#only using AI for spellcheck?

[likeabxrdinflight]

my boss sometimes uses ai tools (mostly chatgpt and grammarly) to help write his testing reports and sure it saves time, but being stubborn and adamantly opposed to all this ai shit, I just refuse to use those tools even though it adds actual hours of work to do it the old fashioned way.

I just. refuse. to put my name on something I didn't write myself.

[thehorrortree]

Submission Window: March 15th-21st POC, March 22nd-April 15th, everyone Payment: 3 cents per word, with a minimum of $20 Theme: Speculative Fiction in the science fiction or fantasy variety We are open annually for submissions from March 15th through April 15th for our August issue, and from September 15th through October 15th for our February issue. The first week of submissions (March 15-21 and Sept 15-21) is reserved for writers of color. The remainder of the window will be for general submissions. If you’re a writer of color who submits during that first week and you hear back from us before the general window closes, you’re welcome to send a second submission during that time. We are not interested in machine-generated (AI/LLM) characters, plots, or text of any kind. Spellcheckers and grammar checkers that run off machine learning are absolutely fine by us (though we also don’t want you to let a machine strip out your natural writing voice in the name of someone else’s idealized grammar!) HOW TO SUBMIT SUBMIT YOUR STORIES HERE WHAT TO SUBMIT The short version: We pay $0.03 per word with a minimum of $20 in exchange for first world electronic rights in English. We ask for an exclusivity period of 3 months from date of publication. Maximum 5,000 words. Your story must contain speculative elements: that means science fiction or fantasy. We do not accept nonfiction. No simultaneous submissions. Only one submission per writer per open period. We aim to make our final decisions within a month and a half of the close of submissions (i.e. by May 31st for the spring period, and by November 30th for the fall period). You will often receive a response much sooner. If you haven’t heard from us by that time, please query at the above address. The long version: Broadly defined, the type of fiction we are looking for is “fun”. Yes, that descriptor is highly subjective, and ultimately it comes down to the personal preferences of the editors. However, here are a few road signs to get you started on the path into our hearts. A fun story, at its core, is one that works on the premise that things aren’t all bad; that ultimately, good wins out. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your story has to be silly or lighthearted (though it certainly can be). Joy can be made all the more powerful when juxtaposed against tragedy. In the end, though, there should be hope, and we want stories that are truly fun for as many different kinds of people as possible. Swashbuckling adventure, deadly intrigue, and gleeful romance are some of the most obvious examples of what we’re looking for, but we won’t say no to more subtle or complicated topics, as long as they fit under the wider “fun” umbrella. We HIGHLY ENCOURAGE submissions from authors of marginalized ethnicities, sexualities, genders, abilities and perspectives. If you are an author whose experience is not often represented, we absolutely want to hear from you. YES, YOU. If you’re comfortable sharing this information with us in your cover letter, please do. What we’re enthusiastic about: Characters of all genders and sexualities or lack thereof Settings in non-Western cultures Friendship Happy marriages Stories that pass the Bechdel test and/or the Mako Mori test Afrofuturism Neurodivergent characters Characters with disabilities What we’re NOT looking for: Non-speculative fiction. That means no historical stories (outside of historical fantasy), no contemporary romance, no general literary fiction. Pedophilia and rape, especially stories that glorify those things or use them as cheap ways of sidelining female characters. Violence is okay, but torture porn is not. In other words, the violence should serve the story, not BE the story. Similarly, sex is okay, but erotica is not. (There’s nothing wrong with erotica! We’re just not the market for it.) No fanfiction. No revenge fantasies against shrewish, nagging wives and girlfriends. No stories about how humanity is basically terrible.

No works previously published in English. This includes anything that has been published on your own website. In other words, we don’t accept reprints unless it was previously published in a language other than English. No stories that we’ve already rejected unless we specifically request a rewrite. If you’re not sure if your story is what we’re looking for, please send it to us and let us decide! DON’T SELF REJECT. Via: Translunar Travelers Lounge.

[noeyecontactpleasse]

I'm so glad that generative AI is dying, but please please please understand that chatbot AIs and art generation AIs and voice replicating AIs are not the ones I'm scared of, they're just the most gimmicky, and the easiest to fight in a court of law.

You should be concerned with facial recognition software being used in policing. Many of these AIs are trained on datasets of majority white males, meaning they become less accurate and less effective when used on someone outside of those demographics, meaning more innocent people of marginalized communities being accused and harassed by police.

You should be concerned with resume-reading AI. Amazon created an AI model that was trained on previous hiring data and used to filter out applications. The software recognized a pattern of applicants with non-white names being rejected and thus filtered out every applicant with any non-white name. This software was deemed a failure by Amazon and was scrapped, but highlights a big issue with AI in general. If there's a shred of bias in a testing dataset, that bias will be amplified by the software.

You should be concerned with autonomous weaponry used in warfare. See, when I say "I want fewer people to die in war", it's because I want less war. What I don't want is for large wealthy imperialist countries to be putting lethal weapons with little to no human oversight into warzones where they can 'identify enemy combatants' and 'eliminate targets' at the discretion of a computer program. You know it's bad when even Elon Musk has publicly supported a ban on autonomous weaponry.

You should be concerned with AIs being trained to diagnose medical problems. These AIs are being trained on diagnosis data of previous medical cases. Meaning using patient data for a testing dataset (HIPAA/PIPEDA/GDPR etc. violations??). Anyone who's been tossed around the medical system could tell you that removing the humanity from healthcare will only lead to more suffering.

