#same software different case
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
Tumblr media
Snake Dance (1983)
Hell Bent (2015)
520 notes · View notes
mustfindcreativeusername · 10 months ago
Text
Hey. Hey, don't cry. They didn't change Watson's actor. No, you see, he regenerated. No, it does make sense, he died of heartbreak over Sherlock's death, and he... Uh.... Hm. Yeah, actually you can cry.
22 notes · View notes
rockets-sweet-girl · 4 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
Same software, different case
1 note · View note
artem1sc0re · 7 months ago
Text
Dropping the reveal of my main operatives through doodles because why not 🗣️🗣️‼️‼️
Tumblr media
Here’s their appearances in game as well :>
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Close-ups:
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
12 notes · View notes
tkbrokkoli · 3 months ago
Text
nnnnggghh are these ppl fuckling stupid wtffffff
#i cant fucking beieve it oh my goood!#so ive sent 3 emails and called them twice - my doctor's office#i need 3 documents from them for my health insurance so my top surgery will be covered#so 2 documents of these are just results of test they've done. easy roght. zhey hv these pdfs ready sitting somewhere in their software#i even added the dates the tests were taken so they could easily find them and just add them to the reply email and send it to me#the 3rd document is an evaluation so that might take some time to write. maybe 3 hrs max if my doctor rly puts his whole pussy in.#i don't hear anything after a week. i send a 2nd email. i hear nothing so after 2 days i call. the nurse on the line says it's being taken#care of. or smth along these lines. i hear nothing so the next monday i write a 3rd email. i hear nothing. today it's been 3 weeks#since i first contacted them. i call them again. the nurse tells me they sent everything in the mail last week. why tf are you sending it i#the mail instead of just replying to my fuxcking email???? anyweay then the nurse says oh it looks like we sent you only 2 instead of 3#documents. she tells me she'll send everything in an email today. i hang up i get dressded i rush downstairs to check the mailbox.#the letter is there i rip it open. it's only 2 documents. like. WHAT. i made an indented list numbered 1) 2) 3) in my email so it would be#easy to spot that i need THREE documents. how tf can you think oh yeah the patient wants 3 documents. but i'm putting 2 in the enverlope no#this is right and im not making a mistake now. anyway after 2 hrs i get an email w 3 documents in them. i finally feel relief bc my#health insurance wants that shit until next tuesday. mind you i reached out to them THREE weeks ago and i contacted them 5 times in total.#i open the files. only one (1) document is actually what i need and it's one of the lab tests. the 2nd lab test i need is not there. instea#there's a completely different lab test. from a different year (i literally wrote the fuking dates so they knew which tests i need!!!)#the evalutation i need which i thgoiught might take a max of 3 hrs to write is 2 sentences long. it doesn't address the actual issue that i#need evaluated. it took you THREE wekks to write 2 sentences that are WRONG??????#are yiou fuckihg stipouzds!! am i going insane like wtf is going on#i can use this to wipe my ass but not to hand it in for the health insurance!!!! *screams*#now i sent them another email (the 4th email) asking them to send me that test results that i need. i added the full name of the test#and the date it was taken. even checked my calendar to double check i got the right date. these ppl probably fucking hate me now#but. do your fuxking job!!! how can you not read how can you take 3 weeks to add 2 pdfs to an email and then one of them is the wrong one!!#idk what's going on but i suspect maybe they don't hv the results? maybe the tube was lost in the mail or it was too little blood to do the#test or the lab couldn't do the test for other reasons. but if this is the case. why do they not fucking tell me that?? l#like we are all adults i get that sometimes stuff doesn't work out or mistakes are made i promise i'm not mad (initially) i just want to#work together w you to find a solution#same w the evaluation. i suspect the dr doesn't hv the expertise or he can't fucking read idk but if he doesn't hv the expertise#instead of not replying for 3 weeks and then writing some 2 sentence bs that has nothing to do w what i need. you could've just told me you
3 notes · View notes
orange-frog · 2 years ago
Text
ppl up in arms about “sentence mixing being way better than AI voice generators” be so for real. theyre different things. joe biden Pills. Now. Please. and ben shapiro Im Not Gonna Get Old on the Beach are both landmark videos and pretending the second one isnt because it was made by the “scary AI” is like. come on. be serious.
16 notes · View notes
bookish-blood · 2 years ago
Text
Okay, I think I know now why I had a rough time liking Bell's Hells at the beginning of C3: it was the same feeling when I saw the Doctor reincarnating for the first time.
