#people think too large scale
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im-very-sorry · 1 year ago
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what if god is not large,,, what if god is so terribly small
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katabay · 10 months ago
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new desktop theme! mostly because tumblr only does super tiny icons right now RIP, so I made the sidebar image a close up of my new icon: it's the roman emperor valens from subleyra's the mass of saint basil :)
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raininyourblackeyes · 1 year ago
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My cousin, a published writer, a well-known poet in my country and a literature professor, for whom I've always been no.1 support ever since her first attempts at writing in high school, told me that I must stop writing as a hobby because that's her thing and since I'm writing fantasy mostly my writing could never have any important artistic value anyways.
#what happened was that i was feeling really down these past few days#like mental health dead in mariana trench#and i went to visit her because she lives like 10 minutes away and has a cat i can play with#but yesterday morning a friend of mine made a fanart (i guess i can call it that) of a fanfic i am writing for the five of them#she sent it to me and said she's also working on an actual painting on a camvas of her fave scene from my original story#and i was so surprised and exicted#that's actually a too mild description#and when i was visitting my cousin i showed her the pic of the drawing on my phone and explained it to her and she just said ....ehh..#and started texting someone#i was sitting there feeling stupid and thinking wow you could have at least praised my friend's art sytle or something#and when i was getting ready to leave she asked me if i was aware my writing has no artistic merit and fantasy is trivial literature#so i should just stop wasting time on that and focus on developing my art style more for her future poetry collections#i do the art for her book covers#and added how we already have an established writer in the family so i should focus on my role - becoming a good pharmacist#and she knows how much i hate that i'm studying pharmacy like it's the no.1 cause of me hating the direction in which my life is going#finished it off by saying she feels like what she's doing in going to be really great and important on a large scale one day#and how she wants me to continue being her shadow that follows and supports her#i left went home and started at a wall for hours#i just feel so dumb for getting excited over a silly drawing of something not more than 5 people will ever read#i genuinely hate the idea of people reading anything i write so most likely writing will just remain a hobby for me#and now i feel like the most stupid person on earth and am this close to deleting all my word documents from both my laptops
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cuteniarose · 1 month ago
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Sometimes I wish I had more people interested in my creations, but then I get hit by thoughts like “Imagine the outrage you’d be faced with if your Avatar Suiren AU was more popular. This is the fandom that still cannot ‘forgive’ Korra for SOMETHING THAT WAS DONE TO HER, calling her the worst Avatar for losing the connection to her past lives (which came about because she HAD RAAVA LITERALLY RIPPED OUR OF HER) and acting like that is somehow a worse offence than, say, inaction leading to genocide. The hate you’d get for intentionally making Suiren the last Avatar would be IMMEASURABLE” and go “… actually, I’m glad that for the most part it’s just @katkastrofa and I–”
(Though then again… would it even be an AU by yours truly if it didn’t contain at least one cancellable offence? 😁)
#don’t even try to tell me I’m wrong#also Suiren is even less like Aang than Korra is. she wouldn’t stand a chance in this fandom#everyone knows most people in this fandom can’t handle angry brown girls#and Suiren is honestly on a whole different level#so yeah#I’m glad it’s not a well known thing#but her biggest offence would of course be letting go of Raava#and thus also losing the connection to her past lives and ending the Avatar cycle#her next incarnation will not be the Avatar. they’ll be just a normal EK kid#and that is the biggest crime an Avatar could ever commit#deciding to spare future generations of the burden#the Avatar should not exist. it is too much power and responsibility for one person#and every Avatar we know of was stuck in an endless cycle of fixing their predecessors’ mistakes#nobody deserves that. especially not a child. and the Avatars ARE discovered as children for the most part#even at 16 like Roku Kyoshi and Kuruk is still way too young for having the fate of the world on your shoulders#I’d argue any age is too young#the world can’t depend on one person to solve their problems#the avatar is ultimately human. they make mistakes. they’re biased. they can be corrupted#and not a single generation goes by without at least one world-scale threat. nothing any avatar does is every enough. it’s a thankless job#no era of peace has ever lasted long. that has to be something worked for by the world at large#ending the cycle is the correct move because then the world will not be looking to the Avatar for every issue#and will actually start sorting shit out themselves. that’s my (very correct) view of it. at least#but again. this fandom will not be able to handle that. because they care about a bunch of long dead ghosts more than living characters#I’m sorry but sparing at least one kid of the trauma that comes with being the Avatar makes losing the past lives connection worth it#to me at least. and it’s not like breaking the connection erases them from ever existing like Greater Lord Rukkhadevata. they’re remembered#just can’t be accessed anymore. and that’s okay. they deserve to rest#(forgive me for the Genshin Impact reference it was the only thing I could think of. it was a brief phase I don’t play it anymore)#anyway. idk where this rant/meta just came from. I apparently have A Lot of thoughts about this AU that aren’t limited to Kuviren smut lmao#Avatar Suiren AU#Kat and Nia and their multiverse of madness
