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An Element of Emulation
New blog post: An Element of Emulation.
For an upcoming project, my poetry group has decided to look at forgotten poets from Dundee and bring them back to the forefront once more. As part of our research, we were invited up to the central library to look at archived copies of The People’s Journal. This was in print from 1858 to 1986, and the editions we looked at were all issued towards to the beginning of that period. Unfortunately,…
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Oh, David being David. 😂
#all my children#amc#marissa tasker#david hayward#scott chandler#asshat#soap opera#tv shows#sarah glendening#vincent irizarry#daniel cosgrove#jacob young#fave clip#videos#protective and sarcastic dad#comedic timing#pre minx relationship#not minx related#note: i don't dislike the actor i just don't care for the character
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Oracle cyber maverick dives into cloud security and AI - CyberTalk
New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/oracle-cyber-maverick-dives-into-cloud-security-and-ai-cybertalk/
Oracle cyber maverick dives into cloud security and AI - CyberTalk
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
David is the Senior Vice President for the Oracle SaaS Cloud Security engineering and operations organization. Previously, David was the public Cloud Security Engineering Director in the Google Security and Privacy organization and his preceding 18 years were spent with Microsoft in numerous security cloud, product and engineering leadership roles. David holds a B.S. in Computer Information Systems as well as an MBA with a Management Information Systems concentration and is a longtime advocate of security application and technology, stemming from his U.S. military service background. In this edited interview excerpt from the CISO’s Secrets podcast, SVP & CISO for Oracle SaaS Cloud Security, David Cross, shares insights into his unique career journey, the cloud security evolution, and artificial intelligence. Don’t miss this!
We are very fortunate to host this interview with David Cross! It’s pretty exciting to be here.
I like to say that I’m just a ‘worker bee’, but one who likes to make things happen. I’m a multi-tasker; a quality that’s inherently relevant to security.
Cyber security is not a single task. It’s multi-tasking. You’ve got to jump into many things, all at the same time.
You’ve got to keep things moving. And that’s why it’s a great fit for some people, like myself.
You know one of the things I’ve said for a long long time is and that’s really so awesome about this industry is that no matter when you get in, you’re getting in at the beginning of something.
Would you like to share a bit about your background, which is quite storied and impressive? Sure thing. At the very beginning of my career, I was in an electronic Navy attack squadron, the EA-6B Prowler. I am very thankful to the United States Service. It really helped me in my career…
This kicked off my passion for security. Electronic warfare. The threats. The offensive attacks, those type of things that are both virtual and electronic.
And that was early too…For you to have been thinking about the intersection of the virtual world and security, at such a point in time, is pretty interesting. Well, going back to my earliest days with the squadron, we didn’t really have network computers. We had embedded weapons systems that were based on DOS.
And as we evolved, in just in a couple of years…we went to Banyan Vines for their computer systems. But then in our plane, we had our prototype — and I can’t go into much more detail than this — but we had the Toshiba laptop, with NT 3.5 on it…And at this point, the world was changing…And the threats and risks changed with it.
You talk about the attack squadron…Here we are 20-30 years later…How do you feel that your experience in the military influences your role today? At that point in time, not a lot of people were thinking about security.
Long story short, we were coming back from our last deployment, I was in an aircraft carrier. I was standing watch in the ready room. My commander wants me to sign-up and do another tour. And my thinking was ‘no, my time is done’.
I then stopped at the naval exchange bookstore, in Naples, Italy, and I picked up Bruce Schneier’s first book, Applied Cryptography. And as I was reading that, I realized ‘this is what I need to do’.
And it wasn’t my domain at that point. I was not a cryptographer and I wasn’t into cyber security. But after my experience and after I saw the transformation in terms of what was going on in the military…I felt that it was the time to jump in.
What are your views on cloud and how the cloud is evolving within the security space?
Absolutely. I spent a lot of my time on the operating system layer and on things like Windows. But then it became clear that the cloud was emerging…And you really just had to jump in.
Otherwise, it would be like saying ‘no, I’ll never use online bill pay, it’s too dangerous!’ Not for me. But, once the gate opened…
Right, otherwise it would be like saying, ‘I’d rather keep buying stamps!’
…It’s not ‘if’ everybody’s moving to the cloud, it’s ‘when’ you’re moving to the cloud. There’s no getting around it. For how long do you think that your favorite mail server on bare hardware is going to be produced and supported at this point? It’s going away. There could be some things that remain on-premise, but let’s look at reality. We have to accept emerging technologies. Just like AI.
Is AI going to go away? We already know the answer to that, don’t we?
Right, not a chance. With your background, I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about your views on AI. With AI, we’ve had ML for a long time, but now we’re witnessing a transformation. Pretty exciting, right? I think that now is the opportune time for us to develop applications, as we did when computer infrastructure came out.
My real question to you is, when are we going to adopt the laws of robotics that Issac Asimov came up with so long ago? Isn’t that the same as AI?
That’s a great question, David… I was born and raised in Detroit, an area home to the auto industry. At one point, it was thought that automation within the auto industry would kill jobs.
But it hasn’t. The auto industry has survived. The manufacturing and the roles have not changed.
AI is likely to have a similar effect. People fear that it’s coming for jobs, but the reality is that it probably won’t make a dent in that regard.
Another element that’s been hinted at a few times is that — whether you’re an engineering leader, a security leader or any other type of leader — things are going to change, and you have to keep learning.
The moment you stop learning is the moment that you’ve plateaued, and then you’re declining into the ocean.
AI is the next big thing — Am I going to reject it? No. Am I going to embrace it and learn it? Yes. It’s just like the cloud. We had to embrace it and learn it…
Another thing that I like to say is that it’s not about how hard you work, it’s about how much you invest in yourself. And that is what really makes a difference in people and the world.
You can choose to ignore the latest technology…But I think your point is spot-on. The fascinating stuff is the unknown; it’s not the stuff we know. And I think that’s what’s exciting about this industry, right? The cloud, IoT, SASE…The list goes on in terms of things that are coming to the fore. Totally, and…
Listen to the full podcast here.
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#ai#aircraft#amp#applications#artificial#Artificial Intelligence#automation#background#bee#book#Born#career#change#CISO#Cloud#Cloud Security#cloud security evolution#computer#computers#cryptography#cyber#cyber attack#cyber security#deployment#electronic#electronic warfare#emerging technologies#engineering#Evolution#fear
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A few months after graduating from college in Nairobi, a 30-year-old I’ll call Joe got a job as an annotator — the tedious work of processing the raw information used to train artificial intelligence. AI learns by finding patterns in enormous quantities of data, but first that data has to be sorted and tagged by people, a vast workforce mostly hidden behind the machines. (..) It’s difficult and repetitive work. A several-second blip of footage took eight hours to annotate, for which Joe was paid about $10.
Then, in 2019, an opportunity arose: Joe could make four times as much running an annotation boot camp for a new company that was hungry for labelers. Every two weeks, 50 new recruits would file into an office building in Nairobi to begin their apprenticeships. There seemed to be limitless demand for the work. They would be asked to categorize clothing seen in mirror selfies, look through the eyes of robot vacuum cleaners to determine which rooms they were in, and draw squares around lidar scans of motorcycles. Over half of Joe’s students usually dropped out before the boot camp was finished. (..)
After boot camp, they went home to work alone in their bedrooms and kitchens, forbidden from telling anyone what they were working on, which wasn’t really a problem because they rarely knew themselves. (..) Each project was such a small component of some larger process that it was difficult to say what they were actually training AI to do. Nor did the names of the projects offer any clues: Crab Generation, Whale Segment, Woodland Gyro, and Pillbox Bratwurst. They were non sequitur code names for non sequitur work.
As for the company employing them, most knew it only as Remotasks, a website offering work to anyone fluent in English. Like most of the annotators I spoke with, Joe was unaware until I told him that Remotasks is the worker-facing subsidiary of a company called Scale AI, a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley data vendor that counts OpenAI and the U.S. military among its customers. Neither Remotasks’ or Scale’s website mentions the other.
Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.
For Joe’s students, it was work stripped of all its normal trappings: a schedule, colleagues, knowledge of what they were working on or whom they were working for. In fact, they rarely called it work at all — just “tasking.” They were taskers.
The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.
The current AI boom (..) began with an unprecedented feat of tedious and repetitive labor.
In 2007, the AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, then a professor at Princeton, suspected the key to improving image-recognition neural networks, a method of machine learning that had been languishing for years, was training on more data — millions of labeled images rather than tens of thousands. The problem was that it would take decades and millions of dollars for her team of undergrads to label that many photos.
