I continued working on a drawing project I started in 2021, called Octuber, where I draw 31 different types of edible roots, & for some reason I decided to incorporate 1890’s fashion from around the world. I’m about 2/3 of the way thru the list woooo
I think society would be much better if it was considered more normal and acceptable to go on quests sometimes. At least once in your life, and it doesn’t even have to be personal to you. Like you could call your boss like “hey my friend is going on a quest to find out once and for all what’s the truth about her grandmother’s childhood family. Ain’t got nothing to do with me, but this is probably going to be a big one and she’s going to need a friend with her.”
And they’d just be like “alright, sure. See you in a year, and let us know if it’s going to be longer, so we can start training a more permanent hire until you get back.”
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Associated Press: Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near "human level robustness and accuracy." But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text -- known in the industry as hallucinations -- can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.
The full extent of the problem is difficult to discern, but researchers and engineers said they frequently have come across Whisper's hallucinations in their work. A University of Michigan researcher conducting a study of public meetings, for example, said he found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected, before he started trying to improve the model. A machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper. The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study by computer scientists uncovered 187 hallucinations in more than 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined. That trend would lead to tens of thousands of faulty transcriptions over millions of recordings, researchers said. Further reading: AI Tool Cuts Unexpected Deaths In Hospital By 26%, Canadian Study Finds
Astronaut Mark Kelly smuggled a gorilla suit into the ISS, without telling the rest of the crew
Winston
Winston
My favourite incident like this was the Skylab 4 mission, where the crew arrived at the empty station, only to find several people already inside, to their great alarm. Upon investigating, they realized the intruders were wearing the Skylab 3 mission patches… and were also just dummies the Skylab 3 crew had made and left there without telling anyone, specifically to fuck with the next team.
Can you imagine entering a supposedly empty space station and seeing this? Fucking terrifying. I love it.
I’m just impressed that, in an environment where weight and available resources are so carefully accounted for, people still find windows to pull bullshit like this.
Texas Track Club of Abilene, 1964. This image miiight be AI or photoshopped but from the digging I’ve done I can’t really tell. Regardless, the image below is definitely real.
I love poinsettias with all me heart. Those wild motherfuckers just keep finding new ways to die and rejoin all those who have gone before them on the endless ancestral plane. Who is to say that their every cell that makes up each leaf and bract and jeweled cyathia does not remember the sun in Mexico? Who is to say, like the monarchs do, they are not winging their way back there each winter? If only as spirits that lift from their limp bodies, leaving behind the feeble plastic pots and cages, rising high above their brethren spread under acres of glass. For some, for those that go early, no drench or spray or careful tending can keep the rot from sinking in and keep them grounded here for a little longer. And others behave and thrive and go as the solstice turns and many take flight before the year ends and many have met their end feeling the frost creep up their velvet bracts, limned for a breath of time with a fatal crown of ice, glittering.
reblogging to normalize. because we really should be uplifting sex workers as bread winners. Also because they should be able to show their face in public without fear of repercussions??? (cough cough), like this gentleman.
Honestly its unhinged and hilarious but yet also seriously something I want to see more of
image described in alt text
Anyway…👀
Reblog if you’re a cheap whore. Or respect cheap whores. Or have the power to turn young people into cheap whores. (they can never tell which)
If you’re making enough to pay off your sister’s student loans you are not a cheap whore you are a wildly successful whore which is admittedly beside the point but damn
I respect whores, both professional and recreational.
moment of silence for everyone who relied on AI chat bots for research when it’s going around saying shit like this.
[image description: search that reads “country in africa that starts with K”. the featured snipped is from www.emergentmind.com and reads “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.” /end ID]
this cunt gave me a Python script to PROVE how wrong it is
IT JUST KEEPS GOING
IT GASLIT ME AND THEN REFUED TO TALK 😭😭 ai is not the fucking future
Nono, if the goal is to replace human labour, this is exactly how a lot of humans talk when wrong on the internet.
There’s this guy in town who owns this little house, and a while back he rescued a street dog that was going to get put down. Turned out she was pregnant.
Problem is, he has mental health & drug issues and couldn’t afford to get them all spayed & neutered, so now there are 6 grown bitches with 15 puppies total, and they’ve dug under his fence in multiple places but he can’t afford to fix it so they go roaming all around town. (When I say can’t afford it, I mean his house is currently running on a generator because he can’t afford his electric bill.) He’s also a day laborer so he cannot take multiple full days off work to take them to the vet an hour away. He’s in a really rough spot.
He’s not a bad person. He’s just overwhelmed.
