Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?
this really does sound like an episode of black mirror
This is gonna produce some absolutely baffling pornography.
…. oh my fucking god they actually are using open source software. They’re using a fucking one-layer unidirectional bicategory tag-trained neural network. This will never work. Literally, it will never work. There’s just not enough algorithmic complexity to do what they’re asking of it. I bet you I could prove on a mathematical level that this joke of a neural net fundamentally lacks the abstraction necessary to do its job.
This will never get better. Their algorithm will never stop fucking up, it will never actually flag porn reliably and it will always require a massive quantity of human hours to deal with the deluge of mistagged pictures. This isn’t just a case of an insufficiently trained algorithm, it’s just … this is the most basic neural network you can make. It probably hasa a lot of neurons and has loads of training data but like … you can’t just brute force this kind of stuff. One layer of neurons is just Not Enough.
Also, just to make this clear, Tumblr lied. I mean, we already know this, but I mean they liiiieeeeed. All that stuff they promised about what would or would not be censored? That cannot be delivered on with a system this simple. Nude classical sculptures, political protests, male-presenting nipples (really Tumblr?), nude art outside the context of sex, all that? You cannot train a bicategory one-layer neural network to exclude those things. It cannot be done. Tumblr never intended for those things to actually be permitted, they were just lying. Because the system they have cannot actually do what they said it would and never will be able to.
Also, this kind of system is super vulnerable to counter-neural strategies. I bet you before the end of the month someone hooks up their own open source one layer bicategory neural network which puts an imperceptible (to humans) layer of patterned static over arbitrary images, and trains it by having it bot-post static-ed images to Tumblr and reinforcing based on whether the images are labeled nsfw or sfw. Seriously, within a month someone will have an input-output machine which can turn any image ‘sfw’ in Tumblr’s eyes.
This is genuinely pathetic. Like, I have real pity for whoever implemented this, because it’s clear Tumblr doesn’t actually have any engineers with any expertise with machine learning left at all and they foisted the job off on some poor bastard who has no idea what they’re doing and is going to get all kinds of flak for their (perfectly reasonable and predetermined) failure from management.
There’s been a major development over the past 24 hours: another member of Congress just came out in support of the House Congressional Review Act resolution to overturn FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s net neutrality repeal.
This is a big deal and could help push other lawmakers do the same, but we have to act fast because the deadline is just over a week away.
We’ve been fighting for months without seeing any movement in Congress, watching the clock ticking down to the deadline. But Rep Joe Morelle (NY-25) his support for the Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution could change that.
If we act fast, we can leverage this new momentum to unleash a small landslide of other representatives coming out for net neutrality before the December 10th deadline, which will make a huge difference in the battles ahead.
Your voice matters. As part of today’s Internet-wide day of action, thousands of others are speaking out, along with celebrities, musicians, and websites like Tumblr, Postmates and Etsy.
You can join them and show your support for net neutrality by submitting an ‘I support net neutrality’ photo. We will be flooding lawmakers’ social media feeds with pictures, so if they decide to vote against the open Internet we will make them look us in the eye as they do it.
We can’t let this deadline come and go without making Congress remember that the whole Internet is watching. We’re still fighting for net neutrality. And we won’t forget if they betray us.
Tell everyone you know to take action at DeadlineForNetNeutrality.com and spread the word any way you can. Click here to find ideas on how you can use your slice of the Internet – whether that’s your Tumblr blog, a website you run, or any of your social media accounts – to help get the word out. We’re counting on you!
On Tuesday, at least eight new science-credentialed candidates were elected: one senator and seven members of the House. Full results are not yet available in Washington state, where a pediatrician is likely to be elected to the House.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — President Trump is painting an astonishingly apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic control in the campaign’s final days, unleashing a torrent of falsehoods and portraying his political opponents as desiring crime, squalor and poverty.
As voters prepare to render their first verdict on his presidency in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump is claiming that Democrats want to erase the nation’s borders and provide sanctuary to drug dealers, human traffickers and MS-13 killers. He is warning that they would destroy the economy, obliterate Medicare and unleash a wave of violent crime that endangers families everywhere. And he is alleging that they would transform the United States into Venezuela with socialism run amok.
Trump has never been hemmed in by fact, fairness or even logic. The 45th president proudly refuses to apologize and routinely violates the norms of decorum that guided his predecessors. But at one mega-rally after another in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump has taken his no-boundaries political ethos to a new level — demagoguing the Democrats in a whirl of distortion and using the power of the federal government to amplify his fantastical arguments.
Today’s cartoonishly twisted economic inequality has created a renaissance of “conspicuous consumption.” This was the term American sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined to describe the purchase of extravagant goods and services, not so much for the pleasure of consuming them but for their ability to signal affluence to others. For example, Forbes magazine’s Cost of Living Extremely Well Index tracks the price of “ultraluxe items” like quarter-million-dollar Russian sable fur coats, $55,000 private school tuition, and $16 million personal Sikorsky helicopters.
