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.
So I make costumes. Not your average fitted attire. I mean I do that too, but not just that. I make BIG costumes. Like with metal and shit. So about October-ish, I contacted a costume making studio that does work with a convention called “Dickens-fair”. Maybe You’ve heard of it. It is a Christmas fair that turns the whole center into a replica of Dickens’ London, complete with actors who represent his characters. I had always wanted to go and was just trying to think of ways to help out.
I contacted the head person for costumes for the actors and I told her I make period pieces and I specialize in weird stuff, but also in turning old thrift store items into period attire. She emailed me back and was like “Come meet me” and so I did. I came out to her studio and was sitting with her folks, showing her pictures of all the stuff I’d done I was proud of. Then she says…”Wait…I have an idea.”
She tells me that every year, Dickens-fair has this one performer who is a fiddling Christmas tree. Like What? yes. A tree…that fiddles. Apparently it’s like the fucking Mickey of Dickens-fair. Only, her outfit was made a few years back from fabric, and kind of looked like a dunce cap with streamers. She told me that this year, the Fiddling Tree wanted a new costume. She says “Can you make a Christmas tree that can fiddle?”
I’m like…no. “If she can fiddle and wear a tree, then I can build a tree that can be worn by a fiddler. Hell yeah.”
And she’s like…”It can’t touch her shoulders, and it has to fit over her normal costume, and it has to be period accurate, so all period ornaments.”
And I’m like…bitch, “I got this.”
She says “Come back in a week and meet her and give us your idea.”
So I designed…because I make costumes and I have Christmas in my blood. My mom always tells this story about how when I was like 4, I was with her at the train station in LA and I saw this man sitting on a bench. Now this man wore blue denim overalls, with a long sleeved red shirt, had a white beard, and carried a wooden cane carved with Rudolph, who had a gemstone nose…He was fucking Santa. Admit it. And 4 year old me was like……SANTA? My mom always says I stared at him hard and then tried to climb in his lap, like for real Tim Allen from Santa Clause style, but he was cool, and pulled me into his lap and had a whole conversation with me about whether or not I was being good…in July. According to my mom, he told her he was a professional Santa and this was something he always got from kids, and that he loved it. He then got picked up by a woman in a convertible and drove away.
My mom has been telling me this story since I was five.
So this year, about 3 years ago, I was like…A Christmas tree that fiddles…I got this.
I mean, I drew this shit. I went to hardware stores and craft shops and I priced out this shit. There were emails about what I could expect to be the substructure. I made a barbie doll scale model with pipe cleaners. I came in with a fucking Plan.
And they laughed and said… “We love the barbie…OK.”
So I had a budget. I had an idea. And I went with it. I made measurements and all sorts of stuff. Let me tell you about this costume…
This woman is 6′2″. She fiddles. She wears, beneath the tree, a full period costume. This means a bell hoop skirt and a corset. I made sure they had a hoop for her that was carved from fucking PVC pipe and a steel boned corset, and I went to work. I had frames…on fucking chains…from MY CEILING. I had the whole thing mapped out.
A lightweight metal skirt in a grid pattern made from chain, linked together in a mesh. gathered at the waist and clipped like a belt. Over the head, a cone-like structure carved out of mesh, mounted on braces that were lashed to the torso with straps bolted into the metal cross-braces. A light aluminum frame. And over this…a cape, made from long dangling chains. Every inch of chain was coated in weatherproofing green paint. Every few links…a limb hacked off a fake plastic Christmas tree. Woven amidst these? A series of handmade and donated ornaments, including fake cookies made from clay, fake candles with a remote control that controlled the flicker. I had paper ornaments, streamers, instruments made of brass, birds, candies made from plastic…I mean I had everything, and all to period. I worked and worked on this for months and had numerous fittings.
The aluminum headpiece came along. I was stressed. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to make this fucking cone mount on her chest so her shoulders would be free. I mean I had ideas – like a cone, but with a back and front piece that came down her torso and to which, straps were fixed that clipped at the sides. This would distribute weight evenly through the corset and allow for freedom of the shoulders. But! I didn’t have a firm plan. I went to the hardware store.
Me. Three months pregnant. All cute and glowy and shit.
And I walked into the section where all the plumbing and flashing is. Now I know my way around. I hate going here because I’m usually hassled by a dude who thinks girls can’t know shit about hardware. But this time…this time it was a nice old man with a snowy white beard, wearing a red shirt and a green apron. I’m like…he’s a Santa…this is fate.