Li found thousands of workers on Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform where people around the world complete small tasks for cheap. The resulting annotated dataset, called ImageNet, enabled breakthroughs in machine learning that revitalized the field and ushered in a decade of progress.
Annotation remains a foundational part of making AI, but there is often a sense among engineers that it’s a passing, inconvenient prerequisite to the more glamorous work of building models. You collect as much labeled data as you can get as cheaply as possible to train your model, and if it works, at least in theory, you no longer need the annotators. But annotation is never really finished. Machine-learning systems are what researchers call “brittle,” prone to fail when encountering something that isn’t well represented in their training data. These failures, called “edge cases,” can have serious consequences. In 2018, an Uber self-driving test car killed a woman because, though it was programmed to avoid cyclists and pedestrians, it didn’t know what to make of someone walking a bike across the street. (..)
Over the past six months, I spoke with more than two dozen annotators from around the world, and while many of them were training cutting-edge chatbots, just as many were doing the mundane manual labor required to keep AI running. There are people classifying the emotional content of TikTok videos, new variants of email spam, and the precise sexual provocativeness of online ads. Others are looking at credit-card transactions and figuring out what sort of purchase they relate to or checking e-commerce recommendations and deciding whether that shirt is really something you might like after buying that other shirt. Humans are correcting customer-service chatbots, listening to Alexa requests, and categorizing the emotions of people on video calls. They are labeling food so that smart refrigerators don’t get confused by new packaging, checking automated security cameras before sounding alarms, and identifying corn for baffled autonomous tractors. (..)
The data vendors behind familiar names like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft come in different forms. There are private outsourcing companies with call-center-like offices, such as the Kenya- and Nepal-based CloudFactory, where Joe annotated for $1.20 an hour before switching to Remotasks. There are also “crowdworking” sites like Mechanical Turk and Clickworker where anyone can sign up to perform tasks. In the middle are services like Scale AI. Anyone can sign up, but everyone has to pass qualification exams and training courses and undergo performance monitoring. Annotation is big business. (..)
This tangled supply chain is deliberately hard to map. According to people in the industry, the companies buying the data demand strict confidentiality. (This is the reason Scale cited to explain why Remotasks has a different name.) Annotation reveals too much about the systems being developed, and the huge number of workers required makes leaks difficult to prevent. Annotators are warned repeatedly not to tell anyone about their jobs, not even their friends and co-workers, but corporate aliases, project code names, and, crucially, the extreme division of labor ensure they don’t have enough information about them to talk even if they wanted to. (Most workers requested pseudonyms for fear of being booted from the platforms.) Consequently, there are no granular estimates of the number of people who work in annotation, but it is a lot, and it is growing. A recent Google Research paper gave an order-of-magnitude figure of “millions” with the potential to become “billions.”
(..) Erik Duhaime, CEO of medical-data-annotation company Centaur Labs, recalled how, several years ago, prominent machine-learning engineers were predicting AI would make the job of radiologist obsolete. When that didn’t happen, conventional wisdom shifted to radiologists using AI as a tool. Neither of those is quite what he sees occurring. AI is very good at specific tasks, Duhaime said, and that leads work to be broken up and distributed across a system of specialized algorithms and to equally specialized humans. (..)
Worries about AI-driven disruption are often countered with the argument that AI automates tasks, not jobs, and that these tasks will be the dull ones, leaving people to pursue more fulfilling and human work. But just as likely, the rise of AI will look like past labor-saving technologies, maybe like the telephone or typewriter, which vanquished the drudgery of message delivering and handwriting but generated so much new correspondence, commerce, and paperwork that new offices staffed by new types of workers — clerks, accountants, typists — were required to manage it. When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious.
Earlier this year, I signed up for Scale AI’s Remotasks. The process was straightforward. After entering my computer specs, internet speed, and some basic contact information, I found myself in the “training center.” To access a paying task, I first had to complete an associated (unpaid) intro course.
The training center displayed a range of courses with inscrutable names like Glue Swimsuit and Poster Macadamia. I clicked on something called GFD Chunking, which revealed itself to be labeling clothing in social-media photos.
The instructions, however, were odd. For one, they basically consisted of the same direction reiterated in the idiosyncratically colored and capitalized typography of a collaged bomb threat. (..)
I skimmed to the bottom of the manual, where the instructor had written in the large bright-red font equivalent of grabbing someone by the shoulders and shaking them, “THE FOLLOWING ITEMS SHOULD NOT BE LABELED because a human could not actually put wear any of these items!” above a photo of C-3PO, Princess Jasmine from Aladdin, and a cartoon shoe with eyeballs.
Feeling confident in my ability to distinguish between real clothes that can be worn by real people and not-real clothes that cannot, I proceeded to the test. Right away, it threw an ontological curveball: a picture of a magazine depicting photos of women in dresses. Is a photograph of clothing real clothing? No, I thought, because a human cannot wear a photograph of clothing. Wrong! As far as AI is concerned, photos of real clothes are real clothes. Next came a photo of a woman in a dimly lit bedroom taking a selfie before a full-length mirror. The blouse and shorts she’s wearing are real. What about their reflection? Also real! Reflections of real clothes are also real clothes.
After an embarrassing amount of trial and error, I made it to the actual work, only to make the horrifying discovery that the instructions I’d been struggling to follow had been updated and clarified so many times that they were now a full 43 printed pages of directives: Do NOT label open suitcases full of clothes; DO label shoes but do NOT label flippers; DO label leggings but do NOT label tights; do NOT label towels even if someone is wearing it; label costumes but do NOT label armor. And so on.
There has been general instruction disarray across the industry, according to Milagros Miceli, a researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute in Germany who studies data work. It is in part a product of the way machine-learning systems learn. Where a human would get the concept of “shirt” with a few examples, machine-learning programs need thousands, and they need to be categorized with perfect consistency yet varied enough that the very literal system can handle the diversity of the real world. (..)
The act of simplifying reality for a machine results in a great deal of complexity for the human. Instruction writers must come up with rules that will get humans to categorize the world with perfect consistency. To do so, they often create categories no human would use. (..)
The job of the annotator often involves putting human understanding aside and following instructions very, very literally. (..) Annotators invariably end up confronted with confounding questions like, Is that a red shirt with white stripes or a white shirt with red stripes? Is a wicker bowl a “decorative bowl” if it’s full of apples? What color is leopard print? When instructors said to label traffic-control directors, did they also mean to label traffic-control directors eating lunch on the sidewalk? Every question must be answered, and a wrong guess could get you banned and booted to a new, totally different task with its own baffling rules.
Most of the work on Remotasks is paid at a piece rate with a single task earning anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. Because tasks can take seconds or hours, wages are hard to predict. When Remotasks first arrived in Kenya, annotators said it paid relatively well — averaging about $5 to $10 per hour depending on the task — but the amount fell as time went on.
Scale AI spokesperson Anna Franko said that the company’s economists analyze the specifics of a project, the skills required, the regional cost of living, and other factors “to ensure fair and competitive compensation.” Former Scale employees also said pay is determined through a surge-pricing-like mechanism that adjusts for how many annotators are available and how quickly the data is needed.
(..) The most common complaint about Remotasks work is its variability; it’s steady enough to be a full-time job for long stretches but too unpredictable to rely on. Annotators spend hours reading instructions and completing unpaid trainings only to do a dozen tasks and then have the project end. There might be nothing new for days, then, without warning, a totally different task appears and could last anywhere from a few hours to weeks. (..)
This boom-and-bust cycle results from the cadence of AI development, according to engineers and data vendors. Training a large model requires an enormous amount of annotation followed by more iterative updates, and engineers want it all as fast as possible so they can hit their target launch date. There may be monthslong demand for thousands of annotators, then for only a few hundred, then for a dozen specialists of a certain type, and then thousands again. (..)
To succeed, annotators work together. (..) Like a lot of annotators, Victor uses unofficial WhatsApp groups to spread the word when a good task drops. When he figures out a new one, he starts impromptu Google Meets to show others how it’s done. Anyone can join and work together for a time, sharing tips. (..)
Because work appears and vanishes without warning, taskers always need to be on alert. Victor has found that projects pop up very late at night, so he is in the habit of waking every three hours or so to check his queue. When a task is there, he’ll stay awake as long as he can to work. (..)
Identifying clothing and labeling customer-service conversations are just some of the annotation gigs available. Lately, the hottest on the market has been chatbot trainer. Because it demands specific areas of expertise or language fluency and wages are often adjusted regionally, this job tends to pay better. Certain types of specialist annotation can go for $50 or more per hour.