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thedreadvampy · 2 years ago
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christ almighty some people are sad fucking miseries huh
#red said#all art that is rewarded by capitalism must be actively preventing you resisting Hegemonic power abloobloobloobloo#fuck me get over yourself#is art a powerful tool for propaganda subject to corporate capture? yes#is art necessary to be human? also yes#all art carries the weight of the society it exists in. and yes revolutionary art is either buried or defanged by the power it protests#so no you're unlikely to see like. Art That Smashes The System on a large scale. the revolution will not be televised.#art is not going to change the world but art can change you. and you change the world be existing in it.#and you are changed and resonated with in ways that are many and unpredictable bc people resonate differently with different things#capitalism isn't. a conspiracy. it's an ideology and system of power.#it's human. and can we be real if there's one thing I'm learning from this EEAAO thing it's that people are really blind#to messages that fully don't land with them#capitalism isn't some infallible godking who foils your every move. art that moves you can still move you#the criticism that art which is lauded by the authorities cannot be truly anti-capitalist art is one thing#to extend that to say art which is lauded by the authorities cannot be positively meaningful AT ALL and can only be counterrevolutionary#is HOG FUCKING WILD like. first off. think about any work of art you can name from the last 1000 years.#guess what. probably a product of the patronage of power. political philosophy too. making art costs. gaining an audience costs.#we exist within a network of systems of power. even within underground and independent art scenes structures of power play in#nonetheless. we require art.#and art is not just for direct political confrontation. art is an act of connection and resonance.#never mind art that's inadequately revolutionary - art that's entirely capitalist is ALSO capable of positive political impact#because a) it acts on people. and politics. is a frame around people. the point of opposing unjust hierarchy is to achieve wellbeing#like. why are you doing politics if not for people? who is it for? for the abstract symbolism of moral purity?#and b) because art is a frame for building your sense of the world. And you bring your own stuff to that.#if you're radically inclined then reading idk les mis can leave you with the idea that revolution is futile.#or with the sense that there's deep vitality and importance to holding your ground against unjust power despite the knowledge of the odds#or with the sense that revolution is personal not political#or with the sense that the personal is metaphorical for the political and that our drive is to act against the law to protect each other#it depends what you bring to the text
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trueloveandy · 3 months ago
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feeling inadequate about my writing tonight
#i don’t really have anywhere else 2 say this#been knocking into way too many cans of gas on bridges yknow and now the only bridges i have left r the spaces that r not doing me too well#admittedly.#it’s more of a me problem#do u know how hard it is to watch people ur age get supported by your friend groups when the only time you’re given the support is when you#claw and scream and beg for it. and even then#im back to not feeling 2 great about my writing#i know their writing is better than mine and that’s fine#it’s not fine but it’s fine . i can cope#i want to believe my writings decent so bad but the only people who read it r my best friend and some girl i met a few weeks ago#if my own friends can’t even fucking try to read it without me crying and begging them too then how is a large scale audience supposed to#if the people who love me and know how important my writing is to me can read it#how are complete strangers supposed to take that gamble#too saturated of a market and im not bringing anything 2 it#starting to think i should just do barrendejng or copywriting or whatever#the people I know are the same ages as me but they’re miles ahead of where I am and I’ve been writing for longer#i don’t think I’m getting better than this.#writing is all I have and I’m so mediocre about it#is it so hard to be asked to be understood and seen. Jesus Christ#ignore this if uve read it. ik shat advice I’m gonna get and its not gonna make feel any better#i just want to give up sometimes.#Anthony’s tumblr adventure#Anthony’s venting arc#there we go. a tag so anyone who follows me on here can block it#venting#that 2#while I’m here#I wish I knew someone like me.#could fix me maybe idk at least I could feel seen and understood by more than one person#begging. please.
