#it's habitual

[littlemizzlinguistics]

Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how "your generation can't speak right/ you're butchering the language" they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn't language wonderful?"

[lucabyte]

On autonomy, and what it means to be Obliged to Help.

Bonus:

[strange-aeons]

Hiya, Strange! I've gone down the rabbit hole of personal fandom research and I was wondering if you could explain how you find really really old posts on tumblr for your videos (especially since the search function on tumblr is kinda sucky).

Tumblr’s shit garbage search function CAN be defeated and I will tell you how.

You only need 1 post from a non-deleted blog to get started. Go to that blog’s archive and navigate to when the post was made — if we’re talking about a big event like dashcon or the exposing of HIVliving, now you’ve likely found a series of posts that person reblogged during the event (because that’s how tumblr users tend to respond and circulate information about a thing). Now make note of the blogs those posts were reblogged from or go through the notes and find the blogs that reblogged them after. Even better if the OPs aren’t deactivated. Now go through those archives. You very quickly start building a network of people who were involved or invested in a thing and uncovering unknown posts about the matter that never would been found otherwise.

Some of the users you come across might even still be active and you can ask them about it!!!

I was honestly shocked how easy (though time consuming) it was to collect information about what happened at dashcon this way. I found easily over 100 confirmed attendees and ended up being able to talk to 50-ish.

TLDR: search function bad archive function VERY VERY GOOD.

[thatpunnyperson]

According to NBC here in the US, the missing titanic sub has been found. As debris. Off the bow of the Titanic wreckage.

And it looks like the sub suffered what we all suspected, and what was undoubtedly the more merciful of the two options: a catastrophic implosion from the pressure.

Also, more info has come to light about the fishing trawler with the hundreds of migrants that sank cataclysmically off the coast of Greece, indicating that the greek coast guard knew about the vessel AND how much trouble the vessel was in, and were towing it at a speed that made it capsize, at which point they unhooked the tow line and watched the trawler sink without helping the passengers to safety. Despite a bunch of other ships trying to help as well throughout the whole ordeal.

So a lot of people are dead, all because of regulations (and the lack thereof) regarding sea-faring vessels and rescue protocols. People shouldnt be allowed to make a business charging a ton of money for a ride on an uncertified, unsafe, un-seaworthy ship going deep into the ocean with no distress beacon or tether to the mothership. People also shouldnt be allowed to enact laws that criminalize the ferrying of refugees, which then force the refugees to hitch rides on fishing trawlers, and which also prevent people from helping those fishing trawlers full of refugees due to fear of legal consequences.

Hopefully BOTH of these events spark changes on an international scale in terms of what is legally allowed to be sailed, who is legally allowed to be the passengers, and what the rescue protocols are in the event of disaster for any seafaring vessel, illegal or not. It shouldnt be just the global 1% who get 24/7 search parties and remote-operated submersibles helping rescue them.

[nightswatchdisbandmentera]

Tbh these aren’t really “Kendrick’s allegations” because we have known for years that Drake is a shady guy. I was there when the whole Millie thing went down and everyone was like wtf why is a grown man texting a minor about boys?? Kendrick mentioned one of Drake’s associates Baka Not Nice, who has a very public record of being charged with human trafficking and SA. Girls from Toronto are coming out of the woodwork talking about Drake’s shady parties. We have tv shows alluding to him being a weirdo. And it was just this year when Megan released Hiss, which most people understood to be a diss on Drake until that dummy inserted herself into it. “Megan’s law” and “hating on bbls but walking with the same scars” are obviously digs at Drake. So I’m not sure what other “evidence” is needed here. Kendrick isn’t revealing new info as a gotcha, he’s just the first person afaik to directly call Drake out on this without dancing around the issue. Drake, on the other hand, is the one misconstruing stuff by lying about Kendrick DV allegations which was about an incident from years ago that had nothing to do with his wife and which Kendrick already addressed in 2014(?). I am more inclined to believe Kendrick than I am to believe Drake, who is a well known liar.