A woman I’ll call Anna was searching for a job in Texas when she stumbled across a generic listing for online work and applied. It was Remotasks, and after passing an introductory exam, she was brought into a Slack room of 1,500 people who were training a project code-named Dolphin, which she later discovered to be Google DeepMind’s chatbot, Sparrow, one of the many bots competing with ChatGPT. Her job is to talk with it all day. At about $14 an hour, plus bonuses for high productivity. (..)
Each time Anna prompts Sparrow, it delivers two responses and she picks the best one, thereby creating something called “human-feedback data.” When ChatGPT debuted late last year, its impressively natural-seeming conversational style was credited to its having been trained on troves of internet data. But the language that fuels ChatGPT and its competitors is filtered through several rounds of human annotation. One group of contractors writes examples of how the engineers want the bot to behave, creating questions followed by correct answers, descriptions of computer programs followed by functional code, and requests for tips on committing crimes followed by polite refusals. After the model is trained on these examples, yet more contractors are brought in to prompt it and rank its responses. This is what Anna is doing with Sparrow. Exactly which criteria the raters are told to use varies — honesty, or helpfulness, or just personal preference. The point is that they are creating data on human taste, and once there’s enough of it, engineers can train a second model to mimic their preferences at scale, automating the ranking process and training their AI to act in ways humans approve of. The result is a remarkably human-seeming bot that mostly declines harmful requests and explains its AI nature with seeming self-awareness.
Put another way, ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing.
This circuitous technique is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or RLHF, and it’s so effective that it’s worth pausing to fully register what it doesn’t do. When annotators teach a model to be accurate, the model isn’t learning to check answers against logic or external sources or about what accuracy as a concept even is. The model is still a text-prediction machine mimicking patterns in human writing, but now its training corpus has been supplemented with bespoke examples, and the model has been weighted to favor them. Maybe this results in the model extracting patterns from the part of its linguistic map labeled as accurate and producing text that happens to align with the truth, but it can also result in it mimicking the confident style and expert jargon of the accurate text while writing things that are totally wrong. There is no guarantee that the text the labelers marked as accurate is in fact accurate, and when it is, there is no guarantee that the model learns the right patterns from it. (..)
When Anna rates Sparrow’s responses, she’s supposed to be looking at their accuracy, helpfulness, and harmlessness while also checking that the model isn’t giving medical or financial advice or anthropomorphizing itself or running afoul of other criteria. (..) According to Geoffrey Irving, one of DeepMind’s research scientists, the company’s researchers hold weekly annotation meetings in which they rerate data themselves and discuss ambiguous cases, consulting with ethical or subject-matter experts when a case is particularly tricky.
Because feedback data is difficult to collect, it fetches a higher price. Basic preferences of the sort Anna is producing sell for about $1 each, according to people with knowledge of the industry. But if you want to train a model to do legal research, you need someone with training in law, and this gets expensive. Everyone involved is reluctant to say how much they’re spending, but in general, specialized written examples can go for hundreds of dollars, while expert ratings can cost $50 or more. One engineer told me about buying examples of Socratic dialogues for up to $300 a pop. Another told me about paying $15 for a “darkly funny limerick about a goldfish.”
OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic did not comment about how many people contribute annotations to their models, how much they are paid, or where in the world they are located. Irving of DeepMind, which is a subsidiary of Google, said the annotators working on Sparrow are paid “at least the hourly living wage” based on their location. Anna knows “absolutely nothing” about Remotasks, but Sparrow has been more open. She wasn’t the only annotator I spoke with who got more information from the AI they were training than from their employer; several others learned whom they were working for by asking their AI for its company’s terms of service. (..)
Until recently, it was relatively easy to spot bad output from a language model. It looked like gibberish. But this gets harder as the models get better — a problem called “scalable oversight.” (..) This trajectory means annotation increasingly requires specific skills and expertise.
Last year, someone I’ll call Lewis was working on Mechanical Turk when, after completing a task, he received a message inviting him to apply for a platform he hadn’t heard of. It was called Taskup.ai, and its website was remarkably basic: just a navy background with text reading GET PAID FOR TASKS ON DEMAND. He applied.
The work paid far better than anything he had tried before, often around $30 an hour. It was more challenging, too: devising complex scenarios to trick chatbots into giving dangerous advice, testing a model’s ability to stay in character, and having detailed conversations about scientific topics so technical they required extensive research. (..) While checking one model’s attempts to code in Python, Lewis was learning too. He couldn’t work for more than four hours at a stretch, lest he risk becoming mentally drained and making mistakes, and he wanted to keep the job. (..)
I spoke with eight other workers, most based in the U.S., who had similar experiences of answering surveys or completing tasks on other platforms and finding themselves recruited for Taskup.ai or several similarly generic sites, such as DataAnnotation.tech or Gethybrid.io. Often their work involved training chatbots, though with higher-quality expectations and more specialized purposes than other sites they had worked for. One was demonstrating spreadsheet macros. Another was just supposed to have conversations and rate responses according to whatever criteria she wanted. (..)
Taskup.ai, DataAnnotation.tech, and Gethybrid.io all appear to be owned by the same company: Surge AI. Its CEO, Edwin Chen, would neither confirm nor deny the connection, but he was willing to talk about his company and how he sees annotation evolving.
“We want AI to tell jokes or write really good marketing copy or help me out when I need therapy or whatnot,” Chen said. “You can’t ask five people to independently come up with a joke and combine it into a majority answer. Not everybody can tell a joke or solve a Python program. The annotation landscape needs to shift from this low-quality, low-skill mind-set to something that’s much richer and captures the range of human skills and creativity and values that we want AI systems to possess.”
Last year, Surge relabeled Google’s dataset classifying Reddit posts by emotion. Google had stripped each post of context and sent them to workers in India for labeling. Surge employees familiar with American internet culture found that 30 percent of the labels were wrong. (..)
Surge claims to vet its workers for qualifications (..) but exactly how Surge finds workers is “proprietary,” Chen said. As with Remotasks, workers often have to complete training courses, though unlike Remotasks, they are paid for it, according to the annotators I spoke with. Having fewer, better-trained workers producing higher-quality data allows Surge to compensate better than its peers, Chen said, though he declined to elaborate, saying only that people are paid “fair and ethical wages.” The workers I spoke with earned between $15 and $30 per hour, but they are a small sample of all the annotators, a group Chen said now consists of 100,000 people. The secrecy, he explained, stems from clients’ demands for confidentiality.
Surge’s customers include OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic. Surge specializes in feedback and language annotation, and after ChatGPT launched, it got an influx of requests. (..)
The new models are so impressive they’ve inspired another round of predictions that annotation is about to be automated. Given the costs involved, there is significant financial pressure to do so. Anthropic, Meta, and other companies have recently made strides in using AI to drastically reduce the amount of human annotation needed to guide models (..). However, a recent paper found that GPT-4-trained models may be learning to mimic GPT’s authoritative style with even less accuracy, and so far, when improvements in AI have made one form of annotation obsolete, demand for other, more sophisticated types of labeling has gone up.
“I think you always need a human to monitor what AIs are doing just because they are this kind of alien entity,” Chen said. Machine-learning systems are just too strange ever to fully trust. The most impressive models today have what, to a human, seems like bizarre weaknesses, he added, pointing out that though GPT-4 can generate complex and convincing prose, it can’t pick out which words are adjectives: “Either that or models get so good that they’re better than humans at all things, in which case, you reach your utopia and who cares?” (..)
One way the AI industry differs from manufacturers of phones and cars is in its fluidity. The work is constantly changing, constantly getting automated away and replaced with new needs for new types of data. It’s an assembly line but one that can be endlessly and instantly reconfigured, moving to wherever there is the right combination of skills, bandwidth, and wages.
Lately, the best-paying work is in the U.S. In May, Scale started listing annotation jobs on its own website, soliciting people with experience in practically every field AI is predicted to conquer. (..) You can make $45 an hour teaching robots law or make $25 an hour teaching them poetry. There were also listings for people with security clearance, presumably to help train military AI. Scale recently launched a defense-oriented language model called Donovan, which Wang called “ammunition in the AI war,” and won a contract to work on the Army’s robotic-combat-vehicle program.
(When Remotasks first arrived in Kenya, Joe thought annotation could be a good career. Even after the work moved elsewhere, he was determined to make it one. (..)
