469ea2

One of the main design principles of modern languages is preventing pointer errors as you can see in the preceding paragraphs. As we said before, direct RAM manipulation is what makes C programming language very fast. However, most modern software doesn't need to be fast as much. Correctness is more valued since programmers are forced to deploy programs fast in this Internet era.

Zero, Null, Nil, Undefined

References can have a special value called null or nil or undefined when they do not point to any object instance. Let's make them fail by abusing them:

String s = null; System.out.println("Length " + s.length());

The result is the Java-style "Segmentation Fault".

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Xyz.main(Xyz.java:6)

Let me stress again. In a modern programing language, the reference may be null or something real, not in-between like in C/C++.

Some more modern languages like Kotlin (a Java dialect) go even further and prevent null value assignment if you don't specifically mark the reference with a question mark:

val String s = null; // Incorrect, don't compile var String? s = null; // Correct ```` ## Leaky Abstraction Operating Systems like Linux and Windows provide C APIs for their services. A modern programming language runtime should call that APIs at some point to do meaningful things like I/O and creating windows. Each of those languages provides some means of accessing C libraries and interacting with C so you can taste the pleasure of direct memory manipulation. For example, C# programming language and its associated runtime .NET provides "Interop" library to interface with the operating system. Interop library contains a big class called Marshal, which has many dirty and dangerous static methods against all OOP principles. For example, the following methods are available to read and write a byte to/from the RAM directly:

public static byte ReadByte(IntPtr ptr); public static void WriteByte(IntPtr ptr, byte val);

IntPtr type represents a C pointer. These methods are ready to throw an "AccessViolationException" when you do the same experiments as in the above paragraphs. But when you access some valid C memory by some means outside the scope of this topic, you can use them conveniently. Read/Write methods have other variants which allow accessing different basic types like int and blocks of byte arrays at once. Now, as always, let's do some naughty things:

using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace savas { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { byte b = 33; GCHandle h = GCHandle.Alloc(b, GCHandleType.Pinned); IntPtr p = h.AddrOfPinnedObject(); byte b2 = Marshal.ReadByte(p); Console.WriteLine("b2 = " + b2);

} }

} ```

After defining the variable b, we "pinned" it so the GC won't move its place in memory. Then we get its address via AddrOfPinnedObject() method just like the & operator in C, read its value and print it. The output is "b2 = 33" as expected.

But if you call Marshal.WriteByte() to manipulate p, it doesn't write into b because once you pin the object, the connection between b and p is lost. This allows C# to stay pure because the Marshal class' memory methods are designed to manipulate buffers provided by the C libraries, not the other way around.

Python programming language has been written in C. At the same time, it provides a C interface that allows built-in classes and libraries be written in C. If that kind of classes supports a "buffer protocol", its raw bytes can be manipulated by memoryview class of Python. By default, Python's standard byte and bytearray objects support that protocol.

Without memoryview, Python-way of manipulating buffers is inefficient since any operation on arrays and slices requires creating a copy of the object. Using memoryview allows C-style direct control of memory in a controlled way; "best of both worlds" in certain scenarios.

[americanmysticom]

Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward

WE NEED YOU

TO HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE

• This evidence is a tool you can use. It represents a real opportunity to hold our leaders accountable as it is not opinion, or modelling, or real world evidence that con be dismissed or manipulated, but LEVEL 1 EVIDENCE from a randomized control trial. As such, it has high evidentiary value. • We're asking that you call your MP and MPP and that you ask for a 1 hour meeting. Preferably in person, but Zoom will work too. • During the meeting, ploy them the video and provide them with the PDF version. Ask them questions, like whether or not they were aware of all the issues with the Pfizer trial. Or what they plan to do now that they are. Get them to agree to a follow-up meeting where they will provide you with an answer.

