AnarchistArtificer

@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People always want their ideal conversation to sound like movie characters, but in reality most people talk as if they're in an interrogation room or how people sound like on police bodycam footage.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Movie dialogue tries to be verisimilitudinous, rather than realistic.

  I’m mostly making this comment because “verisimilitudinous” is an excellent word that I love getting the opportunity to use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epstein Files: X Users Are Asking Grok to 'Unblur' Photos of Children⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The datasets they are trained on do in fact include CSAM. These datasets are so huge that it easily slips through the cracks. It’s usually removed whenever it’s found, but I don’t know how this actually affects the AI models that have already been trained on that data — to my knowledge, it’s not possible to selectively “untrain” models, and they would need to be retrained from scratch. Plus I occasionally see it crop up in the news about how new CSAM keeps being found in the training data.

  It’s one of the many, many problems with generative AI

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This whistle fights fascists | How thousands of 3D-printed whistles are derailing ICE.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for sharing this. This bolstered my spirit.

  I liked the bit where it discusses how, regardless of the effectiveness of whistles in deterring ICE, they have proven to be helpful in regular people feeling less alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Save as PDF⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them

  (I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often.

  Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I’d have two nickels. — which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”

  I think I’m just most people’s token techy friend. Or more specifically, I’m the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Save as PDF⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s sort of like saying “I’m overheating because my apartment is 32ᵒC, let’s turn on the heating and see how we feel once it’s 45ᵒC”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taste the flavor⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I love the fact that you wrote this in a science meme sub. I like getting learning alongside my memes

  (I’m a biochemist, so I didn’t learn anything in this particular instance, but I frequently find my day brightened by helpful people like yourself, who take the time to explain stuff)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Even their fish are fucked up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a friend who uses snuff tobacco, and occasionally she’ll add some cocaine to it — she calls it “spicy snuff”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Didn't Break Copyright Law, It Just Exposed How Broken It Already Was⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?

  Well even before AI, it wasn’t doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don’t need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.

  If you haven’t read the article, I’d encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Add some artistic flair, ffs!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Taking nudes is really difficult. I’ve never taken nudes per se, but recently I was trying to take some photos that included my body, whilst wearing some sexy clothing. That shit takes some skill.

  One tip that I discovered is that using your phone’s regular camera rather than your front facing camera makes a big difference. To get this right, you ideally need to use a mirror so that you can see what’s on your screen as you’re getting the angles right. I found that positioning my phone higher and pointing it slightly downwards was best. Finding a way to securely position my phone to make this work was a bitch.

  If you’re using your backward facing camera, then you’ll probably need to set your phone to take the image on a timer. Alternatively some smart watches can be used to trigger the photograph without you having to get up from your sexy pose to press the button on your phone (which risks knocking your phone out of position). Alternatively, once you’ve found the right angle and pose, you can try taking a video of you posing and then extracting frames from that video later.

  The experience left me with a greater level of respect for people who take good nudes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There are a lot of siblings that hate each other, simultaneously there are only children that feel lonely really want siblings to play with.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember seeing a post of yours elsewhere where you mentioned about difficulty mustering the energy and mental strength to go out beyond your home (possibly linked to your parents being quite overprotective? I may be remembering wrong). Regardless of the specifics, I think that factors like that can worsen relations between family members. My brother and I don’t get on well when we’re living in the same house, for instance. That’s made worse by my mom being a difficult person to live with.

  But I think you’re right also, that there is a significant component of the grass being greener on the other side. I know plenty of people who are only children, who wish they had siblings, and people with siblings who wish they were an only child.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Y'all got one, right?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Impressive dedication. Do you have an important task to do that you’re currently procrastinating? Whenever I show similar levels of commitment to answering trivial questions, that’s what is usually driving me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft lost $357 billion in market cap as stock plunged most since 2020⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Something that I’m super chuffed with is that a few years back, one of my most cheapskate friends asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. When I presented their options to them, they were reluctant to cheap out and get a mediocre laptop that wouldn’t last them very long, but they also balked at the price of even the midrange laptops (they weren’t keen on spending more than £250 on a laptop, which wasn’t enough to get anything that they’d consider to be decent and worth the effort/cost).

