Toots š from 05/15 to 05/19
As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I donāt include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I donāt notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I donāt feel restricted by message length.
Also, I donāt generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
9:04 ā Mon 15 May 2023
Image Not Shown: Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) pulling facial expression, Kenya, Africa
Chimps combine sounds to communicate greater meaning from Futurity
By conducting careful, controlled experiments with wild chimpanzees in Uganda, researchers showed that these combinations are understood by chimpanzees.
Hashtags: #Animals #Communication
It genuinely amazes me how much animal cognition that we find, now that weāve grown inclined to look for it. Weāve found tool use, forms of culture, and this looks a lot like a native language. We have not found evidence of any non-humans that record information for future generations, but weāve found pretty much every classic identifier that we would generally use.
While I donāt want to anthropomorphize anything, because we might look for the wrong behaviors when we think about intelligence, this seems remarkably parallel to colonization and chattel slavery. In both cases, humans (or a subset) dismissed all evidence of intelligence and culture on the land that they wanted, to justify sing the land and its people however they pleased.
12:06 ā Mon 15 May 2023
As the people of Alebione had their British history and read about the Saxons and William, so the Hawaiians should read their historyā¦The King said he thought the history of all the islands should be preserved from first to last.
Hashtags: #Quotes #AAPIHeritage
9:07 ā Tue 16 May 2023
Image Not Shown: A bearded worker in a suit explaining papers to a (presumed) couple
People of color get so used to discrimination in stores they donāt always notice bad customer service from The Conversation
ā¦while all groups rated positive scenarios similarly, Black and Hispanic viewers tended to perceive negative experiences in a better light than white viewers.
Hashtags: #Racism #Discrimination
I wonder how much this overlaps with the fear that many people of color have that, if they complain, that draws attention to them, and they risk some white person either complaining about their temper or calling the police.
12:04 ā Tue 16 May 2023
Therefore, you are rightly called a child of light; It is also an inheritance for that great life that is to comeā¦
Hashtags: #Quotes #AAPIHeritage
9:05 ā Wed 17 May 2023
Content Warning: US Politics
Image Not Shown: Florida governor Ron DeSantis speaks at a fundraising event for the Republican Party on 6 May, 2023 in Rothschild, Wisconsin
How DeSantisās voter suppression model could go national from openDemocracy
But the arrests need not result in convictions for the possibility of being arrested for voting to have a deterrent effect among e.g. African-American communities ā precisely the kinds of communities whose voting Republicans seek to suppress.
Hashtags: #USPol #VoterSuppression
One of the big problems in American politics, in my eyesāapart from the increasingly literal fascist party, I meanāhas to do with how nobody listens to authoritarians or, if they do, they give what they say the most benign interpretation possible. For example, Republicans have spent decades saying that āthe states are the laboratories of democracy.ā They meant that. Specifically, they meant that control of state governments allow them to test anti-democratic measures, to see which measures not only work, but pass sufficient legal scrutiny to safely replicate and expand.
Meanwhile, we have voters worrying about whether the specific man behind a handful of measures gets elected, as if the specific face matters.
12:01 ā Wed 17 May 2023
The race had been very exciting, both vessels flying their national colors, and spreading their sails to the fullest extent, the captain of each standing on the quarter-deck, watching every movement and trimming sails to catch every portion of the breeze.
Hashtags: #Quotes #AAPIHeritage
9:03 ā Thu 18 May 2023
Content Warning: Terrible Former President (and Sex Offender)
Image Not Shown: Former President Donald Trump listens as he speaks with reporters while in flight on his plane after a campaign rally at Waco Regional Airport, in Waco, Texas, Saturday, March 25, 2023, while en route to West Palm Beach, Fla.
Republicans outraged Trump held accountable for sexual abuse from Daily Kos
Then thereās the walking GOP zeitgeist who is Sen. Tommy Tuberville, from Alabama. āIt makes me want to vote for him twice.ā Which is an okay thing to do, if youāre a Republican.
Hashtags: #USPol #Trump #Republicans
Iāve said since Trumpās first day in office in 2017 that we need to ignore all the stories about who secretly hates him. It doesnāt matter, because he supports the destructive policies that they support, and so theyāll happily support him, then have a staffer try to rehabilitate their images with secret hatreds.
Donāt worry. I donāt think much more of the Republicans who refuse to support Trump, because they still support the same policies, and only object to the āpersonalityā presenting them.
12:03 ā Thu 18 May 2023
I have witnessed how education opens doors, and I know that when sound instruction takes place, students experience the joys of new-found knowledge and the ability to excel.
