theivorybilledwoodpecker:

For people who live in the U.S., November can bring to mind a lot of things, and one of them is Thanksgiving. This can be a complicated holiday because while most people just see it as an excuse to get together with friends and family and pig out, we all know that the story of the “First Thanksgiving” is bullshit.

This November, and for as long as it takes, I’m asking you to keep Native American and Alaska Native rights in mind and to fight for them. ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act, is at risk.

This act was created to stop cultural genocide. Until the late 1900s, Native American and Alaska Native children were routinely kidnapped and placed in residential schools and white families, where they faced abuse, forced assimilation, and sometimes murder. ICWA was passed in 1978 to stop this by allowing tribes to control the foster and adoption placement of Native American and Alaska Native children.

However, today, the SCOTUS started hearing arguments in a case that could overturn ICWA. This would not only endanger children and allow cultural genocide, but it would endanger tribal sovereignty since it would deny sovereign tribes the rights over the placement of their own children.

This November, this Thanksgiving, and until ICWA has been upheld, I ask you to stand up for the rights of Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

• Spread the word about what is happening. Don’t let this get swept under the rug. Post about it. Tell your friends and family.
• Sign petitions.
• Write to representatives.
• Reach out to local tribes to see what you can do to help.
• Protest.
• And if you can afford to do so, donate to Native American and Alaska Native organizations.

Sign the Petition

Protect the Indian Child Welfare Act

Change.org

Protect ICWA and Tribal Sovereignty!

Native children and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland are under legal attack in Brackeen v. Haaland. The powerful people behind the

action.lakotalaw.org

Native American Organizations | Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

edi.nih.gov

Lakota People's Law Project

We work to end the long history of treaty violations and systemic corruption that has resulted in the loss of children and sacred lands for

lakotalaw.org

Home - Native American Rights Fund

Native American Rights Fund

segamascott:

segamascott:

totallynotgayforyou:

specialmouse-deactivated2025060:

to all the depressed teens out there not brushing your teeth FUCKING BRUSH THEM i promise you i promise you i promise you i promise you look at me i promise you my heart my liver my lungs that you’re gonna thank yourself later. Just once a day even. Please

maxofs2d:

tsunderebot:

dexer-von-dexer:

danshive:

In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.

Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.

“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”

“It insists she’s the mafia.”

“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”

“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”

I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.

This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.

There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.

Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.

TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help

Having been to several talks on modern ai I can confirm

I always think of this tweet when I see people praising machine learning and the new kinds of AI as a panacea.

what-even-is-thiss:

“Cats don’t actually love you”

A cat is a small creature in the middle of the food chain that is fully aware that you are a very large thing that could stomp its head in at any moment and yet it chooses to rest its tiny little head on your leg for a nap and spreads out on the floor near you exposing its belly and its most sensitive organs. It brings dead mice and bugs to you to share food.

Don’t you get it? This tiny thing trusts you. It wants to help you too. It licks your leg thinking that it’s helping. It kneads on you to find comfort. It shares its body warmth with you in the cold and gives you your space in the heat. It hisses at other mammals it sees outside including other cats in an effort to protect its family.

Cats love you so so much. But they will keep trying to eat plastic.

gulistan-blog:

㋡🥀

colors of the sky.

90-slifestyle:

loveridden1999:

breathtakingdestinations:

Brooklyn - New York - USA (by Lerone Pieters)

punacceptable:

*slaps ur ass* good post good post

dragon-in-a-fez:

dragon-in-a-fez:

there’s a fine line between being wary of manipulation and becoming completely paranoid because you get very close to the realisation that pretty much all human interaction involves doing things we hope will lead to a result we like

this post is about a lot of things. it’s about my ex saying it was manipulative to talk to them in a cute voice because that influenced their emotions. it’s also about someone on this webbed site saying being funny is “engagement farming”. like yeah every single conversation you have is going to be “manipulative” if your standard for that is “did something with the goal of eliciting a response”. if that bothers you go live in a hut in the forest and speak only to the trees. I’ll be over here manipulating my friends into being happy by giving them compliments

moleshow:

balaclava-trismegistus:

katelyn-danger:

“portugal” isn’t a real country, go back to bed

degenezijde:

There’s construction (well, mostly destruction) going on next door and I have turned into menwatchingworkers.jpg for highs like these.