He comes over and says “What can I help you with today?”
And so I tell him the whole story. About the tree, and the odd parameters, the physics, the complexities. I tell him what I’m trying to create, this cone of metal lashed to the chest, and he…
Smiles.
He tells me, “I’m a Santa. I do it every year. I love this project! I want to help!”
As we are brain storming, and he’s showing me all the products that might work, he mentions to me that he isn’t the first Santa in his family.
“My dad did it for most of his life.”
“Man, I have such respect for Santas. My mom always tells this story about me meeting this man who looked like a Santa at a train station and trying to sit on his knee.”
The man got very quiet. “At a train station?”
“Yeah, like he was wearing overalls and a red shirt and had this carved cane…”
“I remember that cane,” he says.
I turn to him… “The one with Rudolph?”
“With a ruby nose. Yeah. After he died I looked everywhere for it, but I couldn’t find it.”
I stopped. Like straight up stopped moving, with like my limbs all cold as snow. “Wait a minute? What? Are you telling me you know that Santa?”
“I think that was my dad. He is exactly as you say. He worked on the railroad as a conductor for most of his life, and when he retired they gave him free travel. He was always taking trips, and he always went as Santa, because after he retired, he did that full time.”
“Did your mom own a convertible? Like a sleek one?”
“Yup.”
I lost it. I’m in the middle of fucking Ace Hardware, talking to Santa, about my Santa, the one I can’t remember, but always knew existed, and that man is this Santa’s daddy. And here I am…shopping for parts to a fiddling Christmas tree. I cried like a little kid. He hugged me. I apologized and told him I was in my first trimester. He said it was fine. He gave me his card. Told me he was glad to hear his father had had such an impact on kids. He helped me pick out my tree pieces and then checked me out.
I built the best fucking tree you ever saw. I wove metal. I bent aluminum. I used riveters. I worked with saws, and vices, and paint, and glue, and fucking plastic clay. I did everything wearing gloves and a mask because of baby. I did it all like I had a fire under me, because fuck that…I’m not letting Santas down.
And this is what I made.
This was the dry fitting, the trial run. We fluffed it out with more limbs, added bits here and there, or planned for more. I strung this fucking thing from my rafters on a mannequin and we had a tree decorating party, putting ornaments on it like it was a real tree. Then we had her put on the whole thing, and we watched her play “O Tannenbaum”
And it was the best Christmas moment ever, for me.
That year, I had free tickets to Dickens-fair. I went and caught sight of my Christmas tree fiddling around, playing songs for kids and spreading the spirit. Then later I saw the fiddler dancing in Fezziwig’s ball, with her tree skirt still on over her dress. It was awesome, seeing this 7.5′ tall tree gliding around, this thing I made, with help from My Santa’s Son.
I was Santa that year. It made my holiday.
So the next time you meet a Santa… it might not be the real guy… but you needed to meet him. And if you are a Santa… this is what you do. This is your legacy.
Keep it up.
Hi! Person who works the Great Dickens Christmas Fair here. I have seen this tree about in our fake London and I was always so in awe of it. I can’t stress this, the women who wears this literally looks like a Christmas tree and it’s magical and I was always like ‘that’s crazy and definitely Fair, I love it’.
You’re a joy and always welcome at the Fair 🙂 I would love to give you tickets for this year and/or future years. You’ve made our fake London more magical and for that I can’t thank you enough.
Wow that’s so sweet!!!!
Unfortunately, I’m not going to be there this year as I’m traveling literally the entire time the fair is on, but I might just take you up on this in future years if you’re game! I love going to this fair and wearing my period costume I made. Really a fun fair. Thank you so much for the offer.
Ah bell hoops…
Are you wearing bloomers also?
That is a very fine gown.
True Story: I’m dating the Fiddling Christmas Tree.
oh my god every single part of this was magical but then i get to the end and THE TREE IS YOUR GIRLFRIEND this is the best thing ever.
why do we have 567898475 hallmark christmas movies about some bland woman being shown the magic of christmas by falling for an equally bland man when we could have generational santa magic inspiring intrepid costumers to bring fiddling trees to life? a Travesty
Hey if you wanna reach out to Lifetime network, that’s totally fine with me.
Touched By A… No. Let me think through this again.
Everyone is panicking over TOS-es right now as they find a new home as Tumblr gets flushed down the toilet. I don’t like those random TOS breakdowns because the analysis is always wrong.
