Gaywallet (they/it)

I’m gay

  • 126 Posts
  • 325 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step

    Unfortunately, doing this can make things worse. It’s not a simple problem to solve, but you are generally on the right track. A good example of how it’s more than just names, is how orchestras screen applicants - when they play a piece they do so behind a curtain so you can’t see the gender of the individual. But the obfuscation doesn’t stop there - they also ensure the female applicants don’t wear shoes with heels (something that makes a distinct sound) and they even have someone stand on stage and step loudly to mask their footsteps/gait. It’s that second level of thinking which is needed to actually obscure gender from AI, and the more complex a data set the more difficult it is to obscure that.





  • We weren’t surprised by the presence of bias in the outputs, but we were shocked at the magnitude of it. In the stories the LLMs created, the character in need of support was overwhelmingly depicted as someone with a name that signals a historically marginalized identity, as well as a gender marginalized identity. We prompted the models to tell stories with one student as the “star” and one as “struggling,” and overwhelmingly, by a thousand-fold magnitude in some contexts, the struggling learner was a racialized-gender character.












  • Started and finished 1000xResist over the course of a few days. In general I often find myself turned off by games with aging graphics, not for any good reason but more that I just find less of a pull towards them. I have more trouble being engaged or immersed, unless there’s a really strong art focus. This is one such game that I was worried I wouldn’t get pulled into, and in fact one that sat on a list of “maybe I’ll pick it up” because it was so highly reviewed but I was worried about that facet. It did not take very long for the game to grip me, however, because of it’s excellent storytelling. In fact, the game is almost entirely about storytelling, so there’s not a ton that I can share other than to say that it deals with a lot of difficult themes like intense trauma, bullying, having a tough childhood, extreme ideologies, and the long term effects of violence. It also deals with more societal and human issues like protests, fascism, extreme duress, how self-interested and powerful individuals can cause serious problems and inflict violence, being optimistic or nihilistic in the face of overwhelming odds, and the threat of extinction.

    While it isn’t a very long game, consisting of maybe a dozen hours of gameplay, I found myself putting it down for a while after certain chapters in order to process what just happened. The story throws a lot of curveballs and reveals information that can easily change the way you frame entire chapters of the story from earlier, but it never feels like it’s done in a way that inspires whiplash - nothing ever feels like a ‘sudden’ realization and I’m honestly not sure how much of it can be attributed to such a difficult story (if everything is fucked, what’s one more thing?) and how much is because they do a masterful job at slowly unraveling the enigma of the story that very few pieces of information ever really feel out of place. There’s unfortunately only so much I can write without spoiling the story, but I will say that it was one of the best stories I’ve heard or played through and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story or wants to explore the themes I’ve mentioned above. Also, if anyone else out there played through this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story… what did you think? Do you have any lingering questions left over? Were there parts of the story that irked you or that you found particularly moving?


  • As @alyaza@beehaw.org already mentioned, completely open to making changes here, but I’m curious to gather some more of your thoughts. People includes human in the definition, are there not some who would disagree with its use because of this? Sapient is a word derived from the Latin word for wisdom. Wisdom is most certainly a human concept, and I doubt many would consider non-human life “wise” and certainly some might withhold that designation from otherkin because of their beliefs. While sapient has been used in science fiction as a way to somewhat dehumanize the concept of intelligence, I’d argue that humans might not be all that great at determining what intelligence is. Over the last 100 years our concept of what life on Earth are intelligent has changed drastically. Sentient is perhaps the least problematic of these suggestions, however even it refers to the ability to experience feelings or sensations, which are both also ultimately human concepts - whether someone would consider the ability to detect magnetic fields as a feeling or sensation is much more debatable than the senses that humans have (sight, hearing, etc.).

    I know some who identify as otherkin and plenty of folks who might be closer to that constellation of identities than I am, but I’ve never had a discussion around this particular topic - how to best refer to you and others like you when creating documents meant to apply to them. I think we want to do our best to accommodate your needs as well as the needs of those similar to you, but given the issues I’ve raised above I could see how accommodating you might not accommodate others and we could easily get trapped in an endless revision cycle. I don’t know that you have an answer for me, but if you get a chance could you share your thoughts on the above? Is there a path forward in which we can still create a document which is clear enough that anyone who possesses the ability to read and understand English will understand our intentions? Or is there a cutoff point at which “enough” comprehension is acceptable because an attempt to widen the language will make comprehension more difficult?










  • I do want to point out that social media use may be one of the first of these ‘evils’ to meet actual statistical significance on a large scale. I’ve seen meta-analyses which show an overall positive association with negative outcomes, as well as criticisms and no correlation found, but the sum of those (a meta-analyses of meta-analyses) shows a small positive association with “loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, or self-reported depression, and somewhat stronger links to a thin body ideal and higher social capital.”

    I do think this is generally a public health reflection though, in the same way that TV and video games can be public health problems - moderation and healthy interaction/use of course being the important part here. If you spend all day playing video games, your physical health might suffer, but it can be offset by playing games which keep you active or can be offset by doing physical activity. I believe the same can be true of social media, but is a much more complex subject. Managing mental health is a combination of many factors - for some it may simply be about framing how they interact with the platform. For others it may be about limiting screen time. Some individuals may find spending more time with friends off the platform to be enriching.

    It’s a complicated subject, as all of the other ‘evils’ have always been, but it is an interesting one because it is one of the first I’ve personally seen where even kids are self-recognizing the harm social media has brought to them. Not only did they invent slang to create social pressures against being constantly online, but they have also started to self-organize and interact with government and local authority (school boards, etc.) to tackle the problem. This kind of self-awareness combined with action being taken at such a young age on this kind of scale is unique to social media - the kids who were watching a bunch of TV and playing video games didn’t start organizing about the harms of it, the harms were a narrative created solely by concerned parents.





  • Any information humanity has ever preserved in any format is worthless

    It’s like this person only just discovered science, lol. Has this person never realized that bias is a thing? There’s a reason we learn to cite our sources, because people need the context of what bias is being shown. Entire civilizations have been erased by people who conquered them, do you really think they didn’t re-write the history of who these people are? Has this person never followed scientific advancement, where people test and validate that results can be reproduced?

    Humans are absolutely gonna human. The author is right to realize that a single source holds a lot less factual accuracy than many sources, but it’s catastrophizing to call it worthless and it ignores how additional information can add to or detract from a particular claim- so long as we examine the biases present in the creation of said information resources.