ploopypoopy

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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 manually generate the dog images to go with these tweets)

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. And not all of the API’s tweets are usable. For the dog_rates tweets, around 19/20 are reasonable, and the remaining 1/20 are way off-target or even contain drug references. For the janellecfakes tweets, it’s got a less consistent format to follow and maybe 1/3 are entertaining and 1/20 are plausibly something I might tweet. They’re not ready for unsupervised use. 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

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What’s the opposite of a brain drain?

  “It was shaping up to be a big spring for Rugved Kore. He was finishing up a master’s degree in engineering that had brought him from the suburbs of Mumbai to Pennsylvania, and two companies had just offered him postgraduation positions that would make him eligible for a visa program for graduates of U.S. universities in technical fields. “It was almost too good to be true,” Kore says. “Getting the job offers felt like a dream because we just don’t have these opportunities in India.” 

  Then the coronavirus pandemic changed everything. Both companies rescinded their offers, and Kore, who graduated from Pennsylvania State University in a virtual ceremony on May 9, could lose his legal status to stay in the U.S. if he can’t find a job by the end of the summer. If he returns home, Kore says, he worries he won’t be able to repay the $66,000 in student debt secured by his family’s house.

   More than a million international students attended U.S. universities during the 2018-19 school year, making up 5.5% of students pursuing higher education, according to the U.S. Department of State. More than half of them pursued science, technology, engineering, or math—or STEM—fields. Those graduating this year are seeing their plans upended by shuttered campuses, closed borders, inflexible immigration policies, and an economy that seized up just as they were about to enter the workforce.”

- Foreign STEM Graduates Are Being Shut Out of the U.S. Job Market

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(note: I have no romantic or sexualized experience myself, so I admit *some* of these points rely entirely on secondhand stuff and media)

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

We talk about women of color or women who are disabled being sexualized, but we don’t talk about how all straight men are desexualized and denied the ability to be sexualized object.

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i made a quiz whose answers are entirely made up of things that don’t actually exist. take this to simulate how confusing it feels when people ask questions based off their own experiences and you have no idea how this will effect your results. 

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It’s impossible to reblog this too much~

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Last month I engaged in some wild speculation about how index funds and other big diversified institutional investors would cure Covid-19. Sort of. What I wrote is that those big investors, who own every public company, are less interested in the relative performance of any one company, and more interested in the performance of companies—and the economy—in general. They do not particularly care which company wins in cutthroat competition with other companies; they care about all of the companies doing okay.

All of the companies, right now, are not doing okay. If one company could find a way to fix that—if a drug company found a cure for Covid-19, say—that company could, theoretically, make a lot of money for itself. If you had a cure you could charge a lot of money for it; if you were the first drug company to make the cure there would be glory and patents and market share in it for you. Curing Covid-19 could be a high-stakes competitive endeavor, for a drug company, just like solving any big societal problem is generally a high-stakes competitive endeavor for the for-profit companies looking to do it. From a societal perspective this might not always be good: It might be better if the drug companies all shared information and worked together to find a cure as fast as possible; once they found it, it might be better if they gave it away for free. But from an individual company’s perspective there are other incentives.

Except that all the individual companies are owned by the same big shareholders, and those shareholders don’t care about who wins, they care about getting the economy working again. So I wrote:

“I will say that if I ran one of the big index-fund companies, and a pharmaceutical company in my portfolio developed a patented fully effective cure for Covid-19 that it could manufacture cheaply and planned to sell to anyone who could pay $50,000 a dose, I would call that company right up and say “no, you give that pill away for free, because the value to me of Covid-19 going away quickly and the economy recovering—the value to me as an owner of airlines and hotels and chain restaurants and retailers and every other company—is vastly, vastly greater than the value to me of your profits on that pill.” Strictly as a financial matter I mean, strictly as a matter of my fiduciary duty to my investors. I would call my index-fund-manager friends and tell them to do the same thing, and between us we might own enough shares of the company’s stock to make it do what we want. Later the antitrust authorities would ask us some uncomfortable questions about our conversations, but in these extreme circumstances that is a risk I’d live with.”

Sadly we are not there yet, in that no one has found a cure. But the rest of that paragraph—about index funds calling drug companies, and each other, to coordinate—is totally happening. From the Financial Times:

“The world’s biggest investors are urging drugmakers to collaborate on developing a coronavirus vaccine to end a crisis that has unleashed market turmoil and hammered returns for pension funds across the world.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, Fidelity Investments and sister company Fidelity International, Aviva Investors, Janus Henderson and Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, all told the Financial Times that they want drug companies to put aside any qualms about collaborating with rivals. …

BlackRock has recently held talks with pharma companies about ways of developing and deploying medicines and equipment, including working with industry competitors and regulators.

A separate group of more than 50 investors, managing more $2.5tn in assets, will next week step up the pressure by writing to more than a dozen global pharmaceutical companies. The letter will ask the groups to share any relevant findings on a vaccine and other treatments as well as to drop any enforcement of relevant patents.”

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I really hate that H.P. Lovecraft has been reduced to being “the problematic, racist author,” and the only one. I recently came across a reading that simply summed him up as a fascinating author, “but a horrible man with horrible ideas”; but this same group gave Agatha Christie a fucking tongue bath (And then There Were None was not always called that), uncritically praised child molester Marion Zimmer Bradley, and read off poems by Modernist poets that were eliminationist Anti-Semites.

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The University of Alberta study adds to a growing scientific realization that herbivores actually love meat, they’re just bad at finding it.

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Well before the new coronavirus spread across American cities, the Chinese regime was already rather creatively trolling U.S. publications, expelling American journalists, and “weaponizing wokeness” over anything it perceived as critical of China’s role in mishandling the epidemic. To hear Chinese spokespeople use the language of racism and prejudice is somewhat surreal, considering this is a regime that has put more than 1 million Muslims and ethnic minorities in “reeducation” camps.

- Shadi Hamid, The Atlantic

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Pics That Show How Differently Celebrities And Normal People Are Treated During The Coronavirus Outbreak

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Excerpt:

“There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this? Isn’t it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation’s mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental “master-minding.”

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it’s all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.”

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so like up until the 1600s, people believed that plants got their mass by eating dirt, because where the fuck else would they get it from. a guy named jan van helmont thought this sounded kind of funky and decided to test it by planting a willow tree sapling, letting it grow in a pot for 5 years, and measuring the soil before and after. lo and behold, at the end of the 5 year experiment the weight of the soil was basically the same. he decided that the mass of the growing willow tree would HAVE to be from water, because what the fuck else could the plant possibly eat, am i right lads???

anyway what im trying to get at is that its actually a really common misconception that plants eat dirt. they do not eat dirt. they get their mass from carbon dioxide in the air that they converted into sugars and starches in photosynthesis. yes, they get nutrients and stuff from the soil, but the bulk of what you see in terms of like, leaves and bark and Non-Water Plant Stuff™ was made from materials converted from carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. 

jan van helmont did not know this. jan van helmont self-identified as an alchemist and spent most of his time thinking very hard about how eating things worked while under the assumption that plants apparently got bigger from only water and absolutely nothing else. this, although some sort of mood i can’t pin down– a small worm, a similar hat, if you will– is not a life style i would encourage

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I don’t think you can plausibly get a union of web writers any more than you can get a union of, say, public masturbators.