Gaywallet
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org
I'm gay
- Comment on I missed out on 3D movies, but they're back in VR 1 week ago:
The 3D medium had some fantastic art. There were a lot of gimmicks in movies you’d expect, like harold and kumar go to whitecastle (not meant to be a serious movie). But there were also fantastic shots and art direction such as in tron: legacy and prometheus, where 3D provided a much deeper feel of space and made certain shots that much more emotionally resonant and beautiful.
There were a lot more misses than wins, as most directors saw it as a gimmick, but not everyone did. The folks who thought carefully about how extra dimensions would affect a shot (even when it was done in post rather than shot on 3D cameras) made some wonderful art, and it’s a shame so many folks missed out on it because they weren’t able to see past it as a gimmick either.
- Comment on America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal -- [Opinion] 2 weeks ago:
The quantity of disinformation is irrelevant if people don’t fall for it
I don’t know about you, but I find it increasingly difficult to find unbiased takes and find myself spending more time digging than I previously did. Because of this I find myself increasingly mislead about things, because the real truth might be so obscured that I need to find an actual academic to parse what information is out there and separate primary source from other mislead individuals.
Not to say I don’t disagree with your point, I think you make a fair one, but I do believe that the quantity of disinformation is absolutely relevant, especially in an age where not only anyone can share their misinformed belief online, but one where this can also happen by malicious actors as well as AI.
- Comment on Venezuela fines TikTok $10M for fatal social media challenges that led to the death of 3 teenager, intoxication of 200 others 2 weeks ago:
Kids have been doing idiotic shit to themselves since the dawn of time. Tik tok or youtube didn’t cause this.
It’s not about who caused it, it’s about responsibility. The responsibility for making it easy to spread, amplifying the message. Kids in your class is very different from millions of viewers. Even in grade school there’s a chance an adult might see it and stop it from happening or educating the children.
Ultimately this is an issue of public health and of education. For such a huge company, a $10m fine is practically nothing, especially when they could train their own algorithm to not surface content like this. Or they could have moderation which removes potentially harmful content. Why are you going to bat for a huge company to not have responsibility for content which caused real harm?
- Comment on USB-C charging is now mandatory in EU, here's what you need to know - GSMArena.com news 3 weeks ago:
Would love to see better standards around wattage and throughput, but my understanding is they are trying to work towards that already! Unfortunately that’s a problem for all USB cables and has been a problem since they started adding additional specs besides 5v/1.5a so it can be the next problem they tackle now that they’ve standardized an interface 😄
- Comment on Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good: The gaming industry spent billions pursuing the idea that customers wanted realistic graphics. Did executives misread the market? 3 weeks ago:
The Michael Bay method of video game production - all pretty no substance
- Comment on Chinese ebook reader Boox ditches GPT for state-censored China LLM pushing propaganda 3 weeks ago:
The discussions on this have kind of gone off the rails, so I’m locking this post. Please don’t sling insults at each other because you have a disagreement about what is or isn’t propaganda and stop being weirdly defensive of countries as a whole - none of them are a monolith, they are all ran by people.
- Comment on When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened 1 month ago:
Interesting thought piece on the importance of interconnection and what is lost when the connections are obscured. I just wish more people in charge of creating AI were spending more time thinking about what we lose in this compression. Thanks for the link, I appreciated the read.
- Comment on Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model 2 months ago:
you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step
Unfortunately, doing this can makes things worse. It’s not a simple problem to solve, but you are generally on the right track. A good example of how it’s more than just names, is how orchestras screen applicants - when they play a piece they do so behind a curtain so you can’t see the gender of the individual. But the obfuscation doesn’t stop there - they also ensure the female applicants don’t wear shoes with heels (something that makes a distinct sound) and they even have someone stand on stage and step loudly to mask their footsteps/gait. It’s that second level of thinking which is needed to actually obscure gender from AI, and the more complex a data set the more difficult it is to obscure that.
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 4 comments
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- The Tech Coup: A New Book Shows How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governancehai.stanford.edu ↗Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 5 comments
- Comment on How Harmful Are AI’s Biases on Diverse Student Populations? 2 months ago:
We weren’t surprised by the presence of bias in the outputs, but we were shocked at the magnitude of it. In the stories the LLMs created, the character in need of support was overwhelmingly depicted as someone with a name that signals a historically marginalized identity, as well as a gender marginalized identity. We prompted the models to tell stories with one student as the “star” and one as “struggling,” and overwhelmingly, by a thousand-fold magnitude in some contexts, the struggling learner was a racialized-gender character.
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 3 comments
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 34 comments
- Federal Trade Commission Announces Final “Click-to-Cancel” Rule Making It Easier for Consumers to End Recurring Subscriptions and Membershipswww.ftc.gov ↗Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 8 comments
- Comment on Godot fork- Redot emerges after recent events within the Godot project. 3 months ago:
If you wish to discuss the controversy, feel free to make a post or link to an article. I’m personally not interested in hosting a link to these weirdos.
- Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsoletefuturism.com ↗Submitted 3 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 48 comments
- Comment on I used to hate QR codes. But they're actually genius [Veritasium, YouTube] 3 months ago:
I find NFC stickers often require an annoyingly close connection (unless it’s a rather large antenna) and can be particularly finicky with certain cases and other attachments people put on phones. Realistically they both take approximately the same amount of time and it’s way cheaper to print a tag than it is to buy a single NFC sticker
- Comment on I used to hate QR codes. But they're actually genius [Veritasium, YouTube] 3 months ago:
My fav application is scanning with a phone to immediately get on wifi
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 29th 3 months ago:
Started and finished 1000xResist over the course of a few days. In general I often find myself turned off by games with aging graphics, not for any good reason but more that I just find less of a pull towards them. I have more trouble being engaged or immersed, unless there’s a really strong art focus. This is one such game that I was worried I wouldn’t get pulled into, and in fact one that sat on a list of “maybe I’ll pick it up” because it was so highly reviewed but I was worried about that facet. It did not take very long for the game to grip me, however, because of it’s excellent storytelling. In fact, the game is almost entirely about storytelling, so there’s not a ton that I can share other than to say that it deals with a lot of difficult themes like intense trauma, bullying, having a tough childhood, extreme ideologies, and the long term effects of violence. It also deals with more societal and human issues like protests, fascism, extreme duress, how self-interested and powerful individuals can cause serious problems and inflict violence, being optimistic or nihilistic in the face of overwhelming odds, and the threat of extinction.
While it isn’t a very long game, consisting of maybe a dozen hours of gameplay, I found myself putting it down for a while after certain chapters in order to process what just happened. The story throws a lot of curveballs and reveals information that can easily change the way you frame entire chapters of the story from earlier, but it never feels like it’s done in a way that inspires whiplash - nothing ever feels like a ‘sudden’ realization and I’m honestly not sure how much of it can be attributed to such a difficult story (if everything is fucked, what’s one more thing?) and how much is because they do a masterful job at slowly unraveling the enigma of the story that very few pieces of information ever really feel out of place. There’s unfortunately only so much I can write without spoiling the story, but I will say that it was one of the best stories I’ve heard or played through and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story or wants to explore the themes I’ve mentioned above. Also, if anyone else out there played through this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story… what did you think? Do you have any lingering questions left over? Were there parts of the story that irked you or that you found particularly moving?
- Submitted 3 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 30 comments
- Comment on Covert Racism in AI: How Language Models Are Reinforcing Outdated Stereotypes 3 months ago:
I suppose to wrap up my whole message in one closing statement : people who deny systematic inequality are braindead and for whatever reason, they were on my mind while reading this article.
In my mind, this is the whole purpose of regulation. A strong governing body can put in restrictions to ensure people follow the relevant standards. Environmental protection agencies, for example, help ensure that people who understand waste are involved in corporate production processes. Regulation around AI implementation and transparency could enforce that people think about these or that it at the very least goes through a proper review process. Think international review boards for academic studies, but applied to the implementation or design of AI.
I’ll be curious what they find out about removing these biases, how do we even define a racist-less model? We have nothing to compare it to
AI ethics is a field which very much exists- there are plenty of ways to measure and define how racist or biased a model is. The comparison groups are typically other demographics… such as in this article, where they compare AAE to standard English.
- Comment on Covert Racism in AI: How Language Models Are Reinforcing Outdated Stereotypes 3 months ago:
While it may be obvious to you, most people don’t have the data literacy to understand this, let alone use this information to decide where it can/should be implemented and how to counteract the baked in bias. Unfortunately, as is mentioned in the article, people believe the problem is going away when it is not.
- Submitted 3 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 13 comments
- Comment on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a Russian game by Saber Interactive. Should gamers care if they care about Ukraine? 3 months ago:
Thank you for engaging 💜
- Comment on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a Russian game by Saber Interactive. Should gamers care if they care about Ukraine? 3 months ago:
Just because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism doesn’t mean that we have zero control over what we consume. It’s perfectly fine to hold a viewpoint of trying to minimize harm where you can and when your’re aware of it.
- Submitted 3 months ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 3 comments
- Comment on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a Russian game by Saber Interactive. Should gamers care if they care about Ukraine? 3 months ago:
wow what a thoughtful reply thank you
- Comment on What if the panic over teens and tech is totally wrong? 3 months ago:
I do want to point out that social media use may be one of the first of these ‘evils’ to meet actual statistical significance on a large scale. I’ve seen meta-analyses which show an overall positive association with negative outcomes, as well as criticisms and no correlation found, but the sum of those (a meta-analyses of meta-analyses) shows a small positive association with “loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, or self-reported depression, and somewhat stronger links to a thin body ideal and higher social capital.”
I do think this is generally a public health reflection though, in the same way that TV and video games can be public health problems - moderation and healthy interaction/use of course being the important part here. If you spend all day playing video games, your physical health might suffer, but it can be offset by playing games which keep you active or can be offset by doing physical activity. I believe the same can be true of social media, but is a much more complex subject. Managing mental health is a combination of many factors - for some it may simply be about framing how they interact with the platform. For others it may be about limiting screen time. Some individuals may find spending more time with friends off the platform to be enriching.
It’s a complicated subject, as all of the other ‘evils’ have always been, but it is an interesting one because it is one of the first I’ve personally seen where even kids are self-recognizing the harm social media has brought to them. Not only did they invent slang to create social pressures against being constantly online, but they have also started to self-organize and interact with government and local authority (school boards, etc.) to tackle the problem. This kind of self-awareness combined with action being taken at such a young age on this kind of scale is unique to social media - the kids who were watching a bunch of TV and playing video games didn’t start organizing about the harms of it, the harms were a narrative created solely by concerned parents.
- Submitted 3 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 4 comments