The Mighty Nein were still fresh. I finished them late 'cause I started late, so there wasn't that long a break between C2 and C3 for me. And as the 11th Doctor, Mighty Nein will always be my favourite, because they were my first, but I came to apprecuate Vox Machina and Bell's Hells for their personalities.
7 notes · View notes
haruka89 · 2 months ago
Text
Quick reminder that the legality of making personal copies of media you own depends on where you live and the laws there.
Me making a copy of my Star Wars DVDs would be illegal for stupid reasons. It's not piracy and not really enforcable without some serious human rights violations, but where I live it is still illegal to circumvent (decades old, outdated, ineffective) copy protections.
you guys know you can get USB connectable CD, dvd, and blu-ray players right. and you can buy external hard drives with crazy amounts of space for an amount of money that would make the average person from 2009’s head explode bc of how cheap it is. and if you do this and get ripping software such as handbrake for CDs and DVDs and makeMKV for blurays you can both own a physical copy of whatever media you want and make it accessible to yourself no matter where you are. do you guys know this
122K notes · View notes
depresseddepot · 3 months ago
Text
uh oh!!!! starting to feel unqualified for the opportunities I have been given!!!!
#one of my references told my other ref in ''secret'' that he is waiting for an opening in his office to recruit me#and he works with Very Important Government Documents in the Very Important Governmental Office he works at#i cant get more specific than that but like. girl i know how to write essays#thats all my fucking degree has taught me hello#like yes i know how to research and fact check but i feel like handling and giving academic support for GOV DOCUMENTS#is maybe a little above my abilities lmfao#and yeah i know stupider people than me have and will continue to do it#but. what if i DO get a good job working with him and he's disappointed in my abilities#fuck what he thinks yes but that means i lose a VERY powerful reference lmfao that mf knows everybody in my field#and im not exaggerating that at all#:(#if someone is willing to TEACH me i am so willing to learn#and im trying to remember that in the past all of my references have loved me BECAUSE of my questions#for some reason my deadly specific worst case scenario autism questions have bewitched them into thinking im smart#but i need to be TAUGHT#i can force people to answer my questions. i WILL force people to answer my questions#but sometimes it feels like higher up positions don't get any training at all? like theyre just expected to hit the ground running#ahhh idk i would love to work with him (and my other ref technically) truly and if he offers i WILL take it no matter how freaky i am abt it#but im just so confused about how training works lol#ive been at the same place in different positions for almost 10 years#do they train you like fully? or do they expect you to Know the exact softwares they use?#do you think i can make all of them want to adopt me the way i have at my current job LMFAO#maybe if they work with a fresh 24 year old theyll just see a baby and let me make mistakes without wanting me fired idk#ugh. i want a good full time position with them really badly though#please please it is such a perfect opportunity for me its even RIGHT in the place i wanted it to be AND with people i know and like#he literally said to me ''it may take a while but we will get you a good job'' VERBATIM#LIKE THATS GOTTA BE GOOD RIGHT? LIKE THAT MEANS HE REALLY DOES WANT ME IN HIS OFFICE AND THAT HE ISNT JUST SAYING THAT TO PEOPLE#god. networking is scary#i just happen to know this guy. and we just so happened to be similarly politically radical in a conservative area
0 notes
no-passaran · 1 year ago
Text
Spain lied about not selling weapons to Israel.
Even after October 7th, Spain has sold more than 1 million € of weapons to Israel. Norway and Finland make it possible.
In January, Spain made headlines word-wide when the government's Minister of Exteriors, José Manuel Albares (PSOE), claimed in Congress and later again in a radio interview that Spain had stopped selling weapons to Israel ever since October 7th. Israel's intensification of violence in Gaza following October 7th meant that, on top of decades of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, between October 7th and January 23rd Israel had already killed 28,000 people and forced 2 million out of their home. In this context, many people were demanding their governments stop arming and funding the genocide of the Palestinian people, and here on Tumblr and other social media sites like Twitter I think we all saw the many posts praising the Spanish government for this.
Well, it turns out it was a lie.
According to Albares, "Since October 7th there are no more weapons exportations [from Spain] to Israel". But in November alone, Spain exported weapons to Israel for 987,000€, as was published on the Spanish Government's official website dedicated to exterior commerce (Comex). A researcher from Centre Delàs (an independent centre for peace studies) found it and published it, and it has also been verified by newspapers such as elDiario.es.