The Pfizer Inoculations Do More Harm Than Good CanadianCovidCareAlliance

https://rumble.com/vqx3kb-the-pfizer-inoculations-do-more-harm-than-good.html

witter PERMANENTLY Suspends mRNA Vaccine Inventor Dr. Robert Malone After Tweeting About the mRNA Vaccines! Pfizer’s Vaccination for Kids is ‘ALL RISK’ and No Benefit – Pfizer Acknowledges it Will Cause Myocarditis in Children

https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/

download the pdf HERE;

https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-COVID-19-Inoculations-More-Harm-Than-Good-REV-Dec-16-2021.pdf

-

see also;

The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Anthony-Fauci-Pharma-Democracy/dp/B09LVYYTJJ/r

https://www.wikihow.com/Give-Audible-Books-As-a-Gift

[Learn about the men who helped move and fund illegal gain-of-function research from the United States to Communist China, and rehearsed the pandemic to trigger a global bureaucratic and autocratic response - based on that ‘research’ and development.]

autocratic

ô″tə-krăt′ĭk

Relating to or being an autocrat.

Tending to impose one's will on others in an insistent or arrogant manner; domineering. synonym:  dictatorial.

Of or pertaining to autocracy or to an autocrat; absolute; holding independent and arbitrary powers of government.

http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/nuremberg/

https://www.bmj.com/content/313/7070#NUREMBERG

Certain corporations (shielding certain individuals by corporate status),

corporations legally given the status of personhood,

have now decided that they might reign as autocrats in the mold of the Third Reich, unchecked

with bureaucracies and media outlets playing the fiddle.]

see also;

Episode 247: THE RISING TIDE The HighWire with Del Bigtree Published  December 23, 2021

https://rumble.com/vrb73e-episode-247-the-rising-tide.html?

https://thehighwire.com/watch/

It’s Time to Get Factsinated

https://thehighwire.com/

see also;

DR SUCHARIT BHAKDI: ORGANS OF DEAD VACCINATED PROVES AUTO IMMUNE ATTACK - 22/12/2021

https://rumble.com/vrdv2d-dr-sucharit-bhakdi-organs-of-dead-vaccinated-proves-auto-immune-attack-2212.html

On COVID vaccines: why they cannot work, and irrefutable evidence of their causative role in deaths after vaccination

https://doctors4covidethics.org/on-covid-vaccines-why-they-cannot-work-and-irrefutable-evidence-of-their-causative-role-in-deaths-after-vaccination/

https://doctors4covidethics.org/blog/

https://precinctstrategy.com/

[I pray to G-d that our good parent intercede to preserve his children from all harm related to this attack on health by the idoliters of modern day]

[tech-news-today-worldwide]

Strong Learners vs. Weak Learners in Ensemble Learning

It is common to describe ensemble learning techniques in terms of weak and strong learners. For example, we may desire to construct a strong learner from the predictions of many weak learners. In fact, this is the explicit goal of the boosting class of ensemble learning algorithms. Although we may describe models as weak or strong generally, the terms have a specific formal definition and are used as the basis for an important finding from the field of computational learning theory. In this tutorial, you will discover weak and strong learners and their relationship with ensemble learning. After completing this tutorial, you will know: Weak learners are models that perform slightly better than random guessing. Strong learners are models that have arbitrarily good accuracy. Weak and strong learners are tools from computational learning theory and provide the basis for the development of the boosting class of ensemble methods. Kick-start your project with my new book Ensemble Learning Algorithms With Python, including step-by-step tutorials and the Python source code files for all examples. Let’s get started. Strong Learners vs. Weak Learners for Ensemble Learning Photo by G. Lamar, some rights reserved.

