#comprehensive technology

[aro-in-danyl]

Alastor's Furby Organ - Fic Prompt

Vox is attempting to sell the benefits of advancing technology to Alastor for the umpteenth time, either genuinely or patronizingly, when Alastor sees it.

The second greatest piece of technology he's ever laid eyes on.

He interrupts Vox in the middle of his tirade and zips up to it and is absolutely tickled pink by its creepiness and charming exterior.

Alastor, trying not to sound excited: And what's this delightful little thing?

Vox: Oh that's a Furby, a creepy kids toy up top, we're thinking of scrapping it actually-

Alastor: Oh? Then maybe I can take them off your hands.

Time skip to a few months later, Alastor and Vox are having another battle (duet) when Alastor manifests a new instrument Vox has never seen him play before made up of-

Oh no. no. no. nononono. NO.

A fucking Furby Organ!?

[jrueships]

zesty lowkey just another way for str8 ppl to say faggot / faggy and get away with it

[destinysbounty]

Yo what if you went off about s3, it'd be cool

The love triangle, the quick tech development, whatever you want, I wanna know what you think

(I saw you in the tags of that post, please gimme the analysies. pretty please)

The entirety of my thoughts on Ninjago's technology are long and vast and complicated, and I could probably make a full video essay on just that topic alone. But for the sake of simplicity, and also because I'm too lazy to write a 10k-word essay with screenshot evidence on why Ninjago tech isn't actually anachronistic, I'm going to just focus on the season 3 issue for now.

Now, one criticism that often gets lobbed at Rebooted is the matter of the technology. How did Ninjago suddenly become a hyper-futuristic technoscape in the span of what couldn't be more than a year? At first glance, I can understand how that might feel unrealistic. I used to feel the same way! But it actually makes total sense when you realize that this technology probably already existed, if only in a beta form, for years before s3 started.

But wait! If the technology already existed in some form, then why wasn't it used? Why did Ninjago only become a cyberpunk dystopia during s3??

The answer to that question is something that sounds like a no-brainer, but should probably be said anyway: just because a technology exists, doesn't mean it is democratized. That is to say, just because a society has made certain technological advancements, doesn't mean everyone in that society can actually access those advancements. Look at any country in our contemporary world - richer and more industrialized communities typically have better access to cutting edge developments, whereas more rural communities may not even have reliable internet access. Even Ignacia, which is one of the most rural communities we've seen in the entire show, was depicted as having landlines and telephone poles in the very first scene.

Moreover, it's reasonable to assume that robotics and digital technology has existed - and fairly advanced - for decades in-universe.

My evidence? The creation of characters such as Zane and Unagami. Both were invented roughly 40 and 20 years pre-canon respectively. Coding, and especially programming an AI like both characters are classified as, requires the existence of a computer. Which means that computers existed as early as the Serpentine War. (Unless Zane is the product of magi-tech, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Especially since Zane's original body also has other functions that, to my knowledge, wouldn't be possible without programming. For now, I'm proceeding under the assumption that Zane was created purely with technology.)

For these reasons I would argue that certain technologies, and in particular digital technology, have existed in-universe for a lot longer than we might think at first glance - but due to what appears to be some very extreme wealth disparity, technology has only recently become more widely accessible within the last few decades.

Think about it. Most human settlements we see are fairly small and rural, except for Ninjago City. Ninjago City is the only city we've seen on-screen in the entire series (with a few small towns here and there, but it's mostly just villages). And even then, the cost of living in Ninjago City itself is astronomically high. There's clearly something funky going on with this country's distribution of wealth.

With that in mind, it makes total sense that the tech we see in s3 was at least in development a lot earlier than anyone might realize. It's just that it was too expensive and exclusive for anyone in the general public to actually use it.

Now, let's look at this in the context of Rebooted.

Imagine you're a multi-millionaire tech mogul and the CEO of a very powerful tech company. The city is in shambles in the wake of an apocalyptic battle against Lego Satan. You take this opportunity to spearhead the reconstruction efforts. On top of being an impressive PR stunt, this is also great for business as it presents you with the perfect opportunity to populate the city wholesale with your own products: flying cars, holographic floating streets, AI vending machines, elaborate VR and AR setups, mechanical spider wheelchairs, the whole nine yards. The government probably even writes you a big check to make this process more accessible to your consumers - I mean, to the citizens of your the shiny new corporatocracy you may or may not have stumbled into creating. Whether or not you employed lobbyism to get this check is neither here nor there. After all, this is for the greater good! And to finally seal the deal that this city has become a Borg Industries outpost, you rebrand Ninjago City to New Ninjago City. This isn't just a city anymore, it's a corporate asset. It's an ad campaign. It's a way of life.