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miyeosin · 4 months ago
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...🫠
i saw on twt recently the italk clip of miyeon with her eyes closed in the car from klaxon filming and someone was using it as an example saying something along the lines of (bc i don't remember they're exact words and this is obviously my understanding of their words but might not have been what they actually meant) that cube has them so overworked that even miyeon is tired and it made me a little annoyed bc it fails to consider the context of the clip
people just get tired. i'm not overworked in anyway and i get sleepy when i'm at my job too.
filming seems like a lot of sitting and waiting, which can also make someone sleepy.
they're working outdoors, in a hot and sunny environment, 2 things that zap your energy. not to mention, miyeon has a hard time opening her eyes in the sun and when your eyes are closed it very easy for your body to be like 'yes good idea let's sleep'
i understand expressing concern over idol health and wellbeing especially when they appear to have back to back schedules, but miyeon has always said not to worry about her and that she's health and happy to being constantly working. and we've also seen the idle members comment/compliment on miyeon's mentality and general health. that's not to say that you're not allowed to have concerns, it means you care, but some of you really need to look at the whole picture and contributing factors of some situations before you go comment on things.
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autumnoakes · 4 months ago
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there are a lot of jobs i would be good at
i'm good at cooking, so i could work in a kitchen. i'm good with people sometimes and i have a good customer service front, so i could do that. i'm good with kids, so i could work in childcare. i'm good at a lot of things
but there's a huge difference between "i'm good at this" and "i could do this as a full time job." because i have worked customer service for 40+ hours a week. and it is absolutely DRAINING as a job. i could maybe do it once a week for a few hours without it starting to take a toll on me. having to do it 5 days a week for 8+ hours each day actually made it so i had very little energy for anything else.
i hear a lot that i would be good in certain fields, and i would say no, i wouldn't be. because i'm good at it when i'm doing it once in a while. i'm good at it when i'm not doing it for a living. if i had to do that for the majority of the rest of my life? i would not be good at it anymore.
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lunaicfantastic · 10 months ago
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I was talking to someone much older than me about politics and the generational divide, and during the discussion they asked me what the young people who support trump are thinking, what they're discussing among themselves, and I told them the truth, which is that I don't know because I don't interact with any in my day to day life. This is true mostly because I go to a hwc and you'd be hard-pressed to find a conservative who'd be willing to admit it there, but also, I think, because I believe they are temporary.
What I mean by temporary is this: the support of trump and the Republican party by youths is a system of beliefs almost entirely dominated by people one to two decades their seniors, minimum, and i don't think that is a particularly good recipe for long-lasting political beliefs. More importantly, however, is that when I was in high school in the rural southern US, and surrounded by people who sided with the right out of habit or passive indoctrination, it did not take much to get most of them to agree with leftist ideals. Usually, only a single conversation. Most people I talked to almost immediately agreed with "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" once explained. And, to me, most importantly, very few people disagreed with Greta thunberg. We all saw what she was doing and most of us understood and agreed with what she was saying.
That, more than anything, makes me believe that any sprouting of republican support among usamerican youths will be shortlived and short-reaching. Because none of us want to die, and more of the world is catching on fire every summer. Climate change, more than any other issue, will be the thing that defines our generation's political beliefs and movements, and I don't think people will take a fantasy told to them by their elders seriously when it becomes more and more obvious by the day that it is fantastical. The weather is inescapable, and the summers are hotter and the storms are worse than they've ever been.
To me, "trumpism" and republican stranglehold on people younger than 30 is temporary because we've been told our whole lives that saving the world from climate apocalypse will fall to us and now that it is harder than ever to ignore that said apocalypse is at our doorstep, those right-wing movements aren't giving them anything but platitudes. I don't think a generation conditioned to battle climate change will listen to a party of people, most of whom will not live to experience the horrors their actions or lack thereof have caused, that tell them to cover their ears, close their eyes, and put the fight down all to make numbers on a screen go up while their futures burn.
I think it's not worthwhile to ponder at length about the future of the right in the us because the right is doggedly working to ensure there will be no future for anyone, and I think people's survival instincts are stronger than that.
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dont-worry-about-1t · 1 year ago
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So I was able to pick out 100% of the fake news headlines. But I thought one true headline was fake.
I guess I'm good with that. I've been trying to tune my bullshit detector for years, so I'm glad that training paid off.
Feel free to try it yourself.
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tungledotedu · 4 months ago
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uh why the fuck would you say this
this post has 3000 notes and they get worse.