Tutorial Overview

This tutorial is divided into three parts; they are: Weak Learners Strong Learners Weak vs. Strong Learners and Boosting

Weak Learners

A weak classifier is a model for binary classification that performs slightly better than random guessing. A weak learner produces a classifier which is only slightly more accurate than random classification. — Page 21, Pattern Classification Using Ensemble Methods, 2010. This means that the model will make predictions that are known to have some skill, e.g. making the capabilities of the model weak, although not so weak that the model has no skill, e.g. performs worse than random. Weak Classifier: Formally, a classifier that achieves slightly better than 50 percent accuracy. A weak classifier is sometimes called a “weak learner” or “base learner” and the concept can be generalized beyond binary classification. Although the concept of a weak learner is well understood in the context of binary classification, it can be taken colloquially to mean any model that performs slightly better than a naive prediction method. In this sense, it is a useful tool for thinking about the capability of classifiers and the composition of ensembles. Weak Learner: Colloquially, a model that performs slightly better than a naive model. More formally, the notion has been generalized to multi-class classification and has a different meaning beyond better than 50 percent accuracy. For binary classification, it is well known that the exact requirement for weak learners is to be better than random guess. Notice that requiring base learners to be better than random guess is too weak for multi-class problems, yet requiring better than 50% accuracy is too stringent. — Page 46, Ensemble Methods, 2012. It is based on formal computational learning theory that proposes a class of learning methods that possess weakly learnability, meaning that they perform better than random guessing. Weak learnability is proposed as a simplification of the more desirable strong learnability, where a learnable achieved arbitrary good classification accuracy. A weaker model of learnability, called weak learnability, drops the requirement that the learner be able to achieve arbitrarily high accuracy; a weak learning algorithm needs only output an hypothesis that performs slightly better (by an inverse polynomial) than random guessing. — The Strength of Weak Learnability, 1990. It is a useful concept as it is often used to describe the capabilities of contributing members of ensemble learning algorithms. For example, sometimes members of a bootstrap aggregation are referred to as weak learners as opposed to strong, at least in the colloquial meaning of the term. More specifically, weak learners are the basis for the boosting class of ensemble learning algorithms. The term boosting refers to a family of algorithms that are able to convert weak learners to strong learners. — Page 23, Ensemble Methods, 2012. The most commonly used type of weak learning model is the decision tree. This is because the weakness of the tree can be controlled by the depth of the tree during construction. The weakest decision tree consists of a single node that makes a decision on one input variable and outputs a binary prediction, for a binary classification task. This is generally referred to as a “decision stump.” Here the weak classifier is just a “stump”: a two terminal-node classification tree. — Page 339, The Elements of Statistical Learning, 2016. It is used as a weak learner so often that decision stump and weak learner are practically synonyms. Decision Stump: A decision tree with a single node operating on one input variable, the output of which makes a prediction directly. Nevertheless, other models can also be configured to be weak learners. Because boosting requires a weak learner, almost any technique with tuning parameters can be made into a weak learner. Trees, as it turns out, make an excellent base learner for boosting … — Page 205, Applied Predictive Modeling, 2013. Although not formally known as weak learners, we can consider the following as candidate weak learning models: k-Nearest Neighbors, with k=1 operating on one or a subset of input variables. Multi-Layer Perceptron, with a single node operating on one or a subset of input variables. Naive Bayes, operating on a single input variable. Now that we are familiar with a weak learner, let’s take a closer look at strong learners. Want to Get Started With Ensemble Learning? Take my free 7-day email crash course now (with sample code). Click to sign-up and also get a free PDF Ebook version of the course. Download Your FREE Mini-Course

Strong Learners

A strong classifier is a model for binary classification that performs with arbitrary performance, much better than random guessing. A class of concepts is learnable (or strongly learnable) if there exists a polynomial-time algorithm that achieves low error with high confidence for all concepts in the class. — The Strength of Weak Learnability, 1990. This is sometimes interpreted to mean perfect skill on a training or holdout dataset, although more likely refers to a “good” or “usefully skillful” model. Strong Classifier: Formally, a classifier that achieves arbitrarily good accuracy. We seek strong classifiers for predictive modeling problems. It is the goal of the modeling project to develop a strong classifier that makes mostly correct predictions with high confidence. Again, although the concept of a strong classifier is well understood for binary classification, it can be generalized to other problem types and we can interpret the concept less formally as a well-performing model, perhaps near-optimal. Strong Learner: Colloquially, a model that performs very well compared to a naive model. We are attempting to develop a strong model when we fit a machine learning model directly on a dataset. For example, we might consider the following algorithms as techniques for fitting a strong model in the colloquial sense, where the hyperparameters of each method are tuned for the target problem: Logistic Regression. Support Vector Machine. k-Nearest Neighbors. And many more methods listed in the previous section or with which you may be familiar. Strong learning is what we seek, and we can contrast their capability with weak learners, although we can also construct strong learners from weak learners.

