Calamus Currentis

English added by me :)

i might have just done something great

“how would you feel if someone blocked you just because they found you annoying?” then i wouldn’t have to interact with someone who thinks i’m annoying? i don’t see a problem

Randomly reminded that Bruce banner has 7 PhDs. Is one of them a PhD in the most inefficient academic career to pursue? I'm sooo curious why would one want 7 PhDs? Why would you do that to yourself? Maybe the pent up rage from having to go through being a PhD student 7 times is what's turning you into a big green smashing creature? Pretty sure 7 PhDs is as detrimental to one's health as the gamma rays he got exposed to

Bruce too????

im. im sorry. the Who

oh hey I wonder why they're called demon ducks maybe I'll just look them up and-

ah right okay

Also if you’re thinking “well that would make one hell of an omelet”, the indigenous people of Australia 47,000+ years ago agreed

These eggs are fascinating. Cool that there’s some evidence they’re from Genyornis and not a bush turkey now — that’s been debated for decades!

Langworth is the funniest ace attorney ship ever created bc it implies that while Kristoph and Phoenix are engaged in 7 years of psychosexual warfare, Edgeworth is off in fantasy Hong Kong getting busy with interpol’s highest ranking furry

the fact that any video game ever gets made is a fucking miracle, let alone good ones.

whenever someone explains to me how video games work, i feel like ive been exposed to some horrifying cthulu ass shit that i can never unsee.

I'd say this is an anomaly but seriously roos are sometimes nosy and just need to be in your business, OR they will fight you if you look at them funny. I love them, they're great, but they make little sense.

The fucking horror I felt in my soul of the 3 seconds it took to try to and work out what the fuck this animal was

A little Homestuck PSA

As 4/13 is right around the corner I just wanted to remind everyone about the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. As Viz and the death of Flash have been slowly killing the intended Homestuck experience there is still a way to see it how it was meant.

This offline program allows for all the flash to be seen and mini games to be played as intended and helps protect from spoilers. If you are going to start reading Homestuck or are planning to trick some unsuspecting friend into reading please consider using this program!

And - I love new livebloggers! Let me know who you love to watch make this journey.

https://bambosh.github.io/unofficial-homestuck-collection/

There's also now an online version if you can't be bothered to download the offline version!!

I know her tumblr would be fire

One of my sister's friends posted something about her attic being creepy and it ended up getting 50k notes as everyone argued about why it was creepy, whether it was real, and if it was actually just perfectly reasonable.

Candace would have dozens of posts like that with her describing some crazy shenanigans of her brothers and a couple weirdly out of focus pics attached.

They'd blow up initially with people scoffing about how dumb it is but then someone pipes up with "oh yeah the rocket race around the world was crazy when they came through our town". And suddenly other people are adding their own photos or reblogs.

Sadly when Candice thinks she has proof and shows her mom, Tumblr's search function tells her they can't find any records of her own post.

you guys all know i'm in the panopticon too right? just because i'm in the tower doesn't mean i should be treated any differently. all of you can see me just as well as i can see you. my position is worse actually because you're all looking at me at once while i can only point the spotlight at one of you at a time. have some compassion. we're all in the panopticon here. we're all in the same boat

yeah where's the robot that picks up cat poop and wipes the floor with disinfectant? Where's the robot that loads and empties the dishwasher? where's the robot that puts away the clean washing?

Roomba's about as good as we can do with current tech

Tags made me rethink this whole situation. We DO have a robot who does the dishes for us. She’s called a dishwasher. Wow.

#couldn't you just upload photos of your utensils and tell your robot that only these exact objects go in the dishwasher#???

They're robots not Lieutenant Data.

Relevant XKCD:

XKCD 1425 Tasks

Oh god it's such a good example of the way that it's hard to understand why algorithmic shit we do have (what we so misleadingly call "AI") is honestly nothing, is literally just sticking words together in word orders, vs what would actually represent real cognition, which is the ability to load a dishwasher.

