A Good Post - Tumblr Posts
YOUNG MAN!
There's no need to feel down,
I MEAN YOUNG THEY!
I forgot your pronoun,
hello! It’s Saint Patrick’s Day! If you draw/write Ronan Lynch in a kilt I will personally come to your home and sit you down and explain that kilts are primarily a Scottish garment and that they are not a thing in Ireland!! this has been a raven cycle Irish heritage PSA!
Neil: *jumping from one identity to another*
Neil: parkour
This is the OpenAI API. It makes spookily good twitter bots 13/10 would retweet
As of today, OpenAI is releasing their new API, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have had a chance to preview it.
Folks, I’m going to be doing a LOT of posts on this.
Like GPT-2, they used internet text as training data, and it can use that knowledge to look at text you give it and predict what comes next. The new OpenAI API is REALLY good at following all sorts of prompts. Set up the first two lines of a chat and it will stay in character.
Me: Hello, who are you? Bot (I wrote this line for it): Foolish mortal! I am the god of the internet. Me: Prove it. Bot: No need to prove it, you will bow down and worship me and the wonders of the internet. Me: What if I don’t? Bot: Then I shall unleash a bot attack on your computer. Me: Go ahead and try it. Bot: But I told you who I was! You must worship me! Me: Let’s see the bot attack first. Bot: Oh, for the love of… Fine! (insert name of random bot here) attacks you! Me: That… is not a bot attack. Literally nothing happened. Bot: … Seriously? Me: Yeah dude, sorry.
It also is pretty good at style transfer. By giving it a few examples to start out with, I got it to do the following rewriite:
This API is versatile. And one thing it does well is make Twitter bots. For those who are unfamiliar, @dog_rates is a twitter account that posts user-submitted dogs, introduces them, and then gives them a rating from one to ten. All the dogs are rated at least 10/10 because they’re very good dogs.
In the past when people have built bot versions of twitter accounts like @dog_rates, the resulting twitter bots really aren’t that on-topic. The original account usually isn’t consistent enough for the neural net to figure out how to sound like it. But after showing this API just 15 recent quintessential tweets, it was rating dogs convincingly and consistently.
Ok, some of its commentary is a little weird.
(I used artbreeder to generate the images)
Because I preceded each of the 15 example tweets with its name and topic, I can even get it to generate tweets with the name and topic of my choosing. Here’s what it did with (Cthulhu, tentacle).
And here’s what it did with (Godzilla, stomp):
What is super impressive about this is how well it copied voice and cadence and then adapted them plausibly to entirely new topics. Why yes, I did do a quick test to see what a twitter bot of myself would look like.
Other programs I’ve worked with can do this to some extent, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more vigorous testing of this one’s capabilities against some standard benchmarks. But I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far, and will be building a lot of neat stuff with this.
Bonus material: more AI attempts to introduce and rate dogs. You can enter your email here, and I’ll send them to you.
My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore
i know that like if we want the rewards of being loved we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known but like what are the rewards of being loved? are they really worth all that? you talk of love and loving often and sometimes im so in your corner but other times it just makes me angry. is it really all that great?
This ask has been in my inbox for a number of days now, and honestly, every time I try and contemplate what it’s asking my mind stalls. “What are the rewards of being loved?” reads like like asking what kind of cheese the moon is made of, or how much dark there is before the dawn. It’s definitely a question! Theoretically it has an answer! But what kind of answer can I give that will make sense, since apparently….the reward of being loved isn’t being loved.
I mean, in the original essay, the one that gave birth to the meme, the trigger for “being known” is not really all that mortifying. Timothy Kreider emailed his friends about a herd of goats he was renting. Someone accidentally replied-all “oof,” which inspired the reflection about the gap between how we imagine people see us (charmingly off-beat renter of goats, perfect) and how we are actually known by the people in our lives (someone who fritters away their income renting a herd of goats for no discernible reason.) Kreider concludes that this actually isn’t a gap at all—we are all fully capable of loving people profoundly while still seeing their faults, finding things they do annoying, and commiserating with mutual friends about that person’s quirks.
I as an individual might like to think I am exempt from this, that I am dazzling and charming and the people who like me don’t even notice my foibles, but the truth is they do, it just doesn’t effect their love for me.