These are only a few examples I know off the top of my head as someone studying computer science in undergrad. This isn't to say that all AI is bad. AI is such a huge category of software that lumping it all together is irresponsible. AI is used in maps and navigation, spellcheck, translation software, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, online banking, malware detection, hate speech filtering, and so many assistive technologies for disabled people.

I'm glad that chatGPT and AI art generators are dying, but they're barely even on my list of concerns when it comes to AI technology.

[thegirlwhorideslikeasamurai]

for the fic writer asks: 3, 25 and 26!!

Thank you so much for the ask! ❤️

Questions are taken from this ficwip ask game.

Question 3: What’s something you learned about yourself as a writer?

Do I ever learn? I can't really tell because I'm a very foolish person. But earlier this year, I had the realisation that writing that comes from a source of hatred for one's own craft and despite everything can be very cathartic. It was during a time when I contemplated once again quitting writing. But I'm the type who has a hard time letting go and so I ended up finishing a story I was contemplating dropping because it hadn't started off well. Ironically, its protagonist [Vitya] was in a similarly miserable situation than I was and through this, I was able to better empathise with him. It didn't solve my issues (and neither did it solve my character's issues), but it got me out of the worst, and, afterwards, I felt better. And perhaps another lesson I learned from that experience is that I just can't stop writing no matter how miserable it makes me feel because it's my passion (not sure if that's healthy lol).

Question 25: What did you use to write? (e.g. writing programs, paper & pen, etc.)

At home, where I do most of my writing, my writing tools are a 17" laptop and Word (Office 2016), which it has a decent grammar and spellcheck for English texts. In addition to that, I used Grammarly and ProWritingAid, but got rid of them during the first half of the year when I learned that these programmes had been enshittified with AI and I don't support that. At the workplace during breaks, I write on a 11" netbook, which is quite tedious because the keyboard is so small and the hardware is slow.

(This question makes me consider taking a pen and a notebook with me whenever I leave the house. I don't even know why I dropped that habit...)

Question 26: If you had to choose one, what was THE most satisfying writing moment of your year?

If we talk only about the process of writing itself because it belongs to me alone (and not the things that happen afterwards), I think that was when I wrote a short story (45k) set in my headcanon universe that deals with several events that happened in Feburary & March 2022 that upset me deeply. In that story, I explored how the YOI characters would react to those events. There's also a bit of fix-it in there, which I felt I needed at the time. Because I had time off (it was the week after Easter), I was able to fully immerse myself into writing, which is always a super satisfying experience. I'm not sure if I ever post this story as the idea is quite naive, but it helped me to process those events. And that was a very good feeling.

[cannonwilcox]

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[refundsalad64]

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[dualitysdownfall]

Portal 2 and Moral Greyness (Analysis)

I had a pretty long conversation in a Discord server yesterday and had already made a few realizations shortly before, so I thought I’d extend my thoughts into a long post.

So for a long time I thought I couldn’t analyze Portal’s story because it was too complex. I’m not good at identifying themes and symbolism, or psychoanalyzing people’s actions and words. So I figured I wouldn’t have anything good to come up with. I’m happy to say I was wrong. Here’s my take on why I think one of the biggest themes/motifs in the Portal franchise is moral greyness. (I’m not going to write grayness @ spellcheck, fucking fight me.)

No one in Portal is definitively bad or good. I see all too often that people simply peg GLaDOS as the villain and Wheatley as the good guy. But that isn’t wholly accurate. It’s right around the middle-ish of the game (accounting for increasing test complexity affecting length) that the big intimidating angry antagonist becomes the small, dependent guide and support for Chell, and vice versa.

How? How does Wheatley become evil, and why does GLaDOS decide to help Chell?

Wheatley’s motives

A lot of people defend Wheatley’s turning evil by saying that it was the chassis corrupting him all along. When I was first reading into these explanations, I thought that made sense enough. Maybe, like the drive to test, something was hard-wired into the system that made whichever AI was inserted into it become violent and vengeful. But while I don’t think this behavior is what Wheatley would have been like if he had never been in the chassis, I don’t think the corruption he experienced was that of a technical nature. It wasn’t the chassis itself causing him to behave the way he did, so much as the power it grants. Interpretations that claim “the chassis was doing it” seem to imply that the chassis is an entity all its own with its own motives, and I think if that had been the case then it would have been presented differently.

An AI in that chassis has control over pretty much the entire facility. You’ve got eyes and ears everywhere, and you can move things around pretty much as you please. Anyone would be a fool to mess with you; you could pull in some neurotoxin or turrets or bombs at any time and absolutely destroy whatever and whoever you wanted. And this power is what led Wheatley from his goal.

Let’s think about this. Wheatley is very clearly shown to have been insulted and belittled by nearly everyone around him. He’s spent his whole robot life being told he was not only an idiot who could never come up with a good plan, but that he was specifically designed to be. That has to be crushing for one’s self-worth, and Wheatley refuses to accept that treatment (as well he should). So, he is driven by a desire to prove that he can make a clever, viable plan, and is worth taking seriously. Unfortunately sometimes people don’t take you seriously until you threaten them. That is why, granted the power of the chassis, he went so crazy.

He spent so long being told he was made to be an idiot. He wanted to prove he was more. He may have started out genuinely wanting to help Chell, but the goal of getting himself and Chell out of the facility was that same plan with which he intended to prove his worth. I am not seeking to prove that Wheatley is selfish and terrible and undeserving of appreciation. I am simply speculating that most if not all of his actions throughout the game cam from a desire to prove his intelligence and capability.