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el-shab-hussein has already explained why he no longer shares how he vets individual fundraisers. scammers will use the information to be less obvious, making it more difficult to spot them.
and senatortedcruz's post has no actual proof of a widespread scam. that is a serious accusation to make, yet people are reblogging it and accepting it as true with no evidence. i won't deny that there are individual grifters on tumblr, but there are accounts like @/neechees, kyra45 and anonthescambuster that will help you avoid them. hussein even has a #scam alert tag for this purpose.
it's racist to spread misinformation about a supposed large-scale deception posing as fundraisers, not to mention dangerous because this makes it less likely for gazans to get what they need to survive and escape relentless airstrikes. we've already seen the consequences of this bias. some of these people are all too happy to be cops and harass or report gazans thinking they're bots or 'spamming' inboxes.
almost nobody on that post is encouraging others to donate to organisations or other vetted lists like those by operation olive branch, which has a faq sheet that explains how they verify fundraisers. i suspect this is an attempt to discourage people from helping palestinians altogether.
gazans are making fundraisers because they have no other choice. many of them cannot work and earn money as their workplaces have been destroyed. some have been disabled by injuries thanks to the iof's targeting of civilians. the fault is on israel for besieging them and on the egyptian government for exploiting their need to evacuate.
they're doing this for the same reason they have been posting photographs and videos of genocide so that people will pay attention to their suffering, so the world will not forget. is it such a leap in logic to understand they will also use social media to start fundraisers? do you just expect them to sit there and die in silence? so you can ignore them and your countries can keep arming israel as it commits atrocities?
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oathofkaslana · 1 year ago
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I truly dont understand how hoyo will write the genshin female characters badly when both honkai impact and hsr show that they are indeed, pretty good at writting them. Is it bc genshin is their safe game to get as much money as possible from dudebros (and fujos)? they truly are capable of writting good female characters but the difference between, for example, mei and ei is abyssmal
LITERALLY!!!!! admittedly im not very far in honkai and i havent played hsr but god it suckssss the level of writing they can commit to but don't!! god yeah. im vv open abt hating ei's first story quest i just think its the zenith of her poor writing. what sucks is that they have interesting concepts! they have potential! they have interesting lore! the fact that teyvat has so much lore to be uncovered that there are niche communities dedicated to cracking its code is really really cool!!!! but you can tell what their priorities are at the end of the day when half the things they put out don't hold up to what the game could be (sorry for dogging on the recent event but like. perfect example imo).
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phoenixyfriend · 1 year ago
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I think referring to the James Somerton situation, or the hbomberguy and Todd in the Shadows videos in general, as "YouTuber Drama" is really underselling the level of academic dishonesty, intellectual theft, and malicious misinformation being discussed and spread by this man and others like him.
This isn't makeup gurus accusing each other of being inappropriate at a birthday dinner or a philosophy channel getting in hot water on Twitter for having a controversial queer celebrity do a voiceover line without fully vetting everything he's ever said.
It's large scale plagiarism and hundreds of thousands of dollars of profiting off other people's work without even credit.
(And 64k in scams. That too.)
And no, I didn't know who any of these people except Harry and Todd were until now, with the exception of MAYBE having heard of Internet Historian in passing, so I had that same "who even are these people" response as most of you.
People like James are why I cannot in good faith just Tell people my college major.
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tinseltina · 6 months ago
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they enforce it and there are 2 main reasons why jaywalking is a crime
1. before cars people just walked wherever, especially on roads. then cars came about and traffic accidents kept happening bc "you maye be walking here, but im driving in a big metal death trap so i get the right of way!" (yes this could also happen with any other form of transport befor the automobile)
2. RACISM
yes, folks, once again race plays a part in this. if a black person was around (especially after emancipation) and white person didn't want to see them existing, they would call the police or if found by a cop they would charge them with something. and if there wasn't anything they could possibly charge them with bc they are literally just WALKING DOWN THE STREET? welp, that's JAYWALKING and now you either got a fine or they took you to the county jail!
Ok so what is jaywalking then
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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months ago
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What kind of bubble is AI?
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My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.
Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.
Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.
AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.
So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means
But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.
Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).
Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).
Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.
These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html
The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.
What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop
The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/
But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.
Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.
The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.
If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:
https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509
These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.
Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.
These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).
So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.
But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.
This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space
But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop
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Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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gaddaboutgriffon · 15 days ago
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The Year of the Dragon.
(Name edited, credit to @jedipirateking for the suggestion.)
A joke the fandom has been making for a while is that Tim is forever stuck at 17. What if we make that something the rest of the Batclan notice too? (I am not following cannon.)
It was just after the annual Family picture day and the new group portrait was taking the place of last year’s and looking at it they noticed 15 year old Damian is now almost the same height as Tim. And Tim is pretty much the same as last year.
