What
I was expecting some kind of explanation at the bottom and I just…
his poop wifi
platypus-protection-syndicate:
Infant ibuprofen sold at Walmart, CVS, Family Dollar recalled
Boost for the parents out there.
Ahhhh
(PUBLISHED: DEC 5TH, 2018)
Tris Pharma Inc. recalled the infants’ ibuprofen Wednesday due to higher levels of ibuprofen found in the product.
Why Tumblr’s NFSW-ban is a cautionary tale for why we need Net Neutrality
Well, here are the salient points, and you’ll have to forgive the America-centric lens despite the wildly international community that’s on Tumblr.
The ~reason~ that Tumblr went into panic mode re: nudity and adult content was because Apple pulled the Tumblr app from the store due to child pornography on the website. Or at least, that’s what they’re telling you – the single largest paragraph in the Staff update re: this change was on child pornography, how abhorrent it is, what all they’re doing to combat it, etc.
But that’s honestly bullshit. That’s not why they’re /really/ doing it, though it’s certainly a flashpoint.
1. They’re rolling it out /now/ because Apple removed their app from the store. Which is on brand for apple. They have a history of removing “adult content” from their products. Here are some posts on Apple and it’s so-called “Walled Garden.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/24/apple-explicit-app-catego_n_475231.html
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78k8yb/reddit-ios-apps-disappear-nsfw-content
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mjxg/apple-tumblr-porn-nsfw-adult-content-banned
Which is fine, if Apple wants to purge adult products from their content (ie things they own and moderate, such as a social media network), that’s their prerogative. But what Apple is ALSO doing is policing what kind of content developers and companies are allowed to have on their own websites that might be accessed by users of Apple technology, which is in exact opposition to principles of net neutrality. Apple preventing users from seeing certain content on their iphones or imac computers, or the safari browser, and preventing them from accessing certain apps/websites that don’t meet their approval, is part of a technology monopoly that controls how certain aspects of the internet are going to develop.
IE, Tumblr purging its nudity content to get back on the Apple apps store, because they want to make money.
There was a lawsuit over this in 2014, which resurfaced in 2017. Here’s the court case on Apple Inc vs. Pepper, if you wanna read more on it:
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/apple-v-pepper/
But the big issue here is, when Apple begins to create a monopoly, net neutrality laws are part of what helps combat this. And if there are no net neutrality laws in place, it’s an awful lot harder to deal with corporations like Apple throttling ~sensitive content.~ A heading under which Apple has notoriously included stuff like LGBTQ+ content (see: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/08/31/apple-censors-pride-watch-face-in-russia/), which is obvious unethical on a number of levels.
2. They had been planning on doing this for a while. You may have seen the vox interview article re: this, but I’ll post it below:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn-ban-verizon-ad-goals-sex-work-fandom
The NSFW ban had been underworks for 6 months already. Six months! They were planning on doing this with or without the CP issues that got them kicked off the Apple app store.
And here’s the thing. Tumblr was bought by Yahoo in 2013, with the intent of making $ through advertising, a goal which was not met. Marissa Mayer was at the helm of this project, and reportedly she was mocked and belittled for a lot of the ideas she had re: Tumblr, and insiders have reported that in general Yahoo really failed to do anything with Tumblr because they didn’t understand how it worked and really didn’t care to learn. Here, we have a case of a MAJOR communications company purchasing an internet social media platform, and basically stagnating it. Every report that we’ve had about Tumblr post Yahoo purchase is that they’ve been hemorrhaging staff – esp senior staff – because they won’t do anything with them, or they’ve actively pushed them out of leadership roles to push their company agendas onto the already existing culture of Tumblr. Basically, they’ve been strangling Tumblr as a website. We joke about @staff being terrible with coding, but from 2014-2018, pretty much all of the dysfunction we’re seeing is in tandem with the Yahoo takeover.
Here’s an article that describes some of these problems, though it’s by no means comprehensive:
https://digiday.com/marketing/tumblr-is-neglected-by-marketers/
Even with all that, Yahoo did somehow manage to mostly leave Tumblr alone, and relatively functional. Yahoo actually wrote Tumblr down for something like half the value that it was worth, counting it as a loss.
The real issue is that Verizon acquired Yahoo in June of 2017, about a year and a half ago. Like Yahoo, Verizon laid off tons of people involved with the programming and management of the website. Then in early 2018 they implemented to “Safe Search” filtering of ~sensitive content~ which was something users could opt out of it they chose. Which, most of us did. It seemed silly at the time, but in hindsight it was very obviously a test run of this current plan to implement the NSFW ban.