This 987,000€ worth of weapons in November was not the only ammunition that Spain has sent to Israel in 2023. In 2023, Spain exported a total of 1.48 million € in war material to Israel.
All of the weapons sent in November come from the factory of Nammo Palencia (Castilla y León), a corporation that is 50% property of the Government of Norway and 50% owned by a public Finnish business. However, even if the owners are foreigners, the ammunition was sent from Spain and thus it had to be authorized by the an organism of the Spanish Government named Junta Interministerial de Defensa y Doble Uso, whose deliberations on whether a weapons exportation is accepted or denied are kept secret. The only cases where they have denied exporting weapons to Israel have been when they thought that Israel would re-sell these weapons to the Philippines.
Spain has had a close relation with Israel for years. As published by the Spanish Government, Spain has sold 20 million € of weapons to Israel between 2012 and 2022. Spain also buys weapons and military software from Israel (for example, the Spanish Intelligence Service has been using the Israeli software Pegasus to illegally spy on Catalan activists, journalists, politicians and civil society members and their relatives to attack the Catalan independence movement), and Spain has continued buying from Israel and allocating defense contracts to Israel even after the October 7th attacks. It is very difficult to track the concessions of public contracts such as buying weapons, but some contracts have been known. For example, on November 24th 2023, Spain bought 287.5 million € of missiles from Israel. This is not unusual: between 2011 and 2021, it is publicly known that Spain bought war material from Israel for at least 268 million €, but experts say that the real number could be two or three times as much.
Spain has also continued allocating concessions to Israel. For example, on December 15th 2023 Spain allocated a contract worth over 576 million € to Israel for a rocket launcher programme. On November 22nd, Spain allocated another another Israeli company to provide missiles for 237 million € at the same time as the Spanish army bought Israeli inhibitors for 1.4 million €. The very next day, November 23rd, Spain signed another military allocation to Israel for 82,600€. The following week, Spain signed yet another allocation with a different Israeli military corporation for 3.7 million €.
Spain also allows Israeli weapon manufacturing companies to produce weapons through their branches located in Spain. This way, Israeli weapons make their way to markets with which Israel doesn't have diplomatic ties but Spain does, like Saudi Arabia. And since Spain is a member of NATO, Israeli weapons produced in Spain are approved according to NATO standards and access it easily. In the same way, these Israeli weapons manufacturers also access European Union defense funds through their branches in Spain. (source).
As I said, I saw a lot of positive posts around when Albares said Spain was going to embargo, but I haven't seen any post about how they didn't do it. I also (personally) haven't seen anything on international media, and barely anything on Spanish media, which is already busy with the PSOE covid material corruption scandal. So I share this in the hope of helping put pressure on Spain to cut all ties with Israel immediately.
SHAME ON EVERYONE WHO GIVES ISRAEL THE MATERIAL AND MONEY THAT WILL BE USED TO MASSACRE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE. SHAME ON SPAIN, NORWAY, AND FINLAND.
3K notes · View notes
phantomrose96 · 1 year ago
Text
The conversation around AI is going to get away from us quickly because people lack the language to distinguish types of AI--and it's not their fault. Companies love to slap "AI" on anything they believe can pass for something "intelligent" a computer program is doing. And this muddies the waters when people want to talk about AI when the exact same word covers a wide umbrella and they themselves don't know how to qualify the distinctions within.
I'm a software engineer and not a data scientist, so I'm not exactly at the level of domain expert. But I work with data scientists, and I have at least rudimentary college-level knowledge of machine learning and linear algebra from my CS degree. So I want to give some quick guidance.
What is AI? And what is not AI?
So what's the difference between just a computer program, and an "AI" program? Computers can do a lot of smart things, and companies love the idea of calling anything that seems smart enough "AI", but industry-wise the question of "how smart" a program is has nothing to do with whether it is AI.
A regular, non-AI computer program is procedural, and rigidly defined. I could "program" traffic light behavior that essentially goes { if(light === green) { go(); } else { stop();} }. I've told it in simple and rigid terms what condition to check, and how to behave based on that check. (A better program would have a lot more to check for, like signs and road conditions and pedestrians in the street, and those things will still need to be spelled out.)