Jason and Damian take the opportunity to tease Tim calling him a shrimp and other short jokes. Which Tim rolls his eyes and goes to work on a case or something with Wayne industries. But Bruce, Dick, and Alfred are more concerned, may feel guilty thinking letting him be a vigilante stunted his growth. And looking back at the photos they have of him notice that he wasn’t growing as much as a normal teen boy should have.
Bruce decides he is going to be more active in running Wayne Enterprises while Alfred plots to cut back Tim’s coffee limit. And Dick is going to help out coordinate the patrols. (He had to move back to Gotham when the Bludhaven city spirit forced all the people out before the city got blown up. It’s a long story but dick has been really down and unmotivated after that.)
Tim is not taking any of this well, and feels like his family being stifling. So he decided to start going through the basement and vault of Drake manor. Which he has been putting off since he didn’t really have time for it between patrols and WE. And in the family heirlooms vault, shoved way in the back with covered in dust and many other things sitting on top, he finds an oak box with an ornately caved dragon on it. Opening it up he finds it is velvet lined and has a large pendant that looks a silver dragon curled deep violet amethyst egg. And next to the pendant is a scroll made of thin leather.
He pulled out the scroll first and tried to read it but it was too faint of lettering to make out in the somewhat dim vault light. But what little he could make out it it was really old 14th century English and mentioned something about a coming of age. He rolls it back up and puts it aside to instead pick up the pendant. When he touches it there is a faint static shock that surprises him other then that the silver and purple necklace doesn’t seem out of the ordinary.
His phone lets off a chime to remind him that diner is in an hour, so he pack the pendant and scroll back in the box and places it in his bag with a few other items he finds interesting and wanted to look into more later. Then returns to Wayne manor to eat before patrol. It isn’t until he wakes up the next morning he realizes that he should have probably read the scroll before touching the pendant.
He wakes up to knocking on his bedroom door and someone yelling at him to get up. He had gotten into the habit of locking his door back when Damian first moved in. He yelps in surprise, falling over because his center of balance is all out of whack when he tried to stand. Now he is fully awake and takes stock of himself.
Scales?
Scales! Why are his arms covered in scales?! His hands look like a mix of paws and talons. He struggles out of the sheets to look at the rest of himself. His pjs are stretched and torn in places to accommodate the new digigrade shape of his legs. Not to mention he now has a long tail and wings and a longer neck. He rushes to his personal bathroom and awkwardly stands up on his two legs so he can get a good look in the mirror. And yep that is a distressed dragon face looking back at him. He catches himself making a weird keening sound as he plops down to sit on the bathroom floor.
Moments later he hears the sound of his bedroom door’s lock being picked. Bruce calling his name and Duke explaining he had heard animal noises from the room. Tim scrabbles to try and get the balcony door unlocked so he can escape and find a way to change back before anyone can see him, but moving on all fours and the new talon hands he is not used too take up too much time and the bedroom door is open.
Living in a family of vigilantes, their reaction time and fight or flight instincts are quick, and Tim is tackled to the floor by Duke while the others start looking at every inch of the room for clues as to what happened to their seemingly missing brother.
Bruce is looking at the dragon in Tim’s pajamas for a second before saying, “Tim? Is that you chum?”
Tim tries to answer but all that comes out is a warbling chuff. Which takes Tim by surprise and has him nearly start to cry in panic. He can’t Talk!
“Hey, you’re ok Tim. Deep breaths. Duke get off him. Breath with me Tim. In 1, 2, 3, 4. Out 1, 2, 3, 4.” Bruce spoke in his soothing a scared child voice. Tim was half annoyed at himself for how much it helped.
“B, Look at this!” Dick said holding the box with the scroll and dragon pendent instead open. Now the gem is a very pale see through purple with only a sliver on the bottom the original color.
They take it down to the bat cave and get to work deciphering the scroll. Turns out the Drake family line are descendants of some ancient medieval prince named Aragorn and that there was a family tradition that on the sixteenth birthday the child would have to live a year in dragon form to let it catch up in maturity. But after the dragon form catches up they will be able to freely shift between forms. But if they don’t follow the tradition they don’t age properly, and the longer they put off the tradition the longer they have to spend as a dragon.
And that is all I had time for before bed. So who does this affect the family dynamic? What about the relationship between Tim and Damian? How do we bring Danny Phantom into this? Does he think Tim is a ghost dragon at first?
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