Rather than focusing on losing weight in 2019, let’s think about what we can gain. What can you add to your life to make it more satisfying? What new practices would make you happier and feel better? Consider some of these healthy resolutions for the new year:
Get more quality sleep
Eat vegetables at every meal
Wash your bed sheets regularly
Meditate
Spend more time outside
Actually eat your fruit before it goes bad
Get back in touch with old friends
Bring your own bags when grocery shopping
Don’t watch tv or use the computer during meals
Support local farms and food producers
Take vitamins
Learn to knit or sew
Stretch and improve your flexibility
Volunteer to register voters
Concentrate on improving your posture
Make doctor and dentist appointments regularly
Cook and prepare lunch instead of relying on processed foods
Replace your toothbrush
Clean your kitchen and dishes after each meal
Stop biting your nails
Compliment someone every day
Regularly donate unworn and ill-fitting clothing to a local shelter
Wear sunscreen every day you’re outside
Clean your pantry and throw out expired food each month
Quit smoking
Explore local museums and parks
Put your laundry away
Get an eye exam and update your prescription
Cut down on the amount of plastic you use each day
Re-try foods that you hate, but haven’t eaten in years
Delete a social media account
Moisturize and remove your makeup before going to bed
Attend town hall meetings
Keep a journal
Floss
Focus on changing your behavior instead of changing your body, and then every step will be a step forward.
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
im not saying “dont vote”, im saying “dont expect voting to save us”.
if hillary had won we would be in a better position now, comparatively, but would still be killing masses of ppl overseas, still deporting ppl and putting children in cages, still allowing corporations to ruin this planet, because the people benefitting from those policies are the same ppl funding the Democrats’ campaigns. and most liberals would be telling leftists talking about it to shut up and wait until after the next election, because the priority would be on making sure the Democrats win, cause of course the Republican candidate would still be way worse. voting is damage control, and im doing it, and i think you all should do it, but it’s not the only or even the main thing “the resistance” should be doing. it’s the only thing liberals tweet about because it’s the thing that directly benefits large portions of the ruling class, who also control most of the media and school systems where ppl get their info about politics. it’s playing a rigged game and acting like ppl who say they dont want to put all their faith in said rigged game are just utopian idiots who don’t see the big picture because they only want to vote for “morally pure” candidates🙄
we gotta vote and do direct action. we gotta join unions and organize strikes. we gotta create mutual aid networks. we gotta mobilize and start trying to produce the commodities necessary for life in our own communities (community gardens/permaculture lots for those lucky enough to own some land are a good place to start, as is learning about how to sew and make clothes, maybe some ideas on how to make bootleg medications and accommodations for our disabled comrades, etc). we gotta come up with more creative ways to protest that meaningfully shut down portions of society until our demands are met. we gotta make this country hostile to imperialist, racist Democrats as well as imperialist, racist Republicans.
“Socialism never took hold in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - source disputed, but accurate
Today’s aesthetic: keeping the same tab open in your browser for three solid weeks because you’re definitely going to get around to reading and/or acting on whatever’s in it any minute now.
I love kids they’re all like.. “when i grow up i’m gonna be an astronaut and a chef and a doctor and an olympic swimmer” like that self confidence! That drive! That optimism! Where does it go
It gets destroyed by adults not believing in you and telling you to pick a realistic career. And by society creating all these obstacles to the point that you’re too tired to try.
But they’re not really unrealistic, SOMEBODY is going to be an olympic swimmer and it might as well be you.
Actually I want to talk about this a little more than I did, because olympic swimming is incredible and works perfectly to talk about attaining goals.
I used to be a varsity swimmer, and I was damn good, but I was forced into it by my parents and completely lost my love for it and therein my drive. But in high school I was swimming against such talented swimmers like Olympic Swimmer Missy Franklin. I’ve met her, and the main difference between her and me was that I was strong but had no passion, but she was strong BECAUSE she had passion.
And I could have been good, really good, maybe even Olympic good. I even have the predisposition for it, been swimming since I was 2 years old, have a mom who was almost an olympic swimmer. Missy didn’t have either of those things, she just wanted it, loved it, had been doing it for a long time, and decided she was going to kick ass at it.
Right, that’s great and all, but I completely missed my opportunity to be an olympic swimmer, yeah? and can never achieve those dreams I had as a kid? No, not even though. There was this whole thought that female athletes peak when they’re 17 years old and lose their skills quickly after that, and male athletes peak around 19. But then Olympic Swimmer Dara Torres shows up. She was an olympic swimmer when she was 17, 21 and 25. Pretty normal age for retirement. She had a few kids. She kicked butt at being a mom.