This is also why, right when Chell was on the brink of freedom, he so suddenly turned around and became violent and ...is intimidating too strong a word? Well, he tried to be intimidating, in any case. He had been seeking all this time to prove that he should be taken seriously, to be listened to. In reaching a state of power that would allow him to achieve that goal, he was distracted by that, and he messed things up with Chell. He used his newfound control to feel strong and smart and powerful, at the cost of Chell’s trust and allyship. He didn’t realize in the moment the mistakes he made, because he was so starved for approval.

That’s not to say I don’t think he ever realized his mistakes. Though the writers of the game presented him as “just a fucking idiot”, I don’t think that defines him. He is definitely impulsive and easily distracted, but I certainly don’t think he’s so stupid as to not realize that the things he did and said were wrong. He is impulsive, absolutely. but he can surely recognize his own mistakes, at least after the fact. He also tends to say things faster than he can reason them, and has to take it back because he got carried away and said something he didn’t mean. For example, when he takes all the credit for getting him to where he is, he is so intent on proving that he made a smart plan that worked that he forgets how much Chell contributed. He doesn’t necessarily intend to erase Chell’s work, he is just preoccupied with proving himself.

Hey, hold on to that “impulsive and easily distracted” description. Do you know who else is commonly described as impulsive and easily distracted? People with ADHD. Do you know what else people with ADHD share in common with Wheatley? They are usually of average or high intellect, but are not perceived as such because they function differently and have other things working against them regarding the way their brain is wired and how the rest of the world works around them. Just something to think about.

GLaDOS’s redemption

GLaDOS’s redemption is vital to the theme of moral greyness too. She has done a lot more terrible things and for longer, but in contrast to how most people tend to define her, she is not definitively bad. She had reasons.

Firstly, Caroline’s consciousness was uploaded to the supercomputer against her will, as suggested by cut voice lines. Caroline’s lack of consent to being put into a computer is a big thing for me—though it isn’t explicitly stated in the final game, it adds a layer of depth to the issue and just makes more sense as it explains why GLaDOS is so violent against humans.

Secondly, though proven time and again that GLaDOS is a person, the scientists treated her more like an object they could control. The combination of that rage, plus the cores, built a desire to prove that the scientists weren’t the bosses of her. The solution to the problem of getting them off her back was easy—she had no qualms with killing them. Let me just put it this way—you’d be furious too if you were treated like less than a person and then shoved into a room against your will with people who never shut up and only told you you were wrong or tried to distract you.

She had been wronged by humans before. Of course she was against Chell too at first. But Chell picking her up from Old Aperture was a gesture of kindness, even if it was out of necessity and not choice. Chell needed her to get back up to Wheatley and take him out of power, and she showed GLaDOS that she could put their past conflicts aside, prompting GLaDOS to do the same. After Chell picks her up from Old Aperture and carries her back up, she very subtly starts to be more supportive and nice to Chell, as if to think “We may have been enemies, but she could have just left me down here to die, and she didn’t; this is the least I owe her. Maybe I can trust her after all.”

After that, GLaDOS comes to face the truth—she never really wanted to kill Chell, and gives Chell the freedom she deserves regardless of what GLaDOS want(s/ed). “The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one... and killing you is hard.” This isn’t about how easily Chell has evaded GLaDOS’s attempts on her life in the past. The scientists evaded GLaDOS’s attempts, too, for a while at least. But GLaDOS still had no problem killing them all. She could do the same to Chell, right then and there, if she wanted to. It was hard because she didn’t want to.

In short, GLaDOS has a weird relationship with humans, with empathy, with humanity. She is still struggling with them, but someone who still genuinely hated Chell wouldn’t have let her go.

Tying it all together

So what do GLaDOS’s redemption and Wheatley’s corruption (and subsequent redemption) mean for the themes of Portal 2 as a whole?

Like I said, there’s no one in this series who is strictly good or strictly bad. The bad guys have redeeming qualities and the good guys have flaws.

Wheatley wants to help Chell, but he also wants to prove his own worth.

GLaDOS wants revenge on humans who have wronged her, but she also cares about Chell’s wellbeing.

Cave Johnson has approved and controlled many unethical experiments but his company has also made significant scientific and technological advances far beyond what can be assumed anyone else in the world had done.

Caroline was hardworking and caring, and willing to stand up for herself when she really needed to, but she also let Cave greenlight those unethical experiments and didn’t seem to have too much of a problem with it.

Chell herself, though strong and resilient with a keen sense of justice (or so it seems), unprompted, killed GLaDOS once before. (Like, she died but she’s okay, but that still counts.)

Aside from teaching us to think with portals, the series goes to show that the distinction between good and evil is not binary—few things are—and that people are often quite different from who you think they are. Most people think GLaDOS is just an angry, lying, dangerous AI and the definitive villain of the series. And, yes, she is angry and dishonest and dangerous, but there is more to her than that.

When I first dipped my toes into reading Portal analyses, I thought that I could never make one of my own because it was too complex and didn’t lend itself well to how my brain perceives things. I was right that my brain struggled with it, but I was wrong on how. There is a difference between complex and vague, and most things in Portal are not clear-cut. There are many topics in the story that are hard for me to wrap my brain around, but that’s because it isn’t all explicitly laid out to see right away. It took me time and deep knowledge of the game as well as having read many analysis posts from other people before I was able to make my own conclusions.

Does this vagueness, this subtlety detract from the story experience? Maybe. I couldn’t tell you. Regardless of how cohesive the themes were when I first went through the game, the characters were what captured my attention and the setting and progression fascinated me enough. I was obsessed within moments.

I do feel that if a couple more hints made a few things more clear, it might be easier to make sense of the story in an analytical, thematic sense. But overall, the story itself is amazing. Portal 2 is amazing.