Hence the “mortifying ordeal”—not only do I have to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s gaze, but I then have to accept that the people who like me do it in full knowledge of who I am. At any given moment, people are walking around fully aware of the fact that I’m a know-it-all and a bad loser, that I am not always emotionally available; my first instinct is to argue and my taste in music is somehow pedestrian and pretentious at once, that I am mostly trying, and a lot of times I fail. All the less-than-perfect things inside me are not secreted out of view; they are very obvious to anyone who has spent enough time with me, who has chosen to be around me for more than a half hour.
And that’s the people who like me!
So if we didn’t want to be known, deep down under all the squirming icky, insecure mess that makes being known such a terrifying prospect, then you’re right. The ordeal isn’t worth it, we should all pack up and go home, because people are always going to fucking see us. The random coworker who watches your face during a meeting knows you; the cousin who listened to your snarky comment knows you. You stumble through the world being known, inevitably, inexorably.
But being seen is necessary to be truly loved—and when it comes down to it, to be loved is to be real. Kreider references The Velveteen Rabbit in his follow-up article, appropriately titled “I Am a Meme Now.” I don’t think he’s wrong to draw on the idea that people observing our secret places, our weird faces, our strange comments and experience of the world makes them ultimate more real. Our experience lives inside us, in our head and impulse and feeling, so we are not objective in this—but we can’t escape all that leak out of us into the sight of others either. We can’t escape being known by someone who isn’t us, and rendered more than just our subjective selves through them. (In some ways, being known by someone else can be even truer than what we know about ourselves.)
The reward of all this—the only one that counts—is that sometimes, someone looks into your bloody beating insides and stays. They see your ugly expressions and listen to your nasty comments and peel back the heavy, wet layers of your intestines to see the guts beneath and still, they love you anyway.
It is the closest thing to a miracle most of us will experience.
No ones asking you to go outside and make out with a wasp or become the worlds #1 wasp advocate we’re asking you to stop making “death to all wasps” and “wasps are evil” into a personality trait because, for people like me, who do work with and care about these creatures and their importance public perception is so incredibly interlinked with conservation
“Save the bees” for example, is incredibly popular but public is almost entirely applied to the European Honey Bee, a commercial species that is farmed by humans and therefore has the benefit of human protections. The bees actually dying out big time? Native bees. Unsurprisingly the commercially beneficial honey bee often directly competes with native bees, harming their populations, and those native bees (which are often solidary species) don’t get the benefit of human care. But most people aren’t thinking about the native bees when they want to help, because they don’t even realize that the bees really struggling are ones that buried 3 feet in dirt and not the cool honeycomb building ones.
Wasps? Who have an actively harmful, negative stereotype where people hate them because their “big mean bully bugs”? do you think they’re getting researched? Funding for conservation? You think people are looking to donate to campaigns that focus on helping obscure wasp populations? Research for obscure flies? Tracking parasite populations? No. You can’t even make a positive comment on social media without getting a literal hoard of people telling you how much you need to know that they personally hate wasps and will kill on sight. The research done for these species that people hate so much? It’s usually done by a literal handful of people. People who like bugs and wasps aren’t asking you to be their best friend and invite them over for tea. We’re asking that people remove this public, widespread unfounded hatred for an entire group of species, a species group so diverse some people think it might actually outnumber beetles, so that people who do care about them can.
one thing I wished I’d learned (and accepted) sooner as an artist is that using tools you have available to you isn’t “cheating”.
can’t draw circles for the life of you? Trace that glass on your paper. And the digital equivalent of dropping in a circle shape is just as valid.
wanna make a background but don’t want to draw every tree? Whether it’s physical or digital, stamp those trees in.
find yourself relying heavily on your undo shortcut? So what? It’s there. Use it. Take advantage of it. Let it free you from fear of mistakes.
you’re not less of an artist because you drop in a fill colour instead of painting it in manually. You’re not less of an artist because you use rulers for your straight lines, or use a blender for your shading.
use the tools at your disposal. They are there for a reason. Not everything has to be difficult to make it worth it.