Weak vs. Strong Learners and Boosting

We have established that weak learners perform slightly better than random, and that strong learners are good or even near-optimal and it is the latter that we seek for a predictive modeling project. In computational learning theory, specifically PAC learning, the formal classes of weak and strong learnability were defined with the open question as to whether the two were equivalent or not. The proof presented here is constructive; an explicit method is described for directly converting a weak learning algorithm into one that achieves arbitrary accuracy. The construction uses filtering to modify the distribution of examples in such a way as to force the weak learning algorithm to focus on the harder-to-learn parts of the distribution. — The Strength of Weak Learnability, 1990. Later, it was discovered that they are indeed equivalent. More so that a strong learner can be constructed from many weak learners, formally defined. This provided the basis for the boosting class of ensemble learning methods. The main result is a proof of the perhaps surprising equivalence of strong and weak learnability. — The Strength of Weak Learnability, 1990. Although this theoretical finding was made, it still took years before the first viable boosting methods were developed, implementing the procedure. Most notably Adaptive Boosting, referred to as AdaBoost, was the first successful boosting method, later leading to a large number of methods, culminating today in highly successful techniques such as gradient boosting and implementations such as Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). Ensembles of weak learners was mostly studied in the machine learning community. In this thread, researchers often work on weak learners and try to design powerful algorithms to boost the performance from weak to strong. This thread of work has led to the birth of famous ensemble methods such as AdaBoost, Bagging, etc., and theoretical understanding on why and how weak learners can be boosted to strong ones. — Page 16, Ensemble Methods, 2012. Generally, the goal of boosting ensembles is to develop a large number of weak learners for a predictive learning problem, then best combine them in order to achieve a strong learner. This is good goal as weak learners are easy to prepare but not desirable, and strong learners are hard to prepare and highly desirable. Since strong learners are desirable yet difficult to get, while weak learners are easy to obtain in real practice, this result opens a promising direction of generating strong learners by ensemble methods. — Pages 16-17, Ensemble Methods, 2012. Weak Learner: Easy to prepare, but not desirable due to their low skill. Strong Learner: Hard to prepare, but desirable because of their high skill. The procedure that was found to achieve this is to sequentially develop weak learners and add them to the ensemble, where each weak learner is trained in a way to pay more attention to parts of the problem domain that prior models got wrong. Although all boosting techniques follow this general procedure with specific differences and optimizations, the notion of weak and strong learners is a useful concept more generally for machine learning and ensemble learning. For example, we have already seen how we can describe the goal of a predictive model is to develop a strong model. It is common practice to evaluate the performance of a model against a baseline or naive model, such as random predictions for binary classification. A weak learner is very much like the naive model, although slightly skillful and using a minimum of information from the problem domain, as opposed to completely naive. Consider that although we do not technically construct weak learners in bootstrap aggregation (bagging), meaning the members are not decision stumps, we do aim to create weaker decision trees to comprise the ensemble. This is often achieved by fitting the trees on sampled subsets of the data and not pruning the trees, allowing them to overfit the training data slightly. For classification we can understand the bagging effect in terms of a consensus of independent weak learners — Page 286, The Elements of Statistical Learning, 2016. Both changes are made to seek less correlated trees but have the effect of training weaker, but perhaps not weak, models to comprise the ensemble. Bagging: explicitly trains weaker (but not weak) learners. Consider stacked generalization (stacking) that trains a model to best combine the predictions from multiple different models fit on the same training dataset. Each contributing level-0 model is in effect a strong learner, and the meta level-1 model seeks to make a stronger model by combining the predictions from the strong models. Stacking: explicitly combines the predictions from strong learners. Mixture of experts (MoE) operates in a similar way, training multiple strong models (the experts) that are combined into hopefully stronger models via a meta-model, the gating network, and combing method. Mixture-of-experts can also be seen as a classifier selection algorithm, where individual classifiers are trained to become experts in some portion of the feature space. In this setting, individual classifiers are indeed trained to become experts, and hence are usually not weak classifiers — Page 16, Ensemble Machine Learning, 2012. This highlights that although weak and strong learnability and learners are an important theoretical finding and basis for boosting, that the more generalized ideas of these classifiers are useful tools for designing and selecting ensemble methods.