If you like this analysis, I’m thinking of writing a few more. Let me know which ones you’d like to see.

Why GLaDOS and Caroline are so different

Canon basis for ChellDOS

What GLaDOS has to prove to herself

Parallels between GLaDOS and Wheatley

Can you tell who my favorite character is?

[scribeofmorpheus]

Opposing Elements Part 3 (Peter Parker x Reader)

Part One, Part Two

A/N: Ahhh! So I had waaaayyy too much fun writing from Peter’s point of view, as a result, we were gifted with a lot of rambling and playful dialogue! Not much reader presence in this chapter, but we do get to see things from Peter’s POV! (Also, I’ll be travelling for the next few days and even though I did a quick spellcheck I’m sure there are a few (many) mistakes I overlooked. I’ll fix that later. I just had to update this fic! It was overdue!)

Remember: Reader is a version of Felicia Hardy AKA Black Cat

Words: 2086

Warnings: Does Crime fighting and therapy multitasking count? Some angst.

(Gif isn’t mine)

Peter’s POV

Peter was perched atop one of the thousand fire escapes on one of the indistinguishable apartment buildings in Queens. His mask was lifted up from the bottom half of his face as he snacked on a Snickers bar. Legs dangling over the edge like he was a little kid at a play park. He was exhausted, but not from crime fighting, sadly. To his dismay, it was one of the slowest nights he'd had in a while. The most action he'd gotten was saving a cat from a tree. Twice! And it was the same cat.

He had patrolled many dark alleyways and shady corners the last month alone. He and Ned had been slowly working towards finding all the remaining alien tech the Vulture -Adrian Toomes- had repurposed and sold on the black market. It hadn't been easy. Tracking down alien technology was time-consuming and difficult, he and Ned barely had any free time lately. He was a little disappointed that he had to miss attending Felicia's gymnastic try-outs today. He really wanted to be there for her.

"Hey, Karen, anything?" Peter asked the AI in his suit, he was getting impatient.

"Nothing as yet, Peter."

"Great," Peter groaned.  He was in need of blowing off some steam. After everything that happened with Liz and her dad, for which he felt partially responsible, Peter had been a little on edge. It didn't help that Aunt May found out about his leading a double life either. She had sworn that if she ever saw him wearing the colours red, blue and white together, on a night that wasn't Halloween where it'd only be acceptable if he dressed as Captain America, she would ground him for life. Either that or she'd slowly kill him with walnut-date loaves. Everything was just so much more complicated now.

With Felicia's return, things just seemed to get even more complicated. He had missed her fiercely when she left, she had been his only friend back then. She was like this unstoppable whirlwind that set its sights on him one day and, for some reason or the other, she had swept him up and carried him away. Away from the bullies and the stolen lunch money. Away from having to think about his parents all the time. She was a force to be reckoned with, but at least then he knew what his feelings for her were. He knew what she had meant to him -and he to her. But now, now they didn't seem to fit so well together anymore. Like two puzzle pieces from two separate puzzles that once looked identical. Turns out they weren't.

To make matters worse keeping secrets from Felicia felt unnatural. When she had asked about the bruise he couldn't bare lying to her face. Not when they stood so close together and she hung her slender arm around his. So the best he could offer her was a half-truth. He had gotten the bruise from falling on gym equipment, the truth was he had gotten the bruise when some hoodlum in possession of a magnetic field generator weapon had flung a piece of gym equipment at him.

Peter sighed, "Anything yet, Karen?"

"No, Peter."

"Oh man! I have so much homework to do. Can't these guys just hurry up and take the bait? I mean it's not like I don't have a life of my own ya' know. Why is it criminals always show up at the most inconvenient of ti--"

"Peter, my scanners have honed in on a frequency. It appears we have some activity," Karen interrupted.

"Yes!" Peter exclaimed excitedly as he pulled the mask over his face completely. He stuffed the candy wrapper in his bag and webbed it to the fire escape. "Let's go re-poses some alien weaponry!"

***

When he reached the source of the frequency, Peter had spotted four guys, all heavily armed with weird looking alien tech. They were loading a truck with duffle bags. They had probably just robbed an ATM or something. Peter mentally scolded himself for failing to stop the robbery before it had occurred.

Peter crawled up to the ceiling from the wall to get to a better vantage point. Once positioned perfectly above them he used his enhanced vision to focus on the gang of criminals.

"Alright, one more score like this and then we're set!" Said the largest of the four, he was without a doubt proud of his winnings.

"Come on, come on! Hurry up! Don't want to be around when the fuzz shows up," one wearing a red bandana around his face hurried the others.

"Or that Spider-Dude," the smallest one added. They all laughed at him. Peter tried not to take much offence.

"Would you like to activate instant kill mode, Peter?" Karen asked innocently.

"W-What, no, no. Karen, we talked about this. No instant kill," Peter panicked for a fleeting second, keeping his voice low so as to avoid detection.

"Acknowledged."

He slowly descended down towards the truck using his retractable web sling. The four men were too preoccupied with stuffing the van to notice Peter was suspended above them. Peter stayed there, hovering above them for a few extra seconds hoping one of them would notice him, but to his chagrin, they didn't.

His second wave of impatience hit him and Peter cleared his throat to garner their attention, "Hey, not to be a buzzkill, but would you guys mind returning all the money you stole?" He quipped childishly.

The big guy pointed his weapon at Peter and fired off a pulse beam, Peter avoided the beam by somersaulting away and landing a few feet away. The surrounding windows of the building screeched in distress before they exploded, the resulting effect was a beautiful yet dangerous shower of microscopic glass shards falling to the ground. Peter shielded himself under some cover.

