floof.org
Christ.
Capitalism laid bare.
Unnecessary consumption and excess waste, all leading to environmental destruction, all for the sake of profit.
All for the same reason so much "work" these days is ultimately pointless: our collective needs can be met by just a few people, but capitalism says no one can live without money, which means they must work. So work must be made for them to do. Everyone must have something to sell (to an employer or to others) or starve, even if society doesn't actually need anything more from them.
I'm selling my donkey fursuit! It's cute, clean and I've only worn it a handful of times.
https://www.thedealersden.com/listing/donkey-fursuit/278365
Cute toony donkey partial fursuit in excellent condition. Includes, head, removable mane, hooves, paws, arms & tail.www.thedealersden.com
There is a big difference between tech as augmentation versus automation. Augmentation (think Excel and accountants) benefits workers while automation (think traffic lights versus traffic wardens) benefits capital.
LLMs are controversial because the tech is best at augmentation but is being sold by lots of vendors as automation.
"Former senior Tory MP and doctor quits job as NHS chair in disgust at government health cuts"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/sarah-wollaston-tory-mp-quits-nhs-b2560399.html
‘No point promising the unachievable, especially if only achievable with unacceptable consequences’ says Dr Sarah WollastonRebecca Thomas (The Independent)
I just rewatched Spider-Man: Homecoming and was reminded that for some reason I just don't like it much. I mean, I like most of the *parts* of it, but as a whole it just leaves me very "meh", much like most of the MCU films. I kept looking at stuff on my phone instead of watching.
I've never really read much of the comic books, but I tend to feel I'm more a comic book Spidey fan, not really a film Spidey fan. Or maybe I just like the character and not the stories, I dunno. It's very hard to tell.
Fast bois! Commission for SpaceHuskyNick and Zabivodka
#furry #furryart #anthro #furries #furryfandom #illustration
I'm tearing up watching this video. Guy helps out at a dog shelter and this wee girl has been in the shelter three days, she's absolutely petrified, won't eat... In fifteen minutes he's got her eating out of his hand, in twenty she's sat in his lap.
Let's help this little Ashley and the shelter. They need kibble so feel free to pick some dog (or cat) food from their Amazon wish list that goes straight to...YouTube
I have a box full of WEEE in the garage I'd like to get rid of ... checked the local council website.
"Access to recycling centres is prohibited on foot: you must bring a vehicle."
"Any commercial vehicle is prohibited, defined as: any vehicle with Taxi or Hackney plates. Any vehicle with a trailer. Vans, pick-up trucks. Any car with more than 5 seats. Any vehicle whose registered keeper lives outside of the area."
It's like they want people to fly-tip.
Once upon a time, a friend was moving and we decided to recycle the old CRTs we had collected. Thanks to the move, we had a rental van so we loaded it up.
Between two of us, we had something like 15 CRTs of various sizes, from 14" to 24" monsters. I had one so large and heavy, it could have been operated as a black hole.
We had a massive row with the site operators, they insisted we were trade, we insisted we were geeks.
Podcast: Why was a potentially deadly gas released at an IRL meeting of ‘a particularly nice and earnest’ online community?Fiona McCann (The Irish Times)
"Brits blame Brexit more than Covid for public services decline, study reveals"
;)
Satisfaction with public services is falling and Brits see Brexit as a top cause, says Ipsos studyAlicja Hagopian (The Independent)
Slightly out of date, but one of the big reasons that our media is so out of touch with what the majority of us want is in my opinion because we no longer provide the majority of their funding.
I'm not suggesting that I know how to fix this problem. I'm just sad that the fossil fuel industry and their co-conspirators like Toyota are the major funders of what news they report.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24183641-drilleddesmog_mediagreenwashingreport
🔗: How it feels to get an AI email from a friend via Neven Mrgan #Tech #AI #Email
Recently I received an AI-written email from a friend. It wasn’t sent to test AI, or to show it off, as in “ha ha check this out”; my friend had a question to ask me, and the email asked it over the course of a few paragraphs. It then disclosed that, oh by the way, I used AI to write this.
https://mrgan.com/ai-email-from-a-friend/
Recently I received an AI-written email from a friend. I'm trying to understand why I had the reaction to it that I did.mrgan.com
Today is the day! Fursuit commissions are now open, for the next week or so ;3
http://jaycostumes.com
At a time when fascism & authoritarianism are creeping into the global politics of the developed world, it’s useful for uskottke.org
Complete List Of Everything I Use Voice Siri For:
1. Setting timers on Watch when brewing tea or doing laundry
2. Begrudgingly, when getting navigator directions and the car stereo safety features won’t let me type onscreen
3. …
That’s pretty much it. 🤷♂️
Did you know that #XScreenSaver (yes, the collection of screensavers for X11) is available on Android?
And that #Google requires it to have a privacy policy in order to be available in the Play Store?
And that the maintainer chose to crowd-source a privacy policy where every item starts with "Unlike Google"?
It's become a great list of all the privacy violations Google did and still does. And I thought that it's gonna be long, but it's even longer than I imagined.
https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/google.html
I've realised what ChatGPT is!
It's Yahoo! Answers (rip, gone too soon) combined with Google's 'I'm feeling lucky' button.
A taxonomic proposal:
#AI = Artificial Intelligence
Using tools such as neural networks and machine learning on deliberately curated training data to perform specific tasks, such as Cornell University's Merlin app for bird identification.
#AM = Artificial Mediocrity
Mediocrity by definition: using large language models to generate the statistically most average/representative text/code response from an input, trained on a ginormous grab bag of data, under the assumption that the most common response in the training data is the best response, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.
Uncertainty quantification (i.e. providing error bars or alternative answers) seems to be addressable to some extent, but it is not trivial to implement and has some extra computational cost.
Explainability (explaining why an ML system gives a certain answer) is an open research area. There are some partial solutions, but ultimately you run into the fact that what counts as an explanation is a philosophical question with a context-specific answer. It requires a lot of engineering and UX work to get right, and we don't know how to address the question in all circumstances.
Extrapolation (dealing with pictures different from the training data) is a huge unsolved problem, and I'm not sure how well it can be solved, but if Merlin's training data is big enough, it might only be a problem for very rare birds.
"eBird has always been great at accumulating large amounts of data, but bad at managing the human component of the process."
This seems to be true of almost every crowdsourced database now.
@wuweiwolf Rare birds are indeed a problem. Merlin does some sort of pre-filtering by looking at location and date to somehow weight the answer based on what's likely in that location that time of year. It will even highlight its own answers as "rare" when it's confident enough to provide an answer.
What would be most helpful is to prompt "what next" in these cases. Suggest additional verification needed before reporting. Show similar species to compare against. The latter would clearly be a more complicated computational task.
For song ID, bird mimics (catbirds, mockingbirds) are a particular challenge! I don't know if their training data deliberately includes mimic songs to try to tease them apart.
#Asbestos can be found in talc, therefore it is in most makeup.
The big companies get around this by saying there is no ‘detectable’ asbestos in their products. That’s not the same as saying there is ‘no’ asbestos in their eye shadows, mascaras, bronzers and face powders.
As tens of thousands of lawsuits related to Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder flood US courts, many women are coming forward claiming that talc-based makeup gave them asbestos-related mesothelioma. Why is talc still present in almost all cosmetics?Anne Karpf (The Guardian)
@breadandcircuses
When I first started reading this I thought you were referring to crypto or AI, since they both also meet the criteria of “unnecessary consumption and excess waste, all leading to environmental destruction, all for the sake of profit.”