[kociamieta]

drew some of my iterators as ancients ^_^

i might do VOS and RFiM sometime, best to keep them separated for now though

the ancient versions are slightly different behavior [and thus sort of personality] wise from their actual, iterator selves.

thank you @skybristle for inspiring me to do this :]

[im-still-watching-anime]

trucy: hang on polly you have a hair on you—oh, it’s long and…blonde. again.

apollo, internally: oh my god they’re all going to think i’m STRAIGHT and that i’m sleeping with a WOMAN

trucy, athena, and wright all thinking: oh that’s for sure klavier’s :/

[mizgnomer]

Furniture Abuse by David Tennant - Part Eight

For even more Furniture Abuse: [ One ] [ Two ] [ Three ] [ Four ] [ Five ] [ Six ] [ Seven ]

Dallas Fan Expo source [ x ] Rex is Not Your Lawyer photo from [ David Tennant Asylum ]

[proteusolm]

Discussed the "would you rather a run into a bear or a man when alone in the woods" question with my friend who is a black bear technician, and I have a lot of experience working in remote areas with a high black bear population myself. She and I both were instantly in agreement that: 1. If I'm in the woods deep in bear country, the bear is simply much more expected and less startling to run into than the man. It would be something we are prepared for and fully unsurprised by. 2. Bear safety is pretty straightforward, we know and have training in their behaviour, how to avoid conflict, what a black bear that is trying to hunt you looks like, and how to maximize your chances of getting out of the situation safely in the incredibly rare case of an attack. There's no equivalent handy step by step guide to respond to a dude attack.

Most people approach the question as a feminist one, thinking more about risk of violence from a man, but neither of us really even expressed much concern about the dude beyond knowing from experience that it is startling and unsettling to run into someone when in a remote wooded area far from any trails or residences. As two animal autistics that studied wildlife management in college and have spent a lot of time in the woods of northern Ontario, we both missed the intended point of the debate, instead coming to a stance solidly rooted in "why would be I be upset to see a bear when I'm knowingly in the bear's home?"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Supervised AI isn't

It wasn't just Ottawa: Microsoft Travel published a whole bushel of absurd articles, including the notorious Ottawa guide recommending that tourists dine at the Ottawa Food Bank ("go on an empty stomach"):

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1692233111260582161

After Paris Marx pointed out the Ottawa article, Business Insider's Nathan McAlone found several more howlers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-removes-embarrassing-offensive-ai-assisted-travel-articles-2023-8

There was the article recommending that visitors to Montreal try "a hamburger" and went on to explain that a hamburger was a "sandwich comprised of a ground beef patty, a sliced bun of some kind, and toppings such as lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc" and that some of the best hamburgers in Montreal could be had at McDonald's.

For Anchorage, Microsoft recommended trying the local delicacy known as "seafood," which it defined as "basically any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish," going on to say, "seafood is a versatile ingredient, so it makes sense that we eat it worldwide."

In Tokyo, visitors seeking "photo-worthy spots" were advised to "eat Wagyu beef."

There were more.

Microsoft insisted that this wasn't an issue of "unsupervised AI," but rather "human error." On its face, this presents a head-scratcher: is Microsoft saying that a human being erroneously decided to recommend the dining at Ottawa's food bank?

But a close parsing of the mealy-mouthed disclaimer reveals the truth. The unnamed Microsoft spokesdroid only appears to be claiming that this wasn't written by an AI, but they're actually just saying that the AI that wrote it wasn't "unsupervised." It was a supervised AI, overseen by a human. Who made an error. Thus: the problem was human error.

This deliberate misdirection actually reveals a deep truth about AI: that the story of AI being managed by a "human in the loop" is a fantasy, because humans are neurologically incapable of maintaining vigilance in watching for rare occurrences.

Our brains wire together neurons that we recruit when we practice a task. When we don't practice a task, the parts of our brain that we optimized for it get reused. Our brains are finite and so don't have the luxury of reserving precious cells for things we don't do.

That's why the TSA sucks so hard at its job – why they are the world's most skilled water-bottle-detecting X-ray readers, but consistently fail to spot the bombs and guns that red teams successfully smuggle past their checkpoints:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

TSA agents (not "officers," please – they're bureaucrats, not cops) spend all day spotting water bottles that we forget in our carry-ons, but almost no one tries to smuggle a weapons through a checkpoint – 99.999999% of the guns and knives they do seize are the result of flier forgetfulness, not a planned hijacking.