Rather than let their skills go to waste, other taskers decided to chase the work wherever it went. They rented proxy servers to disguise their locations and bought fake IDs to pass security checks so they could pretend to work from Singapore, the Netherlands, Mississippi, or wherever the tasks were flowing. It’s a risky business. Scale has become increasingly aggressive about suspending accounts caught disguising their location, according to multiple taskers. It was during one of these crackdowns that my account got banned, presumably because I had been using a VPN to see what workers in other countries were seeing, and all $1.50 or so of my earnings were seized. (..)
Another Kenyan annotator said that after his account got suspended for mysterious reasons, he decided to stop playing by the rules. Now, he runs multiple accounts in multiple countries, tasking wherever the pay is best. He works fast and gets high marks for quality, he said, thanks to ChatGPT. The bot is wonderful, he said, letting him speed through $10 tasks in a matter of minutes. When we spoke, he was having it rate another chatbot’s responses according to seven different criteria, one AI training the other.
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Count-Down: Number 23
Welcome to Count-Down! All throughout the month of October, I’m counting down my Top 31 favorite portrayals and reimaginings of the King of the Vampires, Count Dracula! Today’s Dracula is truly a multi-tasker: he spends as much time chewing scenery as he does biting necks! Number 23 is…Richard Roxburgh.
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I’m fairly certain that “Van Helsing” was my introduction to actor Richard Roxburgh, and I’m equally certain this was one of the earliest “serious” interpretations of Dracula and various other famous monsters from cinema and literature I ever got to see. I use quotation marks with the word “serious” because…well…as anyone who has seen this film will tell you, I think it’s hard to say this is a proper dramatic reimagining and do so with a straight face. “Van Helsing” was the brainchild of Stephen Sommers; Sommers had first made a big break with his action-adventure, B-Movie-With-an-A-Movie-Budget remake of “The Mummy,” which is still considered by many to be, if nothing else, a fun reimagining of the classic titular monster for a new generation. However, after this first blockbuster, Sommers’ projects with monsters tended to fall flat of expectations, as his later Mummy movies never really held a candle to the first…and he did Van Helsing, which seemed to be universally panned by critics and audiences alike at the time, despite having a LOT of hype built up around it, and a lot of money thrown its way. Truth be told, I actually rather like Van Helsing. It’s dumb, but it’s a fun kind of dumb: the film was meant to be a modern-era sendup of the old Monster Mash movies of the 1940s and 50s. In this picture, we have a whole cavalcade of classic creeps appear, most notably Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolfman…and, of course, Count Dracula. And truth be told…that’s exactly what it feels like. Keep in mind, those old Monster Mash movies were over-the-top, ridiculously plotted, had effects that don’t hold up particularly well, and tended to ignore a lot of continuity and canon elements. This movie does all those things, and just like a lot of those older movies, I still find it immeasurably entertaining: for all its flaws, there’s just a sense of ludicrous fun to it. It’s rarely truly scary, and there’s plenty in it one can mock, but for a kid watching it, I thought it was a blast! And as an adult revisiting it? Yes, it’s completely absurd, but it’s got a lot of good things buried inside it, and I still have a soft spot for it…again, just like those old movies. Whether all this was INTENTIONAL or not is up to debate, but the bottom line is that the film, in paying homage to those older pictures, ends up having a similar legacy: it’s hard to call it a good movie, but it’s also hard to say it’s not an entertaining ride, at least for me. A key example of this sense of “updating the old” – both for the better AND the worst, one could argue – is Roxburgh’s performance as Dracula. Roxburgh is an actor known for being something of a ham; this is partially because the projects he does are often rather over-the-top in nature, to be fair, so he’s really just playing to the style, but I guess it doesn’t help the actor’s reputation. All that hammy goodness is on full display as Dracula, who honestly feels, in many ways, like a more modern, “edgier” version of dear old Bela Lugosi. Roxburgh’s thick dialect is certainly similar, as are some of his gestures and facial expressions. But while Lugosi’s melodrama was the commanding, powerful, charismatic sort, Roxburgh gives Dracula a more flamboyant, almost “glam rock” sort of performance. One person at least compared his Dracula to Jareth the Goblin King from Labyrinth, and…I actually find it hard to disagree. There’s something vaguely reminiscent of David Bowie in the way Roxburgh seems to glide from scene to scene, arms gesticulating theatrically and moving from classically debonair to gnashing his teeth like a wild beast. For all his bombastic insanity, however, Roxburgh’s Dracula is, at times, legitimately effective, and while the CGI in the movie is notoriously “meh,” I do love the DESIGN of his “true form,” an idea with Dracula that didn’t START with Roxburgh, but I think MIGHT have been popularized by him. It’s one of the first versions of Dracula I think of when I think of that particular trope, and his Brides in this film – who are equally over-exuberant in their performance – are actually the first versions I think of when I think of those characters, too, bizarre as that may seem. The same goes for a lot of other things in the picture; again, it’s silly, but much like Roxburgh’s portrayal of the Great Undead, there’s still something of value here. Besides, it’s hard to COMPLETELY hate anything Hugh Jackman is in…at least in my experience. (I’m sure there are some things you can completely hate with him involved, I just don’t intend to see them. I’m looking at you, Movie 43: YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE.) Tomorrow, the countdown continues! Hint: A Forgotten Return for the Great Undead.
#count-down#top 31 draculas#dracula#count dracula#halloween advent calendar#october special#number 23#van helsing#richard roxburgh
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today’s bloopers!!
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When Donny walks with the short toddler preset he moves like a windup toy. Or one of those rolling duck things
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what can i say david is a multi-tasker
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and the clones are at it again
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he’s just got to be SO dramatic, god forbid joe get any attention
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speaking of joe, he went for the emo look i guess
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irene doesn’t mess around, boy!
#ts4#s4 decades#sims 4 decades#ts4 decades challenge#the sims 4#sims 4#sims 4 decades challenge#1930s#bloopers
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New York Botanical Garden Gala & Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame Cocktail Hour | New York City, NY | June 3, 2021
Fekkai ‘Baby Blonde Multi-Tasker Brightening Air-Dry Crème’ - $20.00
Hair stylist Renato Campora used this creme which helps to moisturize and brighten blonde hair. It can be used to effortless, lived-in waves and is a great base for styling the hair. It is also available here.
