(sorry for shouting, but open enrollment is only nov 1 – dec 15 this year with minimal advertising to tell folks it’s open. go. please. get yourself covered.)
Tags:
#on the off chance that you haven’t all heard this a zillion times by now #PSA #signal boost #home of the brave
#kind of perpetually surprised that this is surprising #generations and genetics happen? #smaller phenotype populations are mixed into the larger ones #this doesn’t mean they magically disappeared #or were never there
I don’t know about the British perspective, but coming to it as a white USian raised in Southern culture, I think at least some of the reason this isn’t obvious to a lot of people is that we do have that history of blood quantum, of tracking whether someone was one-eighth or one-sixteenth black and refusing them civil rights, of basically forcing the black community to intermarry among themselves, so that they *didn’t* mix out and disappear this way. (Of course, there were also a lot more black folks in USia than there ever were in Britain, I’m not saying that’s the only reason. Just, I think that is a part of the perspective I’m personally coming from. *thinking out loud*)
As a white USian raised in *Northern* culture, I’m not surprised by the intermarriage thing, but I *am* surprised by this clip nonetheless. The surprising thing is that they portray *positively* this guy having an Emotional Connection to His Ancestral Culture because of someone from *five generations back*.
Once you get to smaller fractions than one-quarter or so, having Emotional Connections like that stops being Celebrating Your Heritage and starts being Failing to Stay in Your Lane. The “white person who makes a big deal out of being 1/32 Cherokee” is a *negative* archetype.
As it happens, I too have a black former-slave great-great-great-grandfather (and likewise no black ancestry more recent than that). I don’t have an Emotional Connection about this, but…like, you have no reason to believe me when I say that, because I would say it regardless of whether it were true. You bet your ass I wouldn’t dare openly claim a Connection: it would be seen as cheating, as trying to claim the advantages of being black while skipping out on the disadvantages.
That’s interesting; maybe I’ve been primed by the above, but I would not view you having an Emotional Connection to your former-slave ancestor …
… depending on the form of the connection, of course. It would be weird if you literally identified as nonwhite (I think this is the point of the “1/32 Cherokee” thing?)
Well, I *am* Schrodinger’s White†, but that’s not from the one-drop black, it’s from the one-half Ashkenazi.
(But even then I try to avoid doing anything that even *suggests* claiming non-white-ness, partly because I suspect I would lose the ensuing argument over whether I deserve the privileges (so to speak) of that rank (I pretty much always collapse to white, since I’m pretty much always observed by people for whom that’s the lower-status answer), partly because–as someone who has literally never experienced anti-Semitism–playing the Jew card feels dishonest and distasteful, and partly because I think encouraging the idea of Judaism as innate is counterproductive (I want religion exit rights, mostly on general principles but with a side of “if I ever somehow *do* fall into the hands of people who think Judaism is a disease, I want them to think it’s a *curable* disease so I can let them cure me and survive”).)
—
“Oh, but it’s a different *form* of connection” reads to me as an excuse from someone who *was* trying for a best-of-two-worlds power-grab and is backpedalling now that they’ve realised they aren’t going to get away with it. Mind you, I *am* fairly paranoid and *do* have a tendency to see power struggles where they may or may not actually exist.
—
†When I am observed, the waveform collapses into whichever answer is lower-status by the observer’s standards.
Tags:
#*knocks on wood* #reply via reblog #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #racism cw? #anti-semitism cw? #Judaism #inb4 someone blames my hierarchical thinking on my germophobia #(also tbh I don’t *like* talking about Judaism pretty much at all) #(even mentioning it can feel like encouraging people to see it as a Big Deal) #(when really I want it to be at most a Little Deal)
#kind of perpetually surprised that this is surprising #generations and genetics happen? #smaller phenotype populations are mixed into the larger ones #this doesn’t mean they magically disappeared #or were never there
I don’t know about the British perspective, but coming to it as a white USian raised in Southern culture, I think at least some of the reason this isn’t obvious to a lot of people is that we do have that history of blood quantum, of tracking whether someone was one-eighth or one-sixteenth black and refusing them civil rights, of basically forcing the black community to intermarry among themselves, so that they *didn’t* mix out and disappear this way. (Of course, there were also a lot more black folks in USia than there ever were in Britain, I’m not saying that’s the only reason. Just, I think that is a part of the perspective I’m personally coming from. *thinking out loud*)
As a white USian raised in *Northern* culture, I’m not surprised by the intermarriage thing, but I *am* surprised by this clip nonetheless. The surprising thing is that they portray *positively* this guy having an Emotional Connection to His Ancestral Culture because of someone from *five generations back*.
