Fan of coffee, the ocean, jazz bands, bucket hats, Kill Bill, potted plants, paperbacks, wearing black on a hot day, and the view of a city from an airplane.
Aesthetic posting since 2012, unraveling the human soul since 2009.
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Ask me anything
if you are dealing with extreme heat or even just. moderate heat in your area right now. 80f/26c is when it starts getting toasty for a lot of people. if you are in a heat wave and you have not done yourself the favor of googling fucking “heat exhaustion symptoms” i am shaking you violently right now. look it up. burn the symptoms into your brain. heatstroke is no joke and it can and WILL sneak up on you before you’re aware it’s even an issue. ohh my god
if you are outside and it is hot and sunny and you are sweating thru your clothes or feeling tired or starting to get irrationally agitated or upset in another way or feeling nauseous or your heart is pounding etc etc if you are feeling Weird and Bad for no apparent reason while you are in a warm/hot area then i have news for you! you need to cool down! right now! oh my god.
and there’s a very good chance that you’re gonna think “it’s not heat exhaustion, i don’t feel any warmer than i have all day” when you consider it as a reason why you are suddenly feeling weirdbad for no apparent reason during a record-breaking heatwave and i would like to say. there is no harm in sitting in the shade and drinking some water even if heat exhaustion isn’t the cause of whatever ailment is inflicting itself upon u. once i swore up and down to my bf that i was just kinda tired and headachy and got bitchy about the possibility of being overheated and needing to drink water. because heat exhaustion tends to make you bitchy. but i did as he asked and drank some cold water and my condition immediately improved. because it was heat exhaustion and heat exhaustion is evil and a liar. sit down. drink water
Oo, I get to talk about an absolute CLASSIC marine ecology story!
This is not a story about AI being trained to pick plastic out of the ocean, but picking out something else that’s harmful to the ocean: The Crown of Thorns Starfish. (Also yes, that name DOES go incredibly hard.)
The COTS is a species of venomous starfish found on the barrier reef, and they feed on corals. They aren’t invasive, but they don’t have many natural predators either, so large outbreaks in their population can descercate huge portions of the reef at a time. That’s where this guy comes in:
This is Rangerbot. It’s a “cots bot” equipped with trained AI to recognize inditidual COTS. It then injects the COTS with bile, which is toxic to the COTS but harmless for the environment. This was effectively used to keep the COTS population in check, so the coral of the barrier reef had time to grow.
There’s an episode of Bizarre Beasts about the COTS (hosted by Hank Green himself) which I think is pretty cool and explains the whole situation in a fun way.
So, yeah! If an AI can be trained to recognize a species of starfish with %99 accuracy and effectively get rid of them, I think it is PERFECTLY reasonable to train AI to recognize trash in the oceans, at least in areas close to the shore, and have them clean it up.
Huh, no it’s not. That’s not even a slightly reliably conclusion to draw from COTSbot. The COTSbot computer vision system is an extremely specific task recognizing a single species of starfish in a limited context and, crucially, is only experimental. There is no army of active COTSbots running around spearing starfish. COTSbot is a one-of-a-kind piece of research technology, the gulf between “this robot can perform interesting novel tasks with a lab backing it up” and “this robot can perform a complex task reliably and safely with minimum supervision in the wild” is the difference between a baby saying “mama” and a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
If you think for a second, it is not hard to imagine reasons why removing plastic from the ocean is difficult! Robots are expensive to build, deeply complicated custom-ass devices, they need constant maintenance, they need an army of engineers looking after them, they need to be recharged, they need to return to shore or a boat, they need to be checked for corrosion, they need to not accidentally get tangled in seaweed, these are all independently hard things.
It is difficult to get robots to perform simple, identical operations in a sanitized and controlled factory context, let alone The Ocean. The reason AI for text and images has taken off is because it’s cheap and easy. It’s just maths in the computer, no real world required, it is infinitely easier and cheaper to process terabytes of text than it is to make a simple robot arm work without human aid.
There’s no mustache twirling capitalist going “ahahaha, I will use the infinite and trivially deployed power of TECHNOLOGY to solve poetry, and I shall not clean the oceans because I am literally a cartoon villain.” If you believe this then you have a fundamentally flawed concept of what is easy and what is hard.
Any professional cyberneticist can tell you that making a physical robot do anything is a nightmare task, in fact, here’s our very own cyberneticist going on an extended version of the rant I just did.
“A robot that cleans plastic in the ocean” isn’t a simple design problem! It is as complicated as any other open ended free space navigation problem plus the difficulty of identifying an object which is literally named for its property of having any shape imaginable! These are not comparable classes of problem to “markov chain text generator times four hundred billion”
I >:( when expensive things are actually good cause now I’ll never use anything else again. Every time I get asked what perfume I’m wearing at the gym I’m literally liek that’s my deodorant and sometimes they order it on the spot. It really does smell that good
Believe that things can suddenly change for you. Do not worry about how and when. Just deeply believe in the possibility of a new outcome. It can all be so different than what you are currently experiencing. Nothing is ever final. Allow that to bring you peace and give you hope.
embracing the patterned ambiguity of gender and sex as more or less social constructs can grant you so much more precision in thinking about so many concepts in science.
like, if there was a study (and I’m just making this up as an example) showing women suffer from mosquito bites more than men do
you could do the ~“Gender Critical”~ thing and go “see!? mosquitoes get it!!”
OR
you could go “that’s interesting” and start asking more questions, like:
is this data self-reported? controlled?
were they studying the women or the mosquitoes?
did the study use methods that would let you tell the difference between “being bitten more often” and “noticing bites more often”?
did the study include any trans people and were their results any different? if yes were they on HRT or not?
how similar were the men and women in aspects other than gender? do we know their social class, jobs, diets, blood types?
because in fact the study i made up just then could lead to a huge variety of conclusions. from my description above you can’t tell the difference between studies that show:
mosquitoes are attracted to people with higher estrogen levels
mosquitoes are opportunistic and women spend more time near mosquito habitats for sociocultural reasons
every gender gets bitten about the same amount but men are socialised to pay less attention to physical discomfort so more of them don’t notice minor bites compared to women (and by more we mean like 60-40, this is a bell curve thing)
we accidentally got heaps of women in the study that have the mosquito’s favourite blood type and not so for the men, oops
mosquitoes are attracted to people with more x and y in their diets, which is currently mostly women for, again, largely sociocultural reasons
etc etc etc
you’re just not going to understand actual Gender Science, and therefore reality, if you can’t put “hmm, but what do they mean by woman this time” in your mental toolkit in a relatively neutral way.
Squidward is an aristocratic gay black man who vogues old way because he’s cultured, Spongebob is a twink from the Dominican Republic, Patrick is an anglo saxon bear who doesn’t wash after the gym
