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]
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
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.
You serious!? Give it a month and a day and there’ll be a tool to stenographically hide tags that are normally blocked in that counter-neutral static!
This is disgusting, yeah there will be less nsfw out there but now what slips through the nets will be banal imagery put up by researchers looking to crack a system or whatever hateful things predators dig up to shock kids on this now kid friendly platform. I figured Tumblr would finally be axed for not making nearly enough ad revenue, not by a mission so clearly designed from the getgo to make the platform gracelessly go the way of MySpace.
To make working out more fun I’m analyzing my exercising. The tape-measure-taped-to-the-heavy-things setup shown here had a few major problems when put into practice, one of which was that the incredible sounds the tape measure made constantly demanded the attention of a certain fearless gym cat. While the gym cat poking around this machine is fairly benign, it needed to be sequestered in the gym office when I was doing deadlifts. I have a new setup which doesn’t attract the gym cat but that has it’s own new issues to deal with.
lets-live-virtual asked: If I was invited to a party in Egypt long before cellphones made trading trivia or guessing the punch lines to jokes trivial, what kinds of topical nonsense would we probably be talking about?
I’ve no idea as I’m not Ancient Egyptian. We know next to nothing about social gatherings, let alone social interactions, aside from there being music, wine, dancing, and food. Since most people did agricultural labour or worked as local merchants it’s likely to be ‘what I did in the fields today’ or ‘did you hear that Nesamun bought 3 whole bolts of good upper egyptian linen with the family’s cow?’ or basic stuff like local gossip.
Context: Some technology companies are really pretentious and some other ones are all about trying to be pretentious. Bottom line is consumers have a bad day. But sometimes if you’re YouTube famous you can win.
Friends™
and I℠ like to play narrative heavy games over a video-talking-desktop-streaming service. Just some of the games we’ve enjoyed together are UnderTale, Pirates Fate, Golf With Friends, Doki Doki Literature Club, Night in the Woods, Monster Prom and the one game we’ve suffered through together was Major Minor. But frequently life gets in the way and we can’t stay media syncronized. Now that DELTARUNE was stealth released by that metamaniacal monster Toby Fox and we can’t play it as a group mind just yet because one of us is out of sync.
So let my own personal and entirely intentional single subject social media censorship campaign begin… until we the Web mediated gaming borganism have all experienced UNDERTALE and then DELTARUNE more or less equally.
Ever since I saw this on GameGrumps and then played it for myself… people at work keep asking me “In the routines you wrote, why do all the debug options output ‘Let Go’ when they’re done?” and I cant really tell them why so I tell them that’s how you know it’s done.
I feel like, as a species, we need a villain who is obsessed with microwaves. They monolog on and on about the microwaveing process, trying to help us understand how deeply broken we have become and why they must be an asshole to save us all. Their lair is like that room in The Matrix II with the wall to wall TVs where the Architect talks to Neo except its all wall to wall microwaves with a tiny kitchen table in the centre. His evil getup is a shiny mylar suit brilliantly engineered to reflect the 2.4Ghz microwave frequency thus making him microwave-safe. Annnnd I’m bored with this so time to go to bed.