An AI traffic light behavior is generated by machine-learning, which simplistically is a huge cranking machine of linear algebra which you feed training data into and it "learns" from. By "learning" I mean it's developing a complex and opaque model of parameters to fit the training data (but not over-fit). In this case the training data probably includes thousands of videos of car behavior at traffic intersections. Through parameter tweaking and model adjustment, data scientists will turn this crank over and over adjusting it to create something which, in very opaque terms, has developed a model that will guess the right behavioral output for any future scenario.
A well-trained model would be fed a green light and know to go, and a red light and know to stop, and 'green but there's a kid in the road' and know to stop. A very very well-trained model can probably do this better than my program above, because it has the capacity to be more adaptive than my rigidly-defined thing if the rigidly-defined program is missing some considerations. But if the AI model makes a wrong choice, it is significantly harder to trace down why exactly it did that.
Because again, the reason it's making this decision may be very opaque. It's like engineering a very specific plinko machine which gets tweaked to be very good at taking a road input and giving the right output. But like if that plinko machine contained millions of pegs and none of them necessarily correlated to anything to do with the road. There's possibly no "if green, go, else stop" to look for. (Maybe there is, for traffic light specifically as that is intentionally very simplistic. But a model trained to recognize written numbers for example likely contains no parameters at all that you could map to ideas a human has like "look for a rigid line in the number". The parameters may be all, to humans, meaningless.)
So, that's basics. Here are some categories of things which get called AI:
"AI" which is just genuinely not AI
There's plenty of software that follows a normal, procedural program defined rigidly, with no linear algebra model training, that companies would love to brand as "AI" because it sounds cool.
Something like motion detection/tracking might be sold as artificially intelligent. But under the covers that can be done as simply as "if some range of pixels changes color by a certain amount, flag as motion"
2. AI which IS genuinely AI, but is not the kind of AI everyone is talking about right now
"AI", by which I mean machine learning using linear algebra, is very good at being fed a lot of training data, and then coming up with an ability to go and categorize real information.
The AI technology that looks at cells and determines whether they're cancer or not, that is using this technology. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that can take an image of hand-written text and transcribe it. Again, it's using linear algebra, so yes it's AI.
Many other such examples exist, and have been around for quite a good number of years. They share the genre of technology, which is machine learning models, but these are not the Large Language Model Generative AI that is all over the media. Criticizing these would be like criticizing airplanes when you're actually mad at military drones. It's the same "makes fly in the air" technology but their impact is very different.
3. The AI we ARE talking about. "Chat-gpt" type of Generative AI which uses LLMs ("Large Language Models")
If there was one word I wish people would know in all this, it's LLM (Large Language Model). This describes the KIND of machine learning model that Chat-GPT/midjourney/stablediffusion are fueled by. They're so extremely powerfully trained on human language that they can take an input of conversational language and create a predictive output that is human coherent. (I am less certain what additional technology fuels art-creation, specifically, but considering the AI art generation has risen hand-in-hand with the advent of powerful LLM, I'm at least confident in saying it is still corely LLM).
This technology isn't exactly brand new (predictive text has been using it, but more like the mostly innocent and much less successful older sibling of some celebrity, who no one really thinks about.) But the scale and power of LLM-based AI technology is what is new with Chat-GPT.
This is the generative AI, and even better, the large language model generative AI.
(Data scientists, feel free to add on or correct anything.)
3K notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
The Pyramids Of Mars (1975)
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Boom (2024)
262 notes · View notes
mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago
Text
Every complex ecosystem has parasites
Tumblr media
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.
Tumblr media
Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/
It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it:
The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud.
In other words, if you allow some fraud, you will also allow through a lot of non-fraudulent business that would otherwise trip your fraud meter. Or, put it another way, the only way to prevent all fraud is to chase away a large proportion of your customers, whose transactions are in some way abnormal or unexpected.
Another great explainer is Bruce Schneier, the security expert. In the wake of 9/11, lots of pundits (and senior government officials) ran around saying, "No price is too high to prevent another terrorist attack on our aviation system." Schneier had a foolproof way of shutting these fools up: "Fine, just ground all civilian aircraft, forever." Turns out, there is a price that's too high to pay for preventing air-terrorism.
Latent in these two statements is the idea that the most secure systems are simple, and while simplicity is a fine goal to strive for, we should always keep in mind the maxim attributed to Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." That is to say, some things are just complicated.