Worn with: Atelier Biser top, Mônot pants, Versace shoes and David Webb & Briony Raymond New York jewelry
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Survey #360
“we are the ones that wanna play / always wanna go, but you never wanna stay”
"Crawling" or "In The End?" I want to say "Crawling," but I really can't be sure. Both are bomb. Is your window open? No. Monsters Inc. or Shrek? Shrek, my man. What did you last hear that made your jaw drop? Jason's mom died. What is the longest shower or bath you have ever taken? I remember as kids, Nicole and I would sometimes play 'til Mom made us finish because the water was cold by then. As an adult, idk about my longest shower. Do you have a preference of chocolate? Yeah, milk chocolate. Is there anyone you’d like to hug right now? Yeah. Could you ever picture someone writing a biography about you? Definitely not. Do you have a clock in your room? No. Do you shut off the computer when you’re done using it? No, I just close it. Do you usually catch a cold during the winter? No. I just about never get sick. Are you a good multi-tasker? NOOOOOOOOOOO. Do you know any deaf people? If so, is it easy or difficult to have conversations with them? No. Is there a door knocker on your front door? No. Were you ever into Pokémon? Bitch I still am. Do you drink a lot of water? Sigh, no. I'm definitely better than I used to be, though; once upon a time, I literally never drank it unless I was extremely hot and dehydrated. Nowadays, it's usually after I finish my soda for the day that I then only drink water, normally around one full tall cup of it. Do you like fireworks? They're beautiful, but I'm personally against them out of respect for veterans suffering from PTSD as well as animals, because I'm not exactly interested in traumatizing them, either. Is respect given or earned with you? It's given, the way I think it should be. Are you “in the closet” about anything? No. Are you missing any teeth? No. Do you like scrapbooking? I've never gotten into it and am not really interested in doing so. What was or will be your first tattoo? It's a semicolon butterfly on my right wrist. Sometimes I've thought about getting it covered with a cooler design but the same concept; it was literally from Google, and I'm very much not into "sharing" tattoo designs with probably thousands of other people. But, I still think it really is cute, and it's just very special to me as my first, so idk. Do you have any tattoos dedicated to someone special? I have one written in Sara's handwriting inside a heart, and my "ohana" tattoo that I am 100% getting covered was dedicated to my former best friend Colleen. I've talked before about why "ohana" has never really resonated with me, and I just don't like it anymore at all. Thank God it's small. Do you like ghost stories? Oh HELL yeah, lay 'em on me. What was your favorite movie as a kid? The Lion King. Some things never change, ha. Do you own a lot of cookbooks? Mom has looooots, but never uses any. I think her mom gave them to her, so she just keeps 'em. What’s your father’s handwriting like? It looks like every other man's handwriting I've ever seen lol. All the letters are capitalized. Did you wash your hair last time you showered? I wash my hair every time I shower. I have to with it naturally being so oily. What does your shampoo smell like? Coconut. Do you listen to Guns N' Roses? Not a lot, but yeah. They've got some bangers. I actually want "Sweet Child O' Mine" to be the father/daughter dance at my wedding. Have you ever been a bridesmaid? Yeah, at my sister's wedding. What was the last video game that you beat? I replayed Silent Hill 2 a long time ago. Have you ever hyperventilated? Yep. Do you talk in your sleep? I scream in my sleep. Nightmares/terrors are a blast. Whose house did you last sleep over? Sara's. Have you ever been cut by scissors? No. Do you like peaches? It's odd, I like canned sliced peaches, but the actual, full fruit, I don't. I love peach flavored juice, though. Do you enjoy being surrounded by neighbors, or would you be more comfortable someplace secluded? Take me back to the middle of nowhere, please. I'm really not digging being in an actual neighborhood. Is there any sibling rivalry between you and your siblings, if you have any? Not at all. Do you usually root for the good guys or the bad guys? Ha, the baddies... Are you allowed to have pets at your house? We're allowed to have what we currently own and then maybe one dog if Mom finally finds one. Have you ever lived in a trailer park? No. Is there anyone that you know through the internet that you would feel comfortable meeting in person? There's quite a few, actually! Have you ever had a dream involving characters from a game/movie/television show? Yeah. What’s the last thing you wrote down? My signature, I think? Do you remember any phone numbers from years ago that now belong to someone you don’t know? No. Have you ever found something strange in your mailbox? No. Who was the last relative that came to visit you? My half-sister and her husband. Does your bedding all match? Not currently. Are you more comfortable with having short hair or long hair? SHORT. Are you interested in fantasy movies/shows? That's my preference. Have you ever gone whale-watching? No, but that'd be dope. What is something that you have a large amount of? Meerkat plushies. Who is it that you’re in love with? Nobody. Have you ever gotten love and infatuation confused? No. Do you have a steady income? No. Do you take your medications in the morning or at night? Both. Have you ever bought a YouTuber’s merch? No, I wish. :( Do you think oatmeal tastes better when made with water or milk? MILK. I don't eat it with water. When was the last time you ran into someone that you didn’t want to see? Idk. Have you ever tried vlogging, and if yes, did you stick with it? Noooo, I'm completely disinterested in doing that myself. If you go to church, what is your favorite thing about it? I don't go. Even as a kid when Mom made me, I hated it. ^and what is your least favorite thing about it? N/A What do you do for exercise? I don't. .-. I want a pool SO badly to swim and strengthen my legs without having to worry about sweating or collapsing, though. Mom says we don't have space, but we definitely do. Not a lot, but enough. Do you have a birthmark? If yes, what color is it? Yeah, it's just a bit darker than the rest of my skin. Do you need to lose weight? Yes. My sister, Mom, and I very recently started a Weight Watchers subscription and we're all working our asses off to stick to it. Ash has already lost like, 12 pounds (she started before Mom and me), so I'm kinda hopeful. Have you ever had a cat? Growing up, after we took in a stray female, we ended up with a fucking empire of cats, literally around three dozen, I'd say. They were all outdoors, too, and not fixed because we couldn't afford it, so tomcats would come around and, y'know, make matters worse. Eventually, animal control took them all and I was DEVASTATED, but looking back, I understand it was necessary. Anyway, I have one cat now. Indoors and fixed and the prince of my world, haha. Have you ever had a dog? We've had a few. I was born with my dad having a collie named Trigger, but I don't remember her at all; she died of old age I believe when I was very young. Then we briefly had a pup named Angel, but she died due to that disease some puppies just have. We didn't get another dog until Teddy, who was my Christmas present, and he was put to sleep only last year, rest my baby's soul. We also had Dale, Cali, Delilah, and Bentley. Have you ever any other kind of animal? A LOT. I'm probably going to forget some, but we've had hamsters, rats, snakes, fish, a turtle, two lizards, gerbils, guinea pigs... just a lot. Animals have always been very important in my life. Have you ever had a pet rock? HA, yeah. I didn't take it seriously at all, but I had one. When was the last time you painted something? Not since my Painting course in my final college attempt. Do you have any disabilities? Not in the traditional sense, no. My social anxiety though is at such a severity that it majorly infringes upon my ability to do a LOT of things, though. What are five of your favorite stores at the mall? I couldn't name five. Just Hot Topic and Spencer's, really. What season do you want to get married in? AUTUMN. The actual dream situation would be to get married in the snow in a black dress, like can you IMAGINE the pictures, but realistically, it'd be in the fall to avoid the biting cold. Has anyone ever spread lies about you? Yeah. Anything special planned for today? Nope. Blue or green? Blue. How much older/younger than you was the person you lost your virginity to? He's two years older than me. Do you still care for that person? Very much. Can you completely annihilate the first Mario game in less than an hour? I haven't even played the first game. I've never really been into the games to begin with. Did you make it all the way through the Oregon Trail game? Yes! I was OOOOOBSESSEEEEEED as a kid. I would usually play it after school when my mom was an assistant teacher and was finishing up her work for the day. Have you ever contemplated climbing a water tower? Uh, no. Those kind of people got some wanderlust levels that I ain't got, haha. If you have a Facebook, when was the last time you changed your profile picture? It's been a few months. Would you ever marry someone who was lower class? Um, yes? You can deny it all you want, but answering "no" is pretty much the same as saying you'd marry for money. Is there a guy you wish you hadn’t let slip away? ugh Which do you prefer: English or math? English, by light years. Who is a singer that has given you chills? David Draiman's voice in the Disturbed cover of "Sound of Silence" is fucking haunting. Greatest cover of all time. Do you watch America’s Got Talent? I did when Sharon was a judge. Do you think you could win America’s Got Talent? Hell no. What act would you perform in a talent show? uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Have you ever practiced yoga? Yes. I used to be BANGIN at it. What is your favorite thing to buy at the Farmer’s Market? Fruit! Do you get carsickness? No. What color is the rim of your full-length mirror? Black. What is your state’s bird (if you live in the US)? Cardinal. Which style of wedding dress is your favorite? I'm a sucker for ballgown dresses. Do you enjoy editing videos? I used to love it, for many many years. Now, I just don't have the dedication or motivation to. Do you enjoy editing photos? Yes. If you gave birth, do you think you would want it filmed? Um, absolutely not. I would have NO desire to look back on me shrieking my lungs out and essentially dying. I handle abdominal pain very poorly, so I've got a goooood feeling that if I actually wanted to have kids, I'd be that woman screeching like a banshee.
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Hi! I wanna know who is my true love(long-term relationship/marriage ) , how does he look like (astrology and characteristics/older/younger ) when and where will I meet him? Will he be into music? I am a capricorn sun 2nd house, gemini moon 7th house capricorn venus 1st/2nd house (close) and pisces mars 3rd house conjunct IC, my name is Clarisse and i would like a free tarot reading. Thank you very much🙏😇
Hello! I'm afraid I cannot get all of the specifics of your questions, but I will do my best to answer most of them to the best of my abilities.
The deck I used was my
Mystical Manga Tarot
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Here is your spread!
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The top card is used to represent your person.
I pulled the Nine of Coins (Pentacles)
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Your long term partner is the type of person to know what they want and work hard to achieve their goals. They are self-reliant, inventive, and creative in overcoming challenges. They likely will have worked hard in their life and now seek to share their successes with someone.
On the flip side, this person may also be prone to needing external validation or feeling dissatisfied or like nothing's ever good enough. I'm getting perfectionist vibes (which is not always a bad thing, but is something to be aware of) and the occasional lazy moods (we all have 'em).
With all the red in this card though I'm getting someone who is very ambitious and passionate!
Physical Appearance
The next row is how their physical appearance is and whew we pulled three major arcana here so I get the feeling they will have a unique look to them that makes them stand out.
For their physical appearance I pulled Strength, The Fool, and The Sun.
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With Strength we can tell this person has a strong character, mind, heart or soul. This can also hint at being physically strong too.