And then at 33 years old she decides she’s bored or something gets back in shape and kicks so much ass at the trials that she lands herself on the Olympic Team ONCE AGAIN. And then 8 years later, she decides, heck I’m 41 now, no one has ever made the olympic swim team as old as I am, I want to get in shape yet again and teach these children how sports work.
And she still has the record for oldest US Olympic Swimmer, not even any men have beat out that record.
So basically what I’m saying is you could be an olympic swimmer, you really could be. And there are obviously a lot of things stopping you and trying to get in your way: your brain, society, too much chocolate cake for example. But if you really dedicate yourself to it and love it with all of your heart you could, you really could.
And lets say olympic swimming isn’t your jam? That’s cool too. There isn’t a single skill in this world that you can’t learn if you absolutely love it and want to. Any skill you want is going to take time. There are countless famous people who started learning a skill after 20, 30, 40, or even 50. Not a single person has even been president under age 35 (most likely because you’re not allowed to be, but there’s a reason for that). Whatever you want to do you’re probably going to be bad at first, and I’m talking really shitty.
Van Gogh got started in his 20′s and was thought to have no artistic talent at first and was forced to sit in the back of classrooms where the worst artists in the class sat. So yeah you’ll probably be bad, like really bad and everyone including you will think you’re bad. If you stick with it though, if you’re willing to work for years and years, if you keep loving it after all the pain it’s given you,
then you might just paint Starry Night.
#looks like there’s still time for me to learn how to draw
… YES. As someone who started drawing at 35 and who always was like: ‘eh, I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life, but I would love to be able to’ this is near and dear to my heart. If you want to draw, start drawing. Keep drawing. Be shit at drawing at first. Keep it up, doodle things on scraps but also draw stuff you don’t think you can draw. Challenge yourself, you will be surprised what you can do. It will be frustrating at times, but it will also be awesome. It is SO much a matter of practice and dedication, not talent.
This applies for writing, too.
Don’t ever think for a second that it doesn’t! Want to start writing? Then write! You will get better the more you write, the more often, and you will improve, all of the time, as long as you dedicate yourself.
The worst lie we tell ourselves is “it’s too late.”
not to be controversial but the reason they wont pass a law saying that people with a history of domestic violence arent legally allowed to purchase a gun is bc half of the police force would no longer be legally allowed to hold their jobs.
escaping abusive partners in law enforcement is made particularly difficult for these victims, because police officers
are armed
know the otherwise confidential locations of domestic abuse shelters
are able to game the system in order to avoid punishment
are often friends with the very officers who would be called to assist in a domestic situation
and can sometimes redirect blame onto the victims—one of my coworkers knows someone whose spouse was a cop who got her arrested for kidnapping when she fled with her children.
And if you claim “stresses of the job” as an excuse for this, or shooting unarmed people, or anything else cops do that’s fucked up, go to hell.
I’m seeing a lot of posts cross my dash recommending that people replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice in light of Microsoft’s new terms of service.
OpenOffice is abandonware that hasn’t seen an update in seven years!
Please do not install it. Instead install LibreOffice which is the exact same software plus seven years of updates.
What happened was Oracle acquired OpenOffice when they bought Sun Microsystems but didn’t really have any interest in maintaining it so they abandoned it. Because OpenOffice was an open source project the community was able to just pick it up and continue development. However, because Oracle never gave up the ‘OpenOffice’ trademark the community project could not use the name ‘OpenOffice.’
You can still download OpenOffice but it is no longer being maintained. If you want the up-to-date branch you should be installing LibreOffice. It is the same software.
Not ‘cavemen hunted these’ recently extinct. Recently extinct as in ‘16 to 20 human generations ago’.
Aurochs
What: The ancestor of domestic cattle
Where: 3 subspecies found throughout Northern Africa, Europe, and India
When: 1627
Cause: Humans
Fun fact: They were mentioned in the Hebrew bible as re’em and mistranslated in the king James version as unicorns. There are numerous programs to revive the species
Haast’s Eagle
What: One of the largest flighted bird to have ever lived
Where: New Zealand
When: 1400s
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: It’s been speculated that the ‘giant hawk’ Maui transforms into in Disney’s Moana is a reference to this eagle, which still has cultural significance for the Maori people of NZ, and is known as Pouakai in legends
Quagga
What: Subspecies of plains Zebra
Where: Africa
When: 1883
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: It was the first extinct animal to have it’s DNA analyzed and there are efforts to revive the species. Though there are some triumphant sounding articles there, true quaggas are not back from the dead. We’re getting close now, and have 6 individuals now classed as ‘Rau quaggas’
Stellar’s Sea Cow
What: Massive sirenian mammal related to the modern dugong
Where: Bering Sea
When: 1768
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: It was declared extinct just 27 years after discovery by Europeans.
