ceoln @ceoln@qoto.org

Chaco Canyon from my storm chase trip there last fall. Hard to tell on anything but a big screen, but the rainbow is landing in Pueblo Bonito, the biggest of the ruins. Similarly, the sky is full of raindrop streaks, since it was pouring on me when I shot this from under and umbrella.

#ChacoCanyon #photography #ruins #StormChasing

How to Be a Free Spirited Person

The Races at Longchamp Date: 1866
Artist: Édouard Manet
French, 1832-1883

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/81533/the-races-at-longchamp

not an #artbot @art

Climate protest not a crime, Greta Thunberg says after detention https://reut.rs/3wv7aSN

Today’s excellent spam: “Hello Mr (Mrs) GLENN, I'm A Student And I'm Honored To Be Selling Personalized T-Shirts”

ChatGPT gets treated like technological magic, but that ignores the humans behind the curtain that make it function.

OpenAI paid Sama to hire Kenyan workers at $1.32 to $2 an hour to review “child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest” content. Their work made the tool less toxic, but left them mentally scarred. The company ended the contract when they found out TIME was digging into their practices.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

#tech #chatgpt #ai

We don't need to drink eight glasses of water a day. The original study was clear the water we needed largely comes from food! https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-nutrition/water-myth

Just borrowed this from Hoopla for the one Simon Strantzas story I haven't read. (Plus all the other fab authors.) @bookstodon @bookstadon #HorrorStories #HorrorFiction #WeirdFiction

Hope to visit an exhibit like this, someday... I didn't realize her paintings were so large!

#hilmaafklint #mastoart #fediart #paintings #painters #installation #museum #musee #arte #kunst #exhibit

Installation view, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 12, 2018–February 3, 2019. Photo: David Heald

On the one hand it is very convenient when your body has a built in portal that makes it easier for doctors to poke around and see inside; but on the other hand, I would prefer they not

From 18 Jan: Getting abortion medication online is easier than ever thanks to regulatory changes. The practice is pushing the boundaries of the traditional doctor-patient relationship. - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/17/1140778856/with-telehealth-abortion-doctors-have-to-learn-to-trust-and-empower-patients #abortion #uspol #healthcare-access

@thedextriarchy
It's a direct side effect of the political struggle between the statistical/fuzzy side & the symbolic/GOFAI side of AI research.

Minsky shat on perceptrons in the 60s so from then until the 90s when backprop got really good for computer vision, all pop culture depictions of AI were influenced by expert system research (with the exception of stuff like Deadly Friend).

But backprop made neural nets more useful, & in the 90s they were getting to the point where they could run on commodity hardware; meanwhile, high-profile symbolic logic projects like cyc were failing. So statistical methods got a lot of hype.

Thing about statistical methods is they can't do reasoning except by poorly and expensively simulating reasoning they've observed somebody else do (which is why human beings are so bad at it), and the statistical simulations of reasoning are so overcomplicated that nobody can understand them. In other words, statistical methods are *only* really good for bullshit!

Technical people have known this forever -- it's obvious from first principles -- but pop culture is slow to catch up because pop culture is primarily shaped by writers half-listening to marketing people who half-listened to technical people 20 years ago.

It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually got is smooth-talking bullshit artists who can’t do eighth-grade math.

Masks are not a lockdown.
Nor is testing before events.
Or getting boosters.
Or improving ventilation & filtration.

None of those interventions (despite some people's best efforts to claim otherwise) cause more harm than good. Every person who cares about the economy, jobs & quality of life will support sensible #COVID19 precautions, not oppose them.

Some people are advocating for millions more to die and many more to be chronically disabled. Reject their patent lack of sense & empathy.

"Some say," the dragon proudly said, "that no being is more cruel than a dragon."
"That is also said of us," the cat purred.
"It could be argued," the dragon conceeded. "However..."
"Humans."
"Yes."
"They can be kind, though," the cat said.
"Huh. I bet I can be kinder."
"Me too!"
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

They are no longer making pretense of targeting the drag community alone. Now they are explicitly targeting transgender people. Nebraska has recently done the same thing in dropping the pretense, although they don't explicitly spell out transgender people, just gender identity.

In case you missed it | This #disinformation narrative model is now being deployed against YMCA facilities across the United States -- Port Townsend, Washington in August 2022, Xenia, Ohio in November 2022, and now Santee, California, in January 2023. Each follows the same structure of the 2021 Wi Spa disinformation campaign, which is designed to whip up maximum #transphobia with little to no evidence:

https://www.truthorfiction.com/wi-spa-weaponized-disinformation-campaign/

Anyone up for a small writing challenge?

Reply to this toot, and I'll give you a word prompt for a microfic or poem. If you're a poet and want an additional prompt, ask for a poetic form or device that you must use for your piece.

No pressure to share what you come up with, but if you do, tag me!

🤔

Single-use coffee pods have surprising environmental benefits over other brewing methods

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/01/18/coffee-pods-sustainability-environmental-impact/