In other words, they train all day to spot water bottles, and the only training they get in spotting knives, guns and bombs is in exercises, or the odd time someone forgets about the hand-cannon they shlep around in their day-pack. Of course they're excellent at spotting water bottles and shit at spotting weapons.

This is an inescapable, biological aspect of human cognition: we can't maintain vigilance for rare outcomes. This has long been understood in automation circles, where it is called "automation blindness" or "automation inattention":

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29939767/

Here's the thing: if nearly all of the time the machine does the right thing, the human "supervisor" who oversees it becomes incapable of spotting its error. The job of "review every machine decision and press the green button if it's correct" inevitably becomes "just press the green button," assuming that the machine is usually right.

This is a huge problem. It's why people just click "OK" when they get a bad certificate error in their browsers. 99.99% of the time, the error was caused by someone forgetting to replace an expired certificate, but the problem is, the other 0.01% of the time, it's because criminals are waiting for you to click "OK" so they can steal all your money:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ema-report-finds-nearly-80-130300983.html

Automation blindness can't be automated away. From interpreting radiographic scans:

https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ai-could-safely-automate-some-x-ray-interpretation

to autonomous vehicles:

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/automated-vehicles-may-encourage-new-breed-distracted-drivers

The "human in the loop" is a figleaf. The whole point of automation is to create a system that operates at superhuman scale – you don't buy an LLM to write one Microsoft Travel article, you get it to write a million of them, to flood the zone, top the search engines, and dominate the space.

As I wrote earlier: "There's no market for a machine-learning autopilot, or content moderation algorithm, or loan officer, if all it does is cough up a recommendation for a human to evaluate. Either that system will work so poorly that it gets thrown away, or it works so well that the inattentive human just button-mashes 'OK' every time a dialog box appears":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/21/let-me-summarize/#i-read-the-abstract

Microsoft – like every corporation – is insatiably horny for firing workers. It has spent the past three years cutting its writing staff to the bone, with the express intention of having AI fill its pages, with humans relegated to skimming the output of the plausible sentence-generators and clicking "OK":

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-news-cuts-dozens-of-staffers-in-shift-to-ai-2020-5

We know about the howlers and the clunkers that Microsoft published, but what about all the other travel articles that don't contain any (obvious) mistakes? These were very likely written by a stochastic parrot, and they comprised training data for a human intelligence, the poor schmucks who are supposed to remain vigilant for the "hallucinations" (that is, the habitual, confidently told lies that are the hallmark of AI) in the torrent of "content" that scrolled past their screens:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Like the TSA agents who are fed a steady stream of training data to hone their water-bottle-detection skills, Microsoft's humans in the loop are being asked to pluck atoms of difference out of a raging river of otherwise characterless slurry. They are expected to remain vigilant for something that almost never happens – all while they are racing the clock, charged with preventing a slurry backlog at all costs.

Automation blindness is inescapable – and it's the inconvenient truth that AI boosters conspicuously fail to mention when they are discussing how they will justify the trillion-dollar valuations they ascribe to super-advanced autocomplete systems. Instead, they wave around "humans in the loop," using low-waged workers as props in a Big Store con, just a way to (temporarily) cool the marks.

And what of the people who lose their (vital) jobs to (terminally unsuitable) AI in the course of this long-running, high-stakes infomercial?

Well, there's always the food bank.

"Go on an empty stomach."

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

West Midlands Police (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/westmidlandspolice/8705128684/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[mournfulroses]

Hala Alyan, from The Moon That Turns You Back; "Habituation," publ. 2024

[severalowls]

Hashtag joke. But watch out! Somebody might get hurt in this one.

[hyolks]

twiddles my thumbs. some studies with the troubleshooting promo pics

[webonchin]

Dream worm...

(og idea bellow ,It was so funny i needed to draw it)

[waymond-wang]

PRISCILLA (2023) dir. Sofia Coppola ↳ Well, it’s either me or a career, baby. When I call you, I need you to be there for me.

[kociamieta]

putting them in the game has been pretty fun