themarvelhorse

[themarvelhorse]

Yesterday a kid said to me "excuse me? Your hair looks like beautiful anime hair" which is already amazing and then she said "watch me on your camera when I go down the slide I'm going to do the Peter Griffin death pose when I come out" and she sure did.

[themarvelhorse]

hey man can you fucking loosen my leash a little I swear I was just trying to smell a flower on this walk and not run in the road

[themarvelhorse]

A lot of otherwise intelligent people are scared to criticize chatGPT because they think there is an observed pattern in history where new technology is always either good or inevitable, and people who are skeptical of new technology always look like fools, and they are scared to look foolish when AI is The New Technology That Revolutionized Everything.

I am not scared of any of that nonsense. The first reason, is that chatGPT isn't a "new technology" at all, both because it is just a scaled-up version of stuff that already existed, and because "technology" implies a thing that does something useful and ChatGPT doesn't appear to do anything useful.

The second reason, is that the people frightened of looking like Luddites assume that because we are all alive, the feared bad outcomes of new technology have never happened, and that is just completely false. New technologies have sometimes had awful impacts upon human quality of life and the environment. Sometimes, unilaterally inferior technologies have replaced superior technologies for economic or other reasons. Almost always new technologies have a mix of positive and negative impacts.

In fact, I think the uncontrolled, rapid growth of generative AI and large language models is happening because of the common belief that "new technology" is always inevitable and good. This is a new technology, therefore "developing" it is inherently leading towards Something. But instead, the amount of resources and environmental and human devastation is simply accelerating and accelerating. The new technology takes everything and gives us nothing.

[themarvelhorse]

It’s not a coincidence that multiple governments of countries are rolling out heavy online censorship when people are criticizing and protesting against them the most. They want to censor information, restrict communication, and track every little thing their citizens are saying and doing on the internet. 

This isn’t about governments wanting to protect the children but wanting to control their citizens through censorship and stripping away their privacy.

[themarvelhorse]

[themarvelhorse]

This is potentially a huge step on China's part to crack down on illegal fishing. Rather than policing boats at sea, the UN Agreement on Port State Measures instead sanctions boats that are suspected of illegal or unregulated activities when they come to port.

Since China is home to 14 of the 15 busiest ports in the world, their addition to this legally binding agreement is a big deal in the fight against illegal fishing.

[themarvelhorse]

Phenomenal news. Just what the people ordered.

[themarvelhorse]

based da vinkis per usual

[themarvelhorse]

[themarvelhorse]

one of the most frustrating things about getting a job is that after you go through the absolute hellscape that is applying and interviewing and you finally prove yourself worthy of having employment, you'll end up in the workforce and realise that 90% of the people with jobs are not actually very good at them. so like why was all of that even so hard

[themarvelhorse]

If courage isn’t the absence of fear but doing the right thing regardless of it, maybe confidence isn’t the absence of insecurity but knowing you have real worth despite it

[themarvelhorse]

[themarvelhorse]

[themarvelhorse]

This whole thing about scanning your face to prove tour age is making me remember, in 2018 while out in paris we got our wallet stolen during a particularly busy night at a lesbian bar. It was very late and with no money to buy metro tickets we were effectively stranded, but some people helped us and we ended up staying the night at a really sweet older man's place. His face was deeply scarred and he was missing an eye. We chatted on our way and he told me about his life, probably to help calm me down. He explained he had been stuck in a house fire 20 years ago and had had multiple rounds of facial reconstruction and a skin graft, but there's only so much surgery can do so he just learned to live with it. I remember he said he liked the queer bars because they're the only place people don't really stare at him.

At some point I took out my phone, and at the time I was using face unlock. This prompted him to tell me all the ways this technology doesn't work on him. How his phone selfie camera doesn't focus right because it's not a detecting a face. How he had to update his ID the old fashioned way, because the website kept rejecting his photos. And how it was becoming more and more common, and how it was making his life way harder.

This was 7 years ago, and now whenever I see this sort of technology I think of how that guy can't use it. And how house fires are pretty common, and how anything from being born this way to a skin condition to heavy tattooing can probably cause the same issue. Can these people get age verified ? Will they just lose access to all social media, which are increasingly necessary in society, if this becomes the norm ? These are people who are already driven out of public spaces due to how they look, and they're getting pushed out online too all in the interest of companies wanting more money.