Thylacine
What: Marsupial carnivore
Where: Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea
When: 1936
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: There are purported sightings more than any other animal on this list. Many people believe this animal might still be out there
???
Moa
What: Immense flightless bird
Where: New Zealand
When: By 1445
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: These gigantic birds were the prey of choice for the aforementioned Haast’s eagle. When humans destroyed the Moa population, the eagle was starved out.
Mexican Grizzly Bear
What: Exactly what it’s name suggests
Where: Northern Mexico to southern Arizona and New Mexico
When: 1964
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: Like the Tasmanian tiger this bear might still be out there. The species was declared extinct in the 60′s, however, a brown bear was shot in Sonora in 1976
Elephant bird
What: Gigantic flightless bird
Where: Madagascar
When: By the 1700s
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: They have the largest recorded egg size of any bird, with their eggs weighting up to 22 lbs.
Eastern Elk
What: Large subspecies of elk
Where: Eastern USA
When: The last confirmed eastern elk was shot in 1877
Cause: Bullet (humans)
Fun Fact: This elk could weigh up to about 1,000lbs and could have antlers 6 feet in length. Another subspecies, Merriam’s elk, went extinct around the same time but once lived in southwestern USA.
Koala Lemur
What: Giant lemurs
Where: Madagascar
When: By the 1500s
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: These were relatively human sized lemurs, growing 4-5 feet tall (the average male chimpanzee stands at just under 4 feet)
Japanese Wolves
What: The Hokkaido and Honshu wolves of Japan
Where: Japan
When: By the 1900s
Cause: Humans
Fun Fact: These wolves were purposefully exterminated with mass poisoning efforts by an American hired by the Japanese government.
* Some of these animals aren’t technically megafauna; I’m being lose with the term. The thylacine is about 30 lbs shy of the marker, the Japanese wolves fall a little short, and Haast’s eagle falls well below.
** I’ve left out some of the more recent and / or better known animals; I wanted to focus on animals I feel are slipping from general memory.
*** There are actually several subspecies of Moa, though I’ve lumped them together as they all met the same fate around the same time.
If you’ve never heard of the Little Fireface project, they’re the organization whose lead researcher proved beyond a doubt that the dissemination of “cute” photos and videos of slow loris was directly contributing to an increase in poaching of their populations. They do amazing work. And LUSH apparently just announced that they will no longer be considered for funding (even though their project has been chosen as a recipient three times in the past)… because they also get money from zoos. Here’s a snippet of the linked FB post (forgive the wonky formatting, I’m on mobile, but it’s important to me to get this up as quickly as possible):
“#PhilosophyFriday #haveyoursay We were just really sadly informed that the pretty wonderful LUSH UK and LUSH UK whose products and ethics we love, who we promote, and where many of our volunteers have worked, will not consider funding us any more (despite three times in the past) because we are also funded by zoos. The zoos we are funded by really care about in situ conservation, are passionate to improve the lives of slow lorises in their care, and even serve as rescue centres for slow lorises. We know that some people feel all zoos are bad, but without zoos, there are so many people who never would have loved animals, and there are now fewer and fewer places for wild animals to live. Zoos may be the last chance for many.”
LUSH has made it very clear they will never support zoos - it’s been said directly to someone I know who approached them about a charity pot collaboration, and they provide financial support for campaigns that aim to seize animals from zoos - and now they’re punishing a vital conservation project for simply being receiving funding from zoos. LUSH is choosing to align the organization and its business ethics with the animal rights movement (sometimes called the “animal protection movement”) to the detriment of real animal conservation initiatives.
Why you shouldn’t put goldfish in a bowl - WTF fun facts
By the way, bettas are the same. It’s a myth that they live in puddles. Wild bettas live in rice patties that look like this:
And you know how males fight in captivity? Yeah see, in the wild, each male betta has a territory of roughly one square meter [X]. That’s over 260 gallons of water per betta! Of course they’ll fight in a tiny 1 gallon tank! (The myth about puddles exists because, in the dry season, a betta may get trapped in a puddle, and it is equipped to survive that, but only for a short period of time). Also, notice how much is growing in that water - bettas need a lot of places to hide in and rest on, not just a single bamboo shoot in the center of a vase! They will get stressed and even more aggressive without the hides.
Fish are animals just like your other pets. Do your research before buying and treat them appropriately. If you can’t afford a proper betta or goldfish set up (at LEAST 5 gallons for a betta with a heater and hides, at LEAST 20 gallons for a goldfish with a strong filtering system and NO GRAVEL, and I recommend adding at least 10 gallons to those minimums for healthy and happy fish), don’t get one. They are living things, not decor pieces.
Here is more information on how to properly care for: Goldfish: 1234 Bettas: 123
