Mr Ru

Amalia: I thought that was a good thing.

Eva: She’s not kicking me, she’s kicking Flopin!

So I’ve used neural networks to generate recipes in the past. They’re computer programs that can learn to imitate the data we give them, copying the way that humans drive cars, label images, or translate languages.

That is, they try to learn. They’re called “neural” because they have virtual neurons that work a little like the real neurons in our brains. Their virtual brains, however, are really tiny. Where a human has about 86 million neurons, the neural networks we use today have hundreds to low thousands - think nematode worm or, optimistically, jellyfish. So they often struggle, and recipes, my friends, are one of those times. (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a neural net’s attempt at “small sandwiches”)

I turned to cocktails, inspired by Beth Skwarecki’s cocktails bot (and helped immensely by the dataset she sent me).

The neural net’s first attempt was… an attempt.

I let it train for a little longer, and things got a little more recognizable, as it learned to kinda spell more ingredients.

It had, however, not learned when to quit. 64-ounce (2 liter) cocktails are not unheard of at this stage.

It continued to learn on its own, all without input from me, and eventually ended up with cocktails that were almost plausible.

Some of my other training attempts, however, did not go so well. At first the cocktail titles in my training set were in all caps, which confused the heck out of the neural net because capital letters were so rare that it didn’t see enough examples of what to do with them. It struggled with the titles.

You may also notice that the ill-fated all-caps attempt had a lot of repetition - that’s because I was using textgenrnn, which has a somewhat limited memory. It could learn to spell ingredients, but had no idea whether it had already added sugar and cream. When I switched to char-rnn for the lowercase recipes above, I could give it a memory of 50 characters, enough to cut down on repetition. The textgenrnn version, however, became strangely obsessed with creme de cacao. The less said about its cocktails, the better.

For more neural net cocktails (including custom-generated cocktails for any name you care to provide), check out Beth’s cocktails bot!

December 14th, 2018

Three days remain

Jesus was a baby once and he was Very Cool

The Big Red Man Is Coming

There’s snow outside. that’s good!

I’m alone on xmas and sad

Santa Claus is very sexy

Christmas trees. love em

First of all, you can actually acknowledge the fact it’s International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on December 17th. The fact that tumblr chose that day to remove all nsfw content on tumblr, a site that has been used for YEARS, by sex workers to make income and have a private place to do their job, without interference/restriction/prying eyes like from other sites, is no coincidence.

Second, you can research how to repeal “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” (FOSTA) and “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (SESTA), censorship bills that were passed by the Trump administration earlier this year, in order to “help stop sexual trafficking.” Who wouldn’t want to stop sex trafficking? I certainly do. Except it doesn’t actually do that.

This week, President Trump signed into law a set of controversial bills intended to make it easier to cut down on illegal sex trafficking online. Both bills — the House bill known as FOSTA, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and the Senate bill, SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act — have been hailed by advocates as a victory for sex trafficking victims.

But the bills also poke a huge hole in a famous and longstanding “safe harbor” rule of the internet: Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Usually shorthanded as “Section 230” and generally seen as one of the most important pieces of internet legislation ever created, it holds that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, Section 230 has allowed the internet to thrive on user-generated content without holding platforms and ISPs responsible for whatever those users might create.

But FOSTA-SESTA creates an exception to Section 230 that means website publishers would be responsible if third parties are found to be posting ads for prostitution — including consensual sex work — on their platforms. The goal of this is supposed to be that policing online prostitution rings gets easier. What FOSTA-SESTA has actually done, however, is create confusion and immediate repercussions among a range of internet sites as they grapple with the ruling’s sweeping language. (https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom)

In addition, there’s this:

We are asking a court to declare the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (“FOSTA”) unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced. The law was written so poorly that it actually criminalizes a substantial amount of protected speech and, according to experts, actually hinders efforts to prosecute sex traffickers and aid victims.

In our lawsuit, two human rights organizations, an individual advocate for sex workers, a certified non-sexual massage therapist, and the Internet Archive, are challenging the law as an unconstitutional violation of the First and Fifth Amendments. Although the law was passed by Congress for the worthy purpose of fighting sex trafficking, its broad language makes criminals of those who advocate for and provide resources to adult, consensual sex workers and actually hinders efforts to prosecute sex traffickers and aid victims.