Hashtags: #Quotes #AAPIHeritage
4:00 PM ā Thu 18 May 2023
Have the AI chatbots been getting worse? It feels like they have increasingly gotten into the business of avoiding work instead of doing work. Occasionally, I give one a task like āwrite a short story about that,ā or ātake this file and modify its contents to represent this well-known thing.ā Iāve gotten more and more non-solutions, like telling me how I could do the work or repeating my file back to me verbatim, then giving me something entirely unrelated when I complain that it got it wrongā¦
I consider that a serious question, though I can understand why some might read it as a joke. As you can probably guess, I have a pile of one-off projects that Iād like to work on, and AI seems like a perfect way to make progress on at least some of them, by providing a rough draft to edit and add a āvoiceā to. It used to do this extremely well.
Recently, though, it almost feels like somebody programmed ChatGPT in particular to avoid work.
For an example, I gave it a function and asked it to refactor the code. It chose to define refactoring for me. When I explained that I didnāt ask for a definition, it gave me a list of steps to walk through for refactoring. Again, I complained, and it gave meā¦the original function. One last time, I explained the problem with that answer, and it generated some entirely unrelated code.
In similar cases, it now only tells the same prose or scripted story, where two people disagree about something, and decide to accept it.
Other projects require more explanationāenough to fill their own blog posts, if I thought that they had enough distinctive features to interest readersābut the generated results proved increasingly implausible and erratic. Though in my āfavorite,ā most frustrating case, the AI would keep āforgettingā what I had asked it. I put that in sarcasm-quotes, because it could query the conversation to summarize my requests, but when I told it to finish the work, itād insist that I needed to repeat the question to make progress, but doing so would cause it to repeat the previous wrong solution.
Update: 20 May 2023: I tried my queryāthe one that keeps going off the rails while it assigns itself an unrelated (but far easier) task to solve instead of what I requestedāagain with ChatGPT. It provided me with this illuminating response, though Iāve removed the boilerplate apology and insistence that it loves to help people.
As an AI language model, my responses are based on the text inputs I receive, and I try my best to provide accurate information and assistance. However, I donāt have the ability to recall specific past interactions or visualize the chat interface. I rely on the text you provide and respond accordingly.
Arguing with it further, it confirms that, no, it doesnāt remember parts of the conversation other than what it responds to immediately and a small amount of context.
This explains a lot of the problems that Iāve seen. If trueāit might have lied, though this has the ring of a bespoke responseāthis means that OpenAI has deliberately sabotaged their product, presumably to reduce the chances of it saying racist things when racists interact with it. What a waste of time to get to this pointā¦
9:06 ā Fri 19 May 2023
Image Not Shown: A hand holding a phone, open to an app, facing a busy street
Gig Work Is Getting Dangerous from OtherWords
To make ends meet, many workers rely on incentives, such as bonuses and surge pay. Those require completing a specific number of rides or orders within a set timeframe, putting pressure on them to work at any cost.
Hashtags: #GigEconomy #Exploitation
I generally support automating jobs away, specifically because of these issues. I would love to have a robot deliver my groceries, so that I donāt need to worry that the weather will turn, or someone driving through my neighborhood will make it unsafe. We need an economic system that makes sure that these people donāt run out of money, but we also canāt keep asking them to literally put their lives on the line for sub-minimum wage.
12:07 ā Fri 19 May 2023
A magnificent avenue of Tamarind trees in full growth and bearing lined the driveway leading to Kinau Hale. Someone had a dream and forsooth, the trees had to go. A pity.
Hashtags: #Quotes #AAPIHeritage
Bonus
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didnāt fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
New American Psychological Association guidelines: Parents should advise teenagers on social media use, impose restrictions from WikiNews
According to the report, before teenagers use social media, parents should provide guidance on social media literacy and support for psychological development.
While certainly not the most critical story, enough parents read hereāand social media use has always made good fodder for this blogāthat I couldnāt ignore it.
Content Warning: Police activity
Image Not Shown: Police make an arrest close to the 'King's Procession' in central London on 6 May 2023
Outcry over policing is overdue, say groups targeted by cops for decades from openDemocracy
Blowe added that āracist, aggressive and violentā policing has made people from marginalized communities feel much more cautious about taking to the streets and protesting, ābecause the risks are greaterā.
I generally ignore UK news, since Iāve never lived there and so have little to no context for anything, but this felt universal enough to warrant reading and sharing.
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Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
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