Badboneszone - BAD TO THE BONES* - Tumblr Blog
when the ogre I hired to guard the castle complains that the longsword I gave him requires a level of control and finesse he isn't used to
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
what’s the story about the generative power model and water consumption? /gen
There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.
To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.
But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there's hysterical bullshit. And the whole "AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn't" thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being "real art" -- a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven't bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.
I was about to add a note to something but had the horrifying thought of “is this the kind of joke my dad would make?” And panicked. Gotta post something he would never say now. um. Pussy is the powerhouse of the catboy. Me when I’m stuck in a grain silo. I’m sorry I’ve let my obsession with getting my old life back blind me to the future I could have built.. Girl dick.
So one of my tweets kinda blew up. :v
the fact that we have a global economy but no way of coordinating it seems like one of the biggest challenges humanity faces, although arguably that’s just a corollary of our inability to coordinate anything else at the global level.
Also, “doing things that bother you” and “being inconsiderate” are not synonymous.
Lots of people have tics, lots of them can be annoying. Doesn’t make it inconsiderate. Your minimum interference and another person’s minimum interference can vary drastically.
“Do your best and assume that other people are doing theirs” is an outlook that has seriously improved my life in so many ways
asking people to be mindful of others when sharing a communal space (especially one you cannot just up and leave from) is not selfish or misanthropic. come on now
It’s Flat Friend Friday; reblog with pictures of your pet being flat and comfy.
Everyone needs to read this and bookmark it
Watching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap devour basic moral practice in real time is fascinating in a terrible kind of way
Pretty sure this is the plot to 127 hours
this summer follow one man's inspiring journey to die badly inside an inaccessible hole
How to protect yourself during stampede
“Where’s the pathetic element?” Exactly Tom Hardy. Exactly.
(x)
This is the most chaotic good thing I’ve ever seen
Look, I'm not saying that it's our place as an organisation to dictate who does and does not get to claim monsterhood. I'm just saying that when the membership of the organisation in question includes a sphinx, a bridge troll, several mysterious hermits, and a pair of goblins where one of them always tells the truth and the other always lies, "no gatekeeping" is a policy that needs to be approached with nuance.
Aamer Rahman: "A colonizer’s favourite trick is to start the timeline when it's convenient for them."
i’m so glad earth only has one moon, if there were more i’d have to pick a favorite and that sounds too emotionally taxing to even fathom