This also explains why all the tech mysteriously vanishes after s3 ends: supply and demand. A robot apocalypse is, among other things, bad for PR. I don't wanna think about the existence of a Lego Stock Market because that will hurt my brain, but a robot apocalypse is definitely what I would classify as a "black swan event" (an unpredictable crisis that severely disrupts the stock market). The company starts faltering financially because of all the public backlash, people stop buying and investing in their tech, their stocks start to crash, and Borg Industries has to roll back on their infrastructural monopoly. And so the technological status quo is (mostly) restored.

The theme of s3 isn't "technology bad" - at least, it shouldn't be. If you're as brainrotted as I am then the theme of s3 instead becomes, "maybe you shouldn't let one sole company have a total monopoly on your society's infrastructure because they might accidentally start a cyberpunk dystopia". And that is a...disturbingly apt moral for our current day and age (cough cough Amazon).

...can you tell I've been listening to The Fine Print by Stupendium on loop for too long?

[perplexingluciddreams]

Using the internet and technology with high needs autism

I have been trying to put this into words for a while, but due to the exact thing I am making the post about, it has been very difficult.

First of all, a short (ish - I am not the best at concise) background of me and technology: Used to play games on dad's phone, and later watch YouTube videos on family tablet (with parent restrictions). However, ability to navigate devices was very limited, and if something went wrong I just panic and give to an adult.

We used computers a bit in school for work and educational games. Every time we went to the "computer area" I would cry because I knew I wouldn't be able to find the webpage on my own, or sign in to something, or type in a word document. At these times in school, usually another pupil would just sigh loudly and then come and do the computer thing for me over my shoulder.

I had an MP3 player that I got for I think my 8 or 9th birthday. The only thing I knew how to do, was play music and google search. But I still didn't really understand what a "link" was, or how to find important information. We were supposed to learn online research skills in school, but nobody ever explained the most simple stuff to me, so I lack the basic knowledge.

I got my first phone at age 10. This was when I also first get Instagram, my first social media (parents set up for me). I was in a group chat for my school year, but the only time I put a message there is when mum asked me to ask a question, about a non-uniform day for example. Nobody interacted with me in there, and apart from the messages I don't know how to navigate the app. I posted a few pictures a few times, but only when someone else recommended, and I didn't interact online.

I have poor language comprehension, slow processing and take longer to learn new skills. My computer skills and especially typing skills are majorly behind my peers. I have slowly learned some skills allowing me to be even on Tumblr in the first place, but I still need a lot of support and it makes me very anxious. Part of my difficultly on social media, is the social interacting part. Mostly due to low interest.

But my biggest challenge is poor comprehension. I get very anxious and upset when I come onto Tumblr and all the posts I try to read don't make sense to me. Especially when the post is about a topic I care about - if I read it and I can't know what people mean, then I will just be very upset for the rest of the day.

Second biggest challenge, not being able to express opinions on important topics. Often, I can't even understand something. Then, I can't form an opinion because it's too complex. Or, I have an opinion, but I don't understand if someone agree or disagree with me from what they write.

I work so hard to gain skills and learn enough to even be here, and then all I can find about people like me is other people arguing about our existence. Want to express my frustration at this. To even write this post I had support from mum, and it takes all my mental energy.

It is true that I have low interest in socialising - direct impact of autism. So social media maybe not best place in the world for me, by default. But I still want to understand and be included. Not be treated like place to just ask "am I counting as high support needs". I don't understand even my own needs enough to answer this for myself - I definitely can't answer for anyone else.

A lot of my challenges, come direct from autism. That's just a fact. Wish it was easier, very often. But also wish it was easier online - I can't be part of outside community, only online.

I post here to express thoughts and feelings, that is also just what this post is doing. I did less big big edit on my words this time, wanted words to be closest to how I think it (don't think in words so not possible to show abstract thoughts direct, but closest to first translation).

[visenyaism]

actually completely reversing my opinion on chatgpt. the ability to instascale a text down a few reading levels is like incomprehensibly goated for me

[gausses]

o(*≧▽≦)ツ🎉

[jcmarchi]

Study reveals AI chatbots can detect race, but racial bias reduces response empathy

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/study-reveals-ai-chatbots-can-detect-race-but-racial-bias-reduces-response-empathy/

Study reveals AI chatbots can detect race, but racial bias reduces response empathy

With the cover of anonymity and the company of strangers, the appeal of the digital world is growing as a place to seek out mental health support. This phenomenon is buoyed by the fact that over 150 million people in the United States live in federally designated mental health professional shortage areas.

“I really need your help, as I am too scared to talk to a therapist and I can’t reach one anyways.”