Murderbot was acab (assigned cop at birth) and transitioned to being acab (all cops are bastards) and that's why we stan a cop-critical agender trans icon
anyway so i feel like the western obsession with romantic love is symptomatic of the absence of community we experience in our socially isolating society,
i think there are more cultures where its the norm for a person to live with their parents until they’re married etc and not kicked out the moment they’re 19 like that’s an extremely western/white custom.. also young ppl start their own families in the same house where their parents and grandparents live together like the concept of a nuclear family is very foreign and new to many cultures and obvs its the cause of many societal issues like the isolation of the elderly and its just weird how ppl make “ur an adult and still live with your parents” jokes as if it’s not gonna be even harder for current teens to find jobs/housing in the future
No I'm like actually a little mad about how people talk about Lore let's talk about that
Data had like multiple episodes proving his personhood in-universe and nobody in the fan base questions it because he's everyone's favorite, but I've seen a lot of people talking about Lore like he's a machine because...? /rhetorical
I just find it funny(/neg) how it all goes out the window the second a heavily nd coded character behaves in a way you don't like. Has anyone else noticed that? I noticed that
Like listen I love Data too but I find it incredibly telling the way he's treated by fans in contrast to Lore. Hell, the way he was treated in canon, too. The second it stops being cute and charming it's "scrapped project" "crazy" "scary" from everyone in-universe and out and I can't say I like that very much! That's not great, actually
no more posts about why aspec people belong at pride. no more threads explaining how aromanticism and asexuality are queer. we belong at pride because we do and we are queer because we are.
i'm not going to waste my time presenting my case for why i should be "included" in my own community. i'm just gonna do what i want.
you know what? fuck you. i think its cool to have no labels, or cool to have more labels then you have fingers, and cool to just say queer, or cool to say "queer but theres more i can explain if youd like", and cool to say sapphic because you cant figure out if you id as a lesbian or bisexual, and cool to say youre asexual even if youd "fit into demisexual" more, and cool to introduce yourself as a trans guy even if youre also complicatedly nonbinary. its amazing no matter. youre all cool. im cool. yeah.
I think people get mixed up a lot about what is fun and what is rewarding. These are two very different kinds of pleasure. You need to be able to tell them apart because if you don't have a balanced diet of both then it will fuck you up, and I mean that in a "known cause of persistent clinical depression" kind of way.
Part of my morning routine is to take Hurley out, hold him in front of my face, and go "Youuuu green beanbeanbeanbeanbeanbeanbeanbeanbeanbeanbeanbeanbeanbean" while he has zero reaction and stares at me like this.
Advice from an hereditary witch’s grandmother: things a crone has to say
My witch of a grandmother gave me her beautiful encyclopedia on healing plants to celebrate Ostara! I told her about my blog and she asked me to share some of her advice “for those lovely internet disciples of yours”. No, Yeyé, that’s not how this works…
But hey! When the crone talks, you listen!
“A jar of glass keeps away envious spirits and people who want to hurt you.”
“Everything dead deserves to be honored.”
“Strings of seeds bring prosperity.”
“A stone in the windowsill is a soldier that keeps away thieves, but make sure it’s not a pretty rock cause they might steal it!”
“When you trim a vine, keep some branches by the door so all the hard work you’ve done doesn’t disappear in a single day!”
“When you’re old and can’t move so much anymore, keep a jar of seeds by the Gods so they can pick their offerings as they please.”
“I keep lavender by the computer because it helps me remember how to open Facebook. Lavender is good for memory. Tell your friends of the internet.”
“I keep the obsidian and the agathe geodes in front of the TV so there will be no bad news.”
So there you have it.
Advice from an authentic crone with over 70 years of Craft , Old Yeyé.
She wishes you all many blessings and love and hopes you are all well guided.
Happy new season from lucky Old Yeyé!
-Semiramis the Magpie Witchling
You are so based for this 💯
astarion making you his spawn but its just bimbofication
rating some drummers' postures!
ian paice, that's not too bad! 8/10
nick mason, you're slouching a bit there nick! 6/10
alan white, he looks comfy, but is slouching a bit 7/10
neil peart, look at that powerful stance! 9/10
bill bruford, WHAT IS THAT BROOF!! STRAIGHTEN UP!!! 4/10
carl palmer, the power! the composure! IMPECCABLE! 10/10
phil collins, BAD. B A D. 2/10
yakno, i don't think undertale monsters approach gender and sexuality like we do, but I think I hit on something good when i proposed that toriel is so old that she still sees sexuality as something you do rather than something you are.
like she's got some stories from back in the day that will have you do a double take, but she thinks everyone did that so she pays it no mind. and I just imagine sans googling "how to tell your gf she's bi" but when he finally brings it up she looks confused for a moment before going "ah! yes, that. i am non-practicing now".
and you see the gears in his head turn for a good five seconds trying to decide what to respond, before finally hitting on "oh. cool." and dropping the subject altogether