20 years ago, my friend Kathryn Myronuk and I were talking about the spam wars, which were raging at the time. The spam wars were caused by the complexity of email: as a protocol (rather than a product), email is heterogenuous. There are lots of different kinds of email servers and clients, and many different ways of creating and rendering an email. All this flexibility makes email really popular, and it also means that users have a wide variety of use-cases for it. As a result, identifying spam is really hard. There's no reliable automated way of telling whether an email is spam or not – you can't just block a given server, or anyone using a kind of server software, or email client. You can't choose words or phrases to block and only block spam.
Many solutions were proposed to this at the height of the spam wars, and they all sucked, because they all assumed that the way the proposer used email was somehow typical, thus we could safely build a system to block things that were very different from this "typical" use and not catch too many dolphins in our tuna nets:
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
So Kathryn and I were talking about this, and she said, "Yeah, all complex ecosystems have parasites." I was thunderstruck. The phrase entered my head and never left. I even gave a major speech with that title later that year, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:
https://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt
Truly, a certain degree of undesirable activity is the inevitable price you pay once you make something general purpose, generative, and open. Open systems – like the web, or email – succeed because they are so adaptable, which means that all kinds of different people with different needs find ways to make use of them. The undesirable activity in open systems is, well, undesirable, and it's valid and useful to try to minimize it. But minimization isn't the same as elimination. "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero," because "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Complexity is generative, but "all complex ecosystems have parasites."
America is a complex system. It has, for example, a Social Security apparatus that has to serve more than 65 million people. By definition, a cohort of 65 million people will experience 65 one-in-a-million outliers every day. Social Security has to accommodate 65 million variations on the (surprisingly complicated) concept of a "street address":
https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886
It will have to cope with 65 million variations on the absolutely, maddeningly complicated idea of a "name":
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
In cybernetics, we say that a means of regulating a system must be capable of representing as many states as the system itself – that is, if you're building a control box for a thing with five functions, the box needs at least five different settings:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html
So when we're talking about managing something as complicated as Social Security, we need to build a Social Security Administration that is just as complicated. Anything that complicated is gonna have parasites – once you make something capable of managing the glorious higgeldy piggeldy that is the human experience of names, dates of birth, and addresses, you will necessarily create exploitable failure modes that bad actors can use to steal Social Security. You can build good fraud detection systems (as the SSA has), and you can investigate fraud (as the SSA does), and you can keep this to a manageable number – in the case of the SSA, that number is well below one percent:
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12948/IF12948.2.pdf
But if you want to reduce Social Security fraud from "a fraction of one percent" to "zero percent," you can either expend a gigantic amount of money (far more than you're losing to fraud) to get a little closer to zero – or you can make Social Security far simpler. For example, you could simply declare that anyone whose life and work history can't fit in a simple database schema is not eligible for Social Security, kick tens of millions of people off the SSI rolls, and cause them to lose their homes and starve on the streets. This isn't merely cruel, it's also very, very expensive, since homelessness costs the system far more than Social Security. The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero.
Conservatives hate complexity. That's why the Trump administration banned all research grants for proposals that contained the word "systemic" (as a person with so-far-local cancer, I sure worry about what happens when and if my lymphoma become systemic). I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made your childhood "simpler" wasn't that the world was less complicated – it's that your parents managed that complexity and shielded you from it. There's always been partner abuse, divorce, gender minorities, mental illness, disability, racial discrimination, geopolitical crises, refugees, and class struggle. The only people who don't have to deal with this stuff are (lucky) children.
Complexity is an unavoidable attribute of all complicated processes. Evolution is complicated, so it produces complexity. It's convenient to think about a simplified model of genes in which individual genes produce specific traits, but it turns out genes all influence each other, are influenced in turn by epigenetics, and that developmental factors play a critical role in our outcomes. From eye-color to gender, evolution produces spectra, not binaries. It's ineluctably (and rather gloriously) complicated.
The conservative project to insist that things can be neatly categorized – animal or plant, man or woman, planet or comet – tries to take graceful bimodal curves and simplify them into a few simple straight lines – one or zero (except even the values of the miniature transistors on your computer's many chips are never at "one" or "zero" – they're "one-ish" and "mostly zero").