Further Reading

This section provides more resources on the topic if you are looking to go deeper. Papers The Strength of Weak Learnability, 1990. Books Pattern Classification Using Ensemble Methods, 2010. Ensemble Methods, 2012. Ensemble Machine Learning, 2012. Ensemble Methods in Data Mining, 2010. The Elements of Statistical Learning, 2016. Applied Predictive Modeling, 2013. Articles Ensemble learning, Wikipedia. Boosting (machine learning), Wikipedia.

Summary

In this tutorial, you discovered weak and strong learners and their relationship with ensemble learning. Specifically, you learned: Weak learners are models that perform slightly better than random guessing. Strong learners are models that have arbitrarily good accuracy. Weak and strong learners are tools from computational learning theory and provide the basis for the development of the boosting class of ensemble methods. Do you have any questions? Ask your questions in the comments below and I will do my best to answer. The post Strong Learners vs. Weak Learners in Ensemble Learning appeared first on Machine Learning Mastery. Read the full article

[still-finding-our-way]

R5, R6

(SX 540672) 12/12/ 2020

Serendipity, rhizomes and lines. 

On my studio desk I have a number of rocks, stones and pebbles. None are particularly rare or precious, most have been collected locally yet every one is an object of beauty. One such stone is a sharp piece of flint. Small enough to hold in my palm, it has become my go to de-stress stone. I like to let its razor sharp edges bite, just a bit, into soft skin. My teasing wake up call. It has volume and weight, four planes—a tetra. One side runs smooth, curving to meet a granular knobbly surface, bone-like and skeletal, like the indenture of a clavicle or ankle bone. The underside of the stone is cut sheer, sliced through its core, creating a flat expanse onto which it is able to stand upright, before rising into a terraced plane, each step the size of a thumb print, a patternation that reveals the cryptocrystalline formation of flint (‘crypto’ meaning ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’). I found it on a beach in Cornwall. A dark grey stone with a white thread running through its centre. Its shape and size tickles my imagination, and as I turn the flint over in my hand I play with the idea that it was used as a Neolithic arrowhead, chipped away, stone on stone some 5000 years ago. The structure of flint requires a level of skill and expertise to shape; one wrong strike will send fracture lines through the stone rendering it useless as a tool. Our early ancestors were artisans and makers. Over and over, I have drawn this stone, feeling it’s texture, the sharp edges and definite weight in my palm. It does not take up much space and yet every time I draw it, a different angle or plane opens up. It is never the same. A small rock, inert and fixed, offering infinite possibilities.

You think you know something, someone, some place. A line on the horizon, a spit away from the sea and moor. Clambering over rocks, swimming in icy rivers and streams, climbing trees and making dens. 'Whence cam'st thou, mighty thane', pronounces Duncan in Act 1 of Macbeth. The utterance of such a question now comes with a cautionary red flag, one that implies exclusion and ‘you are not from here’. Too bad, coming from a white working class background, where histories and lives are lost, undocumented and unrecorded, I have no idea where my roots are tangled. I cometh from nowhere, no fixed abode, shallow rooted, spun together by frail relatives that can’t, or don’t want to, remember. To remedy this unknown, I was gifted by my eldest daughter a DNA test for my 50th birthday. The results from my spit reveal a blueprint that aligns with peoples who cluster around the North East of England, with a smattering of Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Scottish and Irish. Farmers and seafarers I suspect, a web of people who somehow managed to survive hunger and disease, violence and brutality, the lustful fumble in the hay and the traumatic birth. The odds were not good—about one in 400 trillion chance of being born according to the boffins. In staking a claim on the improbability of existence we got lucky, very lucky.