  As a long shot offer, I told them that I could always try installing Linux on their laptop if they wanted to wring another couple of years out of their existing laptop. I was a tad surprised when they opted for this, and even more surprised at how well they took to it; I jokingly call them one of my “normie” friends, because they’re one of the people whose perspective I ask for when I’m trying to calibrate for what non-techie people know/think. I only had limited experience with Linux myself at that point, having only played around with things on live USBs before. I had heard that Linux could give new life to slow computers, but I was surprised at just how effectively it did this.

  (A small amusing aspect to this anecdote is that when I was installing it, I said that one of the side benefits of running Linux is that it could boost nerd cred amongst folk like me. They laughed and said that they didn’t expect that this would be a thing that would ever end up being relevant. Later that year, they got a girlfriend who saw that my friend was running Linux, and expressed approval, which is quite funny to me)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft lost $357 billion in market cap as stock plunged most since 2020⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s sad. Regardless of whether it’s one of the reasons for Microsoft’s nosedive, it does make me feel some unexpected sympathy for Satya Nadella. I also feel pity, because most high up CEOs do not seem happy with their lives — Many of them spend an absurd amount of time at work, even if they never seem to actually do much work, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be to weather grief under such conditions. No amount of money can buy you more time with a lost loved one.

  It really seems like a hollow existence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Being anti-capitalist is entirely fair, but I think being opposed to all businesses is a less justifiable position to hold.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, this really was an excellent answer. I’m impressed by how he used this example to illustrate the wider strategy without it feeling like a weird kind of “we will cut programs like this and then everything will be fine”. It gives the sense that this is being used as an example because it’s simple enough to be at the top of a large pile of potential savings, which will take time and work to dig through.

  To put it a different way, his answer abstracts away the right stuff. He doesn’t pretend that everything will be as simple and easy as cutting this one program was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Often the promised cost savings never materialise, because when the chatbot fucks up, it’s humans who need to clean up the mess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do people eat this?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I quite like Yorkshire puddings.

  But I agree, British cuisine is pretty beige in vibe

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think I’d agree with that. Although it’s gotten large enough that it doesn’t feel like a subset of sociology anymore, it still feels descended from sociology. (To give an example of what I mean by being large enough it’s now distinct from sociology, biochemistry sprang forth from biology/biomedicine, but now is its own distinct field, with methods and modes of inquiry that are distinct from biology/biomedicine)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an interesting perspective. I feel like I disagree with you, but I don’t know why. Whenever I feel like this, it usually means that there is some interesting learning ahead of me if I am willing to chew on some ideas for a while, so thanks for writing this comment

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Something that I often end up ranting about when I’ve had a few drinks at the pub is how I wish that all science education included some philosophy. I don’t mean as a brief, one off unit, but actually woven throughout.

  I actually got really into learning about the philosophy of science because I found this insufficiency became apparent when learning about machine learning systems in the context of bioinformatics and protein structure prediction. There were some absolutely brain-dead takes in papers that seemed to believe that big data methods have the potential of basically removing scientists from the process of science. Fortunately, there were also papers that called this out as nonsense, because expert knowledge is more important than ever in building and using machine learning systems.

  Shout out to Sabine Leonelli, author of Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, which was the book I read that looked at this in detail. Her work is what really cemented my passion for the philosophy of science, and got me into philosophy more generally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that economics is a science, but contrary to the insistence of many economists I have known, it is absolutely a soft science. This is not a pejorative (though I reluctantly admit that I used to view it as such). My view is that economists would be wise to learn from their fellow social scientists in other fields. That would do a lot to help improve the rigour of economics.

  You raise an interesting point, but there’s more to science than just measuring stuff. Most of my beef with economics comes from how economists react when their model’s predictions don’t align with reality. If a physicist’s theory makes incorrect predictions, then there’s not really much wiggle room to explain away the problem. If a psychologist’s theory makes predictions that aren’t correct, then my impression is that “explaining away” errors by gesturing at additional complexities not able to be accounted for is a much more acceptable thing to happen. This isn’t necessarily bad, but rather seems to be a part of how knowledge production happens in the social sciences.