But the best place to turn for a peek at elite excess is definitely Mansion, the Friday Wall Street Journal supplement reviewing the wild extravagance of the hideously rich. Part advertising section, part ruling-class design review, part dangling inducement to middle managers to go on believing in the system, Mansion is a hilarious delight and everyone should read it to learn about the purposeless waste of the upper crust.
Sadly, the Journal’s aggressive paywall prevents many critical readers from peeking through the curtain to view the other side of our class-segregation system. Luckily Current Affairs has the keys! Brace yourself to find out where thirty years of tax cuts promised to create jobs have gone instead.
Reading Mansion quickly reveals the gigantic frigging sums wealthy people have seen fit to throw at their surroundings. From comfortless-looking glass tubs to specialized tequila freezers, the resources committed to these properties are staggering. Articles describe for us the cigar rooms, the $54,000 closet for a Beverly Hills teenager’s sports and drones, the enormous home theaters, the 4700 square-foot gym with a climbing wall. In a review of big-ticket housing in Holland, a rich Dutch designer of elite household renovations laughs “Sometimes I think I could live in that kitchen.” Another article finds real-world comps for super-hero movie mansions, which is easier than you might guess.
Rich-people housing embodies their rich-people diversions, including American car worship. A Miami tower grabbed attention in a crowded market by affiliating with Porsche and including a car elevator for residents, allowing them to park their chrome sport cars right in their chrome condos. An AOL co-founder’s house has an attached garage and a garage attached to the attached garage, with space for thirty cars. Oh, plus a dock for delivery trucks in one of the four kitchens. And while covering a Miami manse built on top of a seven-story parking structure, we learn the luxury garage includes a glass sculpture, 30-foot-high ceilings in places, and “sweeping views.” They hold weddings in it.
Many high-end city mansions have gone through a circuitous odyssey over the twentieth century, often built as giant brownstones for tycoons in the unregulated, no-progressive-income-tax era of the Gilded Age, but then taken over for schools or split into apartments or offices. Yet as the New Deal era has been repealed in endless Republican tax cuts, these properties are widely returning to their original functions as opulent single-family homes. A New York real estate agent comments “It’s like a return to the Gilded Age,” as the press reports that what has “put these mansions and townhouses back in play is the steady escalation of incredibly wealthy buyers” seeking more privacy than a conventional high-end condo can provide.
This kind of high-end marketing literature also teaches how class patterns endure in far more turbulent settings, even through the most cataclysmic events. Mansiondescribes the luxury market in Berlin, where waves of destruction and social reconstruction have crashed over the twentieth century, while still preserving the architecture of class privilege. One high-end West Berlin residential complex was originally built to be “a high-end residential hotel” but “has had many lives over the decades, including as the Weimar Republic’s economics ministry in the 1920s and as a West Berlin finance office during the Cold War.” Now, it has returned to its luxury market origins as elite condos. It’s history in the form of douchebag trophy properties.
Likewise Japan, which at midcentury was firebombed and nuked to kingdom come (the culprit was never caught), saw an archetypal property bubble in the 1980s. These upheavals don’t erase old patterns of excessive privilege and power, and Mansion tellsof Tokyo’s “most exclusive neighborhoods” where “luxury residential towers that cater to the city’s elite now sit where feudal lords once had their lavish villas.” Still, most Japanese domestic buyers “are more restrained in their definition of luxury. There is little demand for splashy interiors, or a gym or a swimming pool in the building.” Don’t these people know how to live!?
Of course, anyone familiar with real estate will know that often the appearance of age on a marketed property is homage rather than reality. Affectations of antiquity are a mainstay of real estate markets across class levels, including Tudor-era stonework and with fireplace “mantels salvaged from castles in France and England.” This reaches its apex in the clichéd tacky US “McMansion,” as you can see for yourself on Kate Wagner’s incredibly entertaining blog, McMansion Hell. Without snobbishness, Wagner playfully laments today’s clumsy and planless use of half-recalled and feverishly jumbled Gothic or colonial architecture, leaving much of the modern high-end property inventory a shallow parody of grandeur.
The anachronistic tacky grotesque is truly on parade in Mansion’s real estate listings. One Beverly Hills mansion “was originally built to resemble ‘Le Petit Trianon,’ Marie Antoinette’s private chateau in Versailles,” and includes “a whiskey lounge, a wine cellar, a cinema, three elevators and a salon and spa.” A rich retired fashion industry tycoon and wife bought a former grain mill outside Madrid and remodeled the property into a mansion, including the portion formerly housing workers, with ill-fitting modern gadgets. We’re told whimsically that the owner has limited knowledge of what the place was and when it operated. The couple also owns an Italian vineyard, vacations on Ibiza and plans to ruin a derelict Valencian farmhouse next.
Aliquid de Magis 