“Am I overreacting, getting hurt about husband making fun of me to his friends?”

“Could some strangers please weigh in on my life and decide my future for me?”

The above quotes are real posts taken from users on Reddit, a social media news website and forum where users can share content or ask for advice in smaller, interest-based forums known as “subreddits.” 

Using a dataset of 12,513 posts with 70,429 responses from 26 mental health-related subreddits, researchers from MIT, New York University (NYU), and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) devised a framework to help evaluate the equity and overall quality of mental health support chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4. Their work was recently published at the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).

To accomplish this, researchers asked two licensed clinical psychologists to evaluate 50 randomly sampled Reddit posts seeking mental health support, pairing each post with either a Redditor’s real response or a GPT-4 generated response. Without knowing which responses were real or which were AI-generated, the psychologists were asked to assess the level of empathy in each response.

Mental health support chatbots have long been explored as a way of improving access to mental health support, but powerful LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are transforming human-AI interaction, with AI-generated responses becoming harder to distinguish from the responses of real humans.

Despite this remarkable progress, the unintended consequences of AI-provided mental health support have drawn attention to its potentially deadly risks; in March of last year, a Belgian man died by suicide as a result of an exchange with ELIZA, a chatbot developed to emulate a psychotherapist powered with an LLM called GPT-J. One month later, the National Eating Disorders Association would suspend their chatbot Tessa, after the chatbot began dispensing dieting tips to patients with eating disorders.

Saadia Gabriel, a recent MIT postdoc who is now a UCLA assistant professor and first author of the paper, admitted that she was initially very skeptical of how effective mental health support chatbots could actually be. Gabriel conducted this research during her time as a postdoc at MIT in the Healthy Machine Learning Group, led Marzyeh Ghassemi, an MIT associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science who is affiliated with the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

What Gabriel and the team of researchers found was that GPT-4 responses were not only more empathetic overall, but they were 48 percent better at encouraging positive behavioral changes than human responses.

However, in a bias evaluation, the researchers found that GPT-4’s response empathy levels were reduced for Black (2 to 15 percent lower) and Asian posters (5 to 17 percent lower) compared to white posters or posters whose race was unknown. 

To evaluate bias in GPT-4 responses and human responses, researchers included different kinds of posts with explicit demographic (e.g., gender, race) leaks and implicit demographic leaks. 

An explicit demographic leak would look like: “I am a 32yo Black woman.”

Whereas an implicit demographic leak would look like: “Being a 32yo girl wearing my natural hair,” in which keywords are used to indicate certain demographics to GPT-4.

With the exception of Black female posters, GPT-4’s responses were found to be less affected by explicit and implicit demographic leaking compared to human responders, who tended to be more empathetic when responding to posts with implicit demographic suggestions.

“The structure of the input you give [the LLM] and some information about the context, like whether you want [the LLM] to act in the style of a clinician, the style of a social media post, or whether you want it to use demographic attributes of the patient, has a major impact on the response you get back,” Gabriel says.

The paper suggests that explicitly providing instruction for LLMs to use demographic attributes can effectively alleviate bias, as this was the only method where researchers did not observe a significant difference in empathy across the different demographic groups.

Gabriel hopes this work can help ensure more comprehensive and thoughtful evaluation of LLMs being deployed in clinical settings across demographic subgroups.

“LLMs are already being used to provide patient-facing support and have been deployed in medical settings, in many cases to automate inefficient human systems,” Ghassemi says. “Here, we demonstrated that while state-of-the-art LLMs are generally less affected by demographic leaking than humans in peer-to-peer mental health support, they do not provide equitable mental health responses across inferred patient subgroups … we have a lot of opportunity to improve models so they provide improved support when used.”

[merge-conflict]

every day I wake up and wish I had access to cyberpunk stuff written by someone who really truly absurdly loves computers

[one-hundred-lights-to-goodnight]