"I guess that's a no then?"

"You two-" the big guy pointed to the smaller, unarmed two of the group, "-keep loading the truck. We got this," confidence practically oozing off him as he urged his bandana wearing companion to join him in his fight.

If Peter hadn't faced guys twice as dangerous as him, he may have wavered for a second. The smaller guys (including the one who had called him 'Spider-Dude') hurried their efforts to fill the truck with the duffle bags.

"Karen, notify the police, someone's gotta return all that money," Peter ordered.

"The police have been notified."

"Who is he talking to?" The armed man with the bandana asked the bigger guy, who in turn shrugged. He seemed just as confused as his partner in crime.

"Probably hallucinating from all that blood rushing to his brain from hanging upside-down for so long."

"You're familiar with the basic physics concept of gravity weighing down on your organs due to the human body being upside down, thereby crushing your lungs causing asphyxiation which can lead to side effects like hallucinations or blurred vision?" Peter asked in surprise.

The large man didn't answer, he chose to fire off his pulse weapon instead. Peter dodged the energy pulse, barely, with another summersault. He then used one of his webs to swing around and kick him in the back. He went down easy.

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall," Peter said with a cool head and a touch of self-gratification. This was exactly the kind of mind-numbing distraction he needed.

In a moment of hysterics, the other armed man fired his weapon carelessly in a flurry of pulsing attacks. Eventually, the power was too much for one ordinary man to withstand and he was blown away by the very weapon he used to defend himself. Ironic, Peter thought.

In short time he managed to subdue all the criminals and webbed them up in a collective ball to the side of the truck. He was about to make his grand exit when his suit notified him he had an incoming call. The caller ID read: Felicia.

"Would you like to accept the call, Peter?" Karen's constantly calm and composed voice was always hard to adjust to after taking on a few criminals in a rush of adrenaline and aerial kicks.

Peter debated whether or not to take the call, "I- I don't know, maybe? Actually, n- no. I can't talk to her right now. But what if she thinks I'm avoiding her? Or worse, what if she thinks I'm a terrible friend for standing her up twice in one day. First with the auditions and now this phone call… No, I'll just call her and apologise later. Y- Yeah, that's what I'll do."

"The call already went to voicemail," Karen informed him too late.

"Uh, hey! Spider-Dude, are you… are you alright?" Asked the smallest of the four men roped up in the ball of webs. His voice soft and sincere. He was definitely the furthest thing from a hardened criminal, Peter thought.

Peter turned to him, he could feel his cheeks flush from embarrassment, it was a good thing he was wearing a mask. He never meant for anyone to witness his little inner dialogue of indecision with himself, let alone the guys he just strung up. Although, since they were all here and not going anywhere anytime soon, Peter decided to make do with what he was given. He sat cross-legged, facing towards the balled mass of men stuck to the side of the truck, he figured it wouldn't hurt to get a second opinion on his current relationship problems.

"Okay so here's the deal: there's this girl right, we used to be besties back in the day, when we were kids, but then she moved away and things… changed. We both changed. But now she's back and at first, ya' know, I was happy, I got my best friend back and I figured things could go back to the way they used to be. Except, they didn't."

Peter used his hands as visual aids as he moved them about from point A to B to A again actively, the four men were forced to do nothing but listen to him overshare about his current predicament, "To be honest, I don't really understand it. When she's happy, I'm happy and when she's sad I get so exasperated because I can't help her. To make things worse, I have this whole other secret life I can't tell her about and lying to her, even by omission, is killing me!"

"Why don't you just tell her how you feel?" the small guy asked.

"Yeah, just tell her how you feel," one of his companions backed him up.

Peter let out an exasperated sigh, "See, that's the thing, I don't know what it is exactly I feel for her. Don't get me wrong, she's amazing and quick-witted and has a horrible habit of swearing all the time -which I find hilarious… "

"But?"

"But, my last relationship didn't end well and I was somewhat responsible for how things ended. I just- I don't want that to happen with her. I don't want to hurt her, I also don't want to ruin what we have," Peter's head hung low, he didn't realise this had bothered him so much.

"Maybe you should stop trying to control everything and just let her decide," the largest of the men offered. Peter hadn't expected someone like him to say something like that, he was at a loss for words.

"Peter, the authorities are closing in. I recommend leaving now," Karen informed him.

"I gotta jet, thanks for everything. You are all great listeners."

Peter left before any of them could say anything, the distant sounds of the sirens blaring through the wind.

***

Peter climbed through his bedroom window still clad in his suit, he had been so preoccupied with making sure Aunt May didn't see or hear him that when a lively feminine voice spoke out he had nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Spider-Man?" Felicia gasped in utter astonishment.

Peter whipped his head around so fast he nearly gave himself whiplash, "Wh-What? Who-"

Suddenly he realised his voice still sounded like him. Peter cleared his throat and deepened his voice to an almost comical extent, "Hey, this isn't my apartment!" He tried to sound perplexed.

"Obviously," Felicia said sarcastically.

She squinted her eyes at him, he knew that look, she was definitely thinking up a storm in that brilliant mind of hers. Peter had to find a way to throw her off the scent.

"Uh… “His mind drew a blank. Peter couldn't think of a smart way to try and explain why exactly Spider-Man was in Peter Parker's bedroom.” I’ll just-" Peter pointed at the window and seconds later he flung himself out of it, leaving Felicia looking on completely flabbergasted.

"What the hell just happened?" Peter heard Felicia ask herself in astonishment.