Once you get to smaller fractions than one-quarter or so, having Emotional Connections like that stops being Celebrating Your Heritage and starts being Failing to Stay in Your Lane. The “white person who makes a big deal out of being 1/32 Cherokee” is a *negative* archetype.
As it happens, I too have a black former-slave great-great-great-grandfather (and likewise no black ancestry more recent than that). I don’t have an Emotional Connection about this, but…like, you have no reason to believe me when I say that, because I would say it regardless of whether it were true. You bet your ass I wouldn’t dare openly claim a Connection: it would be seen as cheating, as trying to claim the advantages of being black while skipping out on the disadvantages.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #racism cw? #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
Reminder to turn off tumblr’s stupid “best first” feature now that it’s rolled out!
Go to profile>settings (the gear)>global settings>dashboard preferences
How to Get Rid of This Shit for Dummies:
Okay, I could only figure out how to turn this off on MOBILE! It doesn’t seem to give you the option on desktop. So I’m sharing an even greater in-depth tutorial (with images) on how to turn this off.
On MOBILE go to the fourth tab at the bottom that looks like a little person:
Then at the top of the screen click the little gear:
At the top of the screen find the option General Settings:
Then find Dashboard Preferences:
And switch “Best Stuff First” to the OFF position:
To reiterate, that’s:
Profile – Settings – General Settings – Dashboard Preferences – Best Stuff First – OFF
In my experience, settings DO extend across platforms, so if you turn it off on mobile, you should be good on the desktop version as well.
Please reblog!
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #oh look an update #here’s a reminder for those of you who use mobile #now that they’ve actually released it
I think like most emotions it would be kind of self-reinforcing, in that once you’re at one end of the scale the other end seems unappealing, but it would still be good to have the option available.
…do people normally find a given level of libido self-reinforcing?
Only middling-libido!mes want to stay that way long-term; I get sick of high libido after ~1 day and of low libido after ~1 week. (Unless I’m too distracted by other things to notice the vague sense of being incomplete that happens when my libido is too low for too long, which is how I spent the month of April. But even that is more “being sufficiently fucked up that your damage-assessment mechanism is also damaged”, rather than actually being okay with it.)
Mind you, when I see other people complaining of loss of libido, they’re almost always talking about practical effects and not the inherent badness of having an ego-syntonic part of your psyche go missing, which makes me wonder if maybe ego-neutral libidos are more common than typical-minding would lead me to believe.
Kind of my feeling is that I often get the feeling of IQ reduced by 25% around hot woman + weird effects on inhibitions (both reduced and increased. Which is sort of self-reinforcing.
But is also why I agree with the anon that I don’t really like a lot of my sex drive.
I would kind of like it if I could turn off my feelings of sexual and romantic attraction 2/3rds of the time. And thats a lot of the reason. I often don’t like a lot of the effect that it has on me.
And I also wish I could shut off a lot of inappropriate times I’m attracted to someone or a lot of the feelings of unrequited crushes and such.
…okay, in hindsight I guess I should have figured my other divergences would imply divergence here as well. I had…kind of forgotten that sex drives could have interpersonal effects, since mine doesn’t really.
(I wish you good luck and good coping.)
Tags:
#god I love being ace #(fun fact: when I typed ”god I love being”) #(the ”popular tags” section recommended ”god I love being bi”) #(you almost got it recommended tags! you’re in the right general area!) #nsfw text? #sexuality and lack thereof #reply via reblog #asexuality #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
I think like most emotions it would be kind of self-reinforcing, in that once you’re at one end of the scale the other end seems unappealing, but it would still be good to have the option available.
…do people normally find a given level of libido self-reinforcing?