And this little conservative town with 6 churches for 300 people, have they tried to help their neighbor? Have they adopted the puppies he’s been trying to give away? Have they offered resources?
NOPE! All they wanna do is talk shit about him and complain about the dogs but never lift a finger of their own. And they come to his house to yell at him and cuss him out about the dogs, which does not exactly engender in him a cooperative attitude, as you might imagine.
So after a while of this going on, my mom gets fed up with all the NIMBY bullshit and starts talking to the guy, because she’s done animal rescue for 20-odd years and has Connections. He’s resistant at first, but when he realizes she’s not being an asshole to him on account of his addiction or the dogs, he decides to let her help.
She gets to work organizing and networking. Finds a non-profit that will cover vaccinations, spay/neuter, and flea treatments for all the dogs. Talks the next-door neighbor into paying for materials to fix the fence, since this guy can do the work of it himself. Gets him in touch with another non-profit that will adopt out the adult dogs.
Less than 2 weeks after she decided to do something, all puppies have been to the vet, 10 puppies and 4 adult dogs have been adopted out, and the second non-profit is coming by next week to pick up the remaining 7 dogs to ship them out for adoption.
I’ve learned a lot of things from my mom—some good, some bad—but I think the most important positive message she lives as an example of is this: sometimes, when something needs done and no one else is willing, you gotta stand up and say “I’ll do it.”
The most mind-blowing revelation I received on this lesson happened to me when I was in college.
I was driving along a mountain road with a person I kinda knew in the passenger seat (like a roommate of a roommate or something). The road was very narrow, very twisty-turny, steep cliffs on both sides. I came around a blind curve to see a huge tree branch in the road. I managed to swerve just in time to avoid it, and also not veer the car into the sheer cliff face going up on the left, or of the sheer cliff face going down on the right.
“That’s so dangerous. Someone should move that.” I said.
“You’re someone.” said my passenger.
I very slowly pressed the brakes, my car slowly rolling to a stop as what he’d said started to sink in to my brain.
It had never occurred to be before, in all my life, that I could be the “someone” who could fix the thing. Not ever.
It was dangerous to stop here. If another car came, they could easily hit me, as it was a blind curve. We talked about it, decided it was worth the risk to possibly save a life, and we quickly ran to the branch and moved it to the side as best we could, then hurried back to the car.
It changed my life. After that, every time I have the thought “Someone should _____”, I now hear that voice. I’m ‘someone’. Now I evaluate whether I’m able to do something about a situation- that doesn’t mean I always can! Sometimes I truly don’t have the energy, knowledge, or time or money to fix something. But I should at least think about doing it myself- consider that I could, and weigh the options, which I never did before that moment.
When I had knee surgery in my 20's the cocky young doc exclaimed "holy shit" when he got the camera inside my knee (chose to be awake for the procedure)
Doctor: Please don’t do that in front of patients.
Some alternative statements you could consider when your initial reaction is just ‘!’:
I’m glad we took that X-ray
Well this is almost certainly diagnostic
When one of my classmates broke my leg in 2nd Grade, there was an entire fiasco and I nearly died but I do remember the guy from radiology storming out to the little curtain area I was in and SLAPPING the X-ray up on the back light and the doctor actually shouting “JE-YAY-SUS! No wonder the kid doesn’t have any damn blood!”
i have corneal dystrophy so my corneas will just kind of. tear. for no reason. quite frequently. cause of death: blinked too hard.
so one time i was in the eye hospital (id been there the day before and a junior doc dismissed me entirely as nothing being wrong, sent me off with no treatment, and my optician was Not Having It)
selfsame junior doc eye rolled and, when it was clear i wouldn’t be leaving again, begrudgingly called in the consultant who took one glance at one eye, said “oh my god” and sent for a second consultant
who took one look and said “‘ive never seen anything like it” and sent for a third
who took a quick look and said “wow. jesus. what a mess” and sent for the fourth etc
(junior doc getting progressively more embarrassed the whole time)
anyway both of my corneas have torn so many times it’s apparently just a mess of scar tissue. but if you were wondering what’s worse than one doctor exclaiming in surprise with 0 info, its having the entire department do it in succession
![screenshot of a notification of user eigenblogging's reblog. They say: "nah absolutely not, shit like this is literally propaganda to turn young people into cheap whores. Even if he made that... [trails off] [hashtag] seeing shit like this makes me violently angry [hashtag] vid"](https://64.media.tumblr.com/786804058e56d80d1a6d524045f8725f/4ad14d7cf1081f50-14/s540x810/18f6d8c6c0907ddaf9f270404f02daf1d73e6361.jpg)