"Next time, use the fire escape," he spoke out loud to himself. "Oh, shit my backpack!" Peter shouted, his voice normalised, as he swung away from his apartment building back in the direction he came from to pick up the third backpack he had forgotten.

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[davidsphysicsblog]

Why does it seem that my cellphone is spying on me?

In his seminal book, “The Singularity is Near – When Humans Transcend Biology,” Ray Kurzweil laments the fate of Artificial Intelligence (AI): “An underlying problem with artificial intelligence that I have personally experienced in my forty years of in the area is that as soon as an AI technique works, it is no longer considered AI and is spun off in its own field …” Kurzweil then goes on to give the example of speech recognition – although if you both listen and watch the closed captions to the nightly news, you might wonder how intelligent this recognition is. Still that point has stuck with me since I first read The Singularity is Near, when it first came out in 2005.

Well, friends there is no longer any denying the existence of AI in our lives. We have moved beyond what has been referred to as the “Dark Age of AI.”We’ve got everything from intelligent toaster ovens to self-driving automobiles. Recently, I saw, with a shutter, a news clip about self-driving eighteen wheelers. Yikes, I thought. But then I considered how many people have been wiped out by drowsy truck drivers. Which is better, which is worse?

Now, I am a great proponent of futurism. More importantly, I recognize that there is no denying technology, any more than there is denying climate change. There are good reasons to fear it, especially if your job is in jeopardy. Ultimately all our jobs are in jeopardy. But there is no stopping it. Technology always outruns its own ethical basis.  It has no morality. It just is. And the Luddites, who in the early nineteenth century rose up and destroyed textile machinery because they feared it would take away their means of employment are now reduced merely to a fancy word and a footnote. As I type this AI programs “spellcheck” me and “autocorrect” my grammar. Both of those words exist in the language only because of the AI revolution.  So, they are taking over our language as well.

There is also the nostalgia factor. My IPad and my Kindle do not feel or smell like a book. I so love these tactile and olfactory experiences. But the fact is that my whole library, which is voluminous, could easily fit in digital form on my computer devices, and I read at least three times faster electronically than on paper. Although one might ask, what the rush is? Ultimately, where this nostalgia is concerned we become like Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Minever Cheevy.”

“Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

And he had reasons.

 Miniver loved the days of old

When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;

The vision of a warrior bold

Would set him dancing.

 Miniver sighed for what was not,

And dreamed, and rested from his labors;

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,

And Priam’s neighbors.

 Miniver mourned the ripe renown

That made so many a name so fragrant;

He mourned Romance, now on the town,

And Art, a vagrant.

 Miniver loved the Medici,

Albeit he had never seen one;

He would have sinned incessantly

Could he have been one.

 Miniver cursed the commonplace

And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the mediæval grace

Of iron clothing.

 Miniver scorned the gold he sought,

But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,

And thought about it.

 Miniver Cheevy, born too late,

Scratched his head and kept on thinking;

Miniver coughed, and called it fate,

And kept on drinking.”

 Isn’t it wonderful how all I needed to do was to type “Minever Cheevy” into my search engine, a form of AI and the whole text, which I first read on paper in high school pops up? This is but the first stage in the development of Kurzweil’s bionic man-machine.

And as I was typing the last, my cellphone dinged with the message from Bloomberg News that:

“Medical apps have made it easier than ever for doctors to treat people without ever seeing them in person.”

Is this getting just a bit spooky?

Which brings me to what I really wanted to discuss. I recently read Michael Chertoff’s “Exploding Data: Reclaiming Our Cyber Security in the Digital Age.” This book describes the megadata on each of us, which seems merely a collection of useless facts. Where we were every minute of the day, what we bought, what we ate, what we spent, and on and on. It is not the individual facts that are significant, but the Gestalt, that ultimately presents the threat, not just to individual privacy an liberty, but to national and world security.

Allow me to quote the ninth amendment to the United States Constitution. Yes, Republican friends there is more than the second amendment, which protects the right of madmen to buy assault rifles. But the little ninth amendment says merely:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

This is your right to privacy, people! The government does not belong in your workplace, in your home, or in your bedroom, for instance. And when we allow ourselves to be monitored 24-7, we give up that right, in part or in total.

And on the security side. Connect your home to the internet with devices such as smart electric meters for instance, where “the bad guys” have implanted administrative codes in the chips they made for us and we bought because they are cheap, and they can shut down our power grids.

In 2004, yes fifteen years ago, the Israeli military assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader and founder of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, by landing a smart missile in the lap of the wheelchair-bound Sheik Yassin. I am not suggesting that you have anything to fear from the fact that your own iPhone is tracking your whereabouts in real-time.

What has freaked me out was an IM session that I was having with a friend on my IPhone to set up a time to meet for coffee. When we had settled as to time and place, I went to add it to my calendar, hit the add button, and there it was Name of Person, Name of place, and time all neatly pre-entered for me. Starting with OS 10.0, we are now up to OS 12.2, the operating system has AI algorithms that search your texts and emails in this way. For convenience, right? I’m sorry it seems not so much as helpful as creepy and an invasion of privacy.

I am reminded of a second poem. This by W. H. Auden and called “To the Unknown Citizen.” Perhaps we might modernize the title to “To the Unknown Citizen and his Megadata.”

(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a

saint,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his Health-card shows he was A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.

He was married and once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his

generation.

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their

education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: e heard.

I feel a need to return photographically to a simpler time, to turn back the clock to the Willoughby of Twilight Zone fame, to a more mechanical time. The time of carburetors, now replaced by AI chips called injection systems.

(c) DE Wolf 2019.