For the purpose of Verizon and Tumblr under Verizon, “sensitive content” was defined as “anything that might not be suitable for some members of the Tumblr community” such as “nudity, //////including/////// in an artistic, educational, or photojournalistic context.
INCLUDING.
For all that Tumblr @staff’s “A better, more positive Tumblr” said that the ban wouldn’t include, say, expression of political nudity or artistic nudity, it’s quite clear from the TOS that this is something they’re slanting against, and I really don’t think it’s purely from the ~bad algorithms~ that posts with topics dealing with sexuality, nudity, LGBTQ+, trans issues, disability issues, body positivity, and etc are being targeted. It’s not a coincidence that the NSFW ban included the language of “female presenting nipples” – as if women’s bodies are inherently sexual in nature.
And it’s sure as hell not a coincidence that Verizon was one of the telecommunications and media corporations that was actively lobbying against net neutrality along with Comcast. Verizon wants to control what kind of content you see, and wants to charge you for the kinds of content you can see. Verizon is a company that has admitted to actively throttling the content of its competitors.
And the fundamental issue here is that, with a large corporation that doesn’t care about its userbase, it’s trying to streamline a website like Tumblr into being something that it wants, instead of trying to work with the website culture that’s already in place. Where Yahoo was at a standstill, Verizon is actively dismantling parts of what make Tumblr so successful and tight-knit as a social media and blogging platform – particularly with content that might otherwise be deemed as “inappropriate” / “sensitive content” in other places like Facebook – talking about trans issues, talking about sexuality, etc. And the fact that this is actively harming sex workers and targeting quote unquote the female form suggests that they want to throttle freedom of expression. So when we talk about fandom leaving FF.N, and LiveJournal, and the kinds of fandom history that younger folks have maybe even only vaguely heard of (the infamous “What’s a lemon?” question comes immediately to mind) we’re talking about how a major mainstream corporation is looking at how to turn its userbase (which is just numbers to them!) into a profitable scheme, and it’s always going to be an upward ladder that harms the communities down below.
Those of us that are looking at the situation and going “Why don’t they do x, y, z? And make it actually functional?” are underestimating in a big way the fact that they want to spend as little money on this project as possible while still trying and double their userbase and profits. The fact that they mentioned BLM as a marketable niche suggests the fundamentally misunderstand why these movements exist in the first place, and the fact that BLM was mentioned in tandem with Game of Thrones fans and Manchester United Fans means that all they’re seeing is demographics and theoretically untapped markets. Making the website more palatable to quote unquote the mainstream is an attempt to bring in more advertisers, which is why they were more than happy to put together the NSFW ban.
The NSFW ban is also probably a response of SESTA, which caused a lot of website platforms to double down on their TOS without actually doing anything meaningful to help combat sex trafficking and child pornography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_Act
With that said – they’re also probably not unhappy to have a left-leaning, pro-net neutrality website like Tumblr die, which is honestly what it’s heading toward. Tumblr spent over a decade building the communities that it has, and a lot of people use it as an alternative to “mainstream media” and as a way to get a lot of information on politics and current events, as well as on obscure topics. It’s been a way to connect social justice activists, queer people who often didn’t have anywhere else to connect with other queer people in a way that wasn’t inherently sexualized (looking at grindr, fetlife, etc), academics, and more. The amount of information dissemination on Tumblr is truly incredible, and, if you’ll excuse the tin hat for a moment, it’s the antithesis of how the media currently functions – with about just 15 billionaires controlling most of America’s media corporations.
A similar thing actually happened with Polyvore, which was owned by Oath, which was [hold your breath, wait for it] owned by Verizon.
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/6/17207450/polyvore-ssense-shutdown-mood-boards-collage
I don’t trust Verizon to do right by the userbase. They’ll do whatever they can to make it profitable and fit their company vision. And if you want a reminder of how utterly evil Verizon is, just refresh yourself on the fact that they were manipulating firefighter cell plans to make $ on them while they were actively in the process of combatting California wildfires.
And to cap it off, it’s 100% not a coincidence that some of the posts that were initially getting throttled on Tumblr were Tumblr/Staff critical posts. Not even on bit. Companies, particularly large companies with huge financial resources, actively scrub their internet presences so that only positive things come up.
some people’s blogs are being incorrectly flagged as explicit so if you would like to check your status, you can look it up on postlimit.com.
if you have been incorrectly marked as nsfw, you can appeal before tumblr permanently filters you as such and your blog is set back to default settings prior to december 18th here.
