Shoo! Get back!

What would it look like if, in the distant future, a group of machine intelligences tried to make tea? Not just to brew tea, but to recreate the entire concept from long-forgotten synapses buried deep within the hidden layers of their virtual brains?

To see what that might be like, I turned to a neural network I’ve used before, a huge model called GPT-2 that can draw on words and correlations that it’s learned from scanning huge chunks of the internet. I prompted it with a list of green teas - teas with evocative names like “Yellow Furry Peak”, named for its fuzzy leaves whose pointed tips resemble the peaks of the Yellow Mountains.

My first attempt, via talktotransformer.com, produced names that seemed more like what you’d get if you randomly started mixing words from the original list - you could tell what they were supposed to be, but they had less character, as if the features had all been smoothed away. That’s one way neural net-generated stuff can go - realism, but a sort of cardboard realism.

So for my second attempt, I used another way of sampling GPT-2, gpt-2-small, that gave me more control over the output. With temperature set to 1 and truncation turned off (both ways of letting the neural net produce less-probable output), I got results that wouldn’t pass as human teas, but were exactly what I was looking for. That’s my favorite style of neural net-generated text - the type that flagrantly fails the Turing test.

Six Vermilion Unicorn Playing The Amber Eagle Glowing Sky Rabbit North Circular Eye Afternoon Supper of Peace Cold Sheep & Thunder! Giving Away Stardust Green Great Gourd of Sunrise Slippery Violet Sands Ember Lathe Wet Leaves

Laptime Tree Spider (Black) Old Blue Beetle Drink Pieces of Peppercorns Memory boops Headaceous Granite Drink Fine Deerscald (fresh scent) Indoor Cream Wave Safe Bucket Buddy Somewhat fair Clever Cat 1 Angry Egg Fluffy Sandberry Tea Squirrely Bubbles Sonara Goat Potswreck Travesty Bee Hatch Kitten Pond Winter Snail Glitter Bomb Hating Frosty Moon Glands

Green Slime Essence Fresh Green Skunk Strawberry Lime Dissolution  B Ice Chlorophyll Glaze Bleeding Apples with Sea Salt Dangerous Rock TREET REFILLED POWER Fraps 0-3 ½.5Gridges 26 Grief Hills 4 Cup Emulsion Drcrated skin finishes! Size Yes 37 (21,28,38) x 54 (9 or 15)mm Shiny Living Veins Blue Foam Duet Fish Drumstick A unique combination of leaf of fire and custard Sodium ascending Fujiyama

Comic strip by classmate Bohzo (earth name Tzu Lun Hwang)

University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Flood

This picture is to remind you that this week’s comic strip can really, for real be about anything.

Sincerely,

“Kaibutsu Ehon 怪物 絵本” - le livre illustré de monstres présente des gravures sur bois de yōkai 妖怪 , ou créatures du folklore japonais. Illustré par

Nabeta Gyokuei 鍋田玉英  actif vers 1880.

For extra credit, copy any of these pictures.

Draw your frame, do a 10 minute non photo blue pencil rough, then do simple line work for 20 minutes, then water color for 30 minutes. Try to keep it to exactly one hour. You can do it in your compbook or on your Strathmore paper but remember to cut it down to 8.5. 11.  Draw the frame any size you like but be sure to leave at least a 1/2″ all around.

Copying is such a good way to learn about your materials and about lines you might have otherwise never thought to make.

Sincerely,

“Kaibutsu Ehon 怪物 絵本” - le livre illustré de monstres présente des gravures sur bois de yōkai 妖怪 , ou créatures du folklore japonais. Illustré par

Nabeta Gyokuei 鍋田玉英  actif vers 1880.

“Kaibutsu Ehon 怪物 絵本” - le livre illustré de monstres présente des gravures sur bois de yōkai 妖怪 , ou créatures du folklore japonais. Illustré par

Nabeta Gyokuei 鍋田玉英  actif vers 1880.

Beck - Colors

Dear Students

Tonight in Sellery Hall we drew four self portraits together. Each self portrait took three minutes. Person, animal ,fruit or vegetable, and monster.

Each page is 12 minutes worth of drawing.

Dig it! Why not try it! Only rule is draw the entire body.