[raftboard1]

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[un-enfant-immature]

Zoho’s office suite gets smarter

As far as big tech companies go, Zoho is a bit different. Not only has it never taken any venture funding, it also offers more than 40 products that range from its online office suite to CRM and HR tools, email, workflow automation services, video conferencing, a bug tracker and everything in-between. You don’t often hear about it, but the company has more than 45 million users worldwide and offices in the U.S., Netherlands, Singapore, Dubai, Yokohama and Beijing — and it owns its data centers, too.

Today, Zoho is launching a major update to its core office suite products: Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show and Notebooks. These tools are getting an infusion of AI — under Zoho’s “Zia” brand — as well as new AppleTV and Android integrations and more. All of the tools are getting some kind of AI-based feature or another, but they are also getting support for Zia Voice, Zoho’s conversational AI assistant.

With this, you can now ask questions about data in your spreadsheets, for example, and Zia will create charts and even pivot tables for you. Similarly, Zoho is using Zia in its document editor and presentation tools to provide better grammar and spellchecking tools (and it’ll now offer a readability score and tips for improving your text). In Zoho Notebook, the note-taking application that is also the company’s newest app, Zia can help users create different formats for their note cards based on the content (text, photo, audio, checklist, sketch, etc.).

“We want to make AI helpful in a very contextual manner for a specific application,” Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s chief evangelist, told me. “Because we do AI across the board, we learned a lot and were are able to apply learnings on one technology and one piece of context and apply that to another.” Zoho first brought Zia to its business intelligence app, for example, and now it’s essentially bringing the same capabilities to its spreadsheet app, too.

It’s worth noting that Google and Microsoft are doing similar things with their productivity apps, too, of course. Zoho, however, argues that it offers a far wider range of applications — and its stated mission is that you should be able to run your entire business on its platform. And the plan is to bring some form of AI to all of them. “Fast-forward a few months and [our AI grammar and spellchecker] is applied to the business application context — maybe a support agent responding to a customer ticket can use this technology to make sure there are no typos in those responses,” Vegesna said.

There are plenty of other updates in this release, too. Zoho Show now works with AppleTV-enabled devices for example, and Android users can now use their phones as a smart remote for Show. Zoho Sheet now lets you build custom functions and scripts and Zoho Writer’s web, mobile and iPad versions can now work completely offline.

The broader context here, though, is that Zoho, with its ridiculously broad product portfolio, is playing a long game. The company has no interest in going public. But it also knows that it’s going up against companies like Google and Microsoft. “Vertical integration is not something that you see in our industry,” said Vegesna. “Companies are in that quick mode of getting traction, sell or go public. We are looking at it in the 10 to 20-year time frame. To really win that game, you need to make these serious investments in the market. The improvements you are seeing here are at the surface level. But we don’t see ourselves as a software company. We see ourselves as a technology company.” And to build up these capabilities, Vegesna said, Zoho has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into its own data centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia, for example.

[marviinmelton]

Microsoft is quietly changing the way we work, again

Spellcheck is one of the greatest technologies of the Microsoft Word era, an automated way for us to look less ideodic, er, idiotic. If you want a single indicator of how much design has changed since spellcheck was introduced at Microsoft, take a look at a feature that now sits right next to spellcheck in Office apps.

It’s called Accessibility Checker. It spots problems with a PowerPoint or an email, like missing annotations for the hard of hearing or low-contrast writing for those with vision impairment. It questions a core assumption in design–that you should build something for the platonic ideal of a user–and broadens it to consider users in the world at large.

[Photo: Microsoft]

What’s most notable about Accessibility Checker is that it’s actually been inside Office since 2010, buried in the menus. But by bringing this feature to the spotlight in 2016 alongside spellcheck, Microsoft was able to increase its usage five-fold. And in the coming months, Accessibility Checker will take another big step to ubiquity by working in the background of Office apps all the time. So the presentations, spreadsheets, and messages anyone writes with Office products will be more legible to everyone.

This moment serves as a point of evidence that the buzziest strategy in tech and design is no longer “convenience” or even “automation.” It’s “inclusivity,” the idea of designing products with so-called edge users, like people with disabilities, at the forefront.

And through a series of new announcements that have hit over the past two weeks, Microsoft is beginning to share work that’s decades of thinking in the making, but only just hitting its stride into products now. Those products include a new Xbox One controller with giant buttons and options for the sip-and-puff mouth switches used by paraplegic people; a conference room that can identify the speaker and take notes on what the person says; a smartphone app called Seeing AI that identifies objects for blind people (now arriving to 21 new countries); and the aforementioned Accessibility Checker. The goal? Give disabled people a more equal work life by making inclusivity an ubiquitous part of its products.

Jenny Lay-Flurrie [Photo: Microsoft]

Meet Microsoft’s accessibility czar

“If I go back two to three years, we made a very, very conscious decision as a company to get into this gig in a much better way,” says says Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie. “In some ways, it’s very logical. This is an enormous marketplace. It always cracks me up that this is called a minority when you have a billion plus people around the world with disabilities.”

Until she mentions it, I have no idea that Lay-Flurrie is talking to me over the phone with the assistance of an ASL interpreter, which is, perhaps, the biggest proof point to what she’s just said. Inclusive-inspired technologies are necessary to make more disabled people employable–which is particularly salient because the unemployment rate for disabled people is double that of the able bodied population.

Lay-Flurrie first came to Microsoft 13 years ago to work on Hotmail, but she quickly pivoted to building Microsoft’s Disability Group. She chaired it for a decade, and in the process, met Satya Nadella. He wasn’t Microsoft’s CEO back then; he was simply the executive spearheading the Disability Group. Now, Lay-Flurrie and Nadella continue to talk regularly, and she is considered the only person within Microsoft who can speak to Nadella’s point of view on all matters of Microsoft inclusivity.