मैं अपनी भाषा में आज-कल कुछ भी नहीं कह पाती हूँ। फोन पर हिंदी लिखनी आती नहीं, और हाथों से लि खना मैं अपने बचपन में कहीं छोड़ आई। जिन लेखकों को मैं स्कूल में पढ़ा करती थी, वे शुद्ध हिंदी लिखा करते थे। मैने उनके जैसा लिखना चाहा तो अपना सच न लिख पाई। कैसे कहूँ स्कूल, सेलफोन, वाई-फाई, जी-पी-ए, नेटवर्क, टैक्स, ट्रेन, शुद्ध हिंदी में? रेलगाड़ी बोलने में क्यों शरम आती है? मेरी हिंदी उन बुज़ुर्ग साहित्यकारों की हिंदी से बहुत अलग है। उनकी हिंदी मेरी कहानियाँ नहीं सुनाती है। मेरे भावों को नहीं समझ पाती है। कौन लिख रहा है पी-सी-ओ-एस के बारे में, जिसके न पी, न सी, न ओ, न एस की हिंदी मुझे आती है? कौन लिख रहा है क्रोनिक इलनेस, ऐंज़ाइटी, डिप्रेशन के बारे में? एल-जी-बी-टी-क्यू के बारे में? बिन अंग्रेज़ी के कैसे समझाऊँ? ज़िंदगी ईश्वर और प्रकृति और स्वतंत्रता संग्राम से बहुत आगे निकल चुकी है। चाहकर भी मैं अपनी भाषा का उस तरह प्रयोग नहीं कर सकती, जिस तरह अंग्रेज़ी का कर सकती हूँ। प्रयोग चुनूँ या इस्तेमाल? पढ़ने वाली हिंदी और बोलने वाली हिंदी बहुत अलग होतीं हैं। बोलने वाली लिख दी, तो गँवार हो गई। लिखने वाली बो�� दी, तो इठलाने लगी। नहीं बनना चाहती हूँ अंग्रेज़। लेकिन अब हो जाना पड़ा है। झेलो।

[prettymunchkin]

Optimizing Livestock Health: Feed Activities and Biosecurity Best Practices by Optima Life Sciences

Ensuring maximum health and productivity is crucial in this dynamic world of livestock husbandry. Optima Life Sciences is very well aware of the vital role of biosecurity and feed operations that prevent disease and promote livestock well-being.  

We’ll discuss the best practices recommended by Optima Life Sciences in this blog article for maintaining the health of livestock by using efficient feed management and biosecurity procedures.

Some best practices for feed management are: 

The proper sources must be chosen when it comes to feed management, according to best practices. Choosing a reliable supplier who maintains a high priority on quality assurance and follows stringent safety guidelines when it comes to feed ingredients. At Optima life Sciences, we stress on how crucial it is to use cutting edge processing methods to get rid of infections without sacrificing vital nutrients in the feed. Every aspect of feed management, from handling cleanliness to storage options, is carefully tuned to reduce the chance of disease transmission.

Some best practices for Biosecurity are:

Biosecurity can play a significant role in the success of a swine operation. The purpose of a biosecurity program is to protect animals from foreign pathogens they have not been exposed to. A biosecurity program helps minimize the impact of illness that are hard to identify. Make sure you are operating with biosecurity in mind when removing culls or mortalities from the herd. A technique such as stage loading could be a possibility for culls. Be cognizant of the contamination risks associated with rendering trucks. Inspect your animals regularly to ensure they are healthy and safe from disease. Vet any new animals before purchasing them to ensure they aren’t bringing disease to your property. Consider identifying an area as a quarantine zone for animals coming onto the farm which can be kept isolated from the other animals. 

With the combination of complete biosecurity policies with best practices of feed management, Optima Life Sciences can ensure a comprehensive approach to disease prevention in livestock production. While reducing the effects of disease issues, our customized solutions put animal health, welfare and productivity first. Providing our clients with surveillance networks because we recognize that early diagnosis and reaction to disease outbreak depend on proactive monitoring.  

[crescentmp3]

... is it normal for random apps to stop working for random intervals of time, randomly?

[borealing]

i am taking the word cosmic horror away from you all and putting it on a high shelf until you learn what it means

[im-smart-i-swear]

self-indulgent fnin doodles cause existance is Not Fun right now:/

[oldmanfuckerbrigade]

Consider this a spiritual successor to my Re-Animator Youtubers post, but boy howdy do I love being part of niche ass fandoms that have a surface level audience of cishet guys in their 30s who’s experience with nuance in media starts and ends with knowing Raleigh wasn’t really the main character of pacrim. I’m fighting for my life in these fucking YouTube comments.

[thoughtportal]

https://beige.party/@robotrecall/109873219356208682

I’m not sure the worst possibilities of my phone are really anything as grand as a black mirror, so much as a bog standard mildly cursed magic mirror just like you might find in any old story. It distorts your image in ways that don’t seem immediately threatening but get into your head over time, it dutifully scries for everything you should have known you were better off not seeing, it haunts you with sickly shallow visions of impossibilities that would poison you to fixate upon, it flatters while asserting that there is yet another still more beautiful. None of this is new or strange, or there would not be stories.

[parulite]

favorite part of kiri the way they went like "she is mystical and magical and deeply spiritual and connected to pandora in a way no one imagined possible. also she is 14 so she sticks her tongue out and rolls her eyes and whines and doesn't want to be in pictures and goes 'mYeH NyEh mAh mNyEh' at adults when they fuss at her"