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The Fool shows that they are courageous or faithful looking. They may give off an aura of loyalty to friends and loved ones. They also may be the type to take risks as well! This could mean they may have something unique to their appearance that others may consider foolish, such as dying your hair a particular color, having piercings, tattoos, etc. They may wear a certain jewelry or have a certain sense of style, something that sets them apart.
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Last but not least we have the Sun. The first thing I think of is they may have a more younger, childish looking appearance, yet still look confident and glowing. They may have a warm or bright appearance or energy. That said I get the feeling they are the type of person that may "fake a smile" to not worry others or pretend things are fine.
With all three of these cards together I suspect they will have a young appearance, strong build or character, and possibly red, blonde, or an eccentric hair color (as shown by the silver haired woman in Strength, and backed up by the meaning of the Fool card)
Are they musically inclined?
I pulled the Page of Coins (Pentacles)
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This person may be more comfortable with what they know already, but should still explore the world and feed into their curiosity.
The Page of Coins is interested in and curious about the physical world and loves to understand how things work on a practical level.
This card feels more practical, as opposed to the emotions of a cups card, or the creativity of a wands card (two suits I would expect to get for someone into music).
They likely will already know what music and musical instruments they like and don't like, and may be resistant to any change. That said, I think they will still manage to be open minded in relation to both you and music.
I do not answer specifics of when and wheres for meeting romantic partners as a personal rule. (I feel it's best to let it happen naturally instead of pondering too much on the what ifs and details).
I also am not terribly skilled in the ways of astrology enough to guess this person's zodiac or star chart elements.
That said! I did pull some charms as a final way to some up what else you may need to know about this person!
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The pink chain is my "red string of fate" charm meant to represent soulmates. It had fallen closest to my musical guitar charm and "god hath given you one conception and make yourself another". This is also near my Star of David faith charm. To me this speaks volumes. This person may not be someone you saw coming and you or this person may have wished for one thing, but received something else even better.
This person finds you very beautiful and will love you always, no matter where. This love is rare like a blue rose. They will be committed (infinity ring) and you will both learn a lot from one another.
You may find them in a time of pain (sewing bobbin) or constriction (corset). They may even come off as mysterious (black cat).
But there will be a new beginning (egg) with creative, out of the box solutions (Wall-E).
They will have loving messages with you and enjoy talking with you (parrot). They will want to offer you sweets (literally and metaphorically- Hello Kitty with her cupcake)
They will be a multi-tasker (octopus) and may work hard for every dime they make. They will rake up their leaves and give you some of their own frosting (donut). Things may not always be crystal clear, but they will be sweet and kind and will intuitively know what you need and vice versa.
So I'll leave you with this.
"What is I fall?
Oh. but my Darling...
what if you fly?"
Let me know what resonates! I love hearing back from you all, even if this one will be much later haha!
If you'd like to send a tip it can be done through Venmo, PayPal, CashApp or Ko-fi. I appreciate even a dollar, as they help me keep my readings interesting and detailed for all my wonderful clients! All of my tips go to new decks or charms.
Information for my paid readings can be found here: 🌻
Sending lots of love and light to you and your future lover! 💖🧚♀️
-Áine
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𝓽𝓱𝓮-𝓯𝓪𝓮𝓻𝔂𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓮𝓷
#my asks#tarot reading#tarot cards#manga tarot#mystical manga tarot#free readings#my readings#my reading#charm readings#charm reading#free reading#free divination#soulmate reading#love reading
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Dharana: The Sixth Limb of Yoga
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Too frequently we get captured up in the busyness of our lives and lose sight of our life's purpose. The last 3 limbs of yoga are called samyama, the pathway to truth light of understanding. Dharana is the sixth limb of yoga and also the significance means "one-pointed interest," showing us exactly how to concentrate our interest on today moment.
The Power of Focus
During the daytime, light is throughout you. The sunlight lights the sky and also you're able to see far, as light is diffused in numerous directions. In the dark, a lot more focused light can come from a flashlight yet it's still relatively diffused. Ultra-focused light, as in a laser, can cut via steel. The real strength as well as power is with full focus.
Normally, our minds are like diffused light. Thoughts are spread out in various directions. For a lot of us, our plates are full. We lead exceptionally busy lives. On top of that, the methods of functioning today tend to maintain us sidetracked much of the moment. Exactly how can you anticipate to be focused when your work needs you to inspect emails and message messages, article on social media, most likely to conferences, surface projects, and answer phone telephone calls? And usually we're expected to respond immediately to many of these demands. We after that start to question why we're not attaining our goals and also moving towards our life's purpose.
Attaining your desire objectives call for laser-pointed emphasis. That implies shooting that beam towards one task only.
To illustrate, I love eagle present (garudasana) in yoga. Holding that pose, particularly, helps to produce emphasis. The eagle should have one-pointed attention while concentrating on its victim. The eagle will extent out the animal it wants to achieve, look intently, and after that fly perhaps for miles to catch it. If he was having actually spread thoughts, talking to his eagle pals, cleaning up his nest, or seeking victim, he might never ever capture anything.
Working Above the Ego
Called Ahankara in Sanskrit, the vanity, will hinder of your emphasis. Its sense of self-importance will state, "I have actually reached take this call currently." Or "I have to message back immediately."
The ego is the master of distraction. Consider the ego as a two-year-old youngster pursuing interest. The ego will inform you tales like, "I can not focus, my order of business is also long." "My children need me." Or "The housework must obtain done."
Thus is the deception of the vanity. Dharana is regarding being entirely concentrated on the here and now minute in what you are doing. Have you ever before seen moms and dads playing on their phones at the play area entirely oblivious of their youngsters? Have you been guilty of that? I understand I have.
I have seen people in restaurants on dates, where a single person was seeing the TELEVISION display and also the various other was texting on the phone. There was definitely no feeling of existing, neither any genuine connection.
There is an old saying that says, "Jack of all professions, master of none." In a sense, we have become master multi-taskers, yet in the long run we can not end up being master of any kind of one thing without focus.
My guru, Dr. David Simon, used to claim, "Picture what your calendar will resemble the day after you pass away." What he suggested was nobody is also crucial of a person to not make the effort to concentrate on one point, someone, or living in the here and now moment. The ego would certainly similar to us to think that it is so.
4 Tools to Practice Dharana
To help you focus on one point each time, try one of these effective methods:
1. Mantra practices. A mantra-based meditation technique is ideal to develop emphasis. Preferably, the professional duplicates a rule or a set of audios with no significance because person's target language. Primordial Sound Meditation is a best instance of a rule practice utilized to hold the mind still and also help remove from the classic monkey mind.
2. Visual mantra meditations. Aesthetic reflections, such as concentrating on a solitary candle fire, can improve your technique of single-pointed understanding. When the room is dark, you can concentrate on the flickering light and also train the mind to strain whatever else.
Another form of visual meditation is using a yantra or aesthetic mantra. Mandalas are art kinds of geometric forms, which you can make use of for your aesthetic meditation.
3. Visualization. Visualization is a wonderful skill for showing up wishes. The factor why many individuals have trouble materializing the items of their wish is that they are looking at the barriers in front of them as opposed to having a clear, concentrated photo of the end result. Once more, the sensible mind and the ego intend to hinder the procedure of manifesting.
Visualize daily your preferred result. Maintaining a vision board is a concrete method of having photos before you, at all times, to advise you that regarded challenges are mere distractions.
4. Shut off your phone and various other tools, and set a timer. Don' t hesitate to set limitations for yourself. Living in the existing moment with one-pointed interest is a kind of meditation. It's a present that allows you to raise pleasure, increase positive self-image, and enhance imagination. Individuals can wait. Call as well as sms message can be returned later. Set a timer and concentrate on one activity. As well as if it's time with a priceless loved one, make a contract to minimize all distractions to focus uniquely on one other.
With technique, you will certainly find life becomes a lot more enjoyable and also you will certainly have the ability to tackle your daily activities with a greater feeling of peace.
Deepen your meditation technique and also master your capacity to manifest anything at our trademark reflection and yoga retreat, Seduction of Spirit. You will certainly return back to your life feeling much more linked to your true nature. Visit this site to learn more.
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Online Classes: Day 2
today was very crazy. i woke up on my friend’s floor after sleeping for 4 hours since we celebrated our last night in the dorms. and since we didn’t have to physically walk to class, we could party on a monday night which felt so weird. i also had 5 classes today and it was st. patrick’s day!