Only middling-libido!mes want to stay that way long-term; I get sick of high libido after ~1 day and of low libido after ~1 week. (Unless I’m too distracted by other things to notice the vague sense of being incomplete that happens when my libido is too low for too long, which is how I spent the month of April. But even that is more “being sufficiently fucked up that your damage-assessment mechanism is also damaged”, rather than actually being okay with it.)
Mind you, when I see other people complaining of loss of libido, they’re almost always talking about practical effects and not the inherent badness of having an ego-syntonic part of your psyche go missing, which makes me wonder if maybe ego-neutral libidos are more common than typical-minding would lead me to believe.
Tags:
#I know I know I have a blatantly atypical mind in this area #but there’s no reason to think that the known divergences would indicate a divergence in *this particular aspect* #and it’s not like I can go around with a baseline assumption that people *aren’t* like me or I won’t get anything done #there are so many ways to be not-like-me and no reason to assume any particular one over others #you have to start *somewhere* #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text?
The news site Slashdot (“news for nerds, stuff that matters”) is celebrating its 20 year anniversary this October. What could be geekier than celebrating with the help of an open-source neural network?
Neural networks are a type of machine learning program that learn by example, rather than by a human programmer feeding them rules. Whatever the headlines contain, whatever common words and rhythms, a neural network will do its best to imitate. I’ve trained an open-source neural network called char-rnn to imitate all kinds of human things, like paint colors, guinea pig names, and craft beer names.
Slashdot sent me a list of all the headlines they’ve ever run, over 162,000 in all, and asked me to train a neural network to try to generate more.
Alternuting Your Computer The Internet Spectrum Violated Microsoft To Develop Programming Law Star Trek Creates Free Memory Launching the Linux Group Socially Microsoft Releases New Months More Pong Users for Kernel Project Nintendo Goes Canadian Edition to Customers New State of Second Life Sexual Security To Allow Australia Programming Supercomputer Library In Star Wars What are The Final Fantasy Review of the Wireless Monster? Portable Mail With Spidey Law New 5400 GPL Formed into An Internet Dvorak on Mario Games? Half-Life 2X Speed Released Ban Manhunt 2 Better than Linux? Vista Releases Denial of the Mumble New Company Revises Super-Things For Problems The Dead of Managing Moneys? Judge Releases Sony Practices in Death Doom’s On Worldwire Networks Sun Releases Enterprise in Smackware I Wants To Control of the Net Nintendo Can Start in the Wild Button? Secondors Talk Open Source For Super-Bork? AOL On Beam Doubt
Some familiar personalities of the tech industry make an appearance:
Microsoft Releases Bill Gates Service Start Steve Jobs To Be Good Shatner Awards Up Towards A Game Car Challenge
Cell phones appear to be have been weird in the early days:
Stem Cell Phone Standards in Space Why Are Blow Systems Taking Your Phone? New Unreal Tournament Phone Reviews Doubts Forget To Support Flat Spam Phone
And you find companies doing rather unexpected things:
Microsoft Announces Mac OS X Released Intel Releasing Linux In A Networks Sun Upgrades Apple Devices Corel Launches $100 Laptop Microsoft Announces Firefox Portal Mozilla’s Audio Caroffice Apple Finally Launches Microsoft
I produced the above headlines by allowing the neural network a high creativity setting, so it could range over many different headline topics that it’s seen over and over. But it’s also fun to turn the creativity down near zero, so the neural network can try to generate the most quintessential headlines:
All The Company Programming Software Software? Some Computer Computer Solution of the New Company Computer More Anti-Spam For Software Computer Mac OS X Interview with Linux Computer Mac OS X Accused of the Business Sony Plans To Start Patent System For All Time Security Hole For Security Hole Security Hole in the Star Trek Computer Computer Computer Computer Software?