Sincerely

Prof. Hantu

“Competitive“ by Woshibai

And just because…

Landlords take on most of the burden of maintaining and improving the property, both financially and in terms of labor. A tenant has to keep the place clean and not damage things themselves through recklessness, but they don’t have to fix or replace anything in the house themselves (or with their money). Many/most landlords also are responsible for all external maintenance of the exterior of the house and yard. This is not trivial, especially for lower income people who might have a hard time finding the spare cash to (for example) replace a broken heater.

Relatedly, the landlord will probably bring greater experience and expertise in maintaining properties, either through their years as landlords or through a management company they pay.

The landlord takes on all the financial risk of owning the property (and, to be sure, all the upside as well). If the property’s value declines, and can only be sold for a loss, that’s on the landlord and the tenant is not stuck with the property. If a natural disaster damages or destroys the property, it’s on the landlord to figure things out financially. And so on.

The landlord provides tenants with a living option that provides them flexibility in their lives. A tenant is only tied down financially to where they live for a year, or even less, and can move to another place, often in another city, without being tied down by a mortgage, or having to find a way to sell their property (which can often be a very long process, and again there’s no guarantee it won’t sell for a loss). 

The landlord provides a place to live (for rents, yes) for people who don’t want to or can’t own property, either because they don’t want to deal with the burdens of ownership, they want to move frequently, they are in a stage in life where they can’t afford a mortgage, etc.

"Is there anything about the rich that is rationally worth defending? Of course not! If you think there is, then you have been fooled by the rich into defending really terrible and awful things."

Another way to present what seemed to be happening in this thread:

A person tells story about leaving a job and situation they were unhappy with to become a small business owner.

This person is derided for choosing to become a blood-sucking parasite on the ass-end of capitalism.

A (not particularly antagonistic) defense of landlordship is presented.

The defense of landlordhip is taken to represent a defense of the wealthy, the powerful, the status quo as a whole.

Since the status quo includes a wide array of obvious horrors and atrocities, the defense in (3) is deemed unnecessary, worthless, even counterproductive.

I think the semantic slide in step (4) is the problem: a move that encourages pitched argumentation rather than productive conversation. What specific groups of people do terms like "wealthy", "powerful", and "status quo" refer to? Are we talking about Bilderbergers? Anyone whose net worth is over $100,000,000? $1,000,000? Property owners? Business owners? The fortunate children of any of the above? Anyone who has savings in an investment portfolio? Americans making above $100,000 a year? White cishet men? Anyone who doesn't think mainstream economics isn't total bullshit? Former nurses who decided to get into business so they could take an awesome vacation every year?

It seems useful to me to be able to draw some distinctions between these groups. I suspect you agree. So I'm honestly not sure why I'm writing any of this.

I usually don't respond to stuff other people write online because 80% of the time what I'm tempted to write is actually just me responding to my own shit that I've projected onto it.

Landlords take on most of the burden of maintaining and improving the property, both financially and in terms of labor. A tenant has to keep the place clean and not damage things themselves through recklessness, but they don’t have to fix or replace anything in the house themselves (or with their money). Many/most landlords also are responsible for all external maintenance of the exterior of the house and yard. This is not trivial, especially for lower income people who might have a hard time finding the spare cash to (for example) replace a broken heater.

Relatedly, the landlord will probably bring greater experience and expertise in maintaining properties, either through their years as landlords or through a management company they pay.

The landlord takes on all the financial risk of owning the property (and, to be sure, all the upside as well). If the property’s value declines, and can only be sold for a loss, that’s on the landlord and the tenant is not stuck with the property. If a natural disaster damages or destroys the property, it’s on the landlord to figure things out financially. And so on.

The landlord provides tenants with a living option that provides them flexibility in their lives. A tenant is only tied down financially to where they live for a year, or even less, and can move to another place, often in another city, without being tied down by a mortgage, or having to find a way to sell their property (which can often be a very long process, and again there’s no guarantee it won’t sell for a loss). 

The landlord provides a place to live (for rents, yes) for people who don’t want to or can’t own property, either because they don’t want to deal with the burdens of ownership, they want to move frequently, they are in a stage in life where they can’t afford a mortgage, etc.