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.
As has been pointed out before, there are no humans behind this at all. The review process just reruns either the same algorithm or another algorithm, but people have posted screen shots showing obviously SFW pictures that were still deemed NSFW on review, despite the fact that any human, no matter how overworked / tired would have seen that these pictures were not porn.
my family fucked up my life by using spoonerisms interchangeably with their true phrase counterparts since before i was born and now i can’t escape from instinctively saying shit like “im gonna shake a tower”
oh “meeking a smee” made me feel like i was being fucking tazed
theres a lot of people on this website who dont realize their dad is a gnome
“Put simply: Mueller just dispersed some of the findings of his investigation to a couple federal judges, who now have the power to safeguard, and later reveal, the key parts of the special counsel’s work directly to the public, former prosecutors said.
“’All that redacted material is now with a judge. Once it’s with a judge, other officials within the Department of Justice lose the power to destroy it.’
…"Protecting those findings may help explain what former prosecutors have called the unusual timing of some of Mueller’s latest moves.
“Typically, cooperating witnesses are sentenced only after the broader investigation is complete. But all three have been lined up for sentencing even while Mueller’s final product remains unfinished.
…"Judges, who get to read the covered up parts, typically keep such portions sealed until one of the parties involved asks for them to be opened to the public.
“A request to unseal the documents could even come from any third party that intervenes in the case — including a media outfit, legal experts said.
In addition, ”[t]hanks to a blue wave in the midterms, Democrats now have some recourse in case [Mueller is fired or his report is withheld]. Democratic leaders are widely expected to wield their newfound subpoena power to obtain key information from the DOJ and the White House, with Mueller’s report likely to top that list. They could even even call Mueller himself to testify about his conclusions in open hearings.“
Multiple backup plans and safeguards are explained in the article.
For the record? As a self-employed small business owner with a preexisting condition, my pre-ACA health insurace suuuuuuuuucked. My current plan actually provides substantially better coverage than the old one and costs half as much. I only wish I’d done it sooner– getting on the exchange was, tbh, entirely a spite-motivated action on my part, and probably the sole positive impact of 45′s presidency on my life.
Please boost. ACA/Obamacare sign-up for next year ends December 15.
I just signed up and got a plan for $44 a month. Go sign up.
teaching children that they are allowed to walk away and cool off if they are feeling overwhelmed might literally save their life as teens/adults
There’s so many cases of people killing someone over roadrage, it’s not even funny. So many times an angry motorist will get out of a car to yell at someone who cut them off and get shot or stabbed. It’s not worth it to get mad at people. Take a breath and walk away. You don’t want to needlessly provoke anyone.
Parents: LET your children walk away and cool off. Mine never did, if I tried, they’d get in my face and escalate. To this day I have a hard time with conflict without devolving into a blubbering, lashing out mess. Admittedly, my folks were emotionally abusive, but still. Cooling off is good for everyone.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.