Decade 2: 2007 – 2017
The neural network had a tougher time with decade 2 – it seems the headlines became longer and more complex, as Slashdot experimented with new formats and new topics. The neural network struggled to create grammatical headlines as a result. But it still did its best to reflect the new topics of the last decade. Compared to the late 1990s and early 2000s, some companies and topics disappeared, while the coverage of Apple in particular exploded. Star Trek and Star Wars, however, remain perennial Slashdot favorites. Here are some neural network-generated headlines for 2007-2017:
Twitter Discovered In the Pirate Bay Google Bacon Medal To Contract Computational Lab Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store In the US Steve Jobs Sues Death of the Future Apple Seeks To Be Become Windows 10 Has Been Control the Desktops Stanford Computer Scientists Develop Super Man Sales For Computer Science Star Wars Hacked In Life On the iPhone Computer Finds Court Broke Math For Secret Company How Do You Design To Stay Them Bomb Ask Slashdot: How Clinton Uses Display For Android Chips On Netflix Court From the Jobs People ‘Fork” At a Flaw Refused The Pirate Bay Tracking Storage Security For Windows 10 German Porn Update To Compete At CNSR Healthy Court Says Supreme Court Can Be Lingeries Apple Says the Moon Project To Pay $1.7 Billion For Free Software Steve Jobs Allowed To Deal With Solar Power Apple Sues Apple To Get Flash Mathematics Microsoft Slashdot: How To Build a Bad Privacy For Windows 10 Twitter That We Use Facebook To Receive The Life Linux Kernel 3.1.0 Launches In Late, Facebook To Sue Star Trek The One-Department For Alleged For Connectivity: 3-D Printed Baby Black Hole Proposed
My favorite part, though? The Slashdot headlines that appeared to come from an alternate, much more advanced, somewhat terrifying timeline:
Google Returns To the Space Station Mac OS X Project Announces Space Station Sony Announces Mars Rover Release Google Patents Intelligent Space Telescope Officials Release Android Apps For New Space Telescope Star Trek Control of the Wild Start Up Scientists Army Interviewed Company Computer Releases Cloning Crime Building A Nano-Tech Back Full Life On The Linux Chernobyl Announces Company And Educators SGI Launches Space Station FreeBSD Base Scientific Hits the Moon Red Hat Releases Linux Games And Moon Apple’s Moon Review About New Moons of a Company Looking For Mars Landers to Linux Mars Rover Set for Alien China Congress To Buy Mars Mister Building a Top 100 Company For Mars Apple Considering Debut in People Processors Apple vs. Biology Details An Android Bans Secret Project For Console Devices Your Own Portals U.S. Considering Death of the Solar System Black Holes from Digital Dell Black Hole Sension of the Linux Microsoft’s Lab Changes “Space” IBM Moves to The Matrix Super Planet Wars Solved
The quintessential headline, though? When I trained the neural network with all 20 years of Slashdot headlines, then turned down the creativity level to near zero, I reveal the following essential Slashdot headlines, distilled from 20 years of technology news:
Sun Sues Open Source Project Content Sun Sues Anti-Spam Computers Sun Sues Security Flaw Contest Sun Sues New Star Trek To Stop The Math Sun Sues Anti-Spam Standards And The Star Wars To Stop Computers Star Wars Companies Are Streaming the Star Wars Star Wars To Support Linux Development Apple Settles The Future of Star Wars Apple Releases Secure State of the World Apple Sues Apple To Start The Solar Power Project Sony Sues Apple Server For Seconds Off From SpaceX Project Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers? The Desist of the Planet
Also: POLL! I’m collecting names of Halloween costumes for training a future neural network. Enter as many as you like (no email address required).
Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?
Tags:
#long post #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(my favourites are ”Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store in US” and ”Facebook to Sue Star Trek”) #(though I agree that ”Do We Want to Be the Computers?” is pretty great even if it does break Betteridge’s Law) #((mind you I’m not sure uploading *in itself* appeals to me)) #((I’m sure silicon-based substrates have their own problems and I have more experience coping with my current body’s problem set)) #((and given that I am honestly impressed this laptop has made it to nearly its third anniversary of purchase)) #((I have no reason to expect they’d even be more durable overall)) #((so really the nice thing about uploading is being able to evacuate to a new body when your current one gives out)) #((for which a cortical stack and the occasional previously-uninhabited clone body would do just fine)) #(((and some offsite backups in case the stack is unrecoverable might be helpful but do leave you more open to forknapping))) #tag rambles #transhumanism #death tw
#Amenta #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #high context jokes #(no even higher context than that) #(like the amount of context needed to parse the sentence ”reds are a clean caste” is not even enough) #(this is one of those posts I reblog mostly for the amusement of my future self) #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself))