9-10 am spanish: i felt awful and my microphone didn’t work the first 2 times i was called on so that was embarrassing. i had to exit out of canvas and rejoin and then it started working but the whole class i felt like i wanted to sleep. she said what the homework was really fast at the end in spanish and none of my classmates have any idea what it is.
10-11:30 am anthropology: my favorite professor from this semester had her kid say hi at the beginning of the lecture which was sweet. this lecture wasn’t live but pre-recorded and i concentrated well for 50 minutes before scrolling through my phone for the last 30 minutes. this is probably going to be my toughest class to pay attention online.
11:30-1:00 information technology: my professor, who is a carbon copy of Larry David, used Zoom. (I basically attend BlueJeans Zoom Online University now!). he sat really close to the camera and the camera was on a table so we could see up his nostrols the whole time he was talking. i ended up leaving halfway through because i again wasn’t paying attention. i texted my friends and no one else was either. i came back at the end to take my first online test and being able to text people during it made it so easy.
2:30-4 pm computer science: this one was a dumpster fire that you couldn’t look away from. we used BlueJeans and as my professor was talking, some kid named Stephen left his mic on and was also talking to his roommate without realizing it. the chat ended up being flooded with Stephen jokes about how his car was broken and he was a really good multi-tasker. the professor then muted everyone and we broke into small groups so when we all had to rejoin she rejoined and defaulted to being on mute. this took 10 minutes to figure out and the last 30 minutes her kids kept coming in (exactly like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmeBMvGhf1g) because they couldn’t figure out how to work the TV.
4-5 pm information technology discussion: this one was like my computer science lab yesterday. it was on BlueJeans and went very well. my GSI is really cool and he called on all of us at least once.
i am now home for 6 months and boy do i need a break from online university tomorrow. thank goodness i have no classes. i hope everyone has a nice day!
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While the Senate's transport committee recommended the upper house defeat the bill outright, a coalition of Independent and Liberal senators has cobbled together enough votes to rescue legislation to implement the government's planned ban on oil tankers along B.C.'s northern coast.
The outcome was far from certain after the committee that studied the legislation recommended against passing the Liberal plan. The committee issued a scathing report this week saying that, if passed, the bill would stoke a nascent separatist movement in Western Canada, and accused the government of unfairly targeting Alberta's oilpatch at a time of constrained pipeline capacity and cratering oil prices.
The strongly worded report — penned by the committee's chair, Conservative Saskatchewan Sen. David Tkachuk — prompted a backlash of sorts Wednesday night from other senators who called it overly partisan.
Senators rejected the committee's report by a vote of 38 to 53, with one abstention. Now, senators are expected to make amendments at the third reading phase of the legislative process before sending the bill back to the Commons for approval.
Continue Reading.
#British Columbia#Alberta#justin trudeau#Canadian Senate#cdnpoli#canada#canadian politics#canadian news#canadian#LPC
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The outcome was far from certain after the committee that studied the legislation recommended against passing the Liberal plan. The committee issued a scathing report this week saying that, if passed, the bill would stoke a nascent separatist movement in Western Canada, and accused the government of unfairly targeting Alberta's oilpatch at a time of constrained pipeline capacity and cratering oil prices.
The strongly worded report — penned by the committee's chair, Conservative Saskatchewan Sen. David Tkachuk — prompted a backlash of sorts Wednesday night from other senators who called it overly partisan.
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WizardWorld Chicago 2018
“I’ll never fly to a con.”
That was my self-imposed rule. See, I live in the Northeast US, so there are lots of major cities within driving/busing distance, and thus lots of cons, and other fandom-adjacent events, happen within a reasonable distance of me. (I realize this is a privilege, and one I’m quite grateful for.) Anyway, when I got into the X-Files fandom a couple of years ago, I was interested in meeting Phile Phriends / Tumblr Pals in real life, and in participating in fandom or fandom-adjacent events, which I have done (and have spent money on), but I told myself that there was no need to ever fly anywhere just for a con: the cost of airfare is too much of an investment, the talent’s schedules can change, and besides, there are a disproportionate amount of options that I don’t have to make the investment to fly to. So I thought.
When DD & GA were announced for WizardWorld Chicago, I had already committed to plans for the con weekend. I was a little bummed, but thought that it was probably for the best that I already had plans, because otherwise, I would have been very tempted to fly to it. Then, just a few weeks prior to the con, after hanging up the phone call in which my last weekend in August plans were postponed, I saw a note from Kristin @kateyes224 alluding to her intention to go to the con. She informed me that @sunflowerseedsandscience, who I had been hoping to meet earlier in the summer, would also be flying in for the occasion. I took this influx of information as a sign that I should get myself to Chicago for that weekend. I justified the cost by using airline and hotel points to subside the expense. I was going to fly to a con. The next few weeks were a whirlwind of madness at work, so I was very grateful to have the aforementioned pals, plus Carrie @carrie11 who would be joining us for her first con, in my pocket to countdown to the weekend with.
I flew to Chicago on the morning Friday, August 24, laughing internally at the absurdity of the situation all the way. I made my way to Rosemont, my eyes going wide when I caught my first glimpse of the convention center, and settled myself into the hotel room before heading downtown on the train to meet Carrie. There was a food truck festival right by the L station that I emerged from, and I realized that all I had consumed only an iced coffee so far in the day, so I remedied that. Carrie was nice enough to indulge in my desire to be a tourist, since I hadn’t been to Chicago proper in years. I had never made it to the Willis Sears Tower, so we did that, and she took some fun pics of Puppet Mulder. I think this is my fav:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/43202f831ef512e560802262bc49aa99/tumblr_inline_peidywOm5t1rnofp4_540.jpg)
We then did a bit of walking -- Grant Park, Lake Shore Drive path, Millenium Park, and the Chicago River, before the rest of the crew arrived and it was finally pizza time! Soon after Carrie and I secured a table at Giordano’s, Kristin, @sunflowerseedsandscience, and Amanda @all-these-ghosts arrived. I greeted them on the patio and had an epic reunion hug with Kristin in which we made a total scene and squeezed each other so tight while squealing that I choked on some of her hair. The five us then had a wonderful dinner that I don’t remember much about except that the pizza was amazing, the company was even better, and I’m pretty sure I was just still in awe that this was all happening. After dinner, we went to grab drinks down the street. There was Shiner Bock on the menu, so Puppet Mulder joined us and confused many of the staff. Amanda especially was tickled by Puppet Mulder, while I was fangirling over her (she wrote Then The Bomb, people!!!) Truly, the con could have been cancelled and the trip still would have been worth it for just hanging out with this crew:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/f7255905b2c1bad69f59874dccf6a81f/tumblr_inline_peiej0F7Tf1rnofp4_540.jpg)
Saturday morning, Kristin procured Starbucks and we all readied ourselves to be presentable for photo ops in the late morning. We met Carrie, Clarice @contrivedcoincidences6, and @albanyparkavenue in the lobby and headed to the convention center. The security line coming from the hotels was long but moved fast. At this point, I had only pre-purchased a dual photo op (and Saturday ticket) but while we were in line I accidentally-but-it-was-bound-to-happen-anyway purchased GA & DD autographs on the ticketing app on my phone. Oops! Once we got in and procured our wristbands, it was already time for those of us with dual photo ops to get in line, so we did. In the midst of a lot of line waiting, Kristin perfected Puppet Mulder’s hair (we decided on Season 4 / Paper Hearts classic floops aka Backstreet Bangs). Puppet Mulder also made friends with a tiny Supergirl, which Carrie captured in a couple pics, and my day was made. Soon, it was go time. I was to go first so that Kristin could do last looks on Puppet Mulder’s hair immediately before the photo. As we approached the final holding area, I situated Puppet Mulder on my right arm and was prepared to pose him in an arms-spread position using the armrods in my left hand (we had been practicing in line.) When it was my turn, I approached, and I was told by those in line behind me that Gillian gave an exasperated “Ohhhhhhhhh boy” while I announced “Puppet Mulder is here!” in an attempt to preemptively stave off any questions about who he was and prevent myself from having to make any awkward hand gestures like I did in Montreal. As we were getting in position I asked, “Can he get in between you? I don’t know that I want to be in it” since I didn’t really care about my face being in it, but also didn’t want to crouch down without warning and confuse everyone. But David insisted, “Ah, no, you gotta be in it!” to which I conceded “I do? Ok.” and stayed put. With that, the photo was taken, I said thanks, and moved out of the way. As the rest of the crew emerged from the Tunnel of Love Anxiety, we went around the corner to retrieve our photos, and I think everyone in the group was pleased with the results! I was pleasantly surprised by mine (even if Gillian is doing her nervous hands.)