Where we come from and who we are. Layers of paint, fresh applications, still wet bleeding into others, making new colours and new pictures. Blending and binding. Some work and some don’t. It seems so arbitrary how we come to be. I should make time to salute the stream of past people, winding all the way back to the bones of dear Lucy, 3.2 million years ago, and her mother and grand-mother, all coming and going, doing their time. But, I won’t, it's enough to breathe in the noise of now. One heart beat, a blink of the eye and we are gone. Serendipity, luck, random, the throw of the dice. The cells didn’t bind in the correct sequence and the possibility of life just slipped down the toilet. Is it any wonder we seek out patterns to create order and structure, finding comfort in numbers and story; assigning value in the unexpected, and agreeableness in what wasn’t sought. Ones and zero’s, lines and dots, giving shape to all things. Artists do this all the time. Seeking opportunity in the accidental and unintended. Any stick, stone, door, book, conversation opening up new creative possibilities. The rhizomes seeking out a good place to settle, a place to nourish. The patterns, whether real or not, helping to make sense of the intensity of the here and now. 

Jennie’s story is fascinating. Her blue eyes, flaxen hair and Bridget Bardot pout might have you thinking she is of Swedish heritage, whilst my dark skin, hair and black eyes has in the past suggested Mediterranean roots. Not so, the paint palette is muddied. I will let Jennie tell her story. One thing to note here though, Jennie is an adventurer, she has travelled all over the world: on her own, through work, with friends and lovers. Occasionally I have joined her but mostly I skirt the edges of Western art history, moseying around European capital cities, museums and galleries. Both of us are wanderers in different ways. Parallel lines. The same but different. I am amused to read that women of ‘a certain age’ partake in what Jennie and I are doing—walking and exploring local history. I also note the term ‘a certain age’ is often used to describe middle-aged women, usually accompanied by a roll of the eyes and a double-fingered quotation sign. It is basically code for women no longer of a fertile age—post 40 and therefore deemed unattractive, and given age tends to gift experience (though not always) they carry a certain confidence i.e., speak their mind and know what they want.  

A simple stone. We are breathing, blinking and unstill. 

We ask ourselves how did we not know about this walk? It is literally a stones throw from Jennie’s parents village, just over the hill yonder, where Jennie spent her teenage years and part of her adulthood, and where I lived for awhile whilst homeless and lovelorn. Of all the places on Dartmoor this is an area that I would confidently say we know well, and yet here we are discovering new trails, hidden valleys, different perspectives and layers and layers of history, a thread of which connects with Jennie’s recent travel’s with her son to the other side of the world. The walk begins in the small Devon village of Meavy on the southwest of Dartmoor, a place I have cycled and walked through many times, enjoying a sup or two at the Royal Oak on the way. The route follows the river Meavy upstream to Burrator dam not far from Down Tor, where Jennie first set this adventure in motion as we glugged champagne and watched the setting of a glorious October sun. From Burrator, the road winds through Sheepstor village and into the woods where earlier in the year, at the height of bluebell season, I waited with my children for the badger's to come out. Hunkered down amongst bramble and fern at dusk, quiet as mice, hearing the birds hush and darkness settle. The children were not scared but reverent and awed by being in the woods at night, a time and place synonymous with the darker side of fairytales: of wolves, witches and being lost, and where the unknown and the unformed lurk. We whispered and signed to each other in the darkening gloom, until we no longer needed words and laid back in a bed of fern, faces turned upwards, watching the patchwork of sky between the canopy high above turn from indigo to midnight blue and then merge dark into the tall trees, the cool air lulling us to sleep. 