Anyway this is what people pay me to do and I will now do it for $0 because I’m tired of everyone spreading misinformation. This post is not a substitute for legal advice etc. Reblogs are appreciated because I literally see TOS nonsense on my dash every day.
Any more experienced copyright lawyers please feel free to weigh in – it’s part of my field yes, but my wheelhouse is more film production COT rather than derivative works.
Google doesn’t have rights to do whatever they want to files you upload to Google Drive
Their TOSes are annoyingly broad in drafting but essentially boilerplate clauses that they need to host your work, use google translate on it, make it searchable etc. They cannot steal your fanfic. They cannot modify your art and use it for whatever.
Your work MAY be threatened (that is, deleted) thanks to FOSTA/SESTA, which imo is a clown provision signed by a clown that sent safe harbour down the toilet. This and this has more information (I’ve skimmed but not perused both), but the tl;dr is: similar to Tumblr, there was a ham-fisted attempt to protect victims of sex trafficking and all it really did was make cloud based services start deleting user files whether relevant or not.
Uploading work to dA doesn’t give them a license to sell it to Hot Topic. This post is incorrect. Debunked here and corrected by the artist himself here. Your art is safe.
There’s a breakdown of the TOS in there that’s pretty much wrong on most points, if someone wants me to do a not-wrong version, ask. This may help.
All you really need to know is that like Google, I checked it over and nothing in there puts you at risk for dA asserting ownership over your work or selling it – they need those rights for thumbnails, search functions, resizing etc.
Yum. I like this one. Easy to read and clearly explained for most people with basic reading comprehension. Section G – What We Do With Content will tell you everything you need to know.
Basically, they have the same clauses about you granting AO3 a license to modify/etc your work, but they take the trouble to explain to you exactly what that means, and how they use it to improve accessibility etc.
No history of content purges as far as I know. Explicit content is allowed with limits eg. no child porn.
Same deal – you’re looking for 1. WordPress – Responsibility of Contributors, with the exact same thing as everybody else. They also do a decent job of explaining what they use the license for (though once again, it’s standard), albeit not as beautifully as AO3.
Same old standard licensing clause, again doesn’t let them steal your stuff.
Incredibly…open content policies…you can basically do whatever you want so long as you don’t break laws or commit fraud it seems? If I’m wrong, feel free to correct.
Hope this helps. Feel free to force me to read and explain any other site TOS documents. Again, more experienced copyright lawyers, feel free to correct me if I clowned up somewhere.
She doesn’t know it yet, but she will soon. You see, the midterm paper on calls for students to write a collection evaluation for a library of our choosing. Now, I know that when she said that library does not need to be real, she meant that we didn’t need to pick a specific one. But what I heard was…
For those of you requesting the full paper, I’ll see what I can do once I get the grade back!
I’M SO GLAD YOU ASKED
For the sake of this evaluation, only the official, present collection of the Unseen University will be examined. Collections belonging to other libraries that are accessible via L-Space will be considered as part of the Interlibrary Loan System, as will materials available by time-travel and other such means.
Relatedly:
Whether or not acquiring books that have not yet been written is a violation of copyright law has yet to be legally clarified, but faculty and students should not expect to be permitted to cite them in their own work (see also Library Rule 3: Do Not Interfere With The Nature Of Causality).
I don’t know if anyone’s seen the absolutely wild reward cards you can get through the Worldbuilders fundraiser right now – they’re basically cards you can present during a D&D game to get a special ability for a bit, themed after important DMs or actual play characters in the D&D community – but all of them (and the page talking about them) are absolutely wild and good for a laugh even if you can’t support the fundraiser
Behold:
I don’t know how I’d even feel about seeing one used in a game (many of them seem much better suited for a humorous campaign) but they’re absolutely hilarious regardless. There’s one for Magnus Burnsides that lets you change a low roll to an 18 and the page accuses Travis McElroy of lying about his rolls. Griffin is give the title “Much-abused GM.”
There’s even a reward card from Mike Mearls that just lets you become the DM for a minute, which feels like the only possible way to try to capture his deeply chaotic energy
We continue with our countdown to the Tumblrpocalypse, today with Elise Vist, PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo.