EFF strongly opposed FOSTA throughout the legislative process. During the months-long Congressional debate on the law we expressed our concern that the law violated free speech rights and would do heavy damage to online freedoms. The law that was ultimately passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump was actually the most egregiously bad of those Congress had been considering. (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eff-sues-invalidate-fosta-unconstitutional-internet-censorship-law)

The first link is back in April of this year, and the second is from June of this year (the EFF’s constitutional challenge was dismissed in September). Throughout all of 2018, the FOSTA/SESTA bills have been at work to violate freedom of speech and to turn the Internet into a widely abused platform to push conservative, antiquated ideals, while also making money off advertisements that are spread for capitalistic ventures.

The rhetoric spewed by antis throughout the years, and as much as I didn’t agree with them (hoo boy did I not agree with them), it’s not like I can’t understand why they had concerns of fiction affecting reality. But this is so much bigger than fandom wank/wars, anti vs non-anti, etc. Demanding tight censorship always leads to more issues.

Craigslist ceased offering its “Personals” section within all US domains in response to the bill’s passing, stating “Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services.” Furry personals website Pounced.org voluntarily shut down, citing increased liability under the bill, and the difficulty of monitoring all the listings on the site for a small organization.

The effectiveness of the bill has come into question as it has purportedly endangered sex workers and has been ineffective in catching and stopping sex traffickers. The sex worker community has claimed the law doesn’t directly address issues that contribute to sex trafficking, has , but instead has drastically limited the tools available for law enforcement to seek surviving victims of sex trade. Similar consequences of the law’s enactment have been reported internationally.

A number of policy changes enacted by the popular social networks Facebook and Tumblr (the latter having been well-known for having liberal policies regarding adult content) to restrict the posting of sexual content on their respective platforms have also been cited as examples of proactive censorship in the wake of the of the law, and a wider pattern of increased targeted censorship towards LGBT communities. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_Act#Corporations_2)

Actual living people are already being affected by this. Jokes aside about tumblr or whatever, these bills are very real, and the broad language is already frightening people because of how confusing the bills are written.They’re purportedly going to be useful in stopping crime, and yet:

The Verge also has an excellent deep dive into how SESTA/FOSTA has put more women’s lives at risk.

What about the claims that SESTA/FOSTA would help law enforcement (many of whom pushed for the law)? Yeah, about that: police are now realizing that it’s more difficult for them to find sex traffickers without Backpage. I mean, it’s not like people were explaining this a decade ago.

Meanwhile, given how many SETSA/FOSTA supporters insisted that the bill was necessary to prevent the sex trafficking scourge, you’d think that sex trafficking prosecutions and arrests would show an upswing, right? Instead, we see things like how a special court in Delaware set up specifically to focus on dealing with sex trafficking cases is shutting down due to the lack of actual sex trafficking victims. The reason the court was shut down according to the judge who shut it down? (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180509/13450339810/police-realizing-that-sesta-fosta-made-their-jobs-harder-sex-traffickers-realizing-made-their-job-easier.shtml)

Lastly,

My name is Arianna Travaglini, and as a sex worker, I shouldn’t have to work so hard for digital platforms, legislators, or you to see me as a human being — to listen to me and to believe me. To be honest, the kind of sex work I do isn’t even important. I have been active in a number of different areas of the sex industry for the past eleven years. I am not, nor have I ever been, a trafficking victim. But thanks to the recent passage of a bill known as SESTA-FOSTA, there is no longer any legal distinction between consenting adult-aged sex work and nonconsensual, often underage sex trafficking.

Trust me, sex workers want to see an end put to sex trafficking just as much as anyone else. But instead of working with us to effectively identify and eradicate trafficking — which would require them to see us as human beings — government officials are seizing and shutting down the very online platforms that we use to make a living and keep ourselves safe.

The FBI raid on the headquarters of Backpage.com — a website known for its sex-related classified ads — is the latest blow to sex workers worldwide at the hands of an overzealous government. Because of its accessible advertising pricing structure, Backpage was especially popular with more marginalized workers, like transgender women and people of color who couldn’t afford to pay for “fancier” ads. Without a way to advertise our services online — and subsequently communicate with interested parties — workers have lost the ability to screen our clientele ahead of time to ensure our own safety. And as a result of lost income, many now run the risk of homelessness and starvation.

The shutdown also pushes sex workers who typically work indoors to the streets to find customers, thereby making them significantly more vulnerable to trafficking, violence, and death. Don’t believe me? A recently released study shows that when Craigslist launched its erotic services site in 2002, female homicide rates dropped by 17 percent. Sadly, both Craigslist’s erotic services site as well as their personals section have now been shut down as a direct result of SESTA-FOSTA.

But yeah, this totally helps trafficking victims, no question about it. (https://www.them.us/story/sesta-fosta-backpage-sex-workers)

NeekoNeekoNee!

I like her concept

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