Like Social Security, fraud in the immigration system is a negligible rounding error. The US immigration system is a baroque, ramified, many-tendriled thing (I have the receipts from the immigration lawyers who helped me get a US visa, a green card, and citizenship to prove it). It is already so overweighted with pitfalls and traps for the unwary that a good immigration lawyer might send you to apply for a visa with 600 pages of documentation (the most I ever presented) just to make sure that every possible requirement is met:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/in/photolist-zp6PxJ-4q9Aqs-2nVHTZK-2pFKHyf
After my decades of experience with the US immigration system, I am prepared to say that the system is now at a stage where it is experiencing sharply diminishing returns from its anti-fraud systems. The cost of administering all this complexity is high, and the marginal amount of fraud caught by any new hoop the system gins up for migrants to jump through will round to zero.
Which poses a problem for Trump and trumpists: having whipped up a national panic about out of control immigration and open borders, the only way to make the system better at catching the infinitesimal amount of fraud it currently endures is to make the rules simpler, through the blunt-force tactic of simply excluding people who should be allowed in the country. For example, you could ban college kids planning to spend the summer in the US on the grounds that they didn't book all their hotels in advance, because they're planning to go from city to city and wing it:
https://www.newsweek.com/germany-tourists-deported-hotel-maria-lepere-charlotte-pohl-hawaii-2062046
Or you could ban the only research scientist in the world who knows how to interpret the results of the most promising new cancer imaging technology because a border guard was confused about the frog embryos she was transporting (she's been locked up for two months now):
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/horrified-harvard-scientists-ice-arrest-leaves-cancer-researchers-scrambling/ar-AA1DlUt8
Of course, the US has long operated a policy of "anything that confuses a border guard is grounds for being refused entry" but the Trump administration has turned the odd, rare outrage into business-as-usual.
But they can lock up or turn away as many people as they want, and they still won't get the amount of fraud to zero. The US is a complicated place. People have complicated reasons for entering the USA – work, family reunion, leisure, research, study, and more. The only immigration system that doesn't leak a little at the seams is an immigration system that is so simple that it has no seams – a toy immigration system for a trivial country in which so little is going on that everything is going on.
The only garden without weeds is a monoculture under a dome. The only email system without spam is a closed system managed by one company that only allows a carefully vetted cluster of subscribers to communicate with one another. The only species with just two genders is one wherein members who fit somewhere else on the spectrum are banished or killed, a charnel process that never ends because there are always newborns that are outside of the first sigma of the two peaks in the bimodal distribution.
A living system – a real country – is complicated. It's a system, where people do things you'll never understand for perfectly good reasons (and vice versa). To accommodate all that complexity, we need complex systems, and all complex ecosystems have parasites. Yes, you can burn the rainforest to the ground and planting monocrops in straight rows, but then what you have is a farm, not a forest, vulnerable to pests and plagues and fire and flood. Complex systems have parasites, sure, but complex systems are resilient. The optimal level of fraud is never zero, because a system that has been simplified to the point where no fraud can take place within it is a system that is so trivial and brittle as to be useless.
Tumblr media
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/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times
617 notes · View notes
literaticat · 27 days ago
Note
Is it ethical to use Chat GPT or Grammarly for line editing purposes? I have a finished book, 100% written by me and line edited by me already--and I do hope to get it traditionally published. But I think it could benefit from a line edit from someone who isn't me, obviously, before querying. But line editing services run $3-4k for a 75k book, which is beyond my budget.
I was chatting with someone recently who self-publishes. They said they use Chat GPT Plus to actually train a model for their projects to line edit using instructions like (do not rewrite or rephrase for content /edit only for rhythm, clarity, tone, and pacing /preserve my voice, sentence structure, and story intent with precision). Those are a few inputs she used and she said it actually worked really well.
So in that case, is AI viewed in the same way you'd collaborate with a human editor? Or does that cross ethical boundaries in traditional publishing? Like say for instance AI rewords your sentence and maybe switches out for a stronger verb or adjective or a stronger metaphor--is using that crossing a line? And if I were to use it for that purpose, would I need to disclose that? I know AI is practically a swear word among authors and publishers right now, so I think even having to say "I used AI tools" might raise eyebrows and make an agent hesitant during the querying process. But obviously, I wouldn't lie if it needs to be disclosed... just not sure I even want to go there and risk having to worry about that. Thoughts? Am I fine? Overthinking it?
Thanks!
I gotta be honest, this question made me flinch so hard I'm surprised my face didn't turn inside out.
Feeding your original work into ChatGPT or a similar generative AI large language model -- which are WELL KNOWN FOR STEALING EVERYTHING THAT GETS PUT INTO THEM AND SPITTING OUT STOLEN MATERIAL-- feels like, idk, just a terrible idea. Letting that AI have ANY kind of control over your words and steal them feels like a terrible idea. Using any words that a literal plagiarism-bot might come up with for you feels like a terrible idea.
