Anonymous asked: Once, I encountered the funny story of an AI image descriptor with a sheep obsession. It had been trained on pictures of fields of sheep. Therefore, it tagged anything in a field as 'sheep', including an empty field, because they work on statistical probability. Therefore, it thinks "ah, a field! there's probably a sheep here." (It's a bit more complicated but basically that.) It also couldn't recognise sheep in places that weren't fields, such as petrol stations or barns. [cont]

garbage-empress:

crazy-pages:

crazy-pages:

retroactivebakeries:

oneiroteuthis:

lauralot89:

Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?

this really does sound like an episode of black mirror

But wait, it’s even weirder than that!

This is gonna produce some absolutely baffling pornography.

…. oh my fucking god they actually are using open source software. They’re using a fucking one-layer unidirectional bicategory tag-trained neural network. This will never work. Literally, it will never work. There’s just not enough algorithmic complexity to do what they’re asking of it. I bet you I could prove on a mathematical level that this joke of a neural net fundamentally lacks the abstraction necessary to do its job.

This will never get better. Their algorithm will never stop fucking up, it will never actually flag porn reliably and it will always require a massive quantity of human hours to deal with the deluge of mistagged pictures. This isn’t just a case of an insufficiently trained algorithm, it’s just … this is the most basic neural network you can make. It probably hasa a lot of neurons and has loads of training data but like … you can’t just brute force this kind of stuff. One layer of neurons is just Not Enough.

Also, just to make this clear, Tumblr lied. I mean, we already know this, but I mean they liiiieeeeed. All that stuff they promised about what would or would not be censored? That cannot be delivered on with a system this simple. Nude classical sculptures, political protests, male-presenting nipples (really Tumblr?), nude art outside the context of sex, all that? You cannot train a bicategory one-layer neural network to exclude those things. It cannot be done. Tumblr never intended for those things to actually be permitted, they were just lying. Because the system they have cannot actually do what they said it would and never will be able to.

Also, this kind of system is super vulnerable to counter-neural strategies. I bet you before the end of the month someone hooks up their own open source one layer bicategory neural network which puts an imperceptible (to humans) layer of patterned static over arbitrary images, and trains it by having it bot-post static-ed images to Tumblr and reinforcing based on whether the images are labeled nsfw or sfw. Seriously, within a month someone will have an input-output machine which can turn any image ‘sfw’ in Tumblr’s eyes.

This is genuinely pathetic. Like, I have real pity for whoever implemented this, because it’s clear Tumblr doesn’t actually have any engineers with any expertise with machine learning left at all and they foisted the job off on some poor bastard who has no idea what they’re doing and is going to get all kinds of flak for their (perfectly reasonable and predetermined) failure from management.

As has been pointed out before, there are no humans behind this at all. The review process just reruns either the same algorithm or another algorithm, but people have posted screen shots showing obviously SFW pictures that were still deemed NSFW on review, despite the fact that any human, no matter how overworked / tired would have seen that these pictures were not porn.

4 years ago  /  67,309 notes

voidedmuffin:

oginochihiro:

oh cool some new astronomy news whats good astro-

oh no

oh no

(via catgirltreats)

4 years ago  /  72,094 notes

thewugtest:

sad-gay-potato:

thewugtest:

if youve never physically been in the presence of like, a real live wolf, and you probably wont get the chance to, heres some stuff about them you should know

• a wolf’s fur is so unbelievably thick that you can get like, your whole hand into it while petting. and then you can keep going
  
• wolves are a lot bigger than you think they are. think about how big you think a wolf is then just like double that
• they dont really smell like dog but they DO smell and youre not going to be able to figure out if its a good smell or not
• a wolf really wants to lick the inside of your mouth. he will not stop trying to lick the inside of your mouth at any cost, and generally speaking you need to press your lips together kind of tightly when he approaches your face so that he doesnt worm his damn tongue in there to give you what he thinks is an appropriate greeting
• a wolf doesnt really want to look at you while you pet him but he wants you to pet him. hes embarrassed
• if a grown ass wolf decides to lay down on you, you just have to deal with it and thats your life now
• young wolves, much like young dogs, are overwhelmingly goofy and stupid. a teenage wolf will see your very fragile, very human shoulder and go “i can probably step on that with my full weight” and then he will do it
• letting a wolf eat out of your hand is actually not remotely frightening, and youll want to do it all day

I wanna know who did this research.

well, i did!

(via catgirltreats)

4 years ago  /  379,345 notes

wild-west-wind:

wild-west-wind:

You know what fantasy writing needs? Working class wizards.