Everyone: this is how I found out I was flagged and marked explicit. Check your stuff out and make sure you’re good to go.
basically:
- it is not a virtue to not set boundaries
- ignoring your own wants and needs is not a healthy way to show love
- people worth loving will respect your boundaries
- people worth loving will not want you to set aside your own wants and needs to make them more comfortable
- ‘having no boundaries at all’ describes a person who is very hurt, not a person who is very virtuous
- suffering for others’ comfort is not how you be a good person, it is just how you become very hurt
- sometimes you need to make others uncomfortable in order to get your needs met
- your needs are more important than others’ comfort
- your comfort is equally important to others’ comfort
- making other people uncomfortable is not, in itself, ethically wrong or morally dubious
Got a cold? Here’s some helpful(?) advice.
It’s snot gross, it’s science.
In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
This is such an accurate description of machine learning. Sadly, it’s also the best computational model we have of how babies learn words.
Tumblr recently clarified that nudity is acceptable in art, descriptions of breastfeeding and childbirth, and other non-porn uses. As they should. But don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. They CAN’T keep their promise using machine learning alone – certainly not with crappy algorithms like “look for skin tones and curves.” Distinguishing porn from simple nudity is a somewhat subjective, culturally-based tasks that challenges smart humans. No set of statistical patterns, however sophisticated, can make that judgment.
My therapist says I should put a band on my wrist and snap it every time I start to rock to help break the habit. Thoughts? This doesn’t sound like good advice, but I don’t have a lot of therapist options. And I don’t know… 😐
First you need to ask you if you actually want to stop. If you don’t want to, just tell her it is something you don’t want to work on that at the moment.
If you do, well, the rubber band thing is a pretty common suggestion for modifying behaviors, but it is essentially out of the ABA playbook that pretends to be cognitive behavioral therapy.
You can do the exact same thing without the rubber band, and just use actual cognitive behavioral therapy.
Essentially the way it works is that you recognize a thought or action, you process the thought or action, you change the thought or action.
The great thing about this is that it doesn’t matter if you succeed or fail – the more you do it, the more you will notice the rocking so the more you interrupt it, so the more you recognize it, so on and so forth.
So it might work like this
You are rocking.
You notice / recognize you are rocking.
You you think to yourself “I would like to stop rocking”.
You stop rocking.
One of the really important things about this is that whether you use CBT or the rubber band it does not matter how long you interrupt the rocking for. It is not a failure if you only stop rocking for half a second or a second or two or five minutes or five hours.
All that matters is that you stopped.
In any event, you can also replace the rubber band with literally any action. You draw a circle with your on your knee with your finger, you can boop your nose, you can hum, you stand on your head.
If you are okay with ABA tactics and using them on yourself, instead of you using an aversive system like the rubber band you can use CBT and follow it with a reward.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using that sort of conditioning on yourself as long as you know what ABA is, know the ethical issues, and are doing it by your choice for yourself.
Finally, you can also tell your therapist that you like the idea of interrupting the rocking, but not the rubber band and ask her if she has any suggestions that don’t use incentives or aversives, that you would like suggestions for a neutral action to help interrupt the rocking without associating it with anything good or bad. Your therapist will know you better than me, so they may have some ideas I’ve not thought about.
I personally prefer CBT, though sometimes I will use a physical action like tapping my knee with my finger with a long three count because it requires me to stop doing the action or thought I want to change, and replace it with with a thought and an action.
At first, it only interrupts my thought or action while I am tapping and counting. But it does get you there in the end, and it isn’t any slower than outright ABA in my opinion.
I know that is along read, but I hope it helps you get some
This is horrifying. The rubber band snapping thing is a good substitute for self-harm, because it doesn’t actually injure.
but telling you that you should hurt yourself when you do something you don’t want to do is awful. Do they recommend this for people in therapy who have negative thoughts they’re trying to get rid of?
Would they tell someone to hurt themselves as punishment for having self-defeating thoughts or something?
Your therapist is telling you to hurt yourself. Even it’s just a minor pain, that’s what they’re telling you to do. They’re telling you to hurt yourself for behaviours that aren’t harmful. That’s horrifying.
Substituting eg. banging your head against a wall or cutting for snapping a rubber band is a good idea – you’re switching a serious harm for minor pain. Substituting harmless behaviours for hurting yourself is an awful idea.
Your therapist is telling you to self-harm. They are not a good therapist, and are telling you to behave in harmful ways.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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