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/a03932d24fffa6845ecf073994acc3c8/tumblr_inline_peielh1a661rnofp4_540.jpg)
I even bought a photo protector sheet after being called out by DD in Montreal for not treating our photo with the utmost respect and bending it a bit. After this ordeal, we realized that we needed drinks and to regroup, so we acquired alcohol (beer is a reasonable lunch, right?) and found a path of floor outside the main hall to make our own. We were joined by some more pals including @dahlia-ships, @observeroftheuniverse, and @perplexistan.
After this recovery period, it was time for Gillian’s autograph session. I had the pleasure of being behind Natalie for this and got to listen to Natalie give the most eloquent, heartfelt litany of thanks to one of her favs. Also, somehow margaritas came up and Natalie and I were like “Yesss we just drank before this!” so clearly my 20 seconds were much less profound, but here’s the rough transcript after that:
Me: Thanks for putting up with us. GA: This was one of my favorite photos of the day. Me: Aww, really?! GA: Yeah, it’s between this one and maybe one other. Me: Oh, what was that? GA: Someone had an alien. Me: Oh yeah, the big blow up thing? [Had spotted this in front of us in the photo op line.] GA: Yeah. Me: *nods* Thanks!
When I emerged from her booth and realized she inscribed “My favorite photo of the day” on the photo, I was both heart-eyed and in awe. See, I am a terrible multi-tasker and thus continually in awe of Gillian’s ability to have a conversation while simultaneously making a non-robotic inscription. Like, yeah, she’s pretty good at acting and contributes to humanitarian causes, but I’d like to give her an award for speaking and writing at the same time. Was this talent born from some crazy avant-garde theatre warm-up? Is this some kind of Mom superpower? Really what I’m asking is: Is there hope for me yet to learn this skill?
Anyway, after the crew got their Gillian autographs, some more drinks were procured, and then we decided to go wait in line for the panel (which was actually a solid 9 minute walk from the main hall.) At this point, I started bothering Kristin to come get a DD autograph with me before the panel, because I’m a bad influence like that. She was unprepared with what she would have him sign though, so we started brainstorming, and landed on possibly The X-Files: Earth Children Are Weird picture book that I had brought a copy of so that Kristin could do a dramatic reading. Since that was back in the hotel room, a few of us darted back to grab it (and to grab our leftover deep dish, which my growling stomach was very grateful for.) We brought the remaining pizza to the line-sitters, and at around 4pm, I successfully convinced Kristin to come grab a DD autograph with me. Shayla @thatredhead00 joined us and her tale of a DD interaction earlier in the day made me howl with laughter. We made friends with a couple of local guys in line, and I connected with a woman I recognized from a previous event, which was funny. Anyway, DD made it back from his afternoon break, the signing session began, and soon enough, Kristin went first with the picture book, and I globbed on to her convo. Here’s the rough transcript:
DD: [signing on the title page] What am I signing? K: The X-Files picture book! DD: [Turns to the front cover] Aww, it’s cute! [Genuinely, high-pitched] DD: What happens in it? K: They go camping in the woods. Me: And Scully’s parents are aliens. Me: Whoops, I gave away the twist ending. DD: Yeah, you ruined it for me. Me: Yeah, it was gonna take you so long to read… Me: Thanks so much!
For those keeping score at home, this brings my record of accidentally-but-lovingly making fun of DD to his face at con autograph sessions to an even 2-0. Interestingly enough, I’ve been to two of his book signings and complimented him (well, his writing) at both of those. Not sure what gives.
Anyway, we decided that we needed more drinks before the panel so grabbed those and then made the journey back to where that was. Our pals were already seated, and the question line had already started forming, so Kristin and Shayla hopped in that while I took a seat with the crew. The panel was perfectly fine in person. Per usual, a few cringey questions (thanks Natalie for letting me squeeze your arm through these), but also a few great questions and responses. Kristin got to ask her question (and, as predicted, Gillian couldn’t remember specifics, and the morgue scene in “Ghouli” was David’s answer, but it was still nice to hear it.) Other highlights included a thoughtful question and response from Gillian on how the show might have been different if written from a more feminist perspective. Also, there was a fleeting moment when I thought the tell-all book was going to be spoiled, plus the infamous “Who tops?” question. All in all, not bad at all, though this was the first panel I’ve attended with just the two of them, so I admittedly don’t have any equal comparison points. Soon enough, it was over, and it was time to drink (more!) with Philes. All of the aforementioned crew from the day joined, plus Amanda, @datanullyx, @redscully, @xfilesgeekery, and @anicepieceofash. We started in the hotel bar but, in the interest of cost savings, eventually procured liquor and ordered (more) pizza and moved to our hotel room. There were lots of hugs and snuggles, lots of loudly wondering “What is my life?”, platonic handholding, one human/puppet makeout session, an impressive demonstration of Kristin’s ability to sleep through anything, and some amazing cheesecake brownies . As the evening got late, Puppet Mulder even changed into his red Speedo (and put on his to-scale legs.) Needless to say, it was a night both wonderful and strange. Here’s some of the crew at the after-after party:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/cc7b4784202235bff3a6eed8de9386de/tumblr_inline_peif5oYQPp1rnofp4_540.jpg)
I feel so lucky to have gotten to spend time with everyone I met or re-met this weekend, and if I start calling out the specifics of why you’re all so great, I’ll make myself cry, so I’m going to stop here. If you’ve read all of this rambling (whether you were present or not), I’m very impressed. Thanks to everyone who shared in this weekend with me from both near and far, and thanks to Gillian and David for giving us an excuse to meetup.
I said I’d never fly to a con, but I’m so glad I did.
Author's note: I always hate writing these because a) it means it’s over, and b) I can never fully capture the awesomeness that is meeting up with fandom friends. Also, I have a shit memory, but jotted down notes about stuff right after it happened on Saturday, so hopefully I’m not misconstruing anything too terribly. If you were present, feel free to correct me!
#wizardworld chicago 2018#wizardworld#x files#david duchovny#gillian anderson#conventions#over a week belated but I finally finished!#long post#in case the readmore fails#also I hope tagging folks works#what a great weekend#I love you all#puppet mulder#chicago#I'll never fly to a con#<-- famous last words#personal
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College of Arts and Sciences Students: The Art of Excellence and Power
College of Arts and Sciences Building will always be the picture of a strong structure that has seen better times; old paint peeling off the walls, outdated facilities and equipment. But inside its aged halls, you will meet people who are set apart by their strengths, intellect and abilities. They are not your regular, run-of-the-mill people. They all have unique qualities that makes them special. It is heartwarming to think that despite of the time that has tested and ran through the halls of this building, it can still produce notable and competent students.
College of Arts and Sciences are composed of Criminology and Psychology students, those who are the future public servants. Criminology students, are usually known for being loud and "makulit" students, those who always been the problem of the professors and some school administrators, but what shocked me the is that in our Department (College of Arts and Sciences) at Batangas State University JPLPC Malvar, Criminology students are different, even though you cannot remove the nature of being men, is that they are all well disciplined and actively participated in both academics and extra curricular activities. You can see that they really want to excel in their field. I find some of them really funny and gentleman. Let me tell you something, my professors are one of the reasons behind that. They are the one who strictly teach and discipline my those students, they always tell us that before we go to our real world job we should act as real one while we are in school so we can apply it in the future. Well some of the guy you did not expect to excel are part of the dean's list, I am really shock that they can really deliver because in my previous school, the Criminology students their are really importunate and unruly, but when you see those criminology students of College and Arts and Sciences you will think in a different way, that's why you will not be surprised if you know that the passing rate of the registered criminologist of the year 2018 is 58% for the first timers. You want to know more about the students of our Department? Well let's talk about the Psychology Students. In this institution I learned that I am not really good at everything, because all of my classmates in my courses are really good. They are really an exceptional students, because every time that they talk you will really know that there is something special on their intellect and abilities. They are the what you call “multi taskers” because they can do numerous researches but at the same time an active participants of the different school activities. Actually they dominated the dean's list.
It's still puzzled to me how these students remained so active in participating in both academics, and extra curricular activities, and not seeing the facility lacking of our building. You can see that they really treasured the knowledge and learnings that they have and treat it as the most important thing in a student. Maybe because they have the determination to learn and dreams in life, right? As like Henry David Thoreau said “ If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” and somehow it can be another factor, but the secrets of how these students are being competitive in all time is still untold. You want to be one of the globally competent students? I think you should come and join our Department, the College and Arts and Sciences.
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