I like swords!

The deliberate conflation of LLMs with actually useful Machine Learning is part of a Motte and Bailey argument - using things machine learning is good at and useful for to sell people their invasive LLMs. That way, if you say you hate AI, they can decalre that you're anti-technology and hate tools that could help us discover new antibiotics. If you accept that AI has its uses, they can say that you're in favour of everything from an AI reading and auto-responding to your emails to AI-powered Minority Report-style predictive policing.

I'm dead serious when I say "it's all marketing". All of it: self-programming AIs, sapient AIs, AI taking all our jobs... all of it is designed to hype up investors into giving them more money and scare ordinary people into thinking that they have to get on board, they have to use it, they have to accept it, they have to be grateful for even having a job and that that job depends on mastering these new tools that will change the world.

AI is great at some things, good at some other things, and terrible at almost everything else, and the things it's great at are incredibly niche and almost impossible to monetise. Folding proteins and detecting cancer cannot provide the return on investment that would justify the umpteen billions every AI company is demanding. There are trillions of US dollars tied up in this bubble and the people who are making bank off of it will say and do anything to keep it going for as long as possible.

And journalists are just repeating their marketing spiel entirely uncritically. "Anthropic says AGI is on the horizon" - they can say that clouds are made out of candyfloss, it doesn't make it true.

These two are amazing!

Here's the thing... it's ALL improv. The whole thing. And those two? Randomly matched.

The moment in the beginning when they started dancing helped them set the tone and energy for eachother so they knew what type of dancing to expect, and they proceeded to pull from that vibe the entire time.

Around the quarter mark when they’re spinning around, green shirt looks at purple shirt’s feet, watching to see if purple was going to move. Purple then takes that and begins to move backwards, into the hand switch (which would have been far more fluid choreographed) and as purple raises their arm, green does the dramatic lean back utilizing the visual element of her hair. Unclear if purple necessarily was the reason but they were definitely asking for some sort of flair and green definitely delivered.

An easier one to see was that the trust fall was not planned but you could see the Very Direct Communication from the purple to the green offering that opportunity. Green didn’t have to take it but when they saw the opportunity they then positioned themselves and timed it with the music so the drop in the music coincided with their torso hitting purple’s arms.

Also the little coordinated butt wiggle at the end when green let purple lead was hilarious loved that.

Fatalistic sarcasm is a thing, however, it usually hides deep feelings of insecurity, and whether you consciously recognize this or not, it validates them. Seriously, I used to constantly make jokes about how other people’s work was better than mine, and it did nothing for my self-esteem, it was a tool to deflect from my own feelings of inferiority and it actively worked against me thinking critically about my own and other people’s work. If it was a joke I could put myself down instead of analyzing why someone’s work was better and trying to incorporate that into my own

As someone who took creative writing courses I was constantly surrounded by other brilliant people, if I hung my head in shame every time I read something as good or better than mine I never would have lifted it. 

As someone who has watched a lot of writers with very good idea’s crash and burn I mean it when I say you either develop a healthy sense of respect for your own work or you stop writing. 

There’s three things I really wish more people consider

1. Do you think their work is better because it’s a different style, one that you like? There’s an element to ‘the grass is greener on the other side’, I have seen people work in some amazing styles that I wished to god I could replicate, some I managed, some I never did, but there’s nothing wrong with either. having a different style Is Not the same as having a bad style, each has their own strengths and you can admire one without putting yours down

2. Knowing someone who is a better writer is a blessing and if they knew you were using their work to bring yourself down they would not be happy, mooch off that friend, analyze their work, ask them to edit your shit, as long as you’re not annoying them be shameless about it. the best thing creative writing did for me was give me the confidence to ask people to critic my work and shamelessly better each other for that sharing 

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

https://www.re3data.org

There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there

That’s her special and silly peanut butter paw.

She actually has…2!