Because for organic systems - humans, other animals even - the ability to communicate in language is a super high level thing. In order to get there, with our meat brains, you have to have already gone through all the levels of cognition below, like "recognize birds" and "perform simple tasks but in multiple uncontrolled settings, reacting to changes of circumstances" and so on. In order to talk, as a human, by whatever method you talk (words, text, sign-languages, whatever) you have to do all those cognitions first, and also have probably done a solid sideline into theory of mind.

And so we assume that because "AI" can generate language, can put together sentences in order that we associate with complexity, according to common patterns, that it must be "intelligent" (or at least surely on the way to becoming so), that this ability to move words around into syntactic patterns represents the same thing for the computer as it does for us.

It just doesn't. The computer program is not working on the same physical sequence and rules as the animal (and thus human) brain. The chat program doesn't have to actually build an entire sequence of sapience and meaning and shit, built in turn on massive amounts of subconscious reactions to circumstances and so on, before it becomes possible for the computer program to move words around into ways that are deceptive to humans (because we only just keep feeding it words).

This becomes painfully obvious when you try to get these programs to actually do things. To actually react to anything outside the carefully controlled environments of the IT lab. It's why "AI" can appear to talk about existential issues, but can't actually power a robot that you can rely on to load your dishwasher.

Or identify a bird in a picture.

Not to shit on a good post, but we have robots building cars. On their own. Germany has factories where the humans only overlook the robots.

It is NOT a question of possibility. It's a questiob of making it affordable.

And I still think it could be done. It would need to have a robotic arm and the shelves within reach. The dishwasher already has a computer, it would only need upgrading with the arms software.

The thing is

It would not make your life easier.

The robot would need maintenance. It would need repair. It would need electricity. All of these are expensive even for dishwashers.

So instead of upgrading the dishwasher, jusz upgrade your life surrounding the dishwasher.

For example: there's lndustrial dishwashers which take about three minutes for a program. You have one tray where you put things on. If you add cabinets which hold trays instead of china, you can take a tray out the washer and store it in the cabinet.

Erasing about 50% of the work by adjusting to the machine. Done.

The thing is that those factories are created - and this is important - to make the robots able to make the cars.

The entire place is hyper-designed to make absolutely sure that nothing upsets, confuses or disrupts the programmed patterns of movement and action that the robots then use to make the car, and no new element of confusion is added to the whole process. The humans overseeing things are there for essentially that purpose: so that the process is maintained, the environment controlled, and if something does go askew the whole thing is stopped and that thing is fixed before it causes a breakdown all the way through the chain.

The human overseers are kept for that purpose . . . .because that's something human cognition can do!

So like yes: you could design your entire life around allowing a mechanism to cause dishes to be done. But that's not really what people mean when they say "I want a robot to do my dishes."

They want a robot to go around their home as it exists - their home full of the messy chaos of a human living in it, leaving dishes on desks and bedsides and tables, with a cat and the cat's box and that pile of unfolded clothing - and washes their own dishes, that they already have, without breaking them or the machine or causing property damage. And without washing anything they have out on surfaces that are available to the robot that looks like a dish, but is actually a decoration. And also without leaving behind things that turn out to be dishes (or dish related mess) but are not recognized as dishes. Presumably most people want this without super-invasive "smart" tagging on everything they own (designed to tell the robot what is and isn't a dish that should be washed).

So like yes: you can set up an environment that allows an automated process, even a very complicated automated process, when you've optimized that environment, and then leave that process to run with only minimal human supervision (which still amounts to "someone sitting in the oversight booth more or less all day" and still involves a loooot of fiddling, and code-fixing, and repair to the system, and redirecting of the system).

That's not the same as what people actually mean when they say "I want a robot to do my dishes", and thus does not speak to why the latter is still not something we're even close to achieving.

#so they can ‘learn’ to paint and write but loading a dishwasher is impossible

Yes that's correct. The physical dexterity it takes to manipulate a variety of unknown 3D objects of highly variable weight and friction, from a constantly changing environment full of other objects they're not supposed to touch, and getting them all into the right area without breaking them or anything else, is a phenomenally complicated task. Much, much more difficult on every level than Spicy Autocomplete. A writing algorithm doesn't even need to be able to move! It's got no arms!