  I can’t comment too much on the specifics, as I am very much not a social scientist. Like I said above though, I have come around from looking down on these fields. In fact, I’ve come to appreciate them precisely because the skills used in the soft sciences are so alien to me. Economics uses a heckton of quantitative methods, but the phenomena they study are fundamentally social in nature, and thus they reduce the utility of their work by trying to distance themselves from the social sciences

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What makes a difference is how models are evaluated in light of new evidence. If a model makes predictions that turn out to be incorrect, then a big part of scientific progress is in re-examining the underlying assumptions of the model.

  My beef with economics isn’t that it’s often wrong, but that economists are often keen to present themselves as scientists to boost their epistemic authority, whilst also acting in a deeply unscientific way.

  The worst economists for this get very offended if you say that economics is a soft science, with more in common with psychology than physics. This offends them because they hear “soft science” as a pejorative. Economics absolutely is a science, but the more that economists try to pretend that their object of study isn’t wibbly wobbly as hell, the less I respect them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You — I like you.

  I hated how statistics was taught in my university science course. I did a ton of extra advanced modules when I was doing my A levels before university, so I learned more stats than most people do in high school. This just made the poor statistics taught to biochemists all the more confusing. There were things that they taught that were straight up wrong, and it really made me doubt myself.

  I ended up going away and learning statistics in a more thorough way, which ended up being a lot of fun. In a weird way, I’m glad for how grim the stats course was because it led me to a much deeper understanding than I’d have gotten otherwise

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wokeness ended, check mate leftists ⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s actually a lot of trans women in the professional modelling world. One friend told me that due to preferences for taller women with particular bone structure, that the field actively selects for trans women. Like, there’s still way more cis women in modelling than trans women, simply because there’s way more cis women in the world, but trans women are disproportionately represented in modelling

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wokeness ended, check mate leftists ⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s because there’s a significant proportion of people whose preferences are something behind “skinny, white, conventionally feminine woman”, and so when people outside of that demographic are featured in media, it freaks them out because their preferences are limited to people who fit within that narrow description, so wider diversity of people depicted in media is, to them, synonymous with a push for unattractive people in media.

  That in and of itself isn’t a problem — they have every right to their own preferences, and I have no interests in trying to convince them of anything. The problem is because they have attached themselves to the idea that their personal preferences are the objective standard. So when they see more diversity in media, and others thirsting for people they would consider to be objectively unattractive, this destabilises the idea that their preferences are The Truth. This means that, rather than just accepting that people like what they like, they contort themselves into believing that this is all a big conspiracy to try to push objectively unattractive people into media. Framing things like that means they end up seeing this as something that is entirely a political push to erode all foundations of society as part of some Woke ploy. They feel threatened and genuinely scared that there will be a future where there is literally no-one who they find attractive represented in media. Which is to say that someone who is accustomed to being the boot distrusts people who want there to be no boot, because surely they must be lying so that they can seize power and be the boot and crush everyone else.

  At the heart of this is a zero-sum way of thinking of the world. They have deeply internalised that if one group in society gains rights, or power of any sort, then it must come at the cost of someone else. Some of them occasionally show awareness of the moral awfulness of them using their privilege to oppress others in society, and they briefly have moments where they understand that if the oppressed wished to take our retribution against them, we would be justified. However, they are incapable (or unwilling) to actually reckon with all the cognitive dissonance they’ve built up, and so their fear causes them to become ever more rigid in their worldview.

  I find it fascinating, really. I am a fat, queer punk, and my existence is viscerally horrifying to them, because I am the epitome of so much of what they hate, and it breaks their brains to imagine that someone could find me attractive (tbh, it still sort of breaks my brain a bit too, but I’m getting there with improving my confidence). They genuinely believe that THE WOKE LEFT want everyone in media to look like me, even though that would be the opposite of the diversity we actually want.

  They don’t believe us when we say this though. Their zero sum thinking combined with their willful inability to acknowledge that their own preferences are as subjective as anyone’s means they don’t believe us when we say this though, and that this is all part of our dastardly plot to seize absolute power for ourselves and make them be the oppressed ones.