[Photo: Microsoft]

That role is key since Microsoft has consolidated much of its brand messaging around inclusivity. But it’s not just marketing. Lay-Flurrie points out that Microsoft has a dedicated disabilities hotline, for any product, and it receives 300,000 calls a year by customers needing assistance. And a new site launches this week in which Microsoft promises to do a better job articulating all of the services it offers that people might not know about.

The company’s new $100 Xbox Adaptive Controller is perhaps the ultimate expression of Microsoft’s inclusive efforts. The stock Xbox controller is a mechanical wonder, but it’s also notoriously bulky, requiring incredible finger dexterity to wield its countless pressure-sensitive buttons. You need to very literally adapt to it, strengthening your hands and learning its strange collection of controls to master them. The Adaptive Controller is modeled in the exact opposite way. Not only is it a flat object that sits on your table or a mount, rather than in your hands. It’s also programmable, with two giant buttons that you could strike with a fist instead of a finger. On top of that, it includes 19 input jacks for any third party switches or sensors that someone with disabilities might want to plug in. The Xbox controller programs you to learn how to use it, while the Adaptive Controller can be tailored to you. 

[Photo: Microsoft]

Making work better for people with disabilities

The World Health Organization defines “disability” as “An impairment…a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations.”

In this sense, disability is not just a health problem. As Lay-Flurrie puts it, it’s “a mismatch between an individual and their environment.”

“I believe technology can be a bridge between that, the empowering tool that can assist,” she says. “It’s not about replacing dogs, canes, or interpreters. It’s another tool in the toolbox.”

In particular, Microsoft imagines that it can do a better job of getting people with disabilities a job and keeping it. Microsoft wants to enable “people to have choice, diversity, go after that job interview with a jacket full of technology that could empower them,” says Lay-Flurrie. Just last week, at the Microsoft Build conference, she witnessed a deaf colleague walk in late. But because transcriptions were on a nearby screen–transcriptions from Microsoft’s own technologies–she could catch right up. Of course, those notes were handy for everyone else, too.

In the best-case scenarios, when Microsoft develops those tools, they benefit people with disabilities, but everyone else, too. In this sense, Microsoft believes designing around the framework of inclusivity makes the company more creative–and that creativity breeds a generalized competitive advantage in its products.

“It may not be every scenario that helps every person, but I do think that design through the lens of disability opens up more avenues for human innovation that helps us all,” she says. “I do understand, there are definitely things developed for the blind that don’t benefit me as a deaf person, and vice versa. But on the other hand, everyone loves meeting notes.”

I ask about long-term goals, and where Lay-Flurrie would like the company to be in five years. She answers with little hesitation. “I hope I’m sitting here with a raft of technology that could help with learning how to code, learning how to set yourself up in a crazy way for that job interview, getting through that college degree,” she says. “I also think there’s a massive opportunity with mental health, and how we can empower someone living with PTSD or anxiety with technology to give you a heads up: ‘Your schedule today is not going to help you. You’re meeting with this individual, and it may give you triggers.'”

If Microsoft can sell us all a bit of peace of mind, that’s a powerful business plan, indeed.

Microsoft is quietly changing the way we work, again published first on https://petrotekb.tumblr.com/

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Woke: Movie Scripts Must Pass Through Disney’s Gender-Bias AI Software

Are movies not woke enough for you? Was it not enough to see Disney turn the Star Wars franchise into an ode to female empowerment? Are you hungry for today’s films to cast aside the needs of the plot in favor of the almighty SJW agenda? Well, we have awesome news for you! According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Walt Disney Company (which now seems to own, well, just about all of the movie industry) is rolling out something called “GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias,” which is an AI program meant to review movie scripts and make sure they’re appropriately balanced, gender-wise.

Oh, we are truly entering a new Hollywood golden age, are we not?

“I’m very proud to announce we have a brand new partnership with Walt Disney Studios using Spell Check for Bias,” actress Geena Davis said at the Power of Inclusion Summit in New Zealand. “They are our pilot partners and we’re going to collaborate with Disney over the next year using this tool to help their decision-making, identify opportunities to increase diversity and inclusion in the manuscripts that they receive. We’re very excited about the possibilities with this new technology and we encourage everybody to get in touch with us and give it a try.”

But…why? Is it more profitable? Because that’s the only sensible reason we could see why a company like Disney would want to go monkeying around with this script machine. And we fail to understand how a perfect balance of men and women in movies is going to make one damn difference to anyone other than rabid feminists who spend too much time on Twitter to have any left over for the movies.

You’ll be happy to know that the tool doesn’t stop with just making sure things are “fair” for women.

“Named ‘GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias,’ the new tool leverages patented machine learning technology developed at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering to rapidly analyze the text of a script to determine its number of male and female characters and whether they are representative of the real population at large. The technology also can discern the numbers of characters who are people of color, LGBTQI, possess disabilities or belong to other groups typically underrepresented and failed by Hollywood storytelling,” writes The Hollywood Reporter.

Goody.

Look, there’s nothing inherently wrong with telling stories that empower women, include a diverse cast, or show people from different walks of life in a positive light. But these stories should come about organically, not through some wildly-pathetic attempt to pacify the “woke” hordes on social media. We’re used to Hollywood liberals using their fame as a soap box. But if the movies themselves are now just going to be thinly-disguised attempts to “change the culture,” then count us out.