Tumblr’s recent “no female-presenting nipples” rule, which bans NSFW content from its platform, is yet another sign that it is no longer the intimate social networking site it started as. Although imperfect – and becoming imperfecter over the last few years – Tumblr initially offered users a middle-ground between the very, very public Twitter and the locked and gated communities of private blogging. The way that Tumblr tags worked (for a while) set up blogging practices that encouraged the formation of intimate publics. Broadly, intimate publics are publics – that is, groups of people who are addressed as a group by media, like a newspaper, a TV show, a radio broadcast, etc – but intimate publics are more protected and private than the dominant, normative publics. Intimate publics tend to be, according to Aimée Morrison (as informed by Lauren Berlant’s work), small, relational communities who protect themselves from outsiders and write to each other as an “us” that they name through metacommentary and discussions about what does and does not belong. Morrison’s work focused on mommybloggers, but we also see intimate publics that form around certain ships, or fanfiction tropes, or even interpretations of what a book means culturally.
Intimate publics really flourished on Tumblr, because it was easy to create those semi-permeable boundaries around ourselves: people could find us, but only if they knew what they were looking for. Additionally, we could have – and react to – conversations about what did and did not belong in a tag and therefore in our intimate public, using new tags to determine new boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘not us.’ In the past, I’ve argued that Tumblr’s tagging system was ideal for the creation of intimate publics, although as Tumblr’s searching and tagging systems have shifted with the goal of creating more publicity, it has become….well, worse.
To understand how Tumblr worked, it helps to contrast it to Twitter. On Twitter, the hashtag and the text appear in the same limited post. Community practice discourages an over-use of tags, because it clogs up the tweet and is seen as spammy rather than a meaningful contribution. Because people see what you post when you retweet or reply to them, you are always in conversation with the tweets you react to (hence the invention of “LRT” or “last retweet” on Twitter, which lets people react to a tweet without necessarily attracting the attention of the tweeter). As a result, then, we use the Twitter hashtag to gather people as a public – for instance, #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo are particularly famous examples of this, as are #CuteAndDisabled, #DistractinglySexy, and even #G*merg*te.
On Tumblr, however, tags and posts were separate and practically infinite. If you reblogged something, for example, you could react to it in two ways: you could add your text in the post, alerting the user and entering into dialogue with them – publicly – or you could react in the tags, which would not necessarily alert the OP to your commentary (tumblr saviour extensions notwithstanding). You could choose, then, whether to enter your reaction into the public of that post, or keep it to the intimate public of people who followed you and/or the other tags that you included. The obscure rules about which tags got included in searches (i.e. the first five globally and the first twenty on your blog) also helped us fine-tune our intimate publics, once we learned and shared those rules with other users. The point of Tumblr, as we might understand it through its tag and search technologies, was to share posts only with people who wanted to see them and knew how to find them.
As we got used to creating these intimate publics, it became a kind of second-language of blogging. We developed idiosyncratic tagging practices and used those to further limit the reach of our posts – using tags like “#destiel” (or “#deancas” when destiel became too public) or “#Johnlock” (or “#TJLC” when the difference between maybe-canon Johnlock and fic Johnlock became too important) to ensure we didn’t show up in general searches for “#Dean Winchester” or “#Sherlock” – potentially attracting the ire of people who didn’t want to see destiel slash or Johnlock theorizing. We created content warning tags and placed them outside of universal searching parameters, posting things like “#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #suicide cw” so that we could discuss a topic without entering the larger public. We could then both warn our followers – our intimate public – of the topic and avoid attracting the unwanted attention of people looking for that topic. As Tumblr widened and broadened searching, we tried to keep up by developing more and more idiosyncratic code-words, incorporating misspellings and asterisks to fool the search algorithm, but that signaled the end of Tumblr as a place to form intimate publics.
The thing is: intimate publics are not profitable. It’s hard to serve ads to an intimate public, because the things we’re posting aren’t legible to the public, and therefore the technologies that determine which ads to show us. You can’t sell an intimate public as an audience as easily as you can a public, because we’re capricious and private, changing our language in response to unwanted attention. We’re not interested in getting bigger, so investing in our eyeballs isn’t worth the time. It isn’t to Tumblr/Yahoo’s benefit to sustain our carefully crafted intimate publics, so they have been working over the past few years to force us into publicity – to create, in their words, “a better, more positive Tumblr.” The “better” Tumblr they’re creating is better not for its users, but for its advertisers. It’s a shame, because although the intimacy of Tumblr’s publics is also partly to blame for the Thing known as Tumblr Drama, it’s also what allowed people to find their people and to craft a place of safety that would be impossible to create on a public account like Twitter. What we’re losing as people migrate away from Tumblr, and as Tumblr makes its commitment to advertisement and profit clearer, is a place where people could shape their online space – for good or ill – to their own desires.
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