And ethical questions aside: AI is simply not good at writing fiction. It doesn't KNOW anything. You want to take its "advice" on your book? Come on. Get it together.
Better idea: Get a good critique group that can tell you if there are major plot holes, characters whose motivations are unclear, anything like that -- those are things that AI can't help you with, anyway. Then read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers -- that info combined with a bit of patience should stand you in good stead.
Finally, I do think that using spell-check/grammarly, either as you work or to check your work, is fine. It's not rewriting your work for you, it's just pointing out typos/mistakes/potential issues, and YOU, PERSONALLY, are going through each and every one to make the decision of how to fix any actual errors that might have snuck in there, and you, personally, are making the decision about when to use a "stronger" word or phrase or recast a sentence that it thinks might be unclear or when to stet for voice, etc. Yes, get rid of typos and real mistakes, by all means!
(And no, I don't think use of that kind of "spell-check/grammar-check" tool is a problem or anything that you need to "disclose" or feel weird about -- spell-check is like, integrated into most word processing software as a rule, it's ubiquitous and helpful, and it's different from feeding your work into some third-party AI thing!)
343 notes · View notes
dilemmaart · 13 days ago
Text
Tumblr media
Same software different case. ✨
297 notes · View notes
thesweetnessofspring · 3 months ago
Text
All possible Baird family tree combinations
Canon details and some assumptions:
Lenore Dove and Burdock are "distant cousins" from Burdock's mother's side. And as we know Lenore Dove's mother was Covey and her "pa's a mystery" then they're related through her mother, too. As Snow tried to kill Lucy Gray, it's unlikely she was out in the open as Burdock's mom so that variation is not included.
Lenore Dove's mother is dead. When Haymitch goes to the Covey graveyard, only Lucy Gray and Maude Ivory are there. There is no Barb Azure in the graveyard, which rules her out as Lenore Dove's mother.
We also know that Barb Azure was seeing a "gal" in TBOSAS but we have no idea if they were secretly partners later and adopted or if Barb Azure is bisexual and/or married a man for whatever reason. From SOTR we do learn that same-sex relationships led to punishment and so a legal marriage wouldn't have been possible for Barb Azure and her gal. A covert "roommates" situation where they adopt orphans? Or one of them gets pregnant from a man but they raise the child together? Anyway, this dynamic does open up to some more questions about the specifics, so one visual in particular could be taken a few different ways.
Lucy Gray mentions her mother while her pa's "name is a mystery." I can't remember if Maude Ivory or Barb Azure's parents were mentioned. So while the children of the Covey grandparents all have the circle indicating female, Maude Ivory and Barb Azure could have fathers who were Bairds, but I wasn't going to get hung up on that detail, but just so we're clear on that part. This is also why I labeled their parents as just that--parents, and not mother or father.
Lenore Dove and Burdock are second cousins variations:
Maude Ivory as Lenore Dove's mother and Barb Azure as Burdock's mother:
Tumblr media
***In this case, Barb Azure did marry Everdeen Sr. There isn't a way I can think of that she's with her gal.
Lucy Gray as Lenore Dove's mother and Maude Ivory as Burdock's mother:
Tumblr media
Lenore Dove and Burdock are second-cousins once removed variations:
Lucy Gray as Lenore Dove's mother and Maude Ivory as Burdock's grandmother:
Tumblr media
Maude Ivory as Lenore Dove's mother and Barb Azure as Burdock's grandmother:
Tumblr media
***In this situation, the BAB Partner could be Barb Azure's gal and her daughter could be adopted or conceived with a man but raised with her partner in a "gal pal" situation to the outside authorities. It could also be that Barb Azure married a man and gave birth to a daughter. I tried to keep it general with the term "partner," only the software here requires either male or female and when creating a child defaults to generating the opposite sex so it shows a male partner for Barb Azure.
Lucy Gray as Burdock's grandmother and Maude Ivory as Lenore Dove's mother.
Tumblr media
***While I find this the least likely scenario, if we have LGB as Lenore Dove's mother, then I think we also need to consider she had a secret child that became Burdock's mother.
These are all the Baird family tree variations I can think of based on what we know of canon.
Which one do you think it is?
182 notes · View notes