• A crew of enchanters maintaining the perpetual flames that run the turbines that generate electricity, covered in ash and grime and stinking of hot chilies and rare mushrooms used for the enchantments
• A wizard specializing in construction, casting feather fall on every worker, and enchanting every hammer to drive nails in straight, animating the living clay that makes up the core of the crane
• An elderly wizard and her apprentice who transmute fragile broken objects. From furniture, to rotten wood beams, to delicate jewelry
• A battle magician, trained with only a few rudimentary spells to solve a shortage of trained wizards on the front who uses his healing spells to help folks around town
• Wizarding shops where cheery little mages enchant wooden blocks to be hammered into the sides of homes. Hammer this into the attic and it will scare off termites, toss this in the fire and clean your chimney, throw this in the air and all dust in the room gets sucked up
• Wizard loggers who transmute cut trees into solid, square beams, reducing waste, and casting spells to speed up regrowth. The forest, they know, will not be too harsh on them if the lost tree’s children may grow in its place
• Wizard farmers who grow their crops in arcane sigils to increase yield, or produce healthier fruit
• Factory wizards who control a dozen little constructs that keep machines cleaned and operational, who cast armor to protect the hands of workers, and who, when the factory strikes for better wages, freeze the machines in place to ensure their bosses can’t bring anyone new in.

Anyway, think about it.

• Construction wizards to turn back time to root out wood worm and strengthen old buildings.
• A wizard tailors who transmutes cloth into fully made clothes without seems and leaving behind no scraps
• A wizard who works in public transit, timing out teleports with detailed schedules, time magic, and enchanted communications, sending dozens of people to far away cities for a day or work or leisure
• A team of wizard gardeners tend to trees grown far outside their native range, and ideal climate, encircled with runes and fed potions to grow none the less
• A wizard sits in their office in the aqueduct, re-casting the spells that allow its precious water to flow to the city uphill
• A wizard fisher casts water repelling spells on the sailors and the stairs, keeps the hoist on the anchor from rusting, casts balls of heat that keep everyone warm below decks. Their real job is to herd fish together so they can be caught in single huge nets, and keep them cold as the boat returns to land.

There are so many possibilities outside of “stodgy academic who wears ugly robes” and “Very good holy man who helps everyone and the fact they’ve never had a job is never brought up” and “evil wizard toiling away on great evils in his evil tower in the evil country.”

(via thenimbus-deactivated20200907)

4 years ago  /  53,042 notes

anthraxlobster:

3battements:

digitaldiscipline:

anthraxlobster:

Free worldbuilding idea:

Wizards have the same trust in magic that software designers have in software, which is to say, almost none at all.

“Are you fucking kidding me I worked in a reagrent shop for a few years I don’t trust any of that stuff. Who the hell knows what other components are in the ashes.”

“Yeah I was in the circle that made Alston’s Divine Circle of Teleportation. There’s some pretty nasty corner cases you can get into but the headmaster published it without us. I just take ships. It’s way safer.”

“I call bullshit on that Necromancer channeling spirits of loved ones. What did he say he was using? ‘Medium Conduit Ruinic Circles’? That’s just a bunch of buzzwords slapped together, and they don’t even interact with each other.”

“I’ve been looking at this scroll all morning and I’m 90% sure that the scribe didn’t even look at the standard for pyromancies.”

“Help Desk, this is Gloriline, what did you fuck up this time?”
*indistinct vocals*
“Dave, I’ve seen the news, and, frankly, I can see the ash cloud from here. You paid for extended support, not enabling support.”

“No, summoned elementals can’t just replace everyone and be magically better at their job. They’re highly specialized creatures and whoever is trying to sell you a general one is lying to you. Even golems are centuries of research away from being that efficient.”

“Ugh, what kind of sealing ritual did they use on this demon? Let me guess, some form of Harrington’s Collapsing Sub-Portals? Come on, the local branch of the guild is supposed to know better than that! It’s been deemed insufficient for years, ever since that one clever archfiend mapped out the whole prison dimension by splitting its essence and sending the fragments ahead to explore.”

“Sure, it might be tempting to try and follow the Cloudsinger Coalition’s free instructions for manipulating the weather, but you know what? You’re gonna spend so much time setting up the spell it might not be worth it in the end. And if anything goes even remotely wrong, you’re on your own. Just pay the few coins for a real Merlin’s Storm™ scroll.”

There have been many responses to this post but this is easily the best one

(via wrexingdrew)

4 years ago  /  80,644 notes

pro-gay:

apparently some nazi group posted this and how is that not the most relatable thing ever?

(via tamascotchi-deactivated20190101)

4 years ago  /  140,542 notes

gunsandfireandshit:

theweirdwideweb:

Talk about getting two birds stoned at once lol

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4 years ago  /  93,141 notes

bob-belcher:

cards against humanity not only buying part of the U.S border to stop trump from building the wall between the U.S and Mexico but also hiring a law firm specializing in eminent domain with the intent of making it harder and more expensive for the government to build the wall has got to be the boldest move in this stupid simulation we’re living in. not all heroes wear capes

(via tamascotchi-deactivated20190101)

4 years ago  /  67,186 notes

robertmueller:

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4 years ago  /  45,219 notes

lmaonade:

toby fox: feel every emotion at once

me: yes sir right away sir

(via tamascotchi-deactivated20190101)

4 years ago  /  28,424 notes