  It’s quite sad for them in the end. I’ve found that a huge part of what has allowed me to become more confident in myself has been acknowledging and embracing all the non conventional things I find attractive in other people. For instance, I firmly believe that the most beautiful point on basically any human body is the point where the curvature of the calf turns from being convex to concave. And because I don’t feel the need to convince other people of this, I can just let myself like what I like and be free to bite my partners’ calves. Even if their tastes do genuinely align with what is considered to be this narrow notion of “conventionally attractive”, I can’t imagine they feel very free to actually enjoy their own desires and their own bodily potential

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Heave-ho!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Image

  This but pants

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Heave-ho!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pants often have pockets, but too small even for a normal sized wallet, or a smaller phone. And women who buy pants with shitty pockets absolutely complain about the pockets. Literally just this week, I complimented someone on her handbag, and she thanked me, and proceeded to complain about shitty pockets that necessitate having bags (she wished that she had good pockets, because then having a nice bag could be a deliberate, aesthetic choice, rather than a necessity.

  Pants are generally crap, but they’re not the only thing that can have pockets: skirts and dresses can too. I love how often I compliment someone on their dress, and they put their hands in their pockets and say “Thanks! It has pockets!”. When I first saw this meme, I was delighted to see someone describing the exact same thing that I love seeing. Every time I see that posted, I see loads of people commenting on agreement. There is a truly incredible amount of solidarity in the experience of shitty pockets on women’s clothes. When we do find clothes with good pockets, it’s so exciting that we can’t wait to share that fact with anyone who compliments us on the outfit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds super cool! Do you have any pics?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨And the cold in particular.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The trick is that most of the magic comes from the hands, then the brain. When I self taught calligraphy, I spend a long time just practicing drills. Pages and pages of lines, circles and isolated letters, where I was honing my muscle memory to be able to keep the pen at the correct angle throughout a stroke, or to make a stroke quickly enough that it looks smooth and not wobbly, but slow enough that it was still correctly aligned.

  The brain-knowledge came afterwards. That’s why, even after years of not practicing calligraphy, I’m still decent at doing some halfway pretty writing. Whoever wrote the phrase in the OP must be at this point too, because writing in snow on a car window will obviously use very different hand and arm movements compared to writing on paper.

  I also futilely spent a lot of time trying to write in a pretty manner when I was in school. I eventually gave up and felt like someone like me, who is not particularly artistic, just isn’t cut out for it. When I actually picked up calligraphy, some years later, I clicked with it surprisingly well precisely because I’m not an artist. It felt more like a technical skill, and I enjoyed the zen of just following the instructions for a particular script, and doing the drills.

  I realised that part of my mistake in school was that I had been trying to jump straight to the level of being able to write in a decorative way. I only got good enough that I could do freehand, decorative style lettering when I had become proficient in 3 or 4 different calligraphy scripts. The only reason why it feels like the “writing” -> “art” conversion part of your brain doesn’t work is because it needs to learn through your hands.

  If you’d be interested to give it a go, a pen that I loved learning with (and still use today whenever I want to be a bit fancy) is the Pilot Parallel. They come in a variety of sizes and are a super accessible way to be able to start learning a wide variety of scripts without the stress of things like dip pens. The swirly writing featured in the OP would probably involve using a flex nib, which does typically require dipped ink, so I didn’t even touch that stuff for years, despite being enamoured with the pretty swirls. This is the book I learned from.

  I liked doing calligraphy because it allowed me to feel artistic without actually being all that creative. It’s also pretty great for gifts. “Half uncial” is pretty similar to the script used in Lord of the Rings, and isn’t too hard, so I used that to make a thing with one of her favourite lines from the book. Another friend got a postcard with “FUCK” written in fancy, gothic capitals. It took a while to get to that point, but it was pretty cool once I was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Heave-ho!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the problem is that the vast vast majority of women’s clothing, especially fast fashion, lacks pockets of good size (or any at all). The smaller places that make garments with good pockets are usually priced higher because they’re inherently not targeting the mass market (because they can’t compete with the big companies, so their only hope is to carve out a niche in the high quality domain)