therandi - Tumblr blog

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palestine signs at seoul pride

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this is so sweet 🥺🥺🥺

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Art by Leah Gardner

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The ‘you’re mature for your age’ to sleeping with a bed full of plushies in your mid twenties pipeline is real

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would a loving god have given us sinuses? send tweet

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a stud in black leather on a black motorcycle just revved their engine at me and thank god I tore my demonic uterus out ages ago because I think that would have finally knocked me up

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I keep thinking abt this comment and giggling

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Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

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Source.

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Storytime

There's this kid that I see a couple times a week walking past our house in the afternoons (usually around the time I walk Deacon after work). He's 10-12 yrs old and he's always pushing one of those jogging strollers with a 2-3yr old kid inside. Bucket hats. Sunglasses. Snow suits. Whatever the weather, they're always kitted out appropriately. And sometimes they're having cute conversations as they pass by. I've never seen an adult with them.

Today, we were out in the yard and the toddler saw Deacon so the older kid asked if they could stop and say hi to him through the fence, and of course that was fine. I told the older one I thought it was cool he took his little brother out for walks so often and he said with 0 tact and 100% confidence, "Well mom said I had to take [ baby brother] or the dog for a walk every day and I don't have to pick up [baby brother]'s poop, so."

The baby brother found this fact uproariously funny (or maybe just the word 'poop,' hard to tell).

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We've been having some issues with our hot water heater so B did a little investigating and decided that the anode rod needed replacing. I intentionally misheard him (as one does with ones husband) when he conveyed this information to me and said, "you need a new anal rod??" which then became a little ongoing joke between us as we found and ordered a new one and then tracked shipping.

Unrelated, we open our windows at sunset each night to cool down the house for sleeping. Also unrelated, we live on a corner in a heavily foot-trafficked area near downtown.

So. The windows are open. The Amazon delivery guy has just dropped off a package. I bring inside the box and, without thinking, shout up the stairs to B, "DARLING, YOUR ANAL ROD IS HERE." There is a large group of people passing by on the left hand sidewalk.

There is a woman with a stroller on the right hand sidewalk.

The amazon driver is only just closing the gate.

They are now all paused and staring in at me. The windows are open.

My husband is laughing.