The ax strikes and life reclaims as swift as the blade can cut. My hand brushes the damp surface of a lopped off tree stump in the woods down from the reservoir, and I stop to observe a platter of squirming, burrowing, scuttling, squirrelling, decaying life; three empty acorn shells evidence a previous luncheon. I have set the objective to notice more when I am on these walks, to seek out habitat changes and to learn and know the names of things. But always I surrender to just being, breathing in the light and air, the atmosphere. I feel happy on these walks, a sense of euphoria and lightness washing over. It feels good to leave aside the cerebral and to let the physical, the motion of walking awaken a realm of sensing and scanning. She doesn’t say but I know Jennie has arranged this walk pre-Christmas because she is aware I am struggling with sadness—a sadness caused by my natural melancholia and tendency to ruminate, and a much bigger life crisis. Battle hardened to general romantic crisis’ I am not so experienced with career rifts, and so I have withdrawn and pulled down the blinds. But it won’t do and I know, as Jennie does, that the moor will help to alleviate the mental muddle I am in, and even if the effects are only temporary, it will store up the memory bank, to plunder and remember during the times when I get locked in. 

Ten minutes into the walk Jennie spots a Heron standing stock still in the woods by the river Meavy. Camouflaged against the bare trees, charcoal grey and ochre, we watch it rise and drift across the valley. Great grey wings, near 6ft in span, pulse slowly, its head and neck arrow-like thrust forward piercing space. It has a primordial presence. In mythology it is linked to the sacred Ibis, a bird revered by the Egyptians as representing Thoth—their god of wisdom, writing and magic. I take it as a good omen. The wood is dazzling, ice cold water tumbling down from Burrator reservoir. Wood, rock and foliage glisten from the early morning downfall, the ground water-logged from weeks of incessant rain. The element of water is strong here, 4210 mega litres—enough to quench the thirst of a city and the surrounding hinterland—held in check by towering granite slabs that form a 23.5 metre high gorge. Completed in 1898 and extended in 1923, the reservoir pools run-off from the surrounding moor and water from the river Meavy. Standing downstream from the dam in the wooded valley I hope the granite wall holds strong. The sun breaks through and turns up the volume on colour. Saturated greens: acid, moss, lichen, pine and fern. We watch a man on the other side of the steep valley, oblivious to our presence, pissing freely, a spray of urine forming a perfect arc; glinting golden droplets catching the sunlight.

Having learned nothing from our previous walks we decided not to take the obvious path and instead followed the course of the river upstream. This meant having to clamber over rocks and fallen trees, until we reach the imposing dam wall and are forced to scrabble up the steep bank, thick with mud, to get back on the road. Jennie leads the way, an experienced hash runner not deterred by the muddy terrain, she turns into a sure-footed mountain goat, while I, slip-sliding, defy gravity and somehow fall up the slope. Walking over Burrator bridge we pass the man we saw pissing earlier and beam broadly, making sure we hold eye contact for a bit longer than comfortable for him. We then follow the road up to Sheepstor village, and—given we are women of ‘a certain age’—we are keen to nosey round St Leonards, the C15th village church. But sadly, the door is locked so instead we admire the Lych gate, a covered over a double gate with a lychstone to rest the coffin before entering (‘Lych’ or ‘lich’ meaning corpse in Old English). At the time I did not notice the foliate skull carving above the main door, only a little while later when we sat for lunch under a massive oak tree, which we reckoned to be near on 500 years old given the size of its girth, do I undertake a little online searching and read to Jen a short history of the church and its whereabouts.