These sorts of tasks have nothing at all in common with writing or drawing algorithms. These are more like roombas or self-driving cars; or I should say, step one, being able to safely move around the house, is like roombas or self-driving cars. We can just about do that part (roombas work fine 99% of the time), but the part where they recognise dishes and know how to safely pick them up and stack them into a dishwasher? Last I saw, the absolute pinnacle of that tech was "the robot can successfully open doors" and "the robot who has been programmed to pick up beer cans (object of completely uniform shape, weight and density) can pick up a beer can" and "the robot can stand back up if it falls over".

It's a bit further along than that in some spaces, but only just a bit. Last I checked, we're talking robot programed to pick up beer cans (object of completely uniform shape, but not uniform fullness (weight, density, center of gravity) can pick up beer cans.

Ah so they can pick up opened beer cans now. That will end well.

I said they could pick them up. I didn't say they wouldn't spill the contents all over the carefully controlled test environment's floor and themselves.

This is also why robots can’t make clothing, by the way. Fabric has way too many variables: stretch and weight and texture, the direction of the grain, fiber content, how much it frays, on and on and on. Every item of clothing on earth is still made by a human being using their hands to put fabric through a sewing machine, because a task done by “unskilled” people being paid starvation wages in a sweatshop is orders of magnitude too complex for any robot.

Pierre Fouché. 1994.77 or Lebenslänglichen Explosionsglück, 2020.

Rayon chords from a World War II parachute.

PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944, photo by Horace Bristol

so like up until the 1600s, people believed that plants got their mass by eating dirt, because where the fuck else would they get it from. a guy named jan van helmont thought this sounded kind of funky and decided to test it by planting a willow tree sapling, letting it grow in a pot for 5 years, and measuring the soil before and after. lo and behold, at the end of the 5 year experiment the weight of the soil was basically the same. he decided that the mass of the growing willow tree would HAVE to be from water, because what the fuck else could the plant possibly eat, am i right lads???

anyway what im trying to get at is that its actually a really common misconception that plants eat dirt. they do not eat dirt. they get their mass from carbon dioxide in the air that they converted into sugars and starches in photosynthesis. yes, they get nutrients and stuff from the soil, but the bulk of what you see in terms of like, leaves and bark and Non-Water Plant Stuff™ was made from materials converted from carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. 

jan van helmont did not know this. jan van helmont self-identified as an alchemist and spent most of his time thinking very hard about how eating things worked while under the assumption that plants apparently got bigger from only water and absolutely nothing else. this, although some sort of mood i can’t pin down– a small worm, a similar hat, if you will– is not a life style i would encourage

This is a weird callout post for a guy who made the most logical deductions he could have given the resources and tools he had at his disposal.

i wrote this trying to find a funnee joke way to correct the ‘plants eat dirt’ misunderstanding but u know what? this is valid. post cancelled jan van helmont didnt deserve this

I mean to be fair the chain of “sounds sensible” is directly inverse to the chain of “actually true”

“plants eat dirt” ok sure, there is physical mass (dirt) and then there is physical mass (plant), most plants can’t survive when taken out of the dirt, this checks out.

“plants eat water” I mean he did weight the dirt so I guess that one’s debunked, and there’s nothing else plants will die without, and I mean they do have sap and so on inside them, we know the water goes into the plant. sure! weird but okay!

“plants eat air” get out of here. you’re just making things up now.

In his defense. They do also eat small amounts of water.

Y'all are going to flip your gourds when you hear about what plants do with photons

In fairness also they do eat part of the dirt too. They’ll sometimes eat a skeleton if they’re hungry.

they will uptake cadmium and arsenic sometimes 👍

From Le Journal Amusant, 1877.

Stego Sweater Pattern // Hunt Hand Knits

@pterribledinosaurdrawings yo dude have you seen this?

@hobbular