So intrigued by what I find that I go back a couple days later, this time with my dog and younger children in tow. In particular I wanted to see the foliate skull above the porch. In recent years there has been a growing interest in Pagan symbology such as the ‘Green Man’ and the ‘Three Hares’, several examples of which can be found in churches across Dartmoor. The ‘Green Man’ is usually represented as a carved face with foliage growing from the head, mouth, nose, ears and eyes. It is presumed to be a pre-christian Pagan symbol representing renewal and life—from death comes life—that has been absorbed into Christian ideas of resurrection and life after death. Often found in churches and cathedrals across Europe, its more macabre cousin, the foliate skull, is said to have appeared after the Black Death in the 14th century. The skull at St Leonards church is carved with ears of wheat sprouting from the eye sockets above an hourglass. The suggested date of its making is given as 1640 and it is suspected to have originally been part of a sundial. Now it sits behind glass in a small recess above the porch, and on this particular day was partially obscured by condensation so I could not see the inscription incorporated into the sculpture: ‘UT HORA SIC VITA’ (As the hour so life passes), ’MORS JANUA VITA’ - (Death is the door of life) and ‘ANIMA REVERTET’ (the soul will return).

As a motif representing vegetation, rebirth and resurrection, the ‘Green Man’ archetype is found in many cultures across the world, including the ancient Egyptian God Osiris, the god of fertility, agriculture, death and resurrection, who is often depicted as green skinned, alongside several green figures found in Nepal, India, Iraq and Lebanon, the latter dated to the 2nd century. I wonder how far the Green Man story goes back? As a cross cultural archetype it suggests a commonality of belief about the life cycle that is interconnected with the land. Whilst its incorporation into ecclesiastical architecture alongside other apparent Pagan motifs, points to the fluidity and evolution of belief systems, which subsume and build on pre-existing ideas, even when the incoming authority seems most rigid and contained. Most of the what we know about the ‘Green Man’ is based on speculation and supposition, as we have no historical evidence as to why and for what reason they were made. Instead the ‘Green Man’ motif has been reclaimed and remoulded at various points in history from Romanticism to Neo-Paganism and most recently as a symbol for the environmental movement.

A little village church under the shadow of the looming granite tor on the southern edge of Dartmoor, connected through culture and shared beliefs with a much wider world and history. If the Green Man does not provide enough evidence of these interconnections, then the large sarcophagus, protected by iron railings in the churchyard, and housing the remains of James Brooke, First Rajah of Sarawak (29 April 1803 – 11 June 1868) alongside two other White Rajahs should affirm the connections without doubt. It was whilst peeling the shell off hard-boiled eggs, freshly laid by my chickens that morning, at the foot of the big oak tree that Jennie realised that she had previously encountered the story of James Brooke whilst travelling through Borneo with her son. A sultry jungle, 7,000 miles away on the other side of the world tied by empire and colonialism, violence, power and trade to this peaceable village. I find out a little more about James, the questions concerning his sexuality and love for men stick with me more than the dates, titles, skirmishes and conquests. I go back again to the church on new years day and with fresh snow on the ground, sipping steaming hot chocolate on the bench overlooking Brooke’s slab of a tombstone, I retell the story of what I know to my children. They hang off the iron railings and argue over the remains of the Christmas chocolate, I don’t think they were listening.

SC

Reading: Lyon, N., (2016) Uprooted: On the trail of the green man (London, Faber & Faber).

https://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/sheepstor_church

[leviathangourmet]

Too many people use “subjectivity” is a synonym for “arbitrary.”

What makes something subjective is how it has different effects depending on context and what/who is effected. Taste is something that is subjective but each of us don’t just randomly decide what we do or don’t like. Our perception of taste is subject to a whole bunch of biological, psychological, and environmental factors which leads to different preferences for each person.

You can say it changes, but it changes in accordance with logical rules and not at random. And you can say it changes depending on context, but that doesn’t make the effects any less real.

Moral relativists never look beyond the surface, they see other people in different societies doing different things and never investigate the circumstances that allow it or the quality of the society that results from it. Ultimately moral relativists are just looking for ways of getting away with doing whatever they want.

“It’s all subjective” is itself an objective statement about morality.

Moral relativism is what allows evil to thrive. Dont walk into the insanity and illogical systems of postmodernism. It is contrary